The latest SEA Write awardee Veeraporn Nitiprapha said one striking thing in an interview: how large parts of our lives, and more specifically the prolonged political conflict, have been shaped by social myths.
"My words serve as a myth-making tool," Veeraporn said in an interview with Prachachat Online last week.
"They show how a myth works, how it takes control of you. Why do you feel sad? Because leaves are slowly falling down from a tree. Why does that make you sad? Because you have witnessed this scene before, probably from movies, time and again. Once this scene is depicted, you have tears running down your eyes before you know it," Veeraporn said.
Veeraporn's first book, the novel Saiduan Tabod Nai Khaowongkot (Blind Earthworm in a Labyrinth), recently won the prestigious literary award.
Veeraporn said she felt compelled to write the book after the deadly crackdown on red-shirt protesters in 2010 that left about a hundred people dead.
The level of violence seemed to exceed the magnitude of the conflict between people, she said.
I have not had a chance to read Veeraporn's book but I find myself agreeing with her theory that much of the decade-long political conflict has been moulded, and sharpened beyond the original causes, by catchphrases based on popular myths or broad-based beliefs that may be hard-hitting but are not always true to our complex reality. Examples are many, and from all political sides.
The ammart-phrai or elites versus serfs refrain coined by the red-shirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship has been very effective in highlighting its political campaign and rallying people to its cause.
The elites-serfs campaign helped awaken many people, not just those who support the red shirts, to problems of inequality and injustice that have long existed in the country.
However, when people subscribed to the idea without question, it became a kind of all-encompassing myth. Before long, the idea was both simplified and extended to imply that all the rich and elites are bad and some people just hold on to this as the absolute truth.
Instead of prompting attempts to correct structural flaws that gave rise to inequalities and injustice in the first place, the powerful refrain ended up fuelling hatred and a class-based struggle that have bred even an deeper social divide.
The same is true with attempts by the conservative side to frame their campaign as a fight against politicians who are seen as being corrupt. Since they view corruption as a moral issue, their response to the assumption has been that politicians must be brought under control by organisations.
Admittedly, the behaviour of many politicians lends weight to the conservatives' view on corruption. The fact, however, is that corruption exists among other professions and is much more of a systemic problem than a moral one.
That is why a campaign of shaming the corrupt or establishing a simple control mechanism would not work. In creating more organisations to keep politicians under scrutiny, which seems to be what the military regime and charter drafters are trying to do now, this will only lead us to need someone to keep watch on the watchers themselves.
The best way to curb corrupt practices among politicians or state employees is to put in place a system that ensures all their decisions and actions are above board and accountable to the public so they can't ask for kick-backs or manipulate anything in secret in the first place.
But as Veeraporn tried to point out in her book, we are doomed to go round and round without finding a way out as long as the way we think is still governed by myths, or fallacies, in most cases.
I read two gossip items in a newspaper yesterday. One was about a real-estate magnate who has been all smiles because he sold out an entire condo in one month, earning 2.35 billion baht.
The other involved an heiress and her seven hi-so friends who caused a stir in Osaka because they posed for pictures in cute kimonos and were all heavily decked out in Hermes and diamonds.
My first thought was that this is the same country where millions of people are earning 300 baht a day. No country can dream of ever becoming stable with such an imbalance.
No rich-bashing or shame-the-corrupt-politicians slogans are going to help us either. Unless we start to see through these political fallacies and tackle the problems structurally, we will be just like what Veeraporn suggested in her award-winning book, a blind earthworm lost in a never-ending maze.
Atiya Achakulwisut is Contributing Editor, Bangkok Post.