In discussing the Burning Sun scandal, one of the questions most commonly come by is, “Why did no one report what was happening?”. It was such a large-scale scandal involving dozens of crimes, many reports include claims from Burning Sun staff saying they’d witnessed assaults and drug use, so, then, why did no one speak up? Why did police repeatedly fail to investigate the various crimes thoroughly? One moral philosophy concept that could explain this phenomenon is the Banalty Of Evil, coined by Hannah Arendt. Although this concept was originally used to explain why the Nazis were able to casually commit atrocities in their day-to-day lives, the concept can also be used to understand bystanders.
Arendt’s primary argument was that great evil does not always come from monstrous people. Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi officials responsible for organizing the deportation of Jews during the Holocaust. What struck her was that Eichmann did not appear to be a sadistic monster. Instead, he seemed ordinary, bureaucratic, and concerned with his career. This led her to argue that terrible crimes can be committed by seemingly normal people.
Arendt’s most famous claim was not that evil is trivial, but that evil can be committed by people who fail to think critically about their actions. Eichmann repeatedly claimed he was simply following orders and obeying the law. Arendt argued that he had abandoned personal moral judgment and replaced it with obedience. The overarching sentiment of Banalty oofEvil is that atrocities are not always committed by people intending to commit atrocities but, rather, are primarily perpetuated by people who are “following orders” or adhering to the status quo.
In regards to Burning Sun employees who may have witnessed suspicious activity but choose not to report, we can draw some conclusions that, perhaps, they’d been conditioned by higher ups not to worry, to prioritize their own jobs, and to allow others—others who may not have intentions to handle it correctly—to deal with it. As explained in the Hierarchies chapter, Korean citizens are taught from birth to respect and rely on those older or in positions higher than them. If the Burning Sun staff who witnessed the sexual assaults, as claimed in earlier chapters, were low-ranking staff,it’s possible they did not believe they even ranked high enough to report it.
While this status quo may have cultural benefits within Korean society, it often results in silence in response to issues such as sexual harassment and workplace mistreatment. Those lower on the hierarchy have no channel through which to report, especially if the suspicious activity they witness was being conducted or participated in by a staff member higher in the hierarchy. When considering the Banalty of Evil, it can be understood that a lack of reporting was not necessarily willful malice or even an active immoral decision but, rather, a result of societal conditioning and imperfect structures.Another topic to consider is The Bystander Effect by John Darley and Bobby Latané, who discuss topics such as the diffusion of responsibility. Considering this, another reason witnesses may not have reported is the human psychological response to external tension wherein we are resistant to getting involved in other people’s conflict. As a result, we may diffuse responsibility top other people present.
For example, if two employees witnessed a sexual assault at Burning Sun, they both may have walked away rationalizing to themselves that, surely, the other person would report it so they didn’t have to.Another common issue that John Darley and Bobby Latané discuss which can create bystanders is Pluralistic Ignorance. This concept describes how, in uncomfortable or unfamiliar settings, people look to each other to know how to react. If everyone involved is waiting for someone else to react first, and no one does, it may be presumed that the lack of reaction is the appropriate reaction—thus resulting in the assumption of something not being as urgent or as big of a deal as they may have initially assumed. If someone witnessed a sexual assault and other staff didn’t react, they may have rationalized to themselves that, maybe, what they saw was actually consensual. Maybe no one reacted because it wasn’t an assault and didn’t need to be reported. In this case, these bystanders may not have realized it was assault until after the Burning Sun investigation began and they re-analyzed what they saw.
One important argument that Darley and Latané made was that bystanders are not always bystanders because they don’t care. They may be concerned but trapped by uncertainty, social convention, cultural hierarchies, or even fear of retaliation. While the Banalty of Evil explains how people can be complicit in evil without caring, the Bystander Effect explains how people can care deeply and still not act.
While concepts such as the Banality of Evil and the Bystander Effect help explain why individuals may fail to intervene when confronted with wrongdoing, explanation is not the same as absolution. Understanding the psychological and social forces that discourage action does not erase the consequences of inaction. A witness who fails to report a crime may not be motivated by malice, but their silence can nevertheless allow harm to continue.
This distinction is particularly important when discussing Burning Sun. It would be easy to dismiss staff members, police officers, industry insiders, and other witnesses as simply products of their environment. However, doing so risks overlooking the very real impact that their inaction had on those who were victimized. Social pressure, cultural hierarchy, and uncertainty may explain why people remained silent, but they do not necessarily excuse that silence.
Ultimately, the value of examining these theories is not to remove responsibility from bystanders but to understand how ordinary people can become part of systems that permit wrongdoing to continue. If future scandals are to be prevented, it is not enough to identify perpetrators alone. We must also understand the social and psychological conditions that discourage intervention, reward silence, and convince otherwise ordinary people that someone else will step in.
While these moral philosophies may explain Burning Sun staff not responding to potential crimes, do they explain the police’s complicity as well? In Jung Joonyoung’s 2016 scandal, it was reported that police seemed unmotivated to secure evidence against him. Other reports arose throughout the Burning Sun scandal claiming police had come to the club multiple times to investigate drug use and minors being permitted entry but, likewise, seemed unmotivated. It’s difficult to say with any certainty without having firsthand experience of what being a police officer in Korea is like but it can be speculated that hierarchies came into play.
If higher ranking police officers were receiving bribes, or even just dismissing the seriousness of the issues they were investigating, younger, lower-ranked police officers would have no choice but to defer to their judgement. This, too, is a diffusion of responsibility.
However, the role of police introduces another important consideration: institutions themselves can become susceptible to the same pressures that affect individuals. Police departments operate through chains of command, meaning decisions are often made collectively rather than independently. In such environments, responsibility can become fragmented. A junior officer may assume that a superior officer has access to information they do not. A supervisor may trust that another department has already reviewed the evidence. When enough people are involved, accountability can become diluted until no single person feels fully responsible for ensuring an investigation is conducted properly.
This does not necessarily require corruption to occur. Even in the absence of bribery or deliberate misconduct, organizational cultures can develop in which certain complaints are viewed as low priority, certain businesses are treated more favorably than others, or certain assumptions go unchallenged simply because they have become normalized. Once these attitudes become embedded within an institution, individual officers may find it difficult to challenge them, particularly in societies where respect for hierarchy and seniority is strongly emphasized.
From this perspective, the failures that occurred before and during the Burning Sun scandal may not be understood solely as the result of individual bad actors. Rather, they may also reflect broader structural issues in which authority, responsibility, and accountability became so dispersed that warning signs were repeatedly overlooked. The danger of such systems is that they can allow harmful behavior to continue even when many people are aware that something is wrong.
None of this is to say there were no bad actors. Reports were released about investigations and arrests of a small but notable handful of police officers who were suspected to have conducted inappropriate relationships with Burning Sun. Although it would seem that there were no actual convictions, concepts like the USA’s Thin Blue Line perspective may have been applied to prevent harsh punishment in spite of there being legitimacy to the allegations. However, regardless of tangible punishment, arguments can be made that accountability is still owed.
While the Banality of Evil and the Bystander Effect help explain how ordinary people become passive in the face of wrongdoing, Karl Jaspers reminds us that explanation is not the same as absolution. Social pressures, cultural hierarchies, and psychological barriers may explain why individuals failed to act, but they do not entirely eliminate the moral responsibility that accompanies witnessing harm and choosing silence.
After World War II, Jaspers wrote The Question of German Guilt to examine the responsibility of German citizens following the Nazi regime. His most influential contribution was dividing guilt into four categories;
1 – Criminal Guilt
As the name suggests, this is tangible guilt with real world consequences wherein one commits a crime.
2 – Political Guilt
Jaspers argued that even if an individual did not personally commit a crime, they still bear some responsibility for the actions carried out by the state or institutions operating in their name.
3 – Moral Guilt
Jaspers argued that people remain morally responsible for choices they make, even when those choices are legal or socially accepted.
4 – Metaphysical Guilt
This is Jaspers’ most controversial and philosophical category. He argued that humans have a fundamental obligation toward one another simply because we share humanity. If a person witnesses profound suffering and does nothing when intervention was possible, they may bear a form of responsibility even if they committed no crime and violated no law. In Jaspers’ words, there is a sense in which human beings are responsible for one another.
Arendt and Darley/Latané explain why people fail to act. Jaspers asks a different question: Even if we understand why they failed to act, what responsibility remains? Jaspers argued that understanding the circumstances surrounding a person’s actions does not automatically absolve them of responsibility. A person may have acted under social pressure, cultural expectations, or institutional constraints, but they still retain some degree of moral agency. For Jaspers, the question is not simply whether an individual committed a crime but whether they fulfilled their obligation to act ethically when confronted with wrongdoing.
The same concept can be applied to Seungri. Although much of this book works to absolve him of myths and rumours, and establishes credible deniability even in his official charges, he can still be labeled as a Bystander. He admitted to knowing about the molka Jung Joonyoung and his other friends were distributing. Considering the commonality of Host Culture in Korea, it’s unlikely he was unaware of Yoo Inseok hiring prostitutes to offer to foreign investors. There are arguments that can be made about his knowledge but lack of action with regards to these crimes and, as a result, similar arguments can be made towards his moral and metaphysical guilts.
Ultimately, one of the most important lessons of the Burning Sun scandal is that accountability extends beyond the individuals who eventually appear in court. While criminal prosecutions focus on identifying those who directly violated the law, social analysis requires a broader examination of the environments that allowed those violations to occur. By understanding the roles played by hierarchy, conformity, diffusion of responsibility, and moral disengagement, we gain a clearer picture not only of what happened at Burning Sun but also of why similar scandals continue to emerge across industries and societies around the world.
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