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I’m not going to read all of them, and I encourage you not to read them.
Apparently, you have an opportunity to check the slides for yourself, from the
website that will be provided in the course. Also there is a written parallel
presentation that I’m not going to read either. Rather what I’m going to do is
talk from the heart about the problems I see, and more importantly, the
solutions I see and the role that Thailand plays in developing those solutions
and promoting them universally.
So I’m going to make an assumption and some of you may disagree with
this assumption, of course, that sufficiency economy philosophy which is an
indigenous, if you will, Thai philosophy, a Thai’s philosophy that comes from
Thailand. It comes from King Bhumibol’s insights and his experience and his
theories. It’s been promoted to various Thai institutions of course that you
know, and it, I think, addresses some very important problems that need to be
dealt with universally. So, I don’t claim to be an expert on Thai governance and
I’m not an expert on sufficiency economy philosophy either for that matter. But
for my perspective as an outsider, it has a great potential for helping us
understand what needs to be understood in order to move forward toward
democracy. So, it applies to every country. So, even though sufficiency
economy philosophy is an economic development philosophy originally or
essentially it can also be seen as informing democracy. And I’m going to make
the assumption that it also helps to resolve tensions between security and
choice. And I’ll get to that in a second because what I have perceived is in all
democracies everywhere there are two fundamental goals that people seek and
one is security, and I’ll talk a little bit about that, and the other is choice, and
we have been struggling with how to find what in planning language is called a
win-win.
How do we get both security and choice in the society, in the global
society now, that is faced with what some call limits to growth? We have
profound environmental problems that everywhere can be dealt with, I think,
through application of sufficiency economy philosophy by people thinking about
it and acting on it as citizens, as voters, and as day to day people who do
jobs of various kinds. So I would say that sufficiency economy philosophy
always helps to resolve tensions between security and choice, but that now it
0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT I will speak a bit more about that.
is especially needed because of the problems that we face environmentally and
So I’m also thinking of democracy as a process of social learning and I
was very taken by the quote from a Thai scholar, Doctor Chai-anand, when he
said that democracy is not a form of political system in the Aristotelian sense.
It rather is a dimension of the state society relations which are in flux, in flux,
and that’s the key here to me is that democracy is not something that you
