The Bangkok Post Sunday columnist Voranai Vanijaka has a reputation for being fearless and forthright.  Which perhaps says more about the pusillanimous pap in the rest of the Post than anything else.  But he does write some interesting 500-word pieces wrapped up columns that are three times that length.

Last week’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ article is a case in point.  The main thesis is the degree to which societies function on a basis of ‘science’ at one end of the spectrum (where he thinks Thailand ought to be) and ‘superstition’ at the other (which of course is where Thailand actually is).  His lead talking point is a medical case, which is unexceptionable.

But he then goes on to politics and argues that ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ based on ‘the scientific understanding of human nature’ leads inescapably to the conclusion that democracy is ‘ the best model for keeping the people satisfied’.

Not the best form of government, you note.  Just the form that best gives people the ‘illusion they actually have a real say in the management of the country’ so that they won’t go making trouble for whoever actually does have the real say.

This damning of democracy with faint praise is something he has perhaps nicked from Plato, who he has quoted in earlier articles (Voranai’s own education did not take place in a Thai university, you understand).  For those not familiar with The Republic, the esteemed Greek philosopher reckoned democracy was the next worst form of government and only one step away from tyranny.  

Good government, Plato argued, was best guaranteed by aristocracy in its etymological sense of ‘rule by the best’ and before you put your hand up for nomination, his idea of ‘best’ was the philosopher imbued with wisdom and reason and I defy you to find one of those in that knacker’s shop called parliament.

Now I think that Khun Voranai has for once been truly fearless and forthright because bringing logic and reason into discussions about forms of government can lead to some dangerous conclusions.  And if anything in the following offends those of a yellow or multi-coloured persuasion, it was him as led me on, yeronner.  

Most of the graduates of Thai faculties of political science that I have spoken to (a sample about as reliable the ones used by the opinion polls before the recent governor’s election) have been blissfully unaware of the existence of a political treatise that is actually called ‘Common Sense’.  And non-political science majors have certainly not heard of it – in this education system, the only people who read historical documents on politics are those who are forced to.  But ‘Common Sense’ is very germane to this discussion.

This is one of Thomas Paine’s bolshie tracts and Section II deals with the question of hereditary succession.  Paine’s arguments are not all based on logic.  A religious man, though unorthodox in his beliefs, he first gives numerous quotations from the Bible to demonstrate the incompatibility of monarchy with what was for his audience the accepted religion.

But he then does move into Voranai’s sphere of logic-science-reason-common sense and pretty much assigns monarchical forms of government, even constitutional monarchies, to the superstitious end of the spectrum.  

(England doesn’t seem to have had any lèse majesté law around at the time.  They had to convict him of seditious libel.  But it didn’t matter because he had already left the country to stir up the American and French Revolutions.)

Is this the revolutionary, nay, seditious conclusion that Voranai was hinting at?  Was he, in a clever, nudge, nudge, wink, wink sort of way, pointing people in a direction that he well understood, but which, with the Post’s censors breathing down his neck, he thought he could leave to be read ‘between the lines’?

Perhaps not.  In his next talking point, he turns to economic systems and notes that capitalism does for the economy what democracy does for government.  Capitalism, he suggests, keeps us all happy by creating for us lots of money.

Ah, not exactly.  See, there’s this book called ‘Capital’ by this feller Charlie Marks …