What North Korean Defectors and U.S. Military Veterans Teach Us About Agency

What North Korean defectors and U.S. military veterans teach us about agency

Watching Beyond Utopia changed how I think about freedom.

Not because of the escapes themselves, although they are extraordinary, dangerous, and heroic. But because of what happens after freedom is reached.

A Brief Summary of the Film

Beyond Utopia documents the real-life efforts of a small network of activists and missionaries who help North Koreans escape one of the most restrictive authoritarian regimes in the world. The film follows defectors as they flee extreme surveillance, starvation, forced labor, and punishment for even minor acts of dissent.

Escape is only the first hurdle.

Once defectors reach safety, often after months or years of hiding and relocation, they enter resettlement programs designed to help them adapt to life outside the regime. These programs focus on practical skills like banking, shopping, transportation, and technology.

What the film reveals, often quietly and powerfully, is that freedom alone does not equal readiness.

Many defectors struggle not because they lack intelligence or resilience, but because they have never practiced independent decision making. Every aspect of life under the regime was dictated. Survival required obedience, not authorship.

When the system disappears, agency does not automatically appear.

What Stayed With Me

The movie sheds light on the shift North Koreans experience as they move from survival, to freedom, to agency.

Freedom did not look like relief. It looked destabilizing. Overwhelming. Unanchored.

For people whose identities, choices, and safety were organized entirely by an external system, freedom arrived without a framework. When that system was removed, the human was suddenly responsible for authorship they had never practiced.

That realization stayed with me because I have seen a parallel experience play out repeatedly with veterans. Similar. And yet dramatically different.

Where the Comparison Holds and Where It Breaks

North Koreans survive by having agency stripped from them.

Veterans serve by choosing to place their agency in service of something larger than themselves.

This distinction matters. Military service is not survival in the way authoritarian oppression is survival. Service members raise their right hand. They sign a contract. They voluntarily consent to constraint, hierarchy, and discipline in pursuit of a shared mission.

This is not coercion. It is purpose.

Veterans do not lose agency in service. They mobilize it collectively. Individual choice gives way to shared responsibility. Personal preference yields to mission. Agency becomes less about self expression and more about execution.

And that collective agency is powerful.

Veterans as the Lens, Not the Exception

This is where veterans matter far beyond the veteran community.

Veterans are not a special case. They are a clear case. They offer a visible, accelerated version of a universal human experience: what happens when identity, agency, and belonging are shaped by a system, and that system ends.

What veterans experience in transition is not unique. It is simply more concentrated, more structured, and more honest.

Every human who undergoes major change experiences some version of this: leaving a long-held role, exiting a defining institution, losing externally assigned meaning, being asked to self-author again.

Executives after mergers. Employees after layoffs. Caregivers after children leave home. First responders after service. Founders after exit.

Veterans allow us to see the pattern clearly because the system they leave is explicit, immersive, and identity forming. They are the lens through which we can understand all human transformation.

Two System-Driven Experiences

North Koreans transition from agency limited by survival.

Veterans transition from agency surrendered and concentrated through service.

Both experiences are system driven. Both rely on structure, rules, hierarchy, and meaning that live outside the individual self.

In both cases, the system works. Until it ends.

The Moment No One Prepares You For

The problem is not life inside the system. The problem is what happens after.

When the system is removed, or when the human is removed from the system, how does the human function?

North Koreans are released into freedom without having practiced choice. Veterans are released into freedom after years of practicing agency through collective mission.

In both cases, freedom arrives faster than readiness. Freedom without agency feels like falling. Not because either group is incapable. But because identity, decision making, and belonging were once externally organized. When that organizing structure disappears, the human must learn how to self organize again.

Why Transition Support Falls Short

Most transition programs focus on logistics. Jobs. Benefits. Housing. Skills translation.

Those things matter. But they are not the core issue.

The real work is psychological and systemic. It is the work of re-authoring identity. It is the work of translating collective agency into personal authorship. It is the work of learning how to belong without uniform, rank, or externally assigned meaning.

This is not weakness. It is a predictable outcome of living inside highly effective systems.

What Veterans Actually Need, and What We All Need

Veterans do not need to be rescued.

They need space to reclaim personal agency after years of collective responsibility. They need language for identity shift. They need environments where choice, voice, and authorship can be practiced safely and without urgency.

And so does everyone else navigating transformation. Veterans simply show us the stakes more clearly.

The Question Beneath the Question

Freedom is not free. Not because someone else paid the price. But because agency must be learned, practiced, and owned.

North Koreans must learn agency for the first time. Veterans must translate agency into a new form without losing meaning. The rest of us will face our own versions of this moment too.

And until we design systems that support what happens after the system, we will continue to confuse freedom with readiness, independence with capability, and transition with logistics.

The real work begins when the structure ends. That is where agency is either rebuilt or lost.

And that is where we should be paying attention.

We build the architecture for what most change models skip: the human.

Sara B. McNamara, MSOD Founder, HumanWorks™ Solutions