President Lee Jae-myung said on the 30th regarding Korea's political culture that "it is not right for politicians to experiment with their own convictions and values when they should be directly responsible for the people's lives." He also stressed, "A man named Max Weber also said that a sense of balance is important," adding, "Politics is reality. What does ideology, values, or personal disposition matter?" Max Weber and the concepts of convictions and values were recently borrowed by former Health and Welfare Minister Yoo Si-min in advocating his "ABC theory," and President Lee appeared to be indirectly pointing to those concepts.
President Lee made the remarks at a town hall meeting held at Halla Convention Center at Halla University in Jeju, after emphasizing that state violence like the Jeju April 3 Incident must never happen again, saying "ultimately, politics must be normalized."
"Increasing one's own wealth while killing someone or taking away what belongs to others is an abnormal society. That was our past," President Lee said. "Yet such behavior persists even now. While claiming to be democratic and working for the nation and the people, when you look at the substance, there are cases where they harm the nation and the people while pursuing their own group's interests."
He continued, "The reality is that politicians gather to form factions and exploit vested interests and systems to push through illegality and injustice." He then stressed, "Politics should be a 'competition over who governs better.' Making politicians compete over who performs better from the people's perspective is what it means for politics to be normalized."
In particular, he emphasized that the standard for judging such a "competition over who governs better" should be "the greatest happiness of the majority of the people." President Lee explained, "There may be people who enter politics to realize their own convictions and values. That may have some merit, but if it ultimately brings harm, then that is not governing well." He then invoked Max Weber's sense of balance and added, "Politics is reality. What does ideology, values, or personal disposition matter?"
Meanwhile, former Minister Yoo had previously borrowed Max Weber's concepts of "ethics of conviction (values) and ethics of responsibility (pragmatism)" to analyze the "New Lee Jae-myung" phenomenon by categorizing politicians into ABC groups — A for core supporters who pursue values, B for those who pursue private interests and would leave if President Lee faces difficulties, and C for those who pursue both values and interests simultaneously.