Far from being a Confucian or Stalinist patriarchy, in other words, North Korea is that very rare thing, a dictatorship without a father principle. Erich Fromm once wrote that such states can have no conscience—an assertion that Japan’s exploits under another “parent leader” would seem to confirm. Though not nearly as destructive, North Korea has often behaved on the world stage in a comparably irrational and unpredictable manner. Rashness is celebrated on the home front, too. The masses are daily reminded that because they are uniquely good—Kim: “There is no people as good as ours in the world”—they should remain true to their instincts. Not surprisingly, then, social and domestic life is marked by a far higher degree of violence than was the case in the old Soviet bloc. Foreigners tend to miss all this. A recent British documentary about life there, which pitched the popular fallacy of North Korea as an old-school communist state, bore the title A State of Mind. When the film was screened in Pyongyang, officials renamed it A Country of Feelings. It was their way of making clear that, as Nietzsche might have put it, theirs is more a Dionysian than an Apollonian society.

We should thus beware of assuming that the transition of power there will follow staid Soviet precedents. Kim Jong Il’s own takeover after his father’s death in 1994 did not exactly go smoothly, though the official media had been working up to it since the early 1970s. He inexplicably lay low for the first few months while his grieving country slid into chaos and famine. Relations between Washington and Pyongyang were improving at the time; the Agreed Framework had just been signed, and the Clinton Administration was sending energy aid. But Kim Jong Il knew that—as Burke once said of revolutionary France—America’s friendship would be more dangerous than its enmity. With his economy in ruin, he had to continue the official tradition of demonizing the U.S. or else acknowledge his own irrelevance. After all, if Koreans should work with the Yankees, why not do it under Seoul’s rule, and go to bed on a full stomach? So when Kim finally fully emerged into the public eye in 1995, it was as a “military first” leader, a man so busy protecting the country from the American threat that he would have no time for economic matters.

A proper understanding of this background will aid us in our preparations for Kim’s death. For one thing, we should not assume that another hereditary succession is inevitable. Even now, the official media continuously reminds the masses that Kim Il Sung wanted his son Kim Jong Il to take over—that there could have been no better candidate, and so on. Such strenuous efforts at persuasion would seem to indicate that at least a part of the public has never fully accepted the legitimacy of his rule. The country will have far greater problems supporting one of Kim Jong Il’s callow sons, of whom the average North Korean has hitherto heard virtually nothing.