I enjoy quiet encounters during quiet hours. We usually meet at dawn, or at the very least, after 11 PM. The meeting places change every time, but we have never met indoors—not even once. We always meet outside, on benches by the roadside, as if we were strangers meeting for the first time. That is one of our rules, and I like that rule. We neither know each other, nor are we aware that we do.
To operate an organization, it must have an ecosystem. If it’s a for-profit organization, it must reward its members appropriately through profit-making activities. If it’s a non-profit, it must engage in meaningful action. Most organizations can be classified as either for-profit or non-profit, but to operate something that transcends both—a society—is another matter altogether. The organization most similar to a society might be a missionary group prepared to face death. The very word “society” (결사, lit. ‘death pact’) implies a commitment to achieve a purpose even at the cost of one's life.
How many people truly have something they value as much as their own life? What does it mean to voluntarily devote one's energy and time to living in alignment with a resolution? Perhaps these people possess something that ordinary people lack—or perhaps they lack the very specialness that everyone else has. I, too, often felt that my values and thoughts differed from others, caught somewhere between absence and exception. I would ask myself, "Why don’t others think like I do?" and at the same time, "Why can’t I think like everyone else?" These two questions live inside me. And maybe, just maybe, I was already someone who had completed the preparation to live as part of a society. The first principle of the society: one must be both a person of absence and a person of exception.
We see people through the questions they carry. Not the answers—but the very questions themselves. Questions are like keys. When the right question is placed before the right door, it opens. But for those who have not yet arrived at the right question, we cannot open the door. That is our standard. What is the greatest question you hold within? With what longing did you wander for so long through unseen darkness in search of an answer to that one question? For a prepared question, a prepared door will open. That is our law.