Revolution is not about changing the world, but about changing thoughts.

[Financial News] Urban architect Lim Jin-hong diagnoses the current Korean society as an 'era of extinction', presenting a structural alternative to the concentration of opportunities, regional extinction, youth's inability to be independent, and intergenerational imbalance in his book 'Rights Revolution; Revolution is not about changing the world, but about changing thoughts' (S Group Books).
The author is an urban architect and planner who designs social structures. He believes that society can be redrawn just as spaces are designed. He has been designing the structure of cities through architecture and is now focusing on the design structures of society that make up our lives, such as labor, welfare, cities, and education. He aims to propose new solutions to inequality, extinction, and youth's inability to be independent through the language of design, not politics. Through his first book, Rights Revolution, he suggests the possibility of a concrete and actionable structural reform, stating that "opportunity must be designed, not declared."
In reality, we are living in an 'era of extinction'. The author diagnoses the structural crisis faced by Korean society, such as low birth rates, regional extinction, youth unemployment, generational conflict, and family disintegration, not as individual policy failures but as design errors of the entire society. He names this trend the 'algorithm of extinction' and argues that the revolution to overturn it should start with design, not destruction. Rights Revolution sees today's extinction not as a simple demographic change or regional self-reliance failure but as a result of structured inequality.
While past inequality was a gap in income and assets, today's inequality is structured by where opportunities are placed and for whom the conditions of independence are designed, changing the very starting line of life. This fixation of opportunities leads to the concentration of youth in the capital region, the loss of function in the provinces, and the disintegration of family structures, ultimately leading the entire Republic of Korea into a path of extinction, according to the author's diagnosis.
Rights Revolution is a book that reinterprets the flow of the four major policy areas of labor, welfare, cities, and education from a structural perspective without political rhetoric, and based on that analysis, presents a structural reform plan to redesign opportunities and independence. The author proposes a method of reconstructing society through design instead of politics, focusing on two practical designs: 'city of rights' and 'autonomous welfare'.
The 'city of rights' model, which quantitatively allocates key resources such as education, healthcare, jobs, and public qualification exams, overly concentrated in Seoul and the southern capital region, based on population ratio by living area, is an institutional proposal that aims to realize regional self-reliance and opportunity equality through design, beyond simple regional balance discussions. It is attracting attention as a model that provides a new philosophical and structural foundation for balanced development that no longer works.
The second design of the book, 'autonomous welfare', is a model where if a young person gives up inheritance and chooses independence, the state designs asset-based independence conditions, and parents convert their assets into pensions to ensure a stable old age. This is a structural contract proposal that reconstructs intergenerational choice and responsibility, pursuing the sustainability of welfare and the coexistence of generations at the same time.
The core design of Rights Revolution is that structural reform is possible without increasing the total amount of opportunities. The author structurally proves that the opportunity structure of the entire society can be changed by justly and rationally reallocating existing resources and systems. Therefore, the structural design proposed by this book is attracting attention as a realistic and ideal alternative that can be implemented without requiring additional budget.
Rights Revolution presents a new perspective of designing opportunities and rights, beyond the existing framework of approaching policy experiments like the special autonomous province in northern Gyeonggi Province through political debate or logic of securing finances. It is also a turning point in perception that expands the discourse on autonomy from 'independence of administrative units' to 'redesign of social structure'.
The cover of Rights Revolution reads: "Revolution is not about changing the world, but about changing thoughts." The book designs structures and rearranges order. Politics debates, but this book designs. The revolution this book talks about is not anger but design, not slogans but blueprints, not destruction but reconstruction.
Rights Revolution does not just remain as the author's awareness of the problem. It is also being evaluated as an alternative for structural reform in the policy field. In particular, a current director-level public official in Gyeonggi Province participated as an 'official reviewer', highly evaluating the feasibility and validity of the structural design in the field of public policy regarding realistic policy ideas such as the special autonomous province in northern Gyeonggi Province.
courage@fnnews.com Jeon Yong-gi Reporter