On October 16, 2020, I was arrested.
It wasn’t planned. I had no intention of going to Pathumwan Intersection that day. But when I heard that police were using force against protesters, something felt off. Not outrage, not even anger—just a sense that I needed to see it for myself. I left my hotel room in whatever I was wearing, carrying only an umbrella and a handkerchief, and took a motorcycle taxi straight into what I thought would be a protest.
It wasn’t a protest anymore. It was chaos.
Somewhere in the middle of that confusion, I found myself standing in front of a line of police officers. I didn’t want escalation. I didn’t want confrontation. So I reached into my pocket, pulled out a white ribbon, and held it up. For a moment, they hesitated. That hesitation—just a few seconds—was probably the most honest moment in the entire situation. And then, not long after, I was arrested.
I wasn’t surprised.
Because what happened that day wasn’t really about me, or even about the protest. It was about something much deeper—something I had been thinking about for months before that moment.
Ignorance.
Earlier that year, back in February, I stood at Chulalongkorn University and told a story about Galileo. Not as a historical figure, but as a metaphor. A man who challenged what was believed to be absolute truth—and paid the price for it. That story later became a blog post I wrote: Ignorance is Our Last Enemy.
The idea is simple, but uncomfortable.
Ignorance isn’t stupidity. It’s not an insult. It’s not something you weaponize against people you disagree with. Ignorance is just a state of not knowing. And more importantly—it’s universal. Everyone has it. Everyone lives with it.
The problem is not ignorance itself. The problem is what we build on top of it.
When ignorance is combined with power, it becomes something else entirely.
If you look back at history, especially during the Middle Ages, institutions like the Church didn’t just maintain authority through belief—they maintained it by controlling what people were allowed to question. Dogmatism wasn’t just a belief system; it was infrastructure. It defined what was real, what was allowed, and what was forbidden. Galileo didn’t just discover that the Moon had a surface—he broke the boundary of what people were permitted to think.
That’s why he was dangerous.
And if we’re being honest, that pattern doesn’t disappear. It just evolves.
Thai society, at least in part, still operates on a version of that structure. We are taught narratives as facts. We are told what to believe before we are taught how to question. Our education system rewards memorization far more than skepticism. And when skepticism does appear, it often gets labeled as disruption rather than inquiry.
From working in science communication, I’ve realized something uncomfortable: we don’t really operate on reasoning. We operate on feeling. Arguments are rarely about evidence—they’re about identity. And once identity is involved, understanding becomes secondary.
That’s why movements today don’t look like movements in the past.
They’re decentralized. Symbolic. Almost abstract at times. What some people call “mind-blogging”—a kind of communication that doesn’t try to overpower the system, but instead tries to confuse it, disrupt it, make it hesitate. The white ribbon wasn’t meant to change the police. It was meant to create a moment—a small break in the script.
Because most systems rely on scripts.
On October 15, the government declared a state of emergency. Protest leaders were arrested. The expectation was escalation. Resistance meets force. That’s how the script goes.
But what happens when you don’t follow it?
I walked up to police officers and asked, “Can I tie this to your wrist?” No slogans. No confrontation. Just a question. The first officer ignored me. The second did the same. The third one hesitated—and then nodded.
That moment matters more than any speech.
Because for a brief second, the system didn’t know what to do.
The next day, I tried again. Same idea. Same intention. But this time, the response was different. The command came quickly: “Arrest him.” No hesitation. No confusion. Just execution.
And that contrast—that difference between hesitation and certainty—that’s where the real story is.
It’s not about whether the police were right or wrong. It’s not even about whether I should have been there. It’s about understanding why the system reacted differently in two nearly identical situations.
That’s where ignorance lives.
Not just in individuals, but in structures. In habits. In the things we don’t question because we’ve never been asked to.
We like to think conflicts are between people—protesters vs. police, young vs. old, state vs. citizens. But most of the time, the real conflict is between two ways of thinking: one that accepts what is given, and one that insists on asking why.
And that second way of thinking—it’s always uncomfortable.
This is not a short fight. It never was.
History doesn’t move because someone wins once. It moves because people leave markers—moments that future generations can look back on and say, “That’s where something changed.” Even if nothing seemed to change at the time.
You can see this in places like Hong Kong. The outcome is still uncertain, but the message is already written into history. The act itself becomes the signal.
That’s what this generation is doing.
Not fighting for immediate victory, but creating reference points. Small disruptions. Moments of hesitation. Things that don’t fit into the existing system cleanly enough to be ignored.
Because in the end, the goal isn’t to defeat an enemy.
The goal is to outgrow ignorance.
And that includes our own.