Page 45 - kpiebook63002
P. 45
²££°¸¡§´²²£
ª²±£°À¥i² £±ÉµÈ 45
¤±³µÃ£Ã£ j³¨£i³¿¸Ç®³¤²³
either have or you don’t. It’s not a binary concept. It is an ongoing process of
development that every society is going through. My own society in Canada is
continuously struggling with how to be more democratic, and so, I’m not
surprised that here in Thailand you were asking the question as well, how could
you be democratic? And I applaud the KPI for addressing this question in a
very forthright way and also by bringing in people such as myself to give you
their thoughts on the matter. So, I’m speaking here as a person from outside, a
Westerner, and as a development planner. I’m not talking as an expert on
government per se.
So, the first point I want to make is that, if we think of democracy as a
process of social learning, then we can think of ways that as concept like
sufficiency economy philosophy or the concepts that are embedded in
sufficiency economy philosophy can be applied over time by people learning and
trying things out. You can have experiments that you either organize in advance
or that happened more spontaneously just because we try things and we don’t
know what there’s going to happen. One way or the other, the idea of social
leaning is that after you plan you have to act, of course. Then you evaluate
and then you plan again and it’s a continuous process. If you insert sufficiency
economy philosophy into that process, then it will be more likely that, both in
the planning and in the evaluation, there will be attention to some of the key
concepts that are part of the sufficiency economy. So, this is the fundamental
point I want to make here is that if we think of security, I can have all kinds
of quotes about what security means starting with the English political
philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, and going through Locke, and so on, as being one
goal of every society and, of course, democratic societies are no different.
Another goal is choice. We want to think of things as having been
individual. We want to have what the United States of American Declaration of
Independence called life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We want to be
able to choose the things we do as individual, but also lately we’ve also come
to talk more and more about participation, meaning we want to have choice as
members of groups, not only a choice as individuals. So, from my perspective,
these can’t be seen because they often have been in a trade-off relationship.
The more you have the one the less you have another. You can put a name on
each of these poles, if you will, where you have 100% security and 0% choice.
That would be an authoritarian society that you’re told what to do and you do
it, or else. The opposite dream, you can have a libertarian society where
everybody is free to do whatever regardless of the consequences for other 0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT
people.
