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A Thai who recently visited Ho Chi Minh City remarked that he could sense the optimism and dynamism in the air there. Here at home, it's lack of direction, frustration, lethargy, helplessness and an uneasy calm. That should explain why we were granted an extra day off last week, perhaps just to "chill out".

Hateful and venomous websites are proliferating like wildfire. They are anti every "establishment" in the book. The more the government clumsily tries to shut them down, the faster they multiply. What goes around on the grapevine is even more menacing. We have become one big unhappy family in search of an elusive elixir.

In response, many are saying the country needs "democracy" so we can be "freer" and therefore happier. But what, and how free, is free? And will it bring us happiness?

The late Sir Ralf Dahrendorf (1929-2009) was a man who spent his life "defining and defending" liberty - freedom from outside compulsion; a condition in which an individual can act out of his/her own free will. Democracy and its problems preoccupied his entire career as a scholar and politician, both in his birthplace Germany and his adopted country, Great Britain.

Before he turned 16, Dahrendorf was arrested by the Gestapo for being part of an anti-Hitler youth society and was put in solitary confinement in a concentration camp in Poland. After being freed by the advancing Soviet troops, he and his friends went on a looting rampage of local shops, and experienced what Dahrendorf would later call "entitlement without provisions", where liberty was carried out to the extreme in the absence of government and rules.

However, he soon discovered the hard way that freedom and liberty need institutions - all the apparatus of a state and civil society - to enable and preserve them.

Democracy, he learned and taught, was not about my "way or the highway," but about "organising conflicts and living with conflicts".

Democracy is a social system that recognises divergent interests and aspirations and allows them to be expressed under the rule of law, and certainly not in a no-holds-barred fashion. Liberty and freedom are not possible in a state of void, or in anarchy. "The world isn't simple, nor should it be simple," he told an audience at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. "It's rich because it's complicated. Let's learn to live with this."

When the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) staged their rallies, their objective was largely against praetorian leadership and bureaucracy, as well as the political venality, that were correctly described as the major impediments to Thailand's political development as a bona fide democratic nation.

But like many public outcries before it, the movement strayed off its original, intended course and turned into a whirligig forum that claimed many innocent, sacrificial lambs. Worst of all, the movement, in its attempt to legitimise its remonstration against the government then in power, dragged into the political fray the institution that it claimed to protect and preserve.

Once that was done, everything was fair game, nothing off-limits. The pictures of the airport seizures by protesters holding photographs of His Majesty and the monarchy's yellow flags palpably sent the unsubstantiated impression to the whole world that there was an "invisible hand" behind the movement that wanted to maintain the political status quo at all costs.

Even though there was never a phone-in to incite such senseless acts, the institution was already judged blindly and harshly - guilty as charged by the kangaroo court of some circles. In a world where histrionic encomium and disapprobation are visceral rather than cerebral, six decades of honest and earnest public service by His Majesty regrettably got lost in the viciousness of banal politics.

The red-shirted Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship (DADD) claims it wants democracy, liberty and freedom. It seems to have no compunction about asking the rather reasonable question: If Thailand is a dictatorial country, why is it allowed to exist, march in the streets, harass public officials, disrupt the affairs of the government and threaten the safety and livelihood of the public?

Its leaders have no past record of public service except for politics, which in Thailand usually corresponds to public disservice. They are armchair intellectual contrarians who have never done anything for the public except take on self-appointed roles as "evil-dragon" slayers.

As hard as one tries to understand the call that underpins the DADD protests, one still comes away empty-handed. Democracy is not about tearing down the social and political fabric and institutions of the country. That is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It is not about the absolute right to stage angry protests with no respect for the rule of law. An ill-guided union of wills and ideas can lead to totalitarianism. The word "free" cannot build, defend or guarantee democracy, liberty and freedom. Tolerance and balance between entitlements and provisions, as untidy as they are, as Dahrendorf found out, are the wisdom that leads to a liberal democracy and civil society.

As much as religion does not create virtue, and money does not solve every problem, the bilious pretension of false hope and blind faith in unbridled freedom is not the Holy Grail of democracy. Maybe - since we have not gained the wisdom of what it really takes and entails - we should stop looking for the Holy Grail of democracy in all the wrong places.

In the novel "White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga, the main protagonist Balram is of humble origin, but he gains knowledge of the way of the world when he becomes driver to a wealthy boss. Throughout the book, Balram reminds himself of this couplet: "I was looking for the keys for years/but the door was always open."

Maybe the same can be said about our quest for democracy.