Radical stuff

re: "And the winner is — Thai Buddhism" (BP, Opinion, May 31, 2023) 

Dear editor,

Stephen B Young’s opinion piece explaining the result of the May 14 election was highly informative. It was, in fact, enlightening, presenting as it does a radical new analysis of some traditional aspects of the pillars of Thai culture. 

The first telling insight Mr Young provides is that “those with baramee have willing and loyal followers; those with such followers win elections.” On this measure, it would be hard to imagine any Thai of recent decades, arguably since 1932, incarnating baramee so thoroughly as former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose well-known election successes exceed those of all others.

This endowment with baramee is further confirmed by the qualification that “Those who do so [provide balance and moderation in their living] reliably can provide stability and sustainability for others who, in turn, respect their charisma and take them for personal patrons.” Again, no one so much as Thaksin, who was re-elected precisely because his devotees saw in him the ability to bring a modest sufficiency of stability and balance to their hitherto highly precarious lives subject to official whims demanding service and submission to the uniformed of all stripes, exemplifies this quality so clearly as Thaksin. 

It was presumably the Thai Buddhist notion of making merit that can be transferred via proper propitiation of the karmic bureaucracy that subsequently lead so many good Thais to believe that Thaksin’s serious accumulation of baramee had been transferred to his chosen family members of the blood, which transfer of merit was responsible for the great success, first of his sister Yingluck, and most recently of his daughter Paetongtarn, albeit with significant diminution of the family sufficiency of baramee and other virtues.

It is here, in Unging's less stellar performance, however, that Mr Young shows the subtlety of his analysis when he introduces the opposing concept of bossism (we can dispense with the quotation marks). Mr Young is surely correct when he equates bossism with “the paternalistic hierarchy of the military/bureaucratic complex revolving around the central government,” which he further clarifies as being “that social structure [which] depends on submissive feelings of grengchai in relation to organisational seniors and social patrons and mentors."

This demonstrates that both baramee and bossism can reside simultaneously in the same individual, as they clearly did in the case of Thaksin, who was also famous for his dubious respect for democratic principle, in particular for free speech. The same is apparent in the recent election’s rejection of those who similarly claim to be imbued with baramee or other positive virtues such as benevolence, whilst at the same time relying on such pure bossism as law that explicitly rejects the notion of respecting peaceful free speech that alone can lead to freely given respect. 

Using the law to command, under pain of serious punishment, nothing less than a show of submissive grengchai, is, as Mr Young has rightly elucidated, the very antithesis of baramee. 

The alternative explanation for the election results of May 14 is not that Thailand suddenly converted from the supremely hierarchical religion known as Thai Buddhism to the Buddha’s actual teachings some time between 2014 and 2023, but that an increasing number of Thais had their eyes opened and decided in favour of liberal democracy founded on justice. 

I can’t recall when I’ve read anything so inspiringly radical in the Bangkok Post. 

 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 12, 2023, under the title "Radical stuff" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2589775/the-people-speak