> The Tumen River has also been a traditionally porous border where black market media (and cosmetics, food, electronics, etc) could flow freely. As is usual in an authoritarian regime, well-connected people can ignore the rules, smart/wealthy people can work around them, and the occasional unlucky person can be made into an example.

Sounds about right. Yeah and also, there's media that is freely distributed just for fun, and I think everyone can play Starcraft...there has to be a way. Game of cat and mouse. It's not just about what's forbidden and what's not it's also about bribing a little bit here, a little bit there...working the system, find a little something in the regular Wednesday (?) black market, hear a little secret...and as long as you're visibly contributing to society overall, you can push the envelope. Same as anywhere, Cuba is big on "sobrecumplir" meaning exceed expectations. If you do that, you can do all kinds of stuff.

So what is also missing from these viewpoints is that yeah on an individual basis, individual freedom, Koreans have fairly little of that to be sure. And it's not only due to rules, the rules and strictness is interwoven with the poverty, they cannot be thought of independently. If a country is poor, its prisons have to be that much worse than a rich country's for them to be a deterrent to theft. And that's just one example.

But collective freedom! Now that's a different story. These Koreans have a lot of that! Basically they gave up all their individual freedom in exchange for all the collective freedom they could possibly get. That's how you end up with Juche, for instance, mostly a way to accept poverty down the line but in exchange never allow foreign powers to perform manipulation through trade. And in fact, in the last "maximum pressure" period that Trump imposed, Korea didn't budge or suffer.[1] And for collective freedom the people--to my fullest understanding--need an autocrat, autocrator [2], the one guy everyone else in society stands in the way of bullets for, and who then thinks of all of them in return without any interference from foreign manipulation. Democracy is then in terms of the neurons of the autocrator. Any one of these neurons can change his mind completely[2], without tallying ballots or recounts.

That's what I gather from reading beyond the curriculum of Stanford's Korean History class.

[1] The price of rice didn't change under sanctions. A big reason given, though there were several, was that because North Korea's agriculture was generally not mechanized, State Dept. couldn't squeeze them on the availability of spare parts for machines. That was a huge surprise for State...and on top of that the counterfeiting. So while United States can owns the ability to print dollars, so does North Korea. How good would you think they would get if they made it a national priority? The brightest minds, thinking of ways to make a Benjamin cheaper than $100. It's a super simple goal. I think anybody can forge them for $1000 apiece, but to get it down under $100, ah! So while South Korea sends its brightest minds (in this case best test scores, they are totally subscribed to that) to eg Stanford, North Korea keeps them right put, working on sovereignty. Nationalism. Like they can get a 99 percentile student on every square millimeter of the $100 dollar bill. And get this, the North historically had better students than the South, especially the most mountainous areas, those had the most Yangban standardized exam passers. Because what else will you do with your time but study!

[2] I think in Russia the Czar is called an autocrator internally, Czar was the external name.

[3] This concept was enshrined in the Choson dynasty, absolutely any son of the King could inherit the throne, without any restrictions on whom his mother was. Although I know little of palatial uh...well conspiracies, what else could you call them...dynamics. Dynamics. There were rules, and nuance, and many interests at play.