The people in small towns and villages—even in the poorer districts of big cities—have demands far different from the things you hear on social media. Iran is a vast country, and those active online do not speak for it.
I remember Iranian men in their thirties and forties, back when I was poor, sneering at me and assuming I was “spoiled,” trying to get attention. How different they were from me, and from the broader Iranian society. Those men are still single. To them, marriage was nothing more than a contract. Most of them were cowards, and yet, when they encountered someone vulnerable, they were filled with resentment and self-loathing. At the same time, when they saw you defenseless and wanting only to be a good person, they would unleash all their emotional, psychological, and sexual frustrations onto you.
So many times I asked myself, what do I have in common with these people—men and women alike?! Why are we even considered compatriots?! I’m searching for a simple loaf of bread, and all they care about is nose jobs, being monitors, managing others, and pointless studying. So many times I asked myself: why doesn’t an ordinary person like me have enough money to live, while they, overflowing with privilege, leave the country, and yet remain dissatisfied even here? Why are these people always unhappy?!
Iran will not achieve freedom. Not because the people of Iran are unworthy of it, no. Because Iranians abroad—most of them, not all—are a cluster of loud, irritable, entitled creatures, and, more importantly, utterly unprepared. The amount of chaos these people can generate even in a simple protest is boundless.
Iranians in Iran—especially in the big cities—share this trait. But it has worsened among Iranians living abroad. Or perhaps it was those who arrived here in the 1970s, and 80s, from upper-class and aristocratic backgrounds, who laid the foundation for it. These people cannot reach agreement on the smallest matters. They possess no hint of selflessness, and never once have they managed to rally together during protests without clashing among themselves or with their country of origin. Even just reading the news about them makes one’s stomach turn.
And let’s not forget that protests are not a method for changing a system. After fifty years of demonstrations, they should understand that to transform a dictatorial, inefficient, oppressive regime—whose connections to the rest of the world are severed—protests in a modern, first-world country are not the solution.
These people are irritable; every single one wants to be the monitor, and in the same dictatorial manner, they want to reshape everything to their own will. Honestly, give me one reason why these loud, irritable selfish little dictators, abroad, yelling at everybody, deserve to be heard.
In all of this, my heart burns for the people inside Iran—for those in small towns, villages, and places untouched by constant news cycles and social‑media frenzy—who are left to pay the price for this loud, entitled, self‑absorbed crowd abroad, and for the comfortable, indifferent elite within Iran itself.
Iran is saturated with inequality—social, economic, political, psychological, educational, inequality of access, of opportunity. One reason I despise academia is exactly this: a mass of lost, would‑be dictators, angry at the world for not having become more than they are, yet in practice doing less real work than the people who actually keep society running. They drag defenceless individuals into the system and subject them to relentless psychological and emotional torment.
Those same dissatisfied, irritable, entitled, wealthy, and bitter people come abroad and try to influence the diaspora to get what they want. Meanwhile, Iranians inside Iran are fighting for a simple loaf of bread. Why do you make it seem as if they’re protesting or striking for the son of a dictator who once called himself a king, fled the country repeatedly, and left it to rot?
A man who called himself Shah, who enshrined dictatorship, religion, and religious dictatorship in the country, and then, at the first sign of protest, killed as many ordinary people as he could—and then fled? The people of Iran are hungry. Civil and social freedoms are no longer their primary concern. These people are poor, starving, sleeping in graves—and the state even drags them out of those graves. Street vendors’ belongings are destroyed, they are beaten, and workers aren’t paid their due wages. Dictatorship and corruption have allowed men in power—managers, company heads, department chiefs—to withhold wages even in private settings, and whenever someone demands their rights, they are met with severe punishment. How does this align with the demands of a bunch of entitled freeloaders in Europe and the West, who talk about things that are neither the first nor last priority of the people inside Iran?! When will these rich people in Iran, and Iranians abroad, ever become accountable human beings?
An Iranian whose stomach is full, whether in Iran or abroad, who has everything and just wants to show off in Iran once or twice a year—why should such a person even claim to represent the oppressed people living under dictatorship, stripped of civil and social freedoms, and constantly suppressed inside Iran?!
These people can’t even tolerate each other in a small, empty protest. Everyone wants to be the Shah, the manager, the boss. Why should the world even listen to us?! And yet, the international community has heard Iranians’ voices time and again. What came of it?! Each time, it only left them more exhausted and more bewildered—because Iranians are so selfish and entitled.
I come from a lower‑middle-class background—and I’m a girl. The psychological, emotional, financial, and social pressure I endured—and especially the burden imposed by Iranian men in satisfying their emotional, psychological, and sexual fetishes on me and countless other defenseless girls—was unbearable. A society where proper sexual intimacy barely exists, where sex as a basic need is only possible if you’re wealthy and well-connected, and where the same morals, behaviours, and judgments are carried abroad and become part of its culture—do you really think such a society can achieve freedom?!
When the most basic needs—eating, sleeping, comfort, seeing nature, gathering with others, joy, safety—aren’t guaranteed in that country, and when people carry these same problems abroad and pass them to the next generation, what path to freedom is even possible for those poor souls?!
When basic needs—food, safety, emotional security—aren’t guaranteed, people naturally prioritise themselves. Add decades of propaganda, corruption, and censorship, and you get a society where selfishness, defensiveness, and aggression are common survival tools.
The entitlement, aggression, obsession with status, inability to cooperate—is systemic, generational, and structural, not just “people being bad.”
This flight of Iranians abroad—only to live exactly as they did back home; this selfishness, this resistance to change, this stubborn clinging to beliefs; these little dictators everyone carries inside; this constant use of others as tools, at any cost, to reach their small personal goals; this indifference toward other people and even animals—all of it has actively contributed to Iran becoming worse and worse.
This external locus of control—the belief that nothing is ever their fault and that they are always the victims—has led us to where we are now. And a people who cannot plan together, cannot talk, cannot practise peaceful agreement or disagreement, cannot exercise reason, are a people headed for destruction.
In all of this, my heart aches for Iran’s poor—especially the young, the very young—who are the ones destined to be crushed.