The reasonably well-informed and observant visitor to Thailand will need about 10 minutes to stumble across one of its paradoxes.

Any half-decent guidebook for tourists will give you the flatteringly one-sided information that Thais are a terribly polite people.  It may then go on to list the more obvious ways of maintaining this politeness, like not pointing with your feet.  With this perfectly correct nugget of knowledge safely in your consciousness, you leave the airport terminal.  And you see the traffic.

If Thais are so ineffably courteous, how come they drive like that?

There is now a second paradox, a little more difficult to see.

The self-appointed censors of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology are going to extraordinary lengths in their efforts, largely ineffective, to prevent any computer in Thailand from accessing any site that denigrates, even quite modestly, the Highest Institution. 

At the same time it is becoming nigh impossible to keep home-grown obscenities out of your inbox.  Once your address gets onto the lists wielded by red, yellow or any other hue (and since some of the messages are genuinely informative, this can happen quite easily), you find yourself reading some despicable language. 

At least the bits I can understand are despicable.  Quite a bit of the vocabulary is too inflammatory for my dictionary and I daren’t take a word list to a linguistically more competent friend, just in case.

Wander into the blog comments pages and it’s even worse.  With almost everyone safely disguised behind the anonymity of user names, just about anything goes.  And the moral guardians of the MICT seem to care not one jot

Fortunately, the explanation for both paradoxes is the same and we can start by looking back 3 or 4 generations. 

The elite of Thai society are commonly criticized for mistaking Bangkok for Thailand.  But for the first half of its existence, Bangkok wasn’t even really Thai.  It had the nobility and it had the Chinese, but the average Thai had no reason to be here.

Ordinary Thais, and ordinary Thai culture (not the semi-foreign and insanely intricate court culture), were in the villages.  And the average Thai villager would spend the vast part of her or his life meeting the same circle of relatives, friends and fellow villagers.  And among that community, every last soul knew their place.  Any amount of discrimination, based on sex, age, marital status and so on, could be, and was, reflected in the way people acted towards each other and talked to each other. 

This is what makes Thai pronouns such a minefield for the foreign learner.  It is impossible to refer to yourself, or the person you are talking to, without signalling important facts about the relationship between the two of you. 

It wasn’t nearly so important to develop any way of dealing with strangers.  So by and large, they didn’t.

Transplant those villagers’ grandchildren into the anonymity of today’s Bangkok and they have a bit of a problem.  Face to face, with someone they know, or are getting to know, they can wai and smile and get into that delicate verbal jousting designed to find out who’s older than who, without actually asking outright.

But nobody knows who’s behind the wheel of the car in front.  And if you can snatch a few inches of road space ahead of them, what’s to stop you?  Certainly not a system of polite behaviour that is predicated on everyone knowing each other’s place.

Those few among us who are celebrities of one kind or another will get deferential treatment precisely because everyone knows who they are.  The rest of us will be polite, and be treated politely by, only those who we know and who know us.

Now where else can anonymity allow rudeness?  Well, there have always been things like the anonymous letter, the bane of the workplace, where someone tries to land you in it by telling your boss and co-workers all sorts of disgusting secrets about you.  And then not signing their name.  So that even if they have written something relevant, it will routinely get binned.

But the internet chat rooms have opened up all sorts of possibilities for polite Thais to turn vulgar in a serious way.  How can you show Thai politeness to someone about whom you know nothing – age, sex, education, money?  The only thing you know is their username and that’s fake.

So the next time you get flamed, try not to take it personally.  If they knew which person you were, it might never have happened.