The Islamic Republic’s Founding Myth
The Islamic Republic’s already lengthy catalogue of fears has ballooned of late: alongside the possibility of being overthrown by its own citizens, it is haunted by the prospect of a full accounting of the massacres it has carried out; by the tenuous loyalty of its army, and its empty coffers; and by the shadow of Israeli spies and Islamic State militants. What terrifies Iran’s theocrats the most, the fear that eclipses all their fears, is the ability of the people at large to clearly see the essential realities of the present regime.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]While Iranians have heroically demanded a great many things in recent weeks—change, new rulers, democratic freedoms—they are fundamentally insisting on dismantling the meticulously curated edifice of deceit and falsehoods sustaining the state as it has been constructed since 1979. For the first time ever, by explicitly chanting the name of a specific, alternative leader in the streets, Iranians have emphasized the true problem: the biggest, the most unsustainable lie of all, they are collectively saying, is the system itself.
The founding myth of the Islamic Republic rested on a contract of rule that promised the people agency and accountability. Instead, it empowered an unelected, ever-shrinking clique answerable to no one but itself. For years, deception remained essential to its survival. Now, soaring food insecurity and hunger have exposed the system for what it truly is: a theoretical fabulism and a real life con. The profound significance of the recent protests lies in their creation of a vast public space where tens of thousands repudiated the lie in unison. The veil was shredded, the illusion was shattered. Nothing will ever be the same. That is why the regime has killed ruthlessly, and killed as it has never killed before.
On the road to this moment, the regime’s attempts to hide reality grew increasingly fantastic. I remember during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Western countries refused to sell the ventilators to Iran (sanctions are sanctions) and thousands were dying unnecessarily, the regime blanketed Tehran with billboards professing that Iranians had “overcome” the pandemic together. As if that one scalding insult wasn’t enough, the propaganda campaign went even further, with banners claiming that Iranians were triumphant in virtually all aspects of modern life—they were also world champions in sport, fine practitioners of democracy, innovators in medicine.
This while the regime banned women from global sports tournaments that might imperil their modesty, leading to defections of talented female athletes; while it tampered so egregiously with elections that many people stopped bothering to vote; while people suffered a catastrophic shortage of basic drugs.
Every facet of life and governance is presented as the inverse of its lived reality. And anyone who dares to peek behind the curtain—journalists, dissident professors, activists, even, bizarrely, the Iranian president himself—becomes a threat to the regime.
The Iranian economy is a grand hall of mirrors, concealing criminal theft on an epic scale. Fake privatizations, hidden backroom tenders, currency tiers purportedly designed to favor consumers, and bank bailouts have enriched oligarchs rich while impoverishing the nation. The regime blames its bankruptcy on sanctions and claims to be working toward their removal while making foreign policy choices guaranteed to trigger more sanctions.
Every crisis is shrouded in lies that mask its real cause: Why is Tehran running out of water? Why is a gas-rich country facing electricity shortages? Why does a single family dominate the import of agricultural feed? Why, as a former mayor of Tehran, demanded in his newspaper last week, do 40 million Iranians live below the poverty line while the state operates mega charitable foundations with billion-dollar budgets ostensibly to help the poor? For this candor, his paper was shut down.
Demands for transparency are increasing because revelations about this despairing state of affairs will clarify precisely who is accountable. The truth risks bringing down the whole edifice, which is why the system writhes to hide who takes decisions large and small. Who decided the system for how oil revenue should be repatriated, leading to bottomless theft? The examples are endless. But concealment is expensive, and the regime is out of money. Previously, it had the funds to partially hide the consequences of its mismanagement and theft through subsidies and handouts. Now, bankruptcy is bringing clarity.
The failure of the regime’s ideological project has been evident for at least two generations, but acknowledging how society has evolved—that it has long been living according to its own reality—remains forbidden. Protests in Iran are often symptoms of changes that have already occurred: a howling demand for these shifts to be recognized and for an end to the exhausting charade of pretense.
The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 represented, in part, a collective act of refusal by women to perpetuate the charade of compliance with everything dress codes imposed by the state symbolized: ersatz piety, state hypocrisy, control over Iranian women’s bodies, and the manifest absence of the rule of the law. Women and girls had long defied the hijab law, but finally, fed up, they rose up and wielded the power of mass disobedience to extend their freedom into spaces symbolic of state control: schools, airports, and banks. It was as much a revolt by young girls and women against this façade as anything else.
What is striking about this specific generation of young Iranians is their moral clarity and demand for complete transparency. They have concluded that pragmatically maneuvering around lies, allowing the regime to operate in the shadows, makes collaborators of everyone. They refuse this abusive predicament. They refuse to be estranged from themselves by tolerating it.
The regime’s war against transparency has led to increasingly bizarre scandals. The state filtering and control of the internet forces ordinary Iranians to purchase Iranian-made VPNs (made and sold by what one Iranian legislator called a “VPN mafia”). In November, X started revealing approximate locations of its users. Soon, Iranians found out that the regime had issued so-called white SIM cards that allowed unrestricted global internet access to thousands of journalists, officials, and pro-state figures. When it was revealed in December that some opposition journalists—the loudest critics of the regime—had quietly benefited from these “white SIMs” a scandal ensued that became a Russian nesting doll of lies.
The revelations of brazen digital inequality and manufactured dissent humiliated Iran’s President Massoud Pezeshkian, who had campaigned on lifting internet restrictions. He not only found himself stymied despite running the executive, but also had a major cover-up on his watch. Forced to turn his pledge into a lie, his dramatic solution was to impose filtering equally on everyone. He declared ominously: “We have instructed that these white internet lines be turned black as well, to show what will happen to people if this blackness continues.”
We have grown accustomed to asking what Iranians want, whether they prioritize livelihoods or democracy, whether they wish for a king but might tolerate a practical, secular general. Yet at every turn what they have been demanding is an end to the secrecy through which the regime hides its failings and imposes an alienated life of falseness on its people.
Transparency is the one fundamental condition they demand, and with it would flow everything else: accountability, a revelation of the true causes of the country’s terminal condition, and the exposure of the regime’s structural rot.