Transcription
We've got to talk about Iran. If you think Iran has always looked like this, I want you to pause for a second because that belief didn't come from history. It came from just a bunch of repetition.
There are people that are alive right now who grew up in Iran wearing jeans, listening to western music, going to universities, falling in love openly, and then they watched their entire country just snap into something unrecognizable. And I think the part that most people miss is that Iran didn't evolve into this. It was taken.
I've done several deployments across the Middle East and you don't survive that without learning one critical distinction that I think all the headlines just completely erase. And the difference between a people and the system that cages the people. That's a big distinction I want to make right here. And this applies to all countries.
But what you're seeing right now, the protests in Iran, the crackdowns, the silence when all the internet went dark the other day, that looks like chaos, that is memory colliding with fear. And I want to prove it to you. And once you understand how that collision happens, you I think you're going to realize Iran is not an exception. Iran is a preview for the rest of the world.
So what we're going to talk about is not a big story about religion. Uh it's not even a story specifically about Iran. This is a story about how any modern educated civilization gets psychologically hijacked without realizing it until it's way too late. And by the end of this, you're going to see exactly where the takeover happened. And the three paths that Iran is likely to take here in the next few months.
In the 1960s and '70s, Iran was secular. They were educated and they were culturally just alive. Iran looked more like a European capital than a caricature of the Middle East. Women in Iran were doctors and lawyers and professors and universities there were world class. So art and music and science were all just thriving in Iran. This was not a primitive society that was just waiting for someone to modernize them. They were already modern.
And that detail matters a lot because it destroys a very convenient myth to the media. This idea that Iran's current state where they're at right now is some natural expression of Iran's culture. It is not. So what happened to Iran wasn't some cultural evolution. It was complete takeover like an interruption.
So first the Shah. This is Muhammad Reza Shah ruled with a lot of western countries backing him, lots of oil money and he got increasingly authoritarian and corruption started growing as it always does even here in our country. All the dissent was crushed and people started getting very, very resentful over time and into that little pressure and maybe in that void this guy steps up that most people outside Iran still don't fully understand and this is Ayatollah Khomeini. He is a cleric who's living in exile and he didn't sell himself to everybody as some tyrant but he wore this costume of being a liberator.
So the revolution that happened in 1979 was not sold as religious extremism. It was sold as a moral cleansing. We need to morally cleanse the country. We need more justice. We need independence. It was sold as independence. And that was the first big psychological trap. And this is how civilizations get hijacked. All all these revolutions that you see, it's it's not overthrowing power. What's really being shifted is who is allowed to use violence. That's the only thing that shifts. If you look back at this, who is allowed to use violence? That's every revolution.
So once the Shah fell, the Islamic Republic didn't emerge overnight. It consolidated and it was a slow, pretty methodical process. And the biggest leverage that they had was belief. They didn't use religion as a weapon. They used fear. So, it was fear being used here, not religion. And it was a fear of I'm going to be outcast. I'm going to be looked down on or judged. I'm going to be labeled immoral. I'm going to be on the wrong side of history. I'm going to be alone. I'm going to be lonely.
So, all these little new public rituals became compliance tests. And then speech became dangerous. Silence was a new way to just survive what was going on. So once belief becomes mandatory, truth becomes a liability. And that's the quote that you can write down for all regimes. If belief becomes mandatory, truth is a liability.
So the Iran-Iraq war hardened everything like crazy. All kinds of sanctions came after this. The economy strained, surveillance got just ridiculously normalized. And informants, like people just telling on their neighbors, it just became ordinary. So an entire generation grew up knowing exactly what not to say, how to stay silent. And another grew up knowing nothing else.
And here's the part that I think most people outside miss. This system that we're talking about in Iran didn't survive because all the people believed in the system. It survived because people learned how to live inside it and they just treated it like it was a normal way and suffering became just this thing that we go through in life. And that works until it doesn't. And you can see this in every country.
So what happens is authoritarian systems don't collapse when people rebel against them. They collapse when their version of a story stops working on the people. So look at right now. There's people on the streets. They're fighting. They're rioting. There's all kinds of violence going on. Look very closely at who is protesting today. They're not extremists. They're students. They're professionals. They're descendants of an educated class. A lot of these people grew up hearing stories of a a very different Iran. And this is through their parents, through photo albums. If you look at pictures of Iran in the 1970s, the 1960s, it is going to blow your mind. The memories that are just kind of smuggled through time, filtering their way into the kids.
So these protests, these people aren't asking for something new. They're asking for something that was stolen from them. And that is a massive distinction. And it's very important because if you have a population that remembers itself, suppression becomes extremely hard. And I'm going to say that again. When a population remembers itself, suppression becomes extremely hard.
So now if you layer in the modern regimes battlefield, we have internet shutdowns, narrative fragmentation, foreign news amplification, we have this information scarcity from Iran. When communication disappears, control increases, but confusion goes through the roof. And confusion is very useful for people like this because regimes don't usually create movements. Think about this. Regimes are not designed to manufacture movements. It's made to hijack movements that are already in progress. It's a lot easier that way. So, you don't need to invent anger when it already exists. You just need to redirect it to fracture it in another direction. And that's what makes this moment right now very dangerous and so unpredictable.
So Iran is under pressure from every direction at one time. They have economic collapse that they're facing. They're facing uh generational defiance, massive elite corruption, a lot of global scrutiny. They've got to obviously have a shitload of oil. Pressure does not guarantee change, but pressure always reveals the cracks every time. That's why I talk so much about paying attention to pressure.
And this brings us to what actually matters right now. And this is what's going to matter to our lives here in in the Western world. It's not what's happening right now that's important. It's what's going to happen next. And I think there are three paths uh that might happen here.
Path number one is the iron fist. And it's the most familiar. The regime survives by hardening up. More repression, more surveillance, more arrests, more of these internet blackouts. So fear replaces legitimacy completely. It's just a rule by fear from and it's worse than a dictatorship. So these people are complying because of the cost of dissent. So Iran doesn't change outwardly. It becomes probably I would say more brittle inwardly. And this path can last years, but it guarantees that it's going to rupture again in the future.
So path number two is a fracture from within. And this one's a little bit quieter and it's probably more realistic than people want to admit. So this is where the system splits. The elites start negotiating survival. All these reformist people and super hardline people quietly realign with each other. And there's you'll start seeing controlled reforms appearing and it's just because they're super necessary. So it's an internal triage that the country kind of does on its own or or with some help. But history shows this path very often emerges when insiders fear losing everything more than they fear change. So the country shifts but slowly, probably carefully and incompletely.
And path number three is the break point. This is a rare path, but I think it's very possible, but it's also the most dangerous. This is where the psychological barrier collapses. So enough people start believing in the system, including all these parts of the security apparatus and the monopoly on violence starts to fracture. That is when regimes fall really fast. And it's not because the protesters out there are super brave and and badass. It's because the enforcement, the people doing the enforcing on the protesters stop believing. This is the path that leads to chaos or rebirth or maybe both. And nobody ever controls how it ends.
The real takeaway here is Iran isn't just a warning about religion. It's a warning about what happens when fear completely replaces consent of people and narrative completely eclipses and replaces legitimacy. This is about Iran losing its ability to say no quietly over time. The heaviness that that I feel just talking about this. It's not just about Iran. What we're talking about here when it comes to regimes, this is about what any society becomes when stories matter more than people. It's when a population forgets who they are, somebody else is going to absolutely decide who they are. And once you see that mechanism, you're going to start seeing it everywhere. And you'll watch it play out here in the next few weeks with Iran. Hope it all goes well. See you.