Back to the supermarket

If the girl of your dreams is stolen away from you by another guy, should you be angry? Or even vengeful, if it is her own wish to be with that guy? I always believed that true love means to be able to let people go. Give them the freedom to find their own happiness. How Disney. My morals are those of an inhabitant of the post-emancipated 21th century society, comparable to those of Disney's Aladdin, or those of the noble aliens in Avatar. The plot of Aladdin is a guy who comes to understand he should not lie about himself to a girl. That is a feminocentric perception and thus inherent to an emancipated world: The traditional man of the 19th century did not give a sh#t about how his love perceives him. He would try to win her heart of course, but the idea of trying to understand her feelings and even adapt himself to these feelings is quite alien to him. Being a dominant, overprotective and resentmental bastard is the accepted male behaviour of the traditional, non-emancipated world.

I will not discuss Avatar. The socially emancipated perceptions in that film are just way over the top. One can be too emancipated.

Coming back to the girl that leaves you for another guy: yet what if you think the guy is a total jerk? What if you think the situation is not just bad for yourself, but for her as well? Is it morally okay then to be protective? In other words: does it make a difference whether you think about her as your love (self-centred, i.e. 'bad' in emancipated feminocentric society) or as your friend (which means you're trying to perceive what's good for her)? Now imagine that girl is not your love, but simply a friend, or worse, your daughter. Is there a situation where it is morally sound to be protective?

I suppose the Buddha would say to let go. Forget all your emotional attachment. Let go. Dis-attachment stops your suffering. You detach your feelings and do not care any longer. No more pondering, no more suffering. Zen. This is key to understanding a society like Thailand. To some degree, it explains how parents can happily sell their children to the sex industry and even brag about it. I am not kidding, I heard Thai parents do that at more than one occasion now. But I feel the whole thing is morally corrupt. After all, if you are so proud of your 16 years old daughter earning enough in a brothel to buy you a new television, or even a car, you show a more basic form of attachment. Namely a materialistic desire for the car, for money. That is not in line with the Buddhist demand to let go at all. This contradiction puzzles me.

In fact, the first impression one can get of Bangkok is that the Thai are not very eager to let go of materialism at all. Bangkok is at first sight made up of big glass skyscrapers, and at street level vendors and supermarkets compete at every street corner, selling mass consumption goods to crowds of fashionably dressed individuals. In many ways, Bangkok feels like one big modern supermarket (it also has to do with the Thai habit of keeping everything immaculately clean). But when you look closer, spiritual aspects of Thai society are visible too. What are those pots with goldfish and lotus flowers for? You see them everywhere. Why do people burn incense in those ceramic things that resemble something in between a bird house and an altar? Why does nobody stop a kid from queue jumping in a supermarket? Why is the man that just walked past apologizing for, well, walking too close to you?

Overall, after living in Bangkok for a couple of weeks one gets the impression that Thai society has many inconsistencies, even hypocrisies. Yet the same is true for western society. Emancipation itself goes against human nature. Women do -in general- not like guys that are too sensitive or understanding, or guys who talk about feelings too much. In a relationship, the female instinct is to find a strong, bold, emotionally stable person who can provide and support. Western emancipated society is itself thus, in many ways, very inconsistent and hypocrite. With this in mind it becomes hard to judge the Thai way.