The Islamic Republic’s Predatory Contract With Its People

Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, who believes that he represents God’s will on Earth, ordered what now appears to be one of the deadliest two-day mass slaughters in modern history. According to estimates provided by two anonymous senior officials in the country’s ministry of health, as many as 30,000 citizens may have been killed during this 48-hour rampage on January 8 and 9. If these estimates prove correct, Ali Khamenei’s January 2026 massacre—the climax of a decades-long reign of repression—will rank among modern history’s deadliest single episodes of state violence.

Since the rise of the modern state in the 17th century, political legitimacy has come to rest on a social contract, in which the government provides security and sustenance in exchange for the consent of the governed. The Islamic Republic’s relationship with Iranians does not resemble a social contract, but a predatory lease signed in 1979 that has long since expired.

The terms of this lease—imposed by the landlord upon the tenants—are nonnegotiable:

You, the tenant, will live inside the religious fever dream of a man, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who viewed the state not as a vessel for national advancement, but as a weapon for personal retribution, and whose copious writings offered detailed pronouncements about the religious penalties for fornicating with animals, yet no insights on how to run a modern economy. “Economics,” he once said, “is for donkeys.”

[Davood Moradian: What I saw in Mashhad]

You will be ruled for four decades by his successor, Khamenei, whose views will remain fixed no matter how much the world, and Iranian society, changes. He will preach resistance and pretend he is a pious man who eschews worldly wealth. But an entity called Setad—a shadowy financial empire under his personal control—has amassed assets valued at more than $95 billion in 2013 and potentially exceeding $200 billion today, much of it confiscated from Iranians who fled political and religious persecution.

We, the landlord, will micromanage your personal life. Whom you love, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, what you drink—all will be subject to our approval. Under our Sharia-based laws, women will be stoned for adultery, while men are permitted to take multiple wives.

You will be subjected to routine power outages, even though your country possesses the world’s third-largest proven reserves of oil and second-largest reserves of natural gas. We will preside over one of the highest inflation rates in the world, wiping out your savings as the national currency loses more than 99 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar since the revolution.

We will so profoundly mismanage our environment–due to corruption and incompetence–that we will dry up your rivers and turn your lakes into salt flats, creating dust storms that choke your cities. We will pump the groundwater until the land beneath Tehran literally sinks, imperiling its habitability for future generations.

Our national slogans will be “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” never “Long Live Iran.” As Khomeini once put it, “Patriots are useless to us. We need Muslims. Islam is opposed to patriotism.” While we chant these slogans, we will send our own children to study in the West.

We will treat half the population as second-class citizens. If you are a woman, your testimony in court will be worth half that of a man’s, and your inheritance will be half that of your brother’s. We will make a piece of cloth—the hijab—the primary symbol of our state’s authority, and we will beat you to death in detention centers for wearing it “improperly.”

Although we will rule from a moral pedestal, we will lie without reserve. As the longtime Khamenei adviser Mohammad-Javad Larijani likes to say, “Being able to keep a secret even if you have to mislead is considered a sign of maturity. It’s Persian wisdom. We don’t have to be ideal people. Everybody lies. Let’s be good liars.”

Our greatest national export will be the intelligence of our nation. We will suffer from one of the highest levels of brain drain in the world. One hundred fifty thousand of our citizens will leave every year, at a cost that even our own officials have conceded could amount to about $150 billion annually.

Rather than recruit the brightest minds from our diaspora back to Iran to contribute to our nation, we will take them hostage and sell them for ransom to the United States and European countries. We will take visiting foreign academics hostage and trade them for convicted terrorists.

Though we will boast about our independence, 90 percent of our oil exports—the lifeblood of our economy—will go to China, which demands steep discounts.

We will use a sizable portion of our national wealth—tens of billions of dollars—to finance and arm Arab militias throughout the Middle East. This should not be confused with concern for the well-being of Palestinians. In contrast to American, European, and Arab governments that fund Palestinian human-welfare initiatives, our resources will arm and finance Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Our goal is not to build Palestine but to destroy Israel. We will achieve neither.

We will spend well more than $500 billion—including the revenue lost to sanctions—for a nuclear program that provides neither energy nor deterrence, as was evidenced by Israel and America’s repeated penetration of Iranian air space.

We will ally with Russia, a country that excised a third of our territory in the 19th century, that occupied and attempted to take more territory in the 20th century, and that benefits from keeping our country isolated so that we cannot compete with them in global energy markets or for influence in Central Asia.

We will preach a “resistance economy” of austerity for you, while our Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operates as a tax-exempt mafia that controls as much as 50 percent of the national economy, including telecommunications, ports, and construction. You will stand in line for subsidized bread while our elites smuggle iPhones and luxury cars through exclusive, unmonitored airport terminals. Our middlemen will funnel your national wealth into European property empires—buying ski resorts in Austria and mansions on London’s Billionaires’ Row—all while financing the very guards who repress you.

[Omid Memarian: What Trump fails to grasp about Iran]

We reserve the right to use you as human shields. When we fear an attack, we may refuse to close civilian airspace, shoot down a passenger plane full of our own citizens, lie about it for three days, and then torment the families of the victims.

If you protest our corruption or incompetence, you will be called a terrorist and charged with “waging war against God” or “corruption on earth.” We will execute you without due process, maintaining the world’s highest execution rate per capita.

We will build a digital wall around you. We will slow your internet speeds to a crawl and block global platforms to prevent you from communicating with one another or the outside world, while our officials post freely on X to spread propaganda to the West.

Even before this latest massacre, the gap between the Iranian government and its citizens was one of the widest on Earth. A critical mass of Iranians, including within the regime, have realized that the structure is condemned. They know that breaking the lease will be costly and terrifying, especially without foreign help. But they also know that living under its terms is at best a dead end, and at worst a death sentence. They do not seek to renegotiate the contract. They seek to evict the landlord.