Pahlavi: The Future Already Experienced

In general, order has two forms. You can say order is constructed, or you can say order is spontaneous. So the first definition of social and cultural order is to see order as conscious, self-regulating, and evolutionary. Or you say order is something that humans intended, planned, and designed and built. Totalitarianism, from the perspective of those who hold a constructed view of order, is what takes shape.

If you believe order is constructed, let's break these two apart and examine what the difference is. When you say order is constructed, it means humans deliberately created what exists today as cultural order, as the order of relations between us. In other words, you are saying that humans intended this from the beginning, that this was their purpose.

Meaning humans deliberately decided: we want to build a certain kind of order, suppress women, keep women confined to the home, let the clergy hold the upper hand, let religion form the government, and let religious doctrine and political order shadow each other, and they did all of this from the very beginning. There is a quote that says: how did religion come into being?

And the answer given is: the first con man who met the first fool, the first idiot he came across. It sounds very clever, but it is entirely false, entirely a lie, because it treats history as a project and imagines that something from outside imposed itself on collective consciousness, or that it conquered collective and historical consciousness.

Meaning individuals outside the social fabric and outside the cultural fabric sat above it all and decided: what do we do? Let's create religion so we can fool these people, exploit them, take advantage of them. Alright, let's go build it. And these people became, say, prophets. Then a mechanism took hold, a hierarchy was arranged, and this idea was injected into society as an imposed idea on society.

This falls under the category, the category of constructed order, which I am explaining this way. Meaning religion is defined this way, woman is defined this way. Men, at some moment in history, paused, called out to each other, went upstairs, whispered to each other, made a decision, came back into the room, and started acting it all out. That is how this view sees it.

in history and in culture, if you consider order to be constructed in this way, then reason rules over history. But what kind of reason? A reason that imagines: since our predecessors were able to establish an order, I too can establish an order. The fascist says: I can establish an order because others did.

The communist says: hasn't history been engineered? Hasn't culture been engineered? Isn't order, isn't order constructed? I will replace any other construction throughout history with a new truth, substituting it for what has existed until now. What kind of authority does that give rise to? What authority? An authority that rises above society's consciousness and tells society: I will take you to the next stage, to the new stage.

I will take you on the next path. The slogan of the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq): the third path. The slogan of the Islamic Republic: in Iran, we will build a new path. They promise you that just as order, authority, and reason have all been constructed, therefore we will bring a new construction, and this is the only way that history can move forward.

that says order is spontaneous, then what kind of reason does it produce? It says reason is also spontaneous, meaning what you in today's society have called the subjugation of women, this was not the subjugation of women. It has now taken on a new meaning. Throughout history, there was a kind of cooperation, coexistence, social division of labor, a kind of consensus that they arrived at.

They divided the labor, divided the responsibilities, took physical limitations into account, and divided things up. No one could go out and hunt and also raise children at the same time, and while raising children also go out and fight battles. One of these genders had to do that work. One of the genders had to go outside, and then a model was built, saying a successful man, in my view, is a man who is out there and can provide economic security, meaning he comes back from the hunt.

He can also provide physical security. What does that mean? It means if someone attacks, if a threat targets the family, the man is the one who is respected when he can defend the family. And it is still the same today, meaning those models of respect we have for social roles like husband and wife are drawn from thousands of years of experience, thousands of years of experience.

Meaning if a man cannot provide in the domain of economics and the domain of family security, he collapses. Before he collapses in the eyes of his family, he collapses within himself, meaning he is crushed, because he cannot fulfill that social role. If this man's boss at work tells him he is a useless person, it might sting, he might walk out, but all it takes is for his wife to tell him you are a useless husband, and he collapses.

He has nothing left to say. As a father, if he cannot provide economically, he cannot be a father. Meaning he gradually realizes that his son, by the age of ten or twelve, is already telling him to get lost, and his daughter no longer listens to him either, saying were you even able to meet my needs or provide for me, that I should still give you that authority of being a father? And you fall apart. In parentheses, what I want to say is this:

Today you can notice very subtle behaviors within the institution of the family. Meaning, a man not only carries economic and security responsibilities, but even in the domain of intimacy and sex, you see again it falls on the man. Meaning, if a man cannot perform, or if the label is put on him that you are not a real man, that you cannot satisfy your wife's sexual needs, he again crumbles.

It is the same in this area too. It becomes a weapon, just as if a woman cannot get pregnant, because the culture says your pregnancy also matters to me. If she turns out to be infertile, she has been given the responsibility of pregnancy, but if she cannot fulfill it, she is sent back to war, and she too is crushed.

Who does this? Who carries out this work? Please look at the issue this way. When a woman within the family institution, for whatever reason, cannot have children, is it the men of the clan who start crushing her, or is it the women? Meaning, it is the women themselves who become the guardians of historical and cultural roles, and it is the men who again become the guardians of men's cultural and historical roles in society. Or take the issue of beauty, the hostility

That is exactly what it means. It means the foundations. That is exactly it. If you view norms as constructed and man-made, you may be right. But then you have no right to criticize the Islamic Republic, no right to criticize fascists, no right to criticize Nazis, no right to criticize communists, because you said that norms are constructed.

Fine, okay. You said norms are constructed. Women were subjugated in a constructed way, under a constructed division of labor. All of this I will accept from you, on one condition: if you promise me that you will be a defender and protector of fascism, and a defender and protector of totalitarianism throughout history. Rather than accepting this incoherence, you cannot view culture one way and then demand something different in politics.

if you embrace spontaneous order, meaning as a liberal you ultimately move toward conservatism, because you come to understand that you must respect spontaneous order. This order is the product of six hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years, and the product of ancient communities spanning several thousand years. So I see this accumulated effort, and I also recognize that these were the achievements of my ancestors.

And I also recognize that if I lose this, if I forget this, I do not start over from here. I have to go back and start from the point where I forgot. Meaning, if you abolish morality, for example, if you eliminate the moral framework in a society, you then realize that a society cannot survive without moral foundations, because those moral foundations took a thousand years to be internalized, to become part of your psyche, and to shape your collective and individual conscience.

What we call, for example, in theological literature, individual conscience, from a sociological and anthropological standpoint, we do not speak of it that way. It is the internalized norms of the collective and collective moral order inside you, that grabs you by the collar. When you transgress and step out of line, it grabs you by the collar.

Where does it grab you by the collar? Not in places where collective surveillance cameras exist, but in your most solitary and most private moments, it comes for you. For something you did that no one else knows about.

it goes looking for others to do that job, and then in a constructed way, if you do this you ultimately arrive at the point where you feel you must construct God as well the very thing you rose up against here, imagining that you were rising up against God, but in the end you realize: I need to build an image, a grand image, and place it above everyone, and tell it: watch over us.

Watch over us while we sleep. Watch over us when we are alone. My mother died, watch over us. A flood came, watch over us. There was a war, watch over us. I am helpless, watch over us. Witness my suffering, watch over us. Give me hope. Yes, you built it yourself and placed it up there, but you realize that the foundations of society and collective life demand this from you.

And then you realize you have only lost history. And at the level of collective life and society, you have turned it into a hall of historical laboratories where society dies inside them, while you tinker with it, tinker with new ideas, to see whether there is anything I can build or not.

This is the importance of liberal conservatism. It says: do not let go of history, you cannot afford to lose history. Whatever new thing you build, it will not be something completely different. Knowledge does not have a revolutionary character. These are human achievements. Humans are a constant being. Gilgamesh's question 4,800 years ago is today's question too: why do people die?

For 4,800 years humanity could not answer that. But it built systems of knowledge, built ethics, built frameworks that reconnect you to life again. Given that you will die, what reason can I give for why I should live? Don't we all die anyway? Why should I struggle? Why should I improve my political order? Why should I make a revolution in Iran? Why should I have children at all?

they turn society into a laboratory, they tell you: step aside for sixty years, let us test new ideas on you, implement a new culture, destroy the family, experiment in the economy, and let's see if we can get anything out of it. They tell you: wait while we engineer society and culture. Meaning society falls for it again, if it falls for these slogans, falls for the third way, the new way, something no one has ever tried before. If it is deceived by these things,

Something that throughout history I have mentioned: look at this disturbing strand of feminism, the Iranian left, with its hostility toward men, where someone posts a story saying "my father died, I don't know whether to be happy or not," because he was a burden to me, but he was still my father. Look at how dangerous this idea is, this idea that wants to make an enemy out of men.

Someone puts a t-shirt on a man, puts a leash on him, and says "all men are dogs," and then as a self-described feminist woman goes live on Instagram and turns a man into a dog, with a chain in her hand, standing over him, declaring that all men are dogs. Tell me honestly, from within this thinking, do you sense freedom?

Does it smell like freedom, or does it smell like a rebellion against a system where it is not at all clear what the outcome will be? Republicanism means exactly this: the realization of whatever they can actually achieve, because the vision it offers you is a wide-open, utopian, idealistic, imaginary vision, full of slogans and writings and so on.

But here you have a future, and this future is a future that has already been experienced. And you know what a great historical opportunity this is. Please pay attention to this concept: an already-experienced future. You know what the vision ahead of you looks like. You know what its path was. You know how foreign policy is going to be written, how the system of citizenship is going to be written, the concepts

The Iranian person living today is the product of at least fifty years of the post-revolution era, during which bad economics, bad education, bad family life, bad politics, bad culture, everything bad was produced and reinforced by a political order that systematically cultivated and reinforced this. It demanded a brutalized human being. In kindergartens, and likewise in television programs, it demanded a brutalized human being.

They made programs where, using childlike language with children, they say: look, these bombs of ours are going to fall on the bad people and wipe them out. They are using childlike language to teach children to practice violence and practice terrorism. Now if we accept that, for example, in the media, in education, in the fields of higher education and academia, the Islamic Republic has sown such poison that in the end a defective human being comes out of it, if you agree with me on this, then we accept that the product of what we are living with in society today is these anxious, hopeless, aggressive people. And dividing them into

with a negative approach toward something in this community that would structure a political order based on nationalism. I am not aware of anyone other than Pahlavi, any of those I have come to know up until now, whose discourse I have analyzed, who is not in the process of subtracting something, whether from history, from culture, from gender.

If we subtract men from history, from culture, from gender, and say the revolution was a women's revolution, can you, through a women's revolution, ultimately build a national project? You have completely forgotten one gender. "National" would mean nothing, it would be nothing at all. It is an illusion. This is why when I say we should look at things humanly, I mean we should understand that yes, women have been oppressed, and so have men.

Women have fallen behind, and men too, in such conditions, human beings become victims. But if someone built a philosophy, or an idea, a constructed philosophy, that went up high and produced only one victim and said, look, only you are the victim because you are a woman, what does it want to do? It wants to tear society apart.

And even if it does not want to, it will ultimately go in that direction, because it has turned one part of society into the enemy of society itself. It calls to you, it summons you, it fills you, in our own common language, it whispers in your ear, and you go back home and rebel against your home.

It calls to women throughout history as the subject of victimhood. It calls to women and says, look, you were victimized, now go, and now that woman goes against the very world in which she herself has historically been present, and she rebels against it. She rebels against it. Was fascism not exactly this? Was it not?

Was it not calling on victims throughout history? And when it called to them, whispered in their ears, did it not say, now go take revenge? Is communism throughout history not the same thing? Calling on a group like the working class, it calls to the working class and then says, now go rebel against this. It calls to the student and says, now go rebel against the capitalist system. From this very perspective, they say feminism is

You experience this, meaning the strategy you adopt for being able to bring the revolution to fruition is that you recognize these spaces, you try to locate, understand, and transform these spaces. But in this part, meaning when you are now about to form a government, the strategy cannot be this. Be careful: do not carry the revolution forward after the revolution is over.

The revolution must not continue into what comes after. Otherwise you end up with the situation in Iran today: you still have revolutionary courts fifty years later. Revolutionary courts in revolutions around the world were meant to last one month, two months. These courts were dedicated to reviewing the cases of the former regime, meaning former figures, politicians, those who had systematically killed people, and then the revolutionary court would be dissolved.

Fifty years of revolutionary courts. In Agamben's terms, you have extended the state of exception throughout history. You keep saying the situation is a state of exception, that I am forced to suspend the law. Meaning in the name of the law, the state of exception is a situation where in the name of the law, the law is annulled.

So the strategy must be this, meaning our understanding of the historical conditions must be this: what society needed in order to realize its own purpose in history, that must not continue into the day after that realization. And to restore order here you need something else. From this same perspective, for example, in the history of Spain, when Juan Carlos comes to power he says: general amnesty, it is over. This violence, this atmosphere of binary thinking, from this point on must transform into a space of full coexistence, pluralist in texture.

This is about channeling that energy, because revolutions release an unprecedented amount of energy from societies. If that energy does not flow into constructive channels, it can produce unbridled violence. If I am no longer alive, tell the next leaders: take this energy and channel it into joy, into collective celebrations, into shared happiness. Issue a general amnesty.

And be careful not to repeat the 1979 revolution. Do not think: execute, execute, execute. Do not carry out killings and violence. Juan Carlos, in a very indirect way, wanted to tell everyone: look, we all have blood on our hands, we all, given our age, have a complicated past. Do not go digging through each other's files.

There is something in their file, and somewhere in your file too, you also cooperated with the previous regime in some way, willingly or not. Let's not go there, because then there will simply be no nation left that wants to take pride in its return to a monarchy. No nation will remain.