Hyun Jin Preston Moon bullied a teenager at the New Yorker Hotel
May 8, 2011
A few weeks ago I was in a bar having a beer with a couple of buddies I had grown up with. An incident came up in our conversation. A few weeks before that, the same incident had come up in a separate conversation with another friend. I didn’t bring it up in either case and yet there it was.
It was strange to me that this incident was so permanently ingrained in all of our memories. Of all the violence we had witnessed growing up, it shouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy. No one was bloodied, no teeth were knocked out. As Moon aggression went it was pretty moderate. And yet for some reason the incident was still very fresh in our minds.
…Five young boys sat on aching swollen knees in the otherwise empty New Yorker Hotel auditorium. Hyun Jin Moon was speaking at us…
In Japanese there are many words that essentially mean “truth”, but two are especially interesting. Tatemae means the truth of things as they seem or appear from the outside, the facade. Honne means the truth of things as they really are. It makes sense that such distinction exists in a society so strictly organized and ceremonial, a society with little nonconformity or crime…other than nonconformity or crime that actually exists. Reality can be a troublesome thing if it doesn’t fit to artificial social rules. (Honne and Tatamae are concepts I first encountered watching the movie adaptation of the book “Freakonomics”.)
…Hyun Jin barked something about how we should follow the hard course in life, the difficult road. “Like going to Harvard”, he said, “the most difficult school in the world!”
“Actually, Caltech is the hardest school in the country”, replied one of the young boys…
The portrait of the Moon sons painted for gullible church members was of loving, caring, wise and wonderful people imbued with an intrinsic spiritual gift by virtue of their bloodline and experience with their parents. This was their facade, their tatemae. Our parents worshiped this truth without question.
The reality, or honne, however, was quite different. Nineteen year old kids never know anything worth teaching and the Moons were no exception. They had no special wisdom and no spiritual powers. In fact they were far worse. They had been brought up to believe they were the main characters of a fairy tale of new royalty here to rule the world. They were products of an entitlement upbringing, spoiled rotten, and had an almost pathological inability to empathize with other humans. The historical reality behind medieval fairy tales, the violent feudal lords and princes who murdered each other for power and preyed ruthlessly on their own subjects, was their model for conduct. And we, the BC’s, were the disposable extras in their story.
In Hyun Jin’s tatemae he was the obvious heir apparent to his father’s empire. He was tall, good looking and sang like Elvis. He brought great prestige to the Moon family by representing Korea at the Olympic Games (although, fittingly, it was on the back of another living thing). When he spoke publicly, it was a breath of fresh air from Hyo Jin’s incoherent and rage-filled rants. And he was even a good student, spending a year or two at Fordham University, but then transferring to the much more prestigious Columbia University and finishing an MBA at Harvard University on the merit of his good grades. The members ate it right up.
…The kid who spoke up that day was geeky and obsessively detail oriented. He was also by far the smartest person in the room. We used to play Trivial Pursuit with him – he’d be one team and the rest of us, five or six kids, were the other team. He would win. When he corrected Hyun Jin it wasn’t to be nasty or disrespectful. Nor was he being arrogant or self-congratulating. He was simply stating a fact.
Hyun Jin stopped talking – there was a familiar uncomfortable silence…
At the time he was becoming more active in BC and church affairs and appeared to be feeling out how best to meet what would later become his apparent ultimate objective – the throne of his father. But it must not have been exactly clear to him yet on how best to motivate and control people, whether through kindness, terror or some combination of both. “Love”, as his father preached (but didn’t live), was not on the table.
We had mostly seen the experiments with varying degrees of relative kindness – relative to his other brothers, that is – until that day. He had appeared reluctant to verbally abuse or physically assault people, generally preferring to lead by example. He wasn’t a crazy bully like Hyo Jin or a paranoid sociopath like Kook Jin.
…Hyun Jin lunged at the kid and belted him hard in the gut. Then he started screaming, lambasting him for his insolence, calling him a “fool”, a “faggot”, “worthless”, “stupid”, etc. Our friend slumped over in pain and didn’t fight back. The verbal assault went on for half an hour during which our friend was accused of everything from sexual depravity to high treason and conspiracy. To this day I deeply regret sitting through the incident and doing nothing about it.
A honne can be quite inconvenient when it stubbornly refuses to comply with a contrived tatamae. As a Moon, Hyun Jin was supposed to be the best in the room at everything. He was a member of the new royalty, a new Nietzsche-esq super person. But he wasn’t. In fact Hyun Jin wasn’t really that smart. Most of his college papers were written by well educated adult church members, not by him. The only reason he graduated from high school at all was because a BC friend did all his homework for him.
The incident betrayed some surprising personality traits. He was petty and insecure to have reacted so badly to someone correcting him. He was avaricious in his need to have control and power over others and overconfident in his own ability to correctly judge the intentions of others, on which he was dead wrong in this case. Worse still, he was unjust. The punishment didn’t fit the crime. But worst of all, he was a fraud. For all his talk of the hard road, his fixation was the image of success (Harvard) rather than the substance of it. I believe the incident was memorable because it was the first time we’d seen this from Hyun Jin. It got us thinking, what’s next? This isn’t the person we thought he was. He’s just as power-obsessed as the rest of them and apparently just as willing to use extreme methods to get his way.
After that incident rumors started circulating of other beatings, mostly of members. Then began the campaign to consolidate church businesses under UCI, of which he had been put in charge of by his father. A few years after the incident he showed up at the company my father worked for and demanded that they turn over the assets of the business to UCI. To the great credit and foresight of those running the firm, they refused. The same can’t be said for others, many of whom spent years working for submarket wages only to find themselves recently jobless because they weren’t sure which side to support.
With much of church business interests under control and the support of church members as heir apparent, in a surprise turn of events, he was asked by his father to step down. One can’t help but wonder why? What had his father seen? Something must have frightened him. Was it simply a test of faith or was there something more to it? Could his father have seen a little too much of himself in his son? Or maybe he was incensed at what appeared to be maneuvering behind his back by Chung Hwan Kwak, whose daughter was married to Hyun Jin. Then again, it might have been that he was turned against Hyun Jin by the whispers of his wife and other children, who no doubt feared and resented Hyun Jin’s popularity and first son status.
Someday the real story, the honne, of that palace intrigue will be laid out by someone who was there. And I’m sure the church hierarchy will be quick to deny it and try to “re-educate” members with a whitewashed, tearful, syrupy, vapid tatemae.
I consulted a couple of the other people who were there that day to make sure I had the story right. One wrote this. I laughed my ass off.
Actually it happened like this:
After Blue Suede Shoes (Hyun Jin) made that comment. **** (name removed) couldn’t help his Einsteinium nature to allow such inaccuracy and tried to correct Hyun’s statement with a respectful gentleman’s glance. But that fateful quick look upward for a fraction of a second crossed path with Hyun’s beady little eyes. **** probably didn’t even know if he did or not because he had a gush of blood daze for hanging his head through most of his banter. Hyun should of know that **** naturally subscribes to Princeton annual college review which give in depth stats of ind. colleges. But that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. His blood turned from “wonder of himself” to “jail house bend over”. He squatted next to **** like a lieutenant in Guantanamo bay to teach the prisoner a lesson for such insolence. He squatted for a good 15 minutes over him. He voice grew louder “Did you know what the best school is (something to that affect)?” while smacking him in the head trying to provoke **** to spill the beans sort of speak. I think he repeated that ADHD line like 10 times. Then he paused and **** knowing he was cornered had to come out and say it. He thought to himself it’s better to get a beating then smell his preppy polo sport cologne for another hour.
And by the way, you forgot that he got into Harvard because of Reverend’s generous endowment to the university that year.
The kid (now all grown up) who was hit wrote this:
There are a couple of points in which my recollection differs factually, and I’m pretty sure about these:
1. This was a larger gathering. The place wasn’t packed, like at a major holiday, but it was probably half-full. It was definitely not an intimate setting with just five guys sitting there. I can’t recall the occasion, but I’m pretty sure it was mostly 2nd gen types.
2. Hyun Jin really belabored the point of the question. Several times he said “isn’t that so? isn’t it true that Harvard is the hardest school to get into?”. In the context of the talk, as I recall, he wasn’t using this to glorify himself by association with a prestigious institution, it was just a stupid rhetorical trick to get the audience to agree on an obvious thing (“the sky is blue, no?”) to support some unrelated point. So, he asked several times and finally I reluctantly offered dissent.
3. I’m pretty sure he didn’t hit me in the gut. If you’re sure you remember differently I’ll defer to that, but I really just recall slapping about the head, without any real damage.
As to background, I had just come back from a year in Europe, where lack of contact with the True Family was actually really beneficial to people’s faith. For a long time there was a widespread belief that the True Children’s will be good leaders “if only they hear the truth, and if people around them stop telling them what they want to hear, etc.” That was very much in my mind that day. I thought, “why should I have anything to fear if I speak honestly with sincerity.” The incident left me feeling not so much assaulted or reeling, but disappointed and betrayed. I realized that they are adults, responsible for their own actions and beliefs. People in Europe asked me “when you get to know them they are regular, sensible people, no?”, and subsequently I had to say “No, they will never treat you as a peer to be respected, and they are not interested in hearing what you have to say unless it confirms what they already think.”
A couple of weeks later, Hyun Jin’s wife sent me a suit through an intermediary (one of the Kwaks, who I didn’t really know and was clearly just sent on the errand). On the one hand, it’s an expression of chagrin, but it’s also not an apology, or admission of remorse. It’s an insulting act of patronage.
When I think back on all the time we spent with Hyun Jin and Kook Jin, there is one moment that always sticks with me:
They seemed incredibly isolated, and that isolation was self-imposed. I never saw them acting warmly, with care and trust with anyone. Not their siblings, not their parents, not their companions. The distance was vigilantly maintained. I remember an evening with Hyun Jin in the rifle range at Barrytown, maybe five or six guys standing around. There is loose banter, somebody cracks a joke (nothing remotely inappropriate or off-color), and everybody shares it, chuckling. For a split-second it feels like a group of friends sharing a moment. All of a sudden Hyun Jin’s face goes dark, and he says “don’t you ever forget who I am, and who I represent.” The room goes silent, everybody snaps to attention, clasps hands behind back, fixes their gaze on the floor.
It’s something I don’t understand or care to address via armchair psychology, but it’s ****ed-up.
It’s interesting to me that so many people remember that ballroom incident. It’s not something I think about a lot, but it did represent a betrayal. The slapping didn’t hurt, but the failure to be recognized and treated as a human being did hurt.
MLP
_______________________________________
The Untold Story of Sushi in America by The New York Times – Fifteen years after the groundbreaking Chicago Tribune Investigation
True Father became every bully in high school I have ever known.
Re: Bully
Fun with Numbers – MLP
Sad Stories: The Death of David Ang – MLP
What I Really Learned From My UC Experience – MLP
My Advice on Leaving the Unification Church – MLP
“You can’t really believe that stuff?” said Ye Jin, Hyo Jin and In Jin Moon
