In the 1990s, a social psychologist, Geert Hofstede, had conducted a massive cross-national survey asking about people’s attitudes and opinions to measure cultural differences across countries. Interestingly, there was one cultural trait where Korea ranked the highest among the sixty countries surveyed. That was uncertainty avoidance. Uncertainty avoidance is a tendency to avoid ambiguous or unknown situations. According to Hofstede, uncertainty avoiding people have an emotional need for rules (even if the rules never seem to work) and are intolerant of unorthodox behavior or ideas. Considering all the chaotic incidences in the modern history of Korea, it is no wonder that we developed a tendency to put more weight on security than anything else. The lack of a social safety net, which can protect people when they fall off from a thin rope of competition, must have contributed to such a propensity, too.
  The problem is that uncertainty avoiding people may also avoid innovation, which inevitably entails a certain level of disorder and noise. Examples are abundant. The fact that public servants have become the most popular job these days shows how our college students struggle to avoid risks and insecurities that seem to be engrained in almost all jobs in private sectors. When young people, who should be the most relentless population in pursuing their desires and ideas thereby leading the country into a newer and better terrain, are seeking the most secure yet least creative jobs, our society loses the energy of innovation. Another example is a recent change in people’s attitudes towards the Sewol ferry tragedy. In 200 days, the unanimous voice for ‘state rebuilding’ at the time of the incident has been diluted and instead emerged as another voice complaining about fatigue caused by the tenacity of the Sewol victims’ families asking for the a special law to ensure thorough investigation.
  Deep down in the minds of people who turned their back against the victims’ families may lie the uncertainty avoiding need to stay away from social turmoil. Again, uncertainty avoidance can hold back social innovation because innovation cannot be achieved without conflicts between people who had their stake in the old system and people who want to change it.
  Culture is a mirror of society. The reason why we desperately try to avoid uncertainty is because our society keeps producing uncertainty by not providing protection to those who are in danger. In that sense, our actions are bound to the system. Nevertheless, we cannot help but relying on people’s action to get the ball rolling. To make a safer society in which people’s lives are more valued than corporate profits and young people can pursue their dreams without worrying about failure, we need to break out of our cultural habit: being more tolerant of cries for change may be a starter.