82. Lessons from Iran: What Happens When You Suppress a Nation

If I told you about a country with one of the oldest civilizations on earth, a place where medieval poetry is still quoted in everyday conversation, where hospitality is a moral code, dignity is sacred, and family is central. And then I told you that this same country has lived through coups, revolutions, war, sanctions, morality police, mass protests, internet shutdowns, and more, you might assume these are two different places, but they are the same place.

And that tension between the profound depth of a civilization and the turbulence of its modern politics is exactly what makes Iran so full of lessons. It has a lot to teach us. Welcome to Wiser World, a podcast for busy people who need a refresher on all things world. Here we explore different regions of the globe, giving you the facts and about current events.

I truly believe that the more we learn about the world, the more we embrace our shared humanity. I'm your host, Ali Roper. Thanks for being here. Väng firar 70 år av resor, och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Hitta våra bästa jubileumserbjudanden på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först.

Welcome back. If you've listened to the past few 101 series on Wiser World, you know that this episode is the final installment in the Iran 101 series. It's meant to be a reflective episode where we stop and think about the lessons that Iran can teach us. and how we can apply them broadly. Because learning history is important. But learning from history, I believe, is most important.

And in the history section of Iran 101, so that's parts one, two, and three, we got the foundation. We know the sweep of Persian history, the nineteen seventy-nine revolution, the structure of the Islamic Republic, the nuclear deals, the protest movements, the economic pressures. so much that Iran has been sitting with. But today

I want to talk about what all of that means. It's less about dates and timelines, but more about patterns. It's about what one country's history can teach us, not just about itself. but about human nature and power and resilience and about the really complicated business of living through history. And hopefully that history will feel more personal to us and we can carry those lessons forward.

I want to be upfront about something before we begin. These are my lessons, things I have personally taken away from months and years of reading, researching, and sitting with Iran's story. I first published. and Iran one on one series in twenty twenty two.

So I've been thinking about this for a while. Other people who study the same history might draw very different conclusions, and that's completely valid. History is rich enough for multiple takeaways. So I am not claiming these are the only lessons or even the most important ones. They're just the ones that have stayed with me. And I'm also going to say, as I always do, please don't let this episode be your only source.

Iran's history is very deep. We've barely scratched the surface across this whole series. So what I'm sharing today is a reflection, a starting point for your own thinking, And there's just so much more to explore. So I'll be sharing more resources on Patreon for those who want to go deeper. All right, with all that said, let's get into it. Here are five lessons that I have learned from studying Iranian history.

All right, lesson one. Lesson one is that political systems are temporary, but culture has a longer memory. You know, when most people hear Iran, they tend to think of hostages and sanctions and nuclear tensions and now images of war. And all of those things are real, they matter, they're part of the story. But Iran is so much more than that. It's Persia. It's Hafez and Rumi and numerous other poets who lived centuries ago and whose words are still quoted.

in everyday Iranian conversation. It's Noruz, the Persian New Year, one of the oldest celebrations on earth. It's a lot of things that have been practiced for a long time. And one of the most powerful lessons Iran teaches is that political systems sit on top. of civilizations. They do not define them entirely. The Islamic Republic has ruled since nineteen seventy nine.

The Persian civilization has existed for more than 2,500 years. That's not a small distinction. That's the difference between a chapter and the entire book. And here's why I think this matters. When we reduce countries to their governments, we flatten millions of lives. We erase the poets and the families and the kids and the farmers and the grandmothers and the engineers, and we take something ancient and layered.

And irreducibly human and collapse it into a political headline. And I think about this every time I hear a country summarized by its worst moment. And Iran has had serious, serious problems, I'm not minimizing that. But the people who live through those problems are not the problems. They are people with long memories, deep roots. And a cultural inheritance. that no government has ever fully managed to extinguish.

That's why Iranians, especially those in the diaspora, will often identify as Persian rather than Iranian. And I used to wonder about that distinction, but now I understand it. It is an act of anchoring. It's a way of saying my identity goes back further than this regime, my culture is older than this government, and I am more than this moment. And I think that's not just a political statement, it's a civilizational one.

And for those of us who study history and who live in countries with complicated political moments. I think this is a lesson worth really thinking about. This is also why I'd push back on the idea that you hear sometimes that a country needs to start fresh after a revolution or a regime change.

The truth is that no society starts from zero ever. Sahara Delhi Jani talked about that in her interview with me, and it really struck me that the institutions may collapse, the government may fall, the laws may be rewritten overnight. But the culture doesn't reset. Memory doesn't reset the values, the grievances. They'll those travel forward and they shape what comes next. whether the new government wants them to or not.

And Iran in 1979 didn't begin from a blank page. It began from 2,500 years of accumulated identity. And that identity kept asserting itself even when the new regime tried to rewrite it. And this can apply to anything in our lives, right? If you're at work and you're trying to build a new work culture, you don't get to start from zero, right? If you're smart, you're gonna work with what you have, with a culture that's there. You're gonna get buy-in and work together to change it.

We can't assume that just because, you know, we're in charge now or whatever means that people are gonna change overnight. So lesson one for me is that political systems are temporary, culture has a longer memory, and nothing really starts from zero.

All right, lesson two has to do with the revolution in nineteen seventy-nine. And lesson two is that tearing something down is easier than building something better. So we know that the 1979 revolution is one of the most studied events in modern history and one of the most misunderstood. It was not a fringe movement. It was not the work of a small group of religious extremists. It was a people's revolution, one of the broadest coalitions in Iranian history.

Involving liberals and secularists and students and communists, intellectuals, merchants, religious conservatives, these were people from all walks of life. united by a common issue. They were done with the Shah. They were done with this secret police, the Savak. They were done with corruption and repression in the sense that their country's wealth was flowing outward. While ordinary Iranians struggled, they wanted dignity, independence, accountability.

And here's what's crucial to understand: their anger, I believe, was legitimate. Their grievances were real, and the Shah's regime was genuinely authoritarian. But the pattern that shows up again and again in history, and Iran is one of the most vivid examples, is that unity against something is not the same as unity for something. And once the monarchy fell, the question became now what?

And that question, what kind of system should replace this one, is the hardest question any revolution ever faces, because destroying the old order is in some ways the easier part. Building something durable. And just in its place, that's the real work and that work requires institutions and compromise and a willingness to distribute power rather than simply just seize it. And in Iran in nineteen seventy nine the most organized faction was the clerical structure around Ayatollah Homeini.

and in the messy, contested aftermath of the revolution, the most organized faction won, not through democratic process, through institutional strength. The theocracy didn't emerge because most Iranians wanted it, it emerged because the clerics had the network, the infrastructure, and the ideological clarity to move faster than everyone else.

And many of the people who participated in the revolution, the liberals, the leftists, the students, the secularists, found themselves on the wrong side of the new order almost immediately, and they had helped tear down one form of control only to find another rising in its place.

This pattern is not unique to Iran. We've seen this in many countries, Cuba, Venezuela, many, Russia, France. The history of revolution is also the history of revolutions not delivering what their participants hope for. Not always, not inevitably, but often enough that the pattern I think is worth noticing. And the lesson here isn't don't revolt. You know, people facing genuine oppression sometimes have no other option.

The lesson I think is s more subtle than that, it's that revolutionary energy is real and powerful, but energy alone doesn't write constitutions. It doesn't protect minority rights. It doesn't create independent courts or free press or peaceful transfer of power. Those things require deliberate, painstaking institutional design, and that design work is hard to do in the heat of a revolutionary moment.

So I think about this lesson in a lot of different contexts. In organizations, in communities, even in families, there's a big difference between removing a bad leader and building a good system. And then the second task almost always takes longer and demands more than anyone anticipates in the excitement of the first. So again, tearing something down is easier than building something better.

All right, lesson three. So lesson three is that a government that suppresses its people is not confident, it's afraid of them. Now we know that the Islamic Republic took one interpretation of a religious worldview and made it legally mandatory. After the nineteen seventy-nine revolution, they implemented sweeping sets of restrictions on women's lives, right? Mandatory hijab, gender segregation in public spaces, schools, transportation, family law restructured around male guardianship.

The morality police give him power to stop, detain, and punish women for very small infractions in many cases. And yet, Iranian women are among the most educated in the entire region. in many university programs, they outnumber men. They are doctors and engineers and a whole slew of other, um Careers, right? And yet at the same time, they live under a legal framework that has required a male guardian's permission for certain travel that has set the legal marriage age as low as nine.

in certain points in history, and again deploys morality police to monitor how they wear a headscarf in public. And I have been sitting in this contradiction. How do these two things exist in the same country at the same time? And the more I have sat with it, the more I think I'm understanding something. The Islamic Republic, its leaders, Didn't suppress women because they thought they were weak. They suppressed them because, on some level, they had to have understood that women are powerful.

Think about it this way, when a government spends this much energy controlling one group, monitoring their clothing, restricting their movement, policing their public behavior, limiting their legal rights. That is not the behavior of a system that feels secure. It is the behavior of a system that feels threatened. And the question worth asking is, threatened by what exactly? And I think that it is Threatened by the women that were produced from this.

Because here's what I find almost darkly ironic about the Islamic Republic's approach to women. Girls did go to school. Thank goodness they did. Women went to universities in enormous numbers, and in doing so, the system in some way or other educated a generation of women who could read, who could think critically, who had access to information, who had professions and incomes and ambitions that extended far beyond what the law allowed them to express.

the state in some way or other were part of creating the very force. that they were most afraid of. And that force eventually said, enough. And in September of twenty twenty-two, we know of the Kurdish Iranian woman named Masa Amini, how she was arrested by arrested by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, and she died.

And what followed was the largest protest movement Iran had seen since the revolution, and women pulled off their headscarfs in public and they cut their hair in the streets and they chanted Woman, life, freedom And that spread across the country and then across the world and men marched alongside them and the protests drew in people across class lines and ethnic lines and generational lines.

And we know that the government cracked down very hard. Hundreds of thousands were killed or arrested. The internet was shut down repeatedly. And yet something had shifted. You could feel it even from the outside. The fear had moved. It wasn't just the people who were afraid of the government anymore. The government was visibly afraid of the people.

And that to me is the clearest possible illustration of this lesson. A government that cannot tolerate the sight of a strand of hair that monitors, detains, and punishes women for how they move through public space. That has to deploy police to enforce dress codes on its own citizens. That government is not projecting strength. Because a government that suppresses its people is not confident, it is afraid of them.

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All right, let's do lesson four. Lesson four is when ideology becomes law, disagreement becomes dangerous. Now what do I mean by this? Well, we know that Iran's government structure is at its core a theocracy, a system where religious authority and political authority are fused.

The supreme leader is a religious figure, holds final power over all major decisions. Laws are vetted to ensure they align with Islamic law as interpreted by the clerical establishment. Judges are expected to be experts in religious jurisprudence. the entire system is designed so that the government and God are in theory speaking with one voice. Now, here's the key consequence of that design.

When law is presented as divine will, disagreement is no longer just political. It becomes moral rebellion or spiritual deviation. Now in a secular system, if you oppose a law, you are disagreeing with a policy. You can argue, petition, protest, vote. Disagreement is understood as a normal part of civic life. But in a system where law is divine, opposing the law

Is opposing God. And that changes the stakes pretty dramatically. It means that dissent can't be tolerated because tolerating dissent would mean tolerating moral deviance. And this logic shapes daily life in profound ways. It shapes how the courts work. Political prisoners are often charged with corruption on earth or enmity against God, which carry the harshest penalties. It shapes how the press works.

Journalism that questions the system is not just politically inconvenient, it's religiously transgressive. It shapes how families navigate public and private life, how people code switch between their authentic selves and the version required for public space. And it creates a particular kind of rigidity in a system that can change its mind, where laws are understood as human-made and therefore open to revision, right? Reform is possible through debate.

But in a system where laws are divine, where the framework is sacred, the space for compromise is much smaller. And I wanna say this is not a critique of Islam or of religious people or of the idea that faith should inform how we live. Billions of people find profound meaning and guidance and community in religious life. I have deep respect for that. I myself am religious. The lesson is specifically about what happens when one interpretation of religion becomes not just a personal framework.

but a legal structure with no exit, when the government's ideology and the government's laws become the same thing enforced by the state and are not subject to public debate. History shows us this pattern in a lot of different contexts as well, not only religious ones, right? Secular ideologies can calcify. In the same way. The point is not religion versus secularism. The point is about what happens to a society when the dominant worldview becomes legally unquestionable.

So what I have gathered from this is that when ideology becomes law, compromise becomes harder. And when compromise becomes harder, pressure becomes the only remaining language. And I find that Very interesting is something to definitely keep in mind.

All right, number five, the final lesson. This is that public and private life can diverge dramatically, and it's very difficult to suppress the human spirit. This might be my favorite lesson. And it's the one that surpr surprises people the most when they first start learning about Iran. Because when you describe the legal restrictions and the morality police and the internet shutdowns and surveillance and censorship, the picture that forms is bleak.

And the reality is hard. I do not want to minimize what Iranians live with. But here's what I did not expect when I started studying Iran. I did not expect how alive Iranian culture is, how much warmth and creativity and humor and joy survive inside these constraints. So let me paint a picture here. So public life in Iran follows these formal codes, right? But when you step inside an Iranian home,

You're finding something entirely different. Music, dancing, laughter, debate, poetry read aloud, wine poured quietly in some homes, you know, the full, messy, beautiful texture of human life. And I think this adaptation is very interesting. It is what human beings have always done when expression carries risk. they relocate their culture to safer space. And they protect what matters by moving it indoors or into code or into whispers or into art.

And Iranians have a long literary tradition of exactly this. Persian poetry has always carried double meanings. Right. Persian culture developed an entire aesthetic language for saying one thing and meaning another, for protecting inner truth from uh outer scrutiny. That tradition did not die in 1979. If anything, I think it deepened. And resilience shows up in a lot of ways. It shows up in women who push the limits of dress codes.

Small daily acts of quiet defiance in underground film and art and music scenes, in comedians who kind of skewer the regime in ways that the regime can never quite catch up with. That to me is one of the most profound lessons in all of history, that the human spirit is remarkably difficult to suppress. Not impossible to harm, not immune to trauma. The Iranian people have suffered real losses and I'm not trying to romanticize that.

But I have learned that suffering and vitality can coexist and in Iran they clearly do. I have deep respect for that. And I definitely feel like when public space narrows The human spirit finds other places to breathe. And I think Iranians have definitely done that.

Wow, I talked longer than I thought I was gonna talk. I clearly had a lot on my mind, but I wanna close out with just saying that Iran is not simple. It's ancient and modern, it's restrictive and expressive. It is publicly formal and privately warm. This is a country where poetry has survived censorship and hospitality has survived sanctions and protest has survived repression. And studying Iran has taught me Uh to be a little more humble. It has reminded me that societies are very layered.

that systems can be rigid and culture can remain alive, that reform is very complicated and nonlinear, and that dignity is not a luxury, it is a driving force in human behavior. And that pride shapes politics in ways that analysts often underestimate. It has also reminded me that behind every policy and every protest, every sanction, every missile, there are families that are affected by it.

And that's the thing about history, right? It is always ultimately about people, not states, not regimes, not abstract forces, people. And I think that is the deepest lesson of all, that wherever we are, whatever country we come from, whatever political moment we're living through, we are all doing some version of the same thing. We're trying to protect what we love, trying to find dignity, trying to make sense.

of this world around us and Hopefully that helps us to see each other more clearly, more humanely. And again, these are just my five lessons. As I said at the beginning, other people who study the same history might take away different things. And that's part of what makes this worth doing. The conversation it opens up, the questions it leaves you sitting with.

If you'd like to go a little deeper on Iran, I've shared many resources on Patreon that hopefully will help you. You can go on to patreon.com. slash wiserworld podcast. You can also join our free weekly email newsletter at wiserworld.com or join us on Instagram at wiserworld podcast. If this episode meant something to you, please consider sharing it with someone Who would find it valuable?

And if you haven't listened yet to the Iran 101 series, parts one, two, and three and the cultural prelude and the interview with Sahar Delijani, those will also give you a lot more historical backbone that makes these lessons land even harder. Thank you for learning with me, for being interested in the world, and let's go make the world a little wiser.

These days I'm really trying to live by quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If something isn't well made, versatile, and built to last, I just don't want it taking up space. And that's why I love Quint. They make high quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like one hundred percent European linen.

silk, organic cotton poplin, lightweight cotton cashmere, that's perfect for this in-between season. The cuts feel thoughtful, the fabrics feel elevated, and everything is designed to be worn on repeat. What I appreciate most is that Quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. You're not paying for flashy branding or expensive retail stores, just beautiful, well made clothing at a price that actually makes sense.

These are the pieces you reach for again and again, season after season. And it's not just me. Quince pieces are consistently rated 4.5 to 5 stars by thousands of customers, real people, wearing them every day and loving them. If you're trying to simplify your wardrobe, And invest in pieces that truly last.

Quince is a brand I genuinely recommend. My go-to quince piece right now is the 100% organic cotton denim chore jacket. I have it in two colors. I wear them probably two to three times a week. I love them. I also really like their packing cubes and the kids' pajamas. Right now, go to quince.com slash wiserworld for free shipping and 365-day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last.

Go to QUINCE.com/slash wiserworld for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash wiserworld.