re: "Popular life coach sparks anger after endorsing Prawit" (BP, June 26, 2020)
Dear editor,
The response by young Thais to "social media influencer" Sean Buranahiran is encouraging. His followers show a healthy independence in thinking and speaking their own minds, valuable qualities for society. Mr. Buranahiran appears not to realize that the worst do strive to be charismatic, to seem reasonable, and selfless, and "kind of sweet". How else, to take a non-political example, would paedophile priests, monks, teachers, scout leaders and other socially respected family friends get what they are after if they did not seem "kind of sweet" to trusting parents and their children? Fraud, of course, succeeds best when the wicked present as friendly and trustworthy. And then there is that long list of charismatic politicians, for whom being "kind of sweet" mixed with socially populist authoritarianism proves a useful tool on their road map to deeds not so sweet.
Is Sean so more easily swayed than many of his followers as to think the image projected in private or in public a more reliable to guide people's true natures than what they are known to have actually done? Has he yet to learn, as Shakespeare has Hamlet put it, “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on June 27, 2020, under the title "Villains smile too" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1941804/asean-must-use-power
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