Not the Absence but the Forgery of Community: Rethinking Lateral Violence in Nursing Through Ubuntu

ABSTRACT Lateral violence among nurses is most often explained as oppressed group behavior: aggression displaced from an external oppressor onto peers. Drawing on the Korean phenomenon of taeeum , the harsh “breaking‐in” of novice nurses, this paper argues that such accounts leave two things unexplained. Why should the violence wear the language of care, teaching, and community? And why does it persist despite being named and condemned? It proposes that these features become intelligible only when the phenomenon is read not as an absence of community but as its forgery. Taking Ubuntu 's proposition that a person becomes a person through other persons, and Menkiti's claim that personhood is a communal attainment that can fail, the paper reconstructs the community as a directional apparatus whose purpose is to raise the novice into a person. It then rereads a meta‐synthesis of qualitative studies of taeeum and shows that the forms of community, including hierarchy, belonging, dialog, and care, remain fully in place while their direction is reversed. This state is named forgery: a structure that possesses every form of the genuine while betraying its purpose. The paper defends the concept against neighboring terms by a substitution test, argues that forgery has no single forger because in taeeum circulation is itself production, and thereby explains persistence: like counterfeit currency, forgery passes by acceptance rather than belief, so condemnation aimed at malice misses it. The same diagnosis is shown to hold in Confucian terms, where taeeum takes the ritual and discards the humaneness, and Ubuntu itself is shown to be subject to betrayal, distinguishing erosion (recoverable absence) from forgery (persisting misdirection). The account offers not a criterion for adjudicating cases but a way of seeing, returning to the nursing community a set of questions about the direction of its own relationships.