Do You Know How Wet the Water Is?

Do You Know How Wet the Water Is?

On Corporate Blindness, Church Culture, and the Courage to See

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address)

On May 18, 2026 — the 46th anniversary of South Korea's Gwangju Protest for Democracy, a day when hundreds of pro-democracy protesters died under the treads of military tanks — Starbucks Korea launched a cheerful marketing promotion. They called it "Tank Day."

The campaign invited customers to buy their new "Tank" tumbler line, encouraging them to put it on the table with a sound of "Tak!" — which, to Koreans, immediately evoked the police explanation given for how a student activist died under torture in 1987. The police claimed an interrogator had merely slammed a desk. The country never forgot that word: tak.

Within hours, the campaign was pulled. The CEO was fired. Shinsegae Group Chairman Chung Yong-jin issued a public bow of apology: "I deeply bow in apology as the representative of the group." Starbucks Global headquarters called the incident "unintentional" — and said it "never should have happened."

Unintentional. That word deserves our full attention.

The Fish Has No Idea What Wetness Is

The scandal was not born of malice. It was born of something more quietly devastating: cultural enclosure. The marketing team at Starbucks Korea was so immersed in the world of brand metrics, tumbler aesthetics, and quarterly promotions that May 18 registered to them as simply another date on the calendar — a good day to move inventory. That the nation outside their glass offices was grieving, remembering, and honoring its dead did not penetrate the bubble.

The former CEO himself acknowledged it: the promotional materials were "not thoroughly reviewed internally before the event began." But the deeper problem was not a missing review step. The problem was that no one in the room already knew what everyone outside the room knew. The institutional culture had become so self-referential that it had lost the capacity to feel the weight of the world in which it operated.

This is what cultural blindness looks like. Not villainy. Not even negligence in the usual sense. Just fish, who have swum in the same water for so long, they no longer know what water is.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing about the ordinary administrators who enabled extraordinary evil, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" — the idea that great harm is often done not by monsters but by people who have simply stopped thinking, who execute their roles inside systems without ever asking what those systems are doing to the people outside them. She wrote: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

You do not have to be running a death camp for this principle to apply. You only have to be running a marketing department — or a church committee — with the blinds drawn.

Plato's Cave Has Wi-Fi Now

Plato told us this story twenty-four centuries ago. In the Republic, he describes prisoners chained in a cave, watching shadows on the wall. The shadows are all they have ever known. The shadows, to them, are reality. When one prisoner escapes and sees the sunlight, he is blinded at first — not because the light is dangerous, but because his eyes were made for darkness. And when he returns to tell the others what he saw, they do not believe him. They think he has lost his mind.

Every institution builds its own cave. The cave of Starbucks Korea was built from brand playbooks, quarterly targets, and internal meetings where the language of "Tank Day" sounded perfectly reasonable because no one in the room represented the 46-year-old grief of an entire nation.

But here is what Plato's allegory also tells us: the cave is comfortable. The shadows feel like truth. The people inside are not stupid. They are simply prisoners of familiarity.

The prophet Isaiah heard God describe the same condition with devastating precision, long before Plato: "Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed." (Isaiah 6:9–10)

This is not God causing blindness. This is God describing a people who have chosen, through years of settled comfort, to no longer truly look.

Now Let's Talk About the Church

I want to be careful here, because I love the church. I am for the church. But precisely because I love her, I cannot pretend that what happened to Starbucks Korea has no analog in our pews.

We have our own "Tank Days."

Every institution develops an internal language — a set of assumed values, unspoken rules, power dynamics, and cultural reflexes that become so embedded they are invisible to the people inside them. In the corporate world, we call it "company culture." In the church, we often call it "the way we do things here," and we give it a theological veneer that makes it harder to question.

Consider how many churches have a stated theology of grace — and an operational culture of performance. How many churches preach servant leadership — and practice a subtle, suffocating hierarchy. How many churches would say they are missional, outward-focused, and for their community, while their internal conversations are almost entirely about their own buildings, budgets, and brand?

This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense. Many of the people inside those churches are genuinely devout, genuinely loving, and genuinely unaware of the gap. They are fish. They do not know what wet is.

The apostle Paul did not mince words about this danger: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12:2)

The "pattern of this world" is not just secularism. It is any self-enclosed system of thinking that stops you from seeing clearly. A church can be worldly not by hosting raunchy parties, but by being so institutionally self-protective, so shaped by the need to survive and grow and appear successful, that it loses the capacity to hear the groaning of the world outside its walls.

And — more painfully — to hear the groaning of the people inside them.

The Wound Dressed Too Lightly

Starbucks Korea's "Tank Day" came with a veneer of innocence — it was, after all, just a tumbler promotion. No one in the boardroom thought they were celebrating a massacre. They were just selling cups. The wound of an entire nation's memory was invisible to them, and so they dressed it lightly, casually, profitably.

Jeremiah wept over something similar: "They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace." (Jeremiah 8:11)

The church, at its worst, can do exactly this. A member comes to leadership with a genuine wound — a betrayal, a pattern of abuse, an injustice — and the institution, trained to protect itself, responds with the theological equivalent of "Tank Day." Words are said. Meetings are held. Apologies are issued. But the deeper question — how did our culture make this possible? — is never asked, because asking it would require the fish to notice the water.

The ancient rebuke Jesus gave to the Pharisees was not that they were irreligious. It was that they were so thoroughly religious — so fluent in the language of the system — that they had lost the very thing the system was meant to protect: human beings made in the image of God. "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill, and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy, and faithfulness." (Matthew 23:23)

The Pharisees were not performing. They genuinely believed they were the custodians of truth. That was the problem.

The Laodicean Church Had Great Branding

There is a church in the book of Revelation that might be the patron saint of institutional blindness. The church at Laodicea was wealthy, comfortable, and apparently thriving. By any external metric, it was successful. But Jesus looked at it and said something devastating:

"You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked." (Revelation 3:17)

Four words: you do not realize.

This is the anatomy of cultural blindness. Not ignorance born of lack of information, but blindness born of sufficiency — the kind that comes from never being hungry enough to look, never being threatened enough to question, never being displaced enough to notice what everyone outside the walls already knows.

The Laodicean church did not need to repent of dramatic sin. It needed to repent of comfortable unawareness, which is, in many ways, the harder repentance, because you have to first believe you need it.

What the Water Feels Like From the Outside

The people who grieved over Starbucks Korea's "Tank Day" were not oversensitive. They were simply people for whom May 18 was not an abstract date. They had grandmothers who remembered. They had family trees with missing branches. They felt the weight of the water because the water was not abstract to them.

The people who get hurt by churches are often in similar situations. They are not oversensitive. They are simply people for whom the words and structures of the institution carry a weight that the institution itself has never had to feel. They see what the fish cannot from the inside.

G.K. Chesterton put it this way: "It is not merely that God has arbitrarily made us such that we cannot see our own backs; it is that the back is precisely the part of us that most needs to be seen by others."

We cannot see our own backs. This is not a moral failure — it is a structural one. And it means that health, for any institution, depends on creating the conditions in which outsiders can speak and insiders can hear.

Toward Seeing

The Starbucks Korea scandal will fade. The CEO will land somewhere else. The tumblers will sell under a different name. The institution will add "stronger internal controls" and "company-wide training," which is the corporate equivalent of rearranging the chairs in Plato's cave.

Real seeing is more costly than that. It requires what the Hebrew prophets called teshuvah — a genuine turning, a willingness to face the direction you have been avoiding. It requires creating genuine space for voices that are not already inside the system. It requires leaders who ask not just "did we follow the right process?" but "what does our process reveal about what we actually value?"

For the church, this means something more than policy review. It means the humility to recognize that the Spirit of God is not confined to the institution — that He speaks through the wounded, the marginalized, the ones who left, the ones who stayed silent, the ones we dismissed as difficult. It means, in the words of Proverbs, resisting the most seductive of all lies: "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death." (Proverbs 14:12)

The way that appears right. Not the obviously wrong way. The way that appears right to the fish, in the water, who have never once asked what wet means.

Conclusion: The Question Worth Asking

David Foster Wallace ended his commencement address with a quiet urgency. The point of education, he said, is not information — it is learning how to think. And thinking, in the truest sense, means choosing to be conscious and aware "rather than going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead inside."

The fish that finally asks "what is water?" is not a smarter fish. It is a braver one.

May the corporation — and the church — find the courage to ask the question.

Jubilee | May 2026