The glossy brochures tell you it's "The Land of Smiles" or maybe it's just "amazing". Slightly more sophisticated takes suggest the essence of Thailand can be found in its unique expressions of showing consideration to others in the context of a hierarchy.
How do you say krengjai in English? Why are there so many pronouns? Good luck with that.
There is another word that captures something essential about Thailand, at least in its current incarnation. It's one of those hard-to-translate terms, and it's not even Thai. But it applies to Thailand as well as anywhere else in the world, and maybe more so. What's the word?
Catch-22.
What? What kind of word is that? What does it even mean? Even Chat-GPT struggles with it: "A self-defeating loop of logic, a paradox, a circular predicament with no way out, an impossible bind created by conflicting requirements, a bureaucratic deadlock with mutually exclusive conditions."
For those familiar with the term, catch-22 is not unlike krengjai in the sense that you can understand it without being able to translate it. What's left is to explain by example, and in both cases, Thailand provides an especially rich lode of anecdotes.
The term catch-22 was coined by American author Joseph Heller, who, in writing about the horrors, frustration and hopelessness on the front of a violent war, invented a term to describe the powerlessness of the individual in the face of a powerful bureaucracy.
His darkly comic novel, Catch-22, is the story of an air pilot grappling with mind-numbing bureaucratic injunctions that make it impossible to achieve any autonomy.
A fighter pilot in an unjust war, protagonist Yossarian reckons the only way to get out is to plead insanity, but by pleading insanity in an insane war, he is showing his sanity and thus is not eligible to get out.
In Heller's novel, catch-22 is about not being able to get out, but it also applies to not being able to get in.
A recent headline in Thaiger, an online publication for expats in Thailand, sums it up just so: The catch-22 facing foreigners in Thailand. The article addresses the conundrum facing foreign applicants for long-term visas for marriage and retirement: You need a Thai bank account to get a long-term visa, but banks require a long-term visa to open an account.
Gotcha!
Catch-22 in a nutshell. You need A to get B, but you need B to get A.
It wasn't always so. Indeed, until Feb 26 of this year, banks allowed applicants for long-term stay visas to open the bank account necessary to meet requirements of the cash deposit that is part of the visa application, but Siam Commercial Bank and Bangkok Bank both confirmed they are no longer opening accounts for foreigners not already on a long-term visa.
The hazy reasoning behind the fiat is something about money laundering, but surely there are more specific and surefire ways to crack down on serious crime than to go after petty bank accounts of vulnerable visa applicants who want to settle in Thailand.
As for the banks, to their credit (and self-interest) they tend to be colourblind about passports if the money is good. Why not let foreigners open accounts? It used to be possible and likely will be again. But in the meantime, until the PR storm created by illicit call centres and shady business operations passes from the public consciousness, an entire class of ordinary people of modest means will be relegated to collateral damage, excluded as potential criminals.
Another connotation of catch-22 is that arbitrary rules are created in order to justify and conceal the abuse of power. The selective finger-pointing, discreet omissions and audible silences about key actors involved in the dodgy construction of the collapsed State Audit building are a case in point. The debacle got a whirlwind of journalistic attention until the public relations people took over, and the opacity of the case is like a mini-course of catch-22 rules in operation.
You can't talk about an ongoing investigation because it's ongoing, and it's ongoing, so you can't talk about it.
Catch-22 in Heller's 1961 novel is weighted with the implication that rules are inaccessible and any notion of justice, logic or fair play is up to the people at the top of the pyramid. "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing…" one of the characters complains. Oddly enough, this lament brings to mind a contemporary legal case involving a powerful clan. As reported in the Bangkok Post, "The Administrative Court says it has no authority to order former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra to pay 10 billion baht in compensation for her administration's failed rice-pledging scheme."
Justice is jeopardised by the court's authority to convict but not collect: Yingluck's defence deftly argues that if she can't be forced to pay, then that's that, and the case should be dropped. As if to rub it in, her defence added: "The court's authority is limited to only annulling the order."
The term was coined to describe the opacity and lack of logic in the US military, but it applies to relations between individuals. People trap themselves in catches of their own making, especially with regard to social stigmas. To loosely paraphrase a character in the novel: you shouldn't sleep with other people if those people are the kind of people who sleep with other people.
Or as Woody Allen memorably put it in one of his films, "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member." One of the more intriguing aspects to catch-22 is the realisation that an understanding of what's going on does nothing to solve the problem. In a very real sense, the solution is the problem, because to resist the rule is to accept it. To play it safe, the first rule of catch-22 is you do not question catch-22. It punishes resistance in the way of quicksand or a Venus flytrap. If you fight catch-22, it only makes things worse. In the end, it's about the asymmetry of power. Opposition is all but futile.
Philip J Cunningham is a media researcher covering Asian politics. He is the author of 'Tiananmen Moon'.