A decade ago, a foreign volunteer was placed with one of the Agricultural Research and Development Centres that are dotted about the country and soon after her arrival she got to participate in a training session for farmers.

This was normally an occasion for government officials to present the results of their experiments on the best variety of soybean to grow in the off season, or the best time to apply which kind of fertilizer, etc. All this was based on the results of research that had usually been conducted on the centre’s own trial plots in accordance with accepted practice.

This normally meant that the research question was quite narrow and was investigated without reference to other factors, like cost or the labour needed, that farmers considered quite important. And it was normally a question that some official had thought of, rather than a response to any need expressed by a farmer.

In the end, the research was often ignored by the farmers as irrelevant or misguided, which gave the officials an excuse to talk about the unwillingness to accept scientific facts by wooden-headed farmers for whom, sigh, they worked so hard with so little reward.

The volunteer eventually got to work on that problem, but on that day, the most telling moment came at lunch. The farmers trooped out of the meeting room and into the grounds where styrofoam boxes had appeared. The volunteer made herself useful in handing these round to the farmers, who squatted on the grass and kerbsides to enjoy lunch.

When she thought everyone had been served, the volunteer took a box for herself and looked for a place to sit. She was quickly seized by colleagues who had anticipated her faux pas, her box was quietly taken from her, and she was shepherded into a room to join the officials in a sit-down, spoon-and-fork lunch on proper plates.

In full view of the farmers.

If that had happened back home, she reported, there would have been a riot.

Two aspects of this experience puzzled her. First was the contempt implied by the officials’ action in assuming a superiority over the farmers and openly displaying their privileges. The other was the farmers’ apparent quiet acceptance of their inferior status.

Well, one of these problems is being resolved. The self-styled ‘phrai’ aren’t taking it quietly any more.

It is common to argue that this awakening was the result of Thaksin’s introduction into Thai politics of the amazing idea of first finding out what people might want from their government, then setting out a manifesto promising this, and, most innovative of all, actually delivering on his promises once elected.

Attributing the class enlightenment currently on display at Ratchaprasong to this one cause is an oversimplification and I am confident that Thaksin’s electoral calculations were also influenced by his beliefs about how the country should be managed (just like a private company). This would include the idea that the major shareholders and executives of the nation-cum-business should be adequately rewarded, one way or another.

But I would be interested to know, for example, exactly how much new information and ideas were leaking into the more entrepreneurial rural families (who benefited most from Thaksin’s policies and who form the backbone of the red shirts) when the gadgetry of PCs and satellite dishes got cheap enough. Once young Somchai had figured out internet porn and betting on foreign football games, did he start browsing such subversive sites as, well, Wikipedia (which the Thai bureaucracy sees fit to censor)? Was the dish tuned to stations beyond the editorial control of the government?

The idea started to percolate that development did not have to be, like taxes and conscription, something imposed on you by the government, but was something you could start doing for yourself, once you’d got this dead weight of the bureaucracy out of the way. You had the village fund to work with. If you started a wee business, there were SME loans. You didn’t have to worry about a catastrophic illness unravelling years of hard work and saving. And perhaps best of all, you didn’t have to go grovelling to the civil servants to get what you now thought of as your rights.

Once you stop taking orders from someone else, then, if you live in a democracy, as we fondly believe, you can start setting your own priorities not just about how to order your own life, but about how society should be organized. It is at this point that we do well to recall Winston Churchill’s observation that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”.

I’m really chuffed that the red shirts are free from the practical and ideological shackles that Thai society had, quite unfairly, bound them in. And I’m absolutely terrified at what they might do with that freedom. If, as I suspect, part of their awakening came from the web boards and satellite TV, then I don’t see how these same channels of prejudice, misinformation and appallingly distasteful language will help anyone advance to a more just, a more equitable or even simply a more sensible society.

And while we’re grappling with that issue, recall that the other problem our volunteer encountered is still with us. How do we get the self-proclaimed ‘educated’ elite to realize that their supercilious disdain has been in the wrong all these years?

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).