Twenty-Seven Principles from the Life of Roh Moo-hyun

Roh Moo-hyun remains one of the South Korean presidents many people remember with particular affection.

As time passes, the people who once occupied the presidency become historical figures. Memories of how they sounded and what it felt like to hear the news about them take longer to fade.

23 May 2009

My memory of the day Roh died is indistinct in some respects and clear in one. I had taken an exam somewhere in North Gyeongsang Province. On the way home I stopped at a rest area and learned that he was dead.

Roh had passed the bar exam without a university degree. He came from modest circumstances and struck many people as unusually unceremonious for a president. He was also an expressive speaker. After he left office, people travelled to his village to see him.

One remark attributed to him gives a sense of the way he spoke about the presidency.

• He asked when people had ever been able to criticise a president as freely as they could then, and said he was sure that making such criticism possible counted as progress for democracy.

That was close to how the period felt to me. Presidents who wanted to seem approachable could still carry the office’s distance with them. Roh seemed willing to stand a little closer to the people who wanted to speak to him.

I remember him making light of criticism and keeping his composure when someone threw an egg. The irreverence he could accept from others may be part of the reason people still recall him warmly.

The Book’s Twenty-Seven Principles

Jeong Ui-seok’s book asks what in Roh’s character and habits might have made him live the way he did.

It draws out twenty-seven principles. They are the book’s way of organising Roh’s life and ideas, rather than a formal list readers need to attribute to Roh himself.

The author links each principle to an episode or an aspect of his life:

1. Find balance in what you study.
2. Be willing to learn anywhere.
3. Carry forward what was valuable in the past.
4. Make up your own mind.
5. Think critically.
6. Allow yourself to think differently.
7. Accept the responsibility that goes with freedom.
8. Break with habits that have outlived their purpose.
9. Admit a mistake plainly.
10. Act on convictions you can stand behind.
11. Develop a philosophy of your own.
12. Resist what you believe is wrong.
13. Hold to a conviction even when it sets you apart.
14. Challenge prejudice.
15. Make a place where people can talk.
16. Find something you can share with other people.
17. Pay attention to the people around you.
18. Check that you understand one another.
19. See the situation from the other person’s side.
20. Be willing to learn from mistakes.
21. Put people first.
22. Treat knowledge as a means to act.
23. Care about other people.
24. Choose the right road over the quick one.
25. Recognise what greed can do to a person.
26. Listen to your conscience.
27. Let a sense of purpose change how you act.

What Lets a Person Hold Their Course

In my experience, a person with a sense of purpose or a conviction of their own can be hard to knock off course.

A goal gives a direction to the work you do, including the work no one sees or rewards right away.

People can choose what to work toward, and that choice can make some part of the world better when it is made with others in mind.

For a while, the book let me think again about the man known affectionately as “Fool Roh,” and about what he was trying to change.

Book Information

Twenty-Seven Principles from the Life of Roh Moo-hyun (Korean title, translated)

Author

Jeong Ui-seok

Publication date

15 May 2015

ISBN13

9788997827671

View the book on YES24

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