Reclaiming Persia (Iran): A Philosophical Inquiry into Identity, Moral Clarity, and the Fog of Hatred
- Charles "Ghost" Coutts
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
There is no more righteous a voice than the one crying out truths nobody else wants to hear. ~C H Coutts
(Opinion) For informational and educational purposes only. It is just something to think about.
Imagine being part of a society awakening to the realization that the name they bear, the flag they fly, and the theocratic system that governs them no longer reflect who they truly are—or who their ancestors were. This is not abstract theory; it is the lived experience many Iranians articulate when they say they want to be Persians again. They seek to reclaim a civilization whose roots stretch back to the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great, to Zoroastrian dualism that framed existence as an eternal contest between light and darkness, order and chaos. That ancient Persian heritage—philosophically rich, administratively sophisticated, and culturally vibrant—was gradually overlaid by successive waves of conquest and ideology, most decisively in the 7th-century Arab-Islamic expansion and then dramatically reasserted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that birthed the current theocratic state.
We are not going to get into the politics or any of the other distractions. We are looking at what actually happened and trying to understand it through psychology, sociology, etc.
Before we dig into that, though, let's take a look back for context and clarification.
The Iranian Revolution in 1979 effectively destroyed the Persian culture and civilization, so let's take a deeper look at that historical event.
From a purely philosophical standpoint, this desire raises timeless questions about authenticity, self-determination, and the nature of civilizational continuity. What right does any regime—or any external ideology—have to commandeer a people’s collective identity? Existential thinkers from Kierkegaard to Sartre would recognize this as a crisis of bad faith: living under a mask that denies one’s historical being. Heidegger spoke of Dasein—being-there—as thrown into a world already shaped by history; true authenticity demands confronting that thrownness rather than fleeing into inauthentic structures. Here, the “thrownness” is centuries of Islamization superimposed on a pre-Islamic Persian substrate.
The regime’s rigid Shia theocracy is not merely governance; it is an existential overlay that many inside Iran experience as alien to their deeper cultural memory. Protests—Woman, Life, Freedom in 2022 and waves continuing into 2025–2026—echo with chants against the clerical establishment, women defying mandatory hijab, and calls for secular freedom. Surveys conducted by independent Iranian researchers (such as GAMAAN) consistently show that a clear majority—often around 70%—reject the Islamic Republic in favor of a secular democracy if given a genuine choice.
Philosophically, evil is not a partisan slogan; it is the deliberate, systematic negation of human flourishing. A regime that functions as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—arming and directing proxies that sow death across the Middle East and the globe, while crushing dissent at home through executions, torture, and surveillance—embodies that negation. The question is not “Is this regime bad?” (the evidence is overwhelming). The question is deeper: If a people cry out for liberation from such a system, and if external actors seek to facilitate that liberation while simultaneously dismantling a machine of global terror, why does opposition arise at all? How can anyone have a problem with that?
This is where the phenomenon transitions from philosophy to psychology and sociology. Enter what is commonly referred to as "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (TDS)—not as a mere insult, but as a recognizable cognitive and emotional condition. In truth, the individual's name is irrelevant; it could be any name, and that's the first thing people need to grasp. Replace Trump with any other name, and the symptoms remain unchanged. The phenomenon itself stays consistent. Our upcoming 2028 national election will demonstrate this if the White House remains under Republican control. The only change will be the name of the target. Everything else will continue seamlessly. History also supports this. Democrats have attempted to demonize and impeach every Republican president elected since Eisenhower. (Ford was not elected) The only change is the name of the target. That is what is known as a pattern, folks!
When visceral hatred toward any single figure becomes the organizing principle of one’s moral universe, rational assessment collapses. The mechanism is classic motivated reasoning: facts are filtered, evidence is inverted, and moral intuitions are hijacked so that “If 'insert evil name here' (or anyone associated with them) supports X, then X must be evil.” Policy outcomes—maximum pressure on a terrorist-sponsoring theocracy, support for Iranian voices calling for regime change—become invisible behind the red mist of personal animus. Tribal loyalty overrides empirical reality; confirmation bias turns every nuance into proof of the hated enemy’s wickedness. Psychologists recognize this as affective polarization on steroids: emotion crowds out logos. The result is a bizarre moral inversion where helping Persians reclaim their heritage and ending a murderous apparatus is reframed as “warmongering” or “imperialism,” while defending the status quo (or remaining silent) is cast as enlightened restraint.
This psychological blindness is not unique to any one side of the political spectrum, but it is especially acute when the target is a polarizing personality. Hatred becomes a lens that distorts everything: the legitimate grievances of Iranians living under oppression are downplayed or explained away as “Western propaganda”; the regime’s body count and terror exports are minimized or relativized (“other countries do bad things too”). The ancient spiritual war the user invokes—the perennial human struggle between forces that liberate the human spirit and those that chain it to power, dogma, and resentment—becomes invisible when one’s gaze is fixed solely on the latest tweet or headline.
There is always more than one way of looking at things, but only if one chooses to look. The philosophical invitation is simple: listen first to the voices of those who actually live under the boot—the women risking arrest for removing a headscarf, the families mourning executed dissidents, the diaspora that deliberately calls itself “Persian” to honor what came before the theocracy. Their testimony is not filtered through partisan media; it is raw, existential. If the goal is moral clarity rather than tribal victory, then supporting the reclamation of Persian civilization while dismantling a regime that exports murder is not complicated. It is, in the oldest philosophical sense, just.
Underneath the noise of elections, sanctions, and cable-news shouting matches lies something older than any modern nation-state: the spiritual war between authenticity and erasure, between light and the forces that would snuff it out. Where one stands in that war matters far more than any transient human alliance. The Persians who yearn for their civilization back are not asking for ideology; they are asking for the right to exist as themselves. The rest of us—blinded or not—must decide whether hatred will keep us from seeing what is plainly before our eyes.
Do we stand with the oppressors, or do we stand with the Persians, who had their very identity and culture stolen from them through rape and murder? This is not a political question. It is a question of humanity. So where are you going to stand?
Author's Note: This is the second time this administration has worked to liberate a nation’s people from oppression. The first instance was in Venezuela, where people around the world, especially Venezuelans, celebrated the efforts. However, here in the United States, Donald Trump and his administration were criticized, even demonized, for their actions.
Now, the people of Iran are also celebrating the potential end to their oppression under an Islamic regime. They are crying out for liberation and looking to us, the United States, to help liberate them. They saw us do it for the Venezuelans. They seek to reclaim their culture, religion, and identity that have been taken from them by a regime that is, notably, the number one state sponsor of terrorism worldwide. This regime is arguably the most murderous in human history. Yet, once again, here in America, efforts to assist the Iranian people in regaining their identity are being met with criticism, even demonization, while the "rest of the world" supports and celebrates the actions of this administration and Trump.
Perhaps it’s time to be honest with ourselves and admit that Trump isn’t the real problem. His name could be anything, and the same situation would arise because the hatred directed at him is a form of manipulation. The mindset of “the orange man is bad, so everything he does is also bad” exemplifies dehumanization. It's worth taking a long, hard look at that. Just a thought.
Difference in the Iranian flags.
Congressional look at TDS
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