Time & Perspective Quote by Bhumibol Adulyadej

Bhumibol turns a moral panic into arithmetic, and that pivot is the point. In a few plain clauses, he deflates the evergreen complaint that society is sliding into depravity by reframing it as a demographic illusion: when the population expands, the raw count of every kind of person expands, too. “More bad people” can be true while “people are worse now” is false. The quote works because it’s a quiet rebuke delivered without scolding; it lets listeners keep their anxiety while stripping it of its grand narrative.

The subtext is political as much as philosophical. A monarch-statesman speaking in a society prone to rumor, urban fear, and periodic crisis isn’t just making a statistical observation; he’s discouraging scapegoating. If you accept his logic, you also accept that the solution to disorder isn’t nostalgia or persecution, but governance: institutions that scale, policing that modernizes, welfare that reaches a larger public. It’s an argument against treating social strain as moral collapse.

There’s also an implicit defense of the present. By attributing perceived deterioration to population growth, he positions the nation’s transformation - urbanization, modernization, louder media - as the backdrop, not the villain. The line’s almost disarming literalism (“there must be three times more bad people”) is rhetorical judo: he lets a simplistic inference run to its conclusion so it collapses under its own neatness. It’s paternal, stabilizing, and strategically calming - a leader telling the country to stop narrating change as sin.