The essence of Thailand in one phrase

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.

- Philip Cunningham

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.