In Order to Live is a cry for individual freedom
In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park is a powerful memoir exposing tyranny. Libertarians will find her call for freedom both haunting and essential.
I just finished Yeonmi Park’s memoir, In Order to Live, well, listened to it on Spotify, but I count that as reading. And it’s one of the most gut-wrenching, necessary books I’ve come across in a long time.
Park don’t just tell a story. She bears witness to a system so fundamentally broken that it crushes human dignity at every turn.
What she endured as a child in North Korea, and then later as a trafficking victim in China, is the sort of thing that should make every thinking person pause and reflect on the consequences of ideological control and absolute state power.
This isn’t just about North Korea, unfortunately
This is about the failure of collectivist systems in general. The ones built on the back of Karl Marx’s fantasies, where individual rights are an afterthought and the state becomes a god.
And even though Yeonmi now identifies as a conservative, a lot of what she says will resonate with libertarians. Her story is, at its core, a cry for freedom, the right to think, speak, and live without being someone else owning you, whether that’s a dictator, a trafficker, or a bureaucrat.
Yeomni Park’s follow-up to In Order to Live
She later followed up with While Time Remains. Based on what I’ve heard so far, it expands her message to Western audiences. It’s a warning that the same ideological seeds she fled are beginning to sprout here, just dressed in more sophisticated language. I agree with her on that front.
In Order to Live isn’t just a memoir; it’s a powerful rebuke of totalitarianism in all its forms. And if you believe in human dignity, individual liberty, and the absolute necessity of resisting centralized control, it’s required reading.
Want some optional reading?
Optional reading based in part on the way North Korean prisons operate? Then you need to read my novel, Civil War. This grimdark dystopian military fantasy follows Mina Hirai, who’s imprisoned in the worst possible situation.
Chained to her own toilet for a time, physically abused, and psychologically tortured, Mina knows a thing or two about harsh prison systems. But what happens when she’s put on a mission to break out of her current predicament and liberate a prison worse than the one she’s left? Oh, the stakes raise pretty damn fast.
