I assume we’ve all seen the video clip where Acharanat Ariyaritwikol drags an unresisting Kittisak Singto across Charoen Krung by the lapels, acting purely out of self-defence of course. He then punches him in the face 3 times because he thought he had a gun or a knife (a manoeuvre that is guaranteed to protect the puncher from being shot or knifed by the punchee).  And finally he screams at him to kowtow to the broken tail light on his treasured Mini Countryman (which indeed cost a treasure)

(And before we go any further, let me note the confusing names in this case.

• Acharanat, when he is an un-bespectacled pretty face on TV or in films, calls himself ‘Nott’.  Strange spelling.  Not ‘Not’ and not ‘Knot’, but ‘Nott’.  Twitt.

• ‘Acharanat’ is one of those trapdoor spellings for anyone who doesn’t know that the ‘ch’ here is pronounced as in ‘stomach’ or ‘ache’ or ‘chretin’.

• And where does ‘Ariyaritwikol’ get that ‘o’?  One suspects a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of English orthography.

• Then there’s the hashtag that developed out of this story, #GraabMyCar, using the Thai word for the full prostration that was supposedly outlawed 5 reigns ago.  I fear this is far too much like GrabTaxi to prevent confusion and I anticipate a spate of misguided fools lying full length in front of bemused cabbies.)

But nomenclature aside, I wish to focus on what this incident tells us about Good People and Bad People.  Nott asks everyone who saw the video not to judge him on what they see.  Instead he insists that he is still a Good Person, despite his public display of unrestrained over-privileged thuggery.

And he has a case.  He was earlier given an award as “exemplary Thai of Year 2016”.  Now some reports say this was granted by an association of news hosts and journalists, themselves an exemplary body of Good People of course, but others say it was a government award.  Either way, he is not just a Good Person but a Certified Good Person.  So there.

And since his anger and now his lawsuit is directed against the hapless Kittisak, we must assume that Kittisak is a Bad Person.  After all, when a taxi had bumped him against the Countryman, causing the damage, he voluntarily returned to the scene of the accident and his subsequent broken nose.

This is patently not the action of a Good Person, whose standard operating procedure in such cases is to bugger off sharpish, claim debilitating injury (at least as far as appearing in police stations or courts is concerned) and acknowledge no responsibility beyond a token compensation payment that can be covered by petty cash.

This forms part of a more general Good Person strategy of simply walking away — from oodles of expensive noodles on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Hawaii, from shutting down airports, government offices and road junctions at whim, or from ripping up constitutions while demanding that everyone else strictly obey laws that Good People make up as they go along.

The other remarkable thing about Good People is that their goodness is an inherent quality that cannot be repudiated by their actions.  Acharanat specifically asks people making nasty comments on his video to remember this fact.

If you are a Good Person and you do something that is palpably malevolent, reckless or self-serving, like dragging the corpse of a traffic policeman a city block under your speeding Ferrari, running away from the scene and then lying about it to a wilfully gullible police investigation, that does not stop you being a Good Person.

You see, you still have the connections, cash, and immunity from even the slenderest accountability which are the basic qualifications for being a Good Person.

Public discourse on morals has been hi-jacked in Thailand by this false dichotomy between Good People and Bad People, a threadbare slack-minded black-and-white view of the world that is consistently touted by the Prime Minister among others.

The first mistaken premise here is that goodness is a more or less permanent characteristic of people.  So once you can get yourself regarded as Good, then you can do no wrong.  And any crime, sin or stupidity perpetrated by a Good Person can be excused as a momentary aberration, the exception that proves the rule, none of us is perfect after all, blah blah.

And the second delusion is that good-bad is a dichotomy rather than a spectrum.  I am now in fear for the future of the planet because of the views on climate change held by the next President of the United States.  But if you can hold your nose for long enough to look for redeeming features, he has got a couple.

International trade agreements, for example.  Touted in the media as ‘free trade’ agreements, they are nothing of the sort.  Most contain more language about restricting trade through the strengthening of intellectual property rights than they do on lowering barriers to trade.  And far from being a negotiation between Nation A and Nation B, they really deal with how capitalists in both nations (who are heavily involved in the ‘secret’ negotiations) can screw the rest of us (who are never told what is being negotiated, supposedly in our interests and at our expense).

Trump, for mostly the wrong reasons, wants to ditch these agreements, which would be an example of a Bad Person doing a Good Thing.  Or, if we are to be more sensible about these things than Nott, Prayut and mainstream opinion, an Extremely Dark Grey Person doing a Sort of Off-White Thing.

About author:  Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).