Kim Dong-hwan, Hubris, and Nemesis: A Killer’s Arrogance Disguised as Greek Tragedy
Kim Dong-hwan, the former airline co-pilot whose identity was disclosed by Busan police, did not merely leave a crime scene behind him. He also left a sentence. As he was sent to prosecutors on March 26, according to multiple Korean news reports, he shouted words rarely heard outside classrooms, translations of Greek tragedy, and the more theatrical corners of educated speech: hubris and nemesis.
The scene was chilling because the words were too large for the mouth that used them. Police said Kim was sent to prosecutors on charges including murder, attempted murder, and preparation for murder after the killing of a former airline captain in Busan and an earlier attempted attack in Goyang. Reports also said investigators believed he had targeted several former colleagues and had tracked residences over months. These are matters for the legal process to determine with precision. Yet the public significance of his speech is already before us. He presented himself not as a man accused of violence, but as a figure of cosmic correction.
That is where the ethical wound deepens. The dead cannot answer the language that steps over them. The bereaved are forced to hear a murderer’s vocabulary auditioning for grandeur. And the public, trained by spectacle, risks pausing at the unusual words before it sees the more ordinary obscenity: a living man tried to make another person’s death serve his private mythology.
The scandal is not that a killer knew the words hubris and nemesis. The scandal is that he tried to make those words kneel before his resentment.
The old Greek words were not made to decorate private revenge
Hubris is often translated as arrogance, but the ancient word carries a harder social edge. It is not just excessive confidence. It is the act of treating another person as if he were beneath the circle of human regard. In Greek moral imagination, hubris wounds the victim’s honor, not accidentally but deliberately. It is an assault on proportion, on limits, on the fragile discipline that keeps power from becoming domination.
Aristotle’s discussion in Rhetoric is useful here because it refuses to romanticize the term. W. Rhys Roberts translates the relevant passage as follows:
Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved.
— Aristotle, Rhetoric (350 BCE)
The Greek term behind “insolence” is hybris. The old concept therefore does not flatter the avenger. It interrogates the one who humiliates. It asks who has converted another person into a prop for his own feeling of superiority. It asks who has decided that his pain, anger, grievance, or imagined disgrace licenses him to place himself above ordinary human limits.
Nemesis, in the popular version, is the punishment that follows hubris. But that popular version is already dangerous when it is pulled away from tragedy and placed in the hands of a person seeking self-absolution. Greek tragedy does not say, “I suffered, therefore I may punish.” It says something far more difficult: human beings are tempted to mistake their wound for law, their anger for truth, and their fall for destiny.
Tragedy is not a machine that turns resentment into justice. It is a stage on which human beings learn, too late, that the universe is not obliged to endorse their self-image.
What Kim’s words tried to reverse
According to the reports, Kim described the alleged destruction of his life by “malicious vested interests” as hubris and called the victim’s death a form of nemesis, even a heavenly punishment. This rhetorical move deserves careful attention. It reverses the moral order of the event. The accused person places himself in the position of the wronged universe. The victim is pushed into the role of punished offender. The act of killing is renamed as judgment.
Here language does not clarify reality. It launders it.
Every society knows the small beginnings of this structure. We have all heard the grammar of grievance expanding beyond evidence. Someone says he was ignored, then betrayed, then destroyed. The account grows warmer each time it is repeated. The world becomes a court in which the speaker is always plaintiff, witness, judge, and executioner. In ordinary life, this produces broken friendships, office feuds, and family estrangements. In extreme cases, when resentment is joined to planning, access, and a fantasy of moral exception, it can become lethal.
None of this reduces responsibility. Quite the opposite. To understand a structure is not to excuse an act. A society that refuses to think about the language of self-justified violence merely waits for the next person to discover a nobler vocabulary for cruelty.
Kim’s phrase matters because it shows how violence borrows legitimacy from words older and more dignified than itself. “Justice” is such a word. “Punishment” is such a word. “Fate” is such a word. They sound public, grave, and almost institutional. But private revenge wants exactly that borrowed clothing. It wants the uniform of principle while keeping the pulse of hatred.
When violence says it is destiny, the first democratic task is to answer: no, it is an act.
The victim disappears when the killer becomes the narrator
There is another violence inside this vocabulary: the theft of attention. A public murder case often produces a perverse redistribution of visibility. The accused person’s face circulates. His words are quoted. His psychology is discussed. His education, career, anger, and possible motive become objects of fascination. Meanwhile, the victim is reduced to an initial, a profession, an address, a sequence in the timeline.
This is not only a media problem. It is a social habit. We are tempted by the dramatic mind of the perpetrator because it offers a plot. The victim offers something harder: absence. Grief does not perform well for the feed. The ordinary life that was cut short resists summary. It does not arrive dressed as theory. It arrives as a chair that will not be used again, a phone call that will not come, a family forced to answer reporters while the accused shouts Greek words from a police vehicle.
That imbalance is precisely why we must be careful with the vocabulary of tragedy. Greek tragedy is full of kings, curses, prophecy, blindness, and recognition. It can make catastrophe appear grand. But real murder is not grand. It is intimate, administrative, bodily, and stupidly irreversible. It passes through elevators, stairwells, parking lots, doorbells, knives, schedules, and the vulnerable confidence of people who did not know their day had been selected by another person’s grievance.
To call such an act “nemesis” is to grant the perpetrator a grandeur he has not earned. It is to let him smuggle his ego into the victim’s last chapter. The correct moral grammar is colder and more exacting. A person was killed. A family was harmed beyond repair. Other people, according to police, may have been marked for death. The law must determine guilt and punishment. The public must not let the accused person choose the metaphysical soundtrack.
Hubris may have been closer than he knew
The bitter irony is that hubris, properly understood, may describe not the alleged arrogance of the victim but the posture of the man who claimed the right to punish. Hubris begins when a human being treats his private injury as a license to stand above the shared world. It begins when one person declares that his grievance is so exceptional that ordinary moral boundaries no longer apply. It begins when the other person’s life becomes a surface on which the self writes its wounded importance.
This is why the ancient word still matters. It names the swelling of the self until no room remains for another person’s reality. Modern societies often pretend that such swelling belongs only to tyrants, billionaires, or rulers who confuse office with destiny. But hubris also lives in smaller rooms. It can grow inside the employee who believes every career failure is conspiracy, the citizen who converts humiliation into hatred, the online crowd that calls cruelty accountability, the lonely man who mistakes obsession for truth.
Again, we must be precise. Most wounded people do not become violent. Most people who feel wronged do not kill. Poverty, frustration, exclusion, professional failure, humiliation, or anger can explain pressure; they do not authorize blood. The line between explanation and excuse must remain bright. A humane society studies the conditions that intensify grievance, but a just society refuses to make the dead pay for another person’s story about himself.
That distinction is not a luxury for philosophers. It is the minimum hygiene of public life. Without it, every grievance can dress itself as judgment. Every murderer can audition as the hand of fate. Every crowd can be tempted to ask not “what happened to the victim?” but “what made the killer feel this way?” The second question has its place. The first must never be displaced.
Against the glamour of the exceptional self
The age of social media has made one dangerous fantasy more available: the fantasy that one’s pain deserves an audience. Many people carry real injuries. Institutions fail people. Workplaces can be cruel. Hierarchies can protect insiders and discard outsiders. A progressive social imagination must not mock grievance just because grievance can become ugly. The weak are often told to be quiet in the name of order; that silence, too, is violence by polite means.
But there is a boundary no emancipatory politics can cross. Suffering does not make a person sovereign over another body. Exclusion does not confer the right to kill. A person may be harmed by systems and still be fully responsible for the harm he chooses to inflict. If we lose this distinction, solidarity itself decays. It becomes not care for the vulnerable but permission for anyone who can narrate himself as wounded.
That is why the phrase “Greek tragedy” must be handled without romance. Tragedy is not a velvet curtain thrown over brutality. It is a school of limits. It teaches that human beings are most dangerous when they believe they have escaped the ordinary measure of human accountability. The tragic hero is not admirable because he falls. He is terrifying because, before the fall, he cannot hear the world correcting him.
Kim’s reported words, then, should not send us into a shallow debate about whether he used the terms correctly. The deeper issue is how a person accused of killing could stand before cameras and attempt to convert another human being’s death into evidence for his own righteousness. That is not tragic wisdom. It is moral narcissism with a classical vocabulary.
Hubris is not the victim’s alleged power over the killer. Hubris is the killer’s claim that his grievance could sit where law, truth, and the victim’s life should have stood.
The practical task: restore the victim, discipline the spectacle
What should the public do with such a sentence? Not censor it, perhaps. The sentence belongs to the record. It shows something about the accused person’s self-understanding. But we must refuse to let it become the center of moral fascination. The point is not to repeat “hubris” and “nemesis” as exotic ornaments. The point is to ask what kind of society lets the perpetrator’s script overpower the victim’s silence.
Editors, commentators, and readers can begin with small acts of discipline. Name the alleged charges before the theatrical words. Keep the victim’s humanity in view. Avoid turning the accused into a dark celebrity. Explain the concepts without granting the speaker their dignity. When discussing motive, do not let motive mutate into justification. When discussing grievance, do not let grievance swallow the dead.
The legal system has its own work: evidence, indictment, trial, verdict, sentence. Public language has another. It must protect reality from being overwritten by spectacle. It must say that a crime does not become philosophy because the accused has memorized a Greek term. It must say that pain, however real or imagined, does not become justice when it picks up a knife.
And perhaps we, too, must examine the smaller habits that prepare the ground for such speech. We live in a culture that rewards self-dramatization. Everyone is invited to become the protagonist of an injury. Algorithms prefer conflict with a face, a slogan, and a villain. In that atmosphere, the old democratic virtues sound unfashionable: proportion, restraint, verification, accountability, the ability to suffer wrong without appointing oneself executioner.
Unfashionable virtues may be the ones we need most.
The words hubris and nemesis come to us from a world that feared the human being who forgot his limits. Kim Dong-hwan’s reported cry should not be remembered as a clever quotation, nor as a puzzle for cultural trivia. It should be remembered as a warning about what happens when wounded pride learns the language of justice but not the discipline of responsibility.
A murder does not become tragedy because the killer names it so. Tragedy begins when a society lets the killer’s language stand taller than the victim’s life.
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