Reading The Country Doctor’s Self-Revolution

In the early 2010s, Ahn Cheol-soo was moving from medicine and software into public life. I remember how much attention that unusual path attracted at the time.

He and Park Gyeong-cheol went around the country holding public conversations with university students. I remember getting to know Park’s name through those events as well.

Why he was called the Country Doctor

Park trained as a doctor at Yeungnam University and opened a practice in Andong after working in several hospitals. “Country Doctor” was the name many people knew him by.

It was also a name he used while writing online about the stock market. Some individual investors followed him because several of his calls had seemed unusually well timed.

The forecasts were part of his public reputation. These are the examples I had seen cited.

• A call to move away from growth stocks before the dot-com collapse.
• A favorable view of Samsung Electronics shares after September 11, 2001.
• A warning about the South Korean market after it reached a high in 2007.

A book in five parts

His Self-Revolution runs to roughly 400 pages in the edition I read. It is made up of separate pieces, so a reader can spend time on one question and return later for another.

The form reminded me of reading John Locke on understanding. Park takes a subject, looks at the assumptions behind it and asks what a person could do differently.

The book has five large sections.

1. Time to look for yourself.
2. A conversation with the world.
3. Changes you can make in your own life.
4. Learning and growing through the work of change.
5. Challenges that open a future.

What kept the pieces together for me was a question about who gets to decide what your life is for.

1. What you learn to value

Park begins with what we learn to value. He brings up kitsch and simulacra while asking how readily a substitute can begin to look like the thing that mattered in the first place.

He also asks how much of happiness can be found in the way you do something before you know how it will turn out.

A person can go a long time taking other people’s values as the standard. Park makes a case for paying attention to what you would choose if you had to explain your reasons.

2. The relationship in a choice of words

The second chapter turns to language. Park listens for what a person’s choice of words can tell you about the relationship they think they are in.

He suggests that form can guide content. A Korean honorific can encourage a different sort of exchange from the one that follows when a speaker begins in a dismissive register.

The discussion widens to ask what people owe one another when they have knowledge and a chance to speak.

3. How to take part in the choices you make

Park uses “self-revolution” for the work of taking a more active part in decisions about your own life.

The attitude you bring to a task can appear in other parts of your day. Park thinks a useful habit is worth cultivating directly because it gives a person something they can do again.

He also asks what effort can teach a person about aptitude. You may learn more about your abilities by using them than by trying to identify them before you start.

Books matter here because there is only so much of the world a person can encounter firsthand.

4. What to do with the hours you have

Park recommends meeting people and reading widely. He also wants readers to examine which repetitions are taking up hours they could use in a way they enjoy more.

I used to check the trending searches on Korean web portals because they were there. I rarely had anything I needed to find out.

Once I began using some of those minutes to read, I found I had less reason to return to the rankings. I was enjoying the new thing more.

Park thinks about time as something a person experiences unevenly. A long afternoon can pass quickly or slowly depending on what occupies it.

That makes the quality of attention matter as much as the number of hours on a schedule.

He recommends giving time to work in order of importance and deciding what you will leave out. The discussion leads from scheduling to a question about how time is connected to change.

• In a passage on the philosophy of time, Park asks whether a world in which absolutely nothing changes would give us any way to tell that time was passing.

He also treats reading as a conversation with the writer. I liked the fact that a conversation in this sense leaves a reader free to disagree.

5. Choosing under uncertain conditions

The final chapter starts from Park’s sense that many people around him had lost confidence in the future. He wants to ask what kind of response they can make without denying what they are up against.

He brings in the I Ching, often called the Book of Changes in English. The title gives him a way to return to an old question about living through circumstances that do not stay fixed.

He also discusses justice and John Rawls. I remembered the attention the subject had received in South Korea around Michael Sandel’s Justice lectures.

• Rawls imagines people choosing principles of justice in a hypothetical situation.
• Behind a “veil of ignorance,” they have to choose without knowing what place they themselves will occupy in society.
• They do not know facts such as their social class or talents, or which particular beliefs they will hold. The constraint is intended to make the choice fairer.

The feeling of having had a conversation

I sometimes get a sense of how carefully a person has thought from the way a paragraph proceeds.

In writers I like, I often notice a long acquaintance with the humanities and philosophy. Park has read widely enough to let one book send him into another.

He also makes room for what happens while you are reading. His thought about happiness in the process made more sense once I had spent time with the process of his own thinking.

I came away with the feeling of having listened to him for a while. Some of his questions seemed to be things I could keep asking without needing to finish the conversation that day.

Book details

The Country Doctor’s Self-Revolution

Author

Park Gyeong-cheol

Published

October 1, 2011

ISBN-13

9788901130460

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