islam

The Memetics of Iran and the Great Decentralization

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Two very cute noses

As I write this, Israeli and US bombs are dropping around Iran on various targets of the Islamic regime. It’s literally been a long time coming, and my opinion is that I hope like hell the Iranian people get a chance to be liberated from the pre-medieval Islamists. Our own Immiserator caste can only dream of the excruciating torture that the mullahs have made Iran endure over the last 47 years.

What is fascinating about all the surrounding confusion is the political alignments in the West that have grown up around the issue of removing the mullahs from power in Iran. Fresh out of the recent pro-Palestinian protests, you would think the Left across the Western world would be in the streets this morning, supporting the Iranian people. The mullahs are decidedly anti-woman, anti-free speech, and basically anti-anything resembling a free and decent society, by anyone’s standards. They want nuclear weapons, not just for some security chit, but because they want to use them against Israel. Various members of the Iranian elite have said as much over the last four decades.

Instead, what we get are a few, tepid demonstrations for the pro-Islamists around the globe. Seattle is having a manufactured protest this morning at Pike Place market. I’m sure more will be extant. But the mullahs are so repugnant an ally, not even the Left wants to smear too much of that defecation on themselves.

Here’s the point. At some level, political labels don’t stick very well to the Iranian situation. If it were women’s rights, or civilian deaths, the Left should be lining up with the general population of Iran. They aren’t, and they won’t. What this should tell us is that our widespread models of Left and Right are just not up to the task of explaining what is going on.

But if we dip our toes just a little into the memetic pool of understanding, looking at the situation from a v-Meme perspective, the reason the Left has even passing sympathy for the mullahs becomes apparent. The Islamic Revolution cohort are totalitarian globalists. They neurogenically match with the Left. They are not pro-Iranian, (just as our own Lefties are not pro-American), other than quite liking the fact that Iran is not some backwater of the Global South. It’s a fully equipped modern state, with universities, deep history, and beach houses on the Caspian Sea. If you’re going to hang out and wait for End Times, it beats the hell out of living in some sand-swept backwater, with a herd of camels at your doorstep. We don’t think of Iran like this — but it is one of the most beautiful countries in the region.

And that makes it a great place to wait. And did I forget to mention all that revenue from sales of oil? With superpower allies?

Some countries in the region have managed the delicate secular balance of being a Muslim nation, while maintaining a cultural identity. Tajikistan is an imperfect one. They banned the burqa, the Hijab, banned Prayer (Namaz) at public places, and the call to prayer (Azan) on loudspeaker, as well as child marriage. You can be a Muslim mostly in private, but you cannot force others in public to follow your prescriptions. The link above is a Tajik wedding dance.

The fact of the matter is the regime in Iran are actual globalists. They want a homogeneous Islamic State spread around the world. They don’t just want Iran. They want the whole enchilada. And the civilizational process necessary for them to get there is hardly any different from the globalists in the EU, or the declining caste in Washington, D.C. Globalists demand an elite. For the mullahs, it’s them. For the EU, it’s the gang in Brussels. And for the U.S., it’s more a country-wide movement, devoid of geography, but full of Woke. All three groups demand profound censorship. All three groups use immiseration as a tool to create a depressed population. All three groups are spearheaded by detached, bubbled up cohorts that believe in smashing dissent, and can’t understand why anyone would disagree with them. And if you do? It’s execution time. Our own Lefties are already plotting revenge, publicly, if and when they regain power. Susan Rice’s recent statement combines the new domestic D talking points with a deep desire for chaos. No exculpatory reading of the past for her.

Safe in their mountain kingdom, the Iranian mullahs don’t need to import more people in order to rig democratic processes for their agenda. That’s obviously not true in Europe and the U.S. The locals are waking up to the fact that they’re on the globalist’s menus. In the U.S., Biden and his Open Borders plan inflated the population of the U.S. by close to 10% to get those voting margins necessary for Leftie hegemony. Europe is in the process, but only after scandal after horrific scandal of immigrants mass-raping their women and children. The result of all this is that for the efforts toward globalization, which is really a centralization and homogenization operation intended to create the optimal psychosocial dynamics for a depressed population, ruled by some self-selected authoritarian overlords, knocks down the notion of culturally diverse nation-states. What it’s working to replace is any sense of agency and independently generated relationships inside those nations.

The problem is that once you do that — once you manage to functionally destroy Western civilization, either through Woke, or Islam, is you have a non-functional economic system. Modern economies are built on some version of trust. And if you cannot trust your neighbor, especially because they come from a low-trust culture, whose language nor mores you do not share, the best you’re going to end up with is a depressed polis, and tribal dynamics. If you don’t believe, look at all the scandals continuing to pour out of Minnesota. Minnesota is the bleak window into the future the Leftists envision as their response to the global Islamic state. And make no mistake — they are both competing for the same share of the memetic pie.

Into all this is the inevitable push-back from the nationalists. Trump in the US, Viktor Orban in Hungary, AfD in Germany, and one of my favorites, Eva Vlardingbroek in the Netherlands, are the vanguard for reclaiming their country from the globalists. As I’ve said before, they are champions in an orderly Great Decentralization, a coming-down from the dysfunctional utopian dreams of the globalists. For good or ill, our populations are simply not evolved enough for an unfettered, no boundaries global society. What we’re seeing now, with the endless flood of economic refugees from the Global South, Mexico and South Asia, is an uneven, but mostly negative patchwork of integration into already advanced cultures in the West.

The result of this is that informal governmental mechanisms, otherwise known as gangs and cartels, are occupying swaths of the geographic landscape in the Western nations. They operate in collusion with ostensibly legitimate governments in these places. But in order for them to exist, nominal, orderly services seem to not be able to. Looking at the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in L.A., still burned to the ground after last year’s fire, is the sign that the memetic pull from both the lack of sophistication and evolution, as well as cold, hard cash from illegal operations that elects incompetent politicians, is downward. These areas cannot recover, because there just aren’t enough smarts to restore even prime real estate.

If it reminds me of anything in my travels, it brings back memories of my trip to Greece. Greece is a nation with a stellar history — the birthplace of Western civilization. And the native people know it. But the streets suck, nothing really works very well, and the people, with their head cast down because they know of the greatness of their forebears, live in a combination of self-conscious, self-aware shame in all of it. How is it to truly know decline? Be the civilization that conquered the known world. And then has no suitable public sanitary facilities.

So what exactly is going on in Iran? The public uprising is really equivalent to all the movements around the world as an attempt for the people there to revive agency and move on the upward path of all civilizations. It is absolutely a re-nationalization effort. It is a populist movement. It is a freedom-of-information movement. It is a women’s liberation movement. And yes — it is revanchist, in that the temporary goal is to go back to Iranian society pre-1979. Witness the appearance of the Shah Pahlavi’s son as the figurehead.

Because where they are trapped now is in an Islamic globalist hell. Which at this point in time, leads back to tyranny. That train is never late. And make no mistake — the Western Left intends the same for us. Information control, 15 minute cities, driving restrictions through radical taxation, deprivation of relational freedom, and endless pointless rituals intended to make us all miserable — all are what’s on the menu. Think about that the next time you do a land acknowledgement.

You wonder what the Lefties have in common with the mullahs and radical Islam? Here’s hoping you now have your answer.

Why Won’t the Left Support the Iranian Revolution?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Stradivarius, Florence, Italy

Why won’t the Left in the United States support the current citizen’s revolution in Iran? If we want to understand why, we have to realize that all these actions occur in The Matrix, as well as on the top level.

A brief update. Approximately a week ago, across Iran, massive public demonstrations have been held against the mullahs and the Islamic Republic. The deeper history locates the start in Iran’s Kurdistan, in the town of Saqqez, centered on the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, after detention by Iran’s morality police in Tehran in 2022. The protests have bubbled along for awhile, but exploded last week across Iran. Though the collapsing economy certainly primed the pump, the treatment of women by the Islamic Republic’s mullahs have driven the moral compass on efforts to overthrow the current regime.

As I’ve written in this piece, Iran is not a ‘downstream tribal’ nation like Saudi Arabia. The population is split into multiple cultural and memetic groups, which range from tribal peasants to modern-day Performance-based liberals. Iran has some of the trappings of a Performance-based Communitarian society, in that its defense programs are likely the most advanced of any Third-World-esque outlaw nation. You don’t invent nuclear weapons nor sophisticated drones without the ability to have advanced social organization. And advanced social organization requires people to possess their own minds — agency.

In the wake of the bombings of the nuclear weapon Fordow and Natanz sites, less reported were other casualties of Israel’s and Iran’s 12 Day War (June 13-June 25, 2025) and Israel’s destruction of key centers of the Islamic Republic’s military ‘civilian suppression’ units. The Thar Allah Corps, Delman Corps, Special Unit in Khavoran, and the Imam Hassan Alborz Corps were four firebases stationed around Tehran to attack the local populace in the case of unrest and uprising. Because of their consolidation during the war — all members reporting in — Israel launched major attacks and basically killed the mullahs’ population suppression shock troops, creating prime conditions for a revolution. As this is being written, the mullahs are attempting to import Arab jihadis from Iraq and Syria to fill in these roles. It is not clear whether they will succeed (I expect Israeli intervention in any kind of mass airlift) but my guess is they will not.

It is important to understand, at least a little, why Islamic regimes are inherently anachronistic and incapable of long-term persistence. Iran long ago left being a Tribal v-Meme society (look at the long history of empires in its cultural record) and was, during the latter part of the 20th century, moving into the meme set of a Legalistic/Performance-based democracy. But this evolutionary progression simply got too far ahead of its leadership — Reza Shah was historically an autocrat and elite, and armed with Savak, a feared secret police, as well as a large peasant caste that was mired back in the Middle Ages. The result was that the regime collapsed, with some help, as well as disinterest from Western forces, and the mullahs took over. Organization and social evolution will always carry the day.

The problem with the level of psychosocial development of any hard core Islamic republic is that Islam, in its core beliefs, is stuck in Tribal/Authoritarian hegemony. Mental models are unchanged literally across centuries. And that means they’re primed to be taken over by psychopaths — which is what happened. Ceilinged out in complicated legalism, the individual has no agency in the face of the mullahs. And there is no allowance for individuals to develop in empathy past what the mullahs will allow. And Islam is very clear about maintaining second-class citizenry for those that don’t fall under the mullahs’ aegis. Don’t believe? Read about Jizya here — the dominant Somali mindset in the current set of fraud scandals in Minnesota.

All this might last for a long time in a pre-modern world (and did.). But influences from the outside are irresistible in the world of the Internet. When the signs of 21st century prosperity are only a click away, and one also gains the ability to broadcast your own plight to that world outside the mullah’s hegemony, regardless what happens with this revolt, the mullahs are living on borrowed time. Ask not who the Death of Geography comes for.

That doesn’t mean that blood will not be spilled. The various military organs of the Islamic State may be more than decimated — but they are not completely gone. And they have far more guns than the urban populations they are up against. A key noted element is whether the Army will refuse to shoot their own civilians, and turn toward the monarchists. We’ll see. I think the Army will turn — because the regime is driving the economy into the ground, and in the end, armies run on money.

So why, then, does the Left seem at best indifferent towards the mass protests in Iran? There is no memetic resonance between the conformance-demanding Left and the desire by the urban Iranian populace for more agency. In fact, it’s anathema. The Sophisticated Left — the Left that has some background knowledge on global affairs — keeps attempting to stand up organizations and agencies similar to what the mullahs have already created. Disinformation policing, messaging rigidity, moral condemnation of non-believers, and funding of special castes are the core of Leftist philosophy. All that’s left to differentiate is a call to prayer five times a day. The v-Meme matching between the punitive legalism and endless categorization of most of the Left in the Western world, and the destructive prescriptions of the mullahs meta-matches. Sure — they disagree on the top level (e.g. ‘treatment’ for homosexuality in Iran involves real conversion therapy — castration, though on second thought, maybe they’re not that physically far apart) but these are minor details. The deep structure of knowledge lines up, regarding who gets to dictate what people think, and who must be punished if their thought just doesn’t line up with the orthodoxy.

The last thing the Left wants to do is amplify the message of more agency. Much has been made about how various young people in the U.S. flocked to the Palestinian protests, and the assumption made was that those young people must have deeply understood the issue. Give me a break. The Palestinian protests were a social relief valve for young people deprived of 3 years of their social development by COVID restrictions. Protest movements were always a great way to get laid, and if you think no one was having sex in those tent cities, you don’t spend much time around post-adolescent adults.

For those that actually know what’s going on, the messages out of Iran are even more powerful against the Left. Iranians as a whole are exhausted with their government’s endless military adventurism across Iraq, Syria and Palestine. They’re the ones under Israel’s bombs, and what the urban class wants is NOT hyperinflation (the Rial, the Iranian currency has undergone something like 1000x inflation in the last 20 years) but some return to a modest prosperity that those of their educational caste have grown to expect. Iranians are very good at secret societies — this comes from literal 1000s of years of dealing with invaders. But by current global world trade standards, no one economy can exist today without trading with its neighbors. This notwithstanding the modest stream of supplies passing through Dubai, and on its way to Bandar al Abbas on the other side of the Persian Gulf.

And as I wrote in this piece, memetically the Left is profoundly wed to collapse. This made them natural allies with Hamas and their suicidal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But the current zeitgeist of the Iranian resistance is far more akin to MAGA — more of a ‘Make Iran Great Again’ mindset. People are literally yelling in the street they don’t care about Israel OR Palestine.

The current figurehead of the Iranian resistance is Shah Reza Pahlavi II — who before he was exiled in 1979, used to fly an F-14 in the Iranian Air Force. Information is sparse on him, honestly. I have a bias against any Pahlavi– they have a notorious reputation in my own family toward killing my family members. But I’m going to hold out hope that if the Revolution is successful, that we will see a receding monarchy after order is established. I’m pretty sundered from the remainder of my relatives in Iran, but I can tell you that all the engineering scholars in the US have no desire to go back. And they are not going to get caught in a group of immigrants condemning America. They know what’s at stake.

This is an ever-evolving situation. I’m going to pray for the Iranian people. No one in the world has a corps of first-class Immiserators like the IRCG and the Islamic regime, and the Iranian people have suffered enough. They serve as a cautionary note if we let our own AWFULs get out of control. And I’d argue that it is the Iranian people’s time. They deserve to be free.

But as we know all too well, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.