Theocratic Visions and Liberal Vacuums: Iran’s Crisis of Meaning
(ANALYSIS) In 1940, while reviewing “Mein Kampf,” George Orwell made an observation that still cuts through our politics. Liberal societies, he wrote, assume that people primarily want comfort, safety, and material well-being. Hitler understood something darker and older: that human beings are also drawn to struggle, sacrifice and a sense of higher purpose. Ideologies that endure offer not only material improvement, but meaning.
That insight is a useful lens through which to view both Iran and today’s liberal democracies. We often analyze regimes like Iran’s in terms of repression, economic failure, or geopolitical games. All of that matters. But it misses a central question: What kind of meaning does such a system offer, and why does it resonate with some people, even under brutal conditions?
From the beginning, Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary project presented itself not just as a new state, but as a total worldview. It fused religion, politics, and morality into a single framework and cast history as a moral — even cosmic — struggle. The Islamic Revolution was not merely a national upheaval; it was portrayed as a confrontation between truth and decadence, faith and corruption. Within that narrative, sacrifice was not only justified but exalted, and martyrdom became both a cultural principle and a political tool.
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From its earliest days, the religious apartheid established by Khomeini relied on a combination of physical, legal and cultural violence to reshape Iranian society. This ranged from the imposition of compulsory hijab on women to the repression of religious minorities and the arbitrary detention and execution of perceived opponents, including former officials and supporters of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Political dissidents — including some who had initially supported the revolution — soon became victims of the new order, as thousands were imprisoned or executed, many of them young people.
During the Iran–Iraq War, the Islamic regime mobilized large numbers of young volunteers, including teenagers, many of whom were sent to the front lines. At the same time, a culture of martyrdom was actively promoted through schools, media, and public institutions. Suffering itself was given theological meaning. The state did not simply demand obedience; it offered a story in which pain, poverty, and loss could be reinterpreted as participation in a sacred drama. That framework continues to shape the Islamic Republic’s rhetoric today, from foreign policy to domestic repression.
Seen through Orwell’s eyes, the appeal of such a system becomes more intelligible. It is not only imposed from above. It taps into a genuine human hunger for significance. In a world that often reduces people to consumers or statistics, a narrative of heroic struggle can feel strangely dignifying — even when it leads to catastrophe.
But the challenge posed by regimes like Iran’s is not only “over there”. It also exposes a weakness within liberal societies themselves. As American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued, contemporary liberalism is suffering from a crisis of confidence and coherence. On one side, neoliberalism has reduced politics to market logic, treating human beings as rational utility maximizers and eroding social solidarity. On the other, a certain form of cultural and identity relativism hesitates to affirm that liberal values — freedom, equality, and human dignity — have any universal force.
The result is a vacuum. Liberal democracies promise freedom and prosperity, yet they often struggle to answer a deeper question: What is this freedom for? When shared narratives and moral horizons fade, individuals may experience fragmentation and a loss of meaning. Politics shrinks into technocratic management.
In such a context, more totalizing ideologies — religious, nationalist or otherwise — can gain renewed appeal. They dare to say what liberalism often hesitates to articulate: here is a clear vision of the good life, a strong sense of “we,” and a cause worth suffering for. In some cases, they even offer apocalyptic promises of redemption under theocratic rule — or dystopian futures reminiscent of works like “The Handmaid's Tale” or “1984.”
This is not a simple opposition between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between two ways of responding to the human condition. Liberalism emphasizes individual autonomy, pluralism, and the reduction of suffering. Ideological regimes focus on unity, purpose and the transformative power of struggle. The former seeks to manage conflict; the latter often thrives on it. When liberal orders hollow out into consumerism plus proceduralism, they risk confirming the charge that they offer “nothing to die for” — and not much to live for, either.
The Islamic Republic is one expression of this dynamic. Like other systems that claim a monopoly on truth, it constructs a moral universe in which political authority is inseparable from a purported higher purpose. Within this framework, it advances ideological narratives such as the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy, the imperative to export the Islamic Revolution, and the portrayal of the United States as the “Great Satan.”
At the same time, a striking contradiction persists: many members of the political elite maintain close personal or familial ties to the very societies they publicly denounce, with some of their children living and studying in the United States and benefiting from the opportunities of American life.
Its endurance cannot be explained solely by coercion or oil revenues. It must also be understood in terms of the meanings it produces and sustains, however distorted they may be.
Heroes without capes
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran in 2022 offered a striking example of this alternative moral horizon. At the start of this year, renewed waves of protest, which many described as a “national revolution,” once again brought large numbers of Iranians into the streets across multiple cities despite the risks. The state responded with severe repression, reportedly massacring thousands of citizens, including children.
In both instances, women and men took to the streets fully aware that they might face imprisonment, torture, or death — yet they did so in the name of something greater than personal comfort: the basic dignity of being able to dress, think, and live as free human beings rather than subjects.
Imprisoned Christian converts and those who are Baha’i, among others, have continued to defy religious tyranny in Iran by exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of conscience and expression. Despite long sentences and sustained harassment, many have refused to renounce their faith, demonstrating a profound commitment to conscience over calculation.
There are countless testimonies of ordinary people acting with extraordinary courage and bringing light into the world. One striking example is that of Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh, a Christian convert who, according to his lawyer Hossein Ahmadiniaz, was given a stark choice by a judge: Deny his faith or receive a ten-year prison sentence. Nasser immediately reaffirmed his faith and shared his testimony about Christ, reportedly leaving the judge stunned before being sentenced to ten years in prison in Tehran.
Beyond Iran, figures such as Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr. and Oscar Romero embody a different tradition of moral courage. Each, in his own context, articulated a vision of justice grounded in universal human dignity and accepted personal risk in its defense. Their examples show that the language of sacrifice and purpose need not lead to exclusion or domination; it can also sustain movements for freedom, solidarity, and reconciliation.
The task today is not to abandon liberal democracy, but to deepen it. A sustainable liberal order must find ways to speak about freedom, justice, and human dignity in richer terms than “choice” and “growth”. It must take seriously the fact that people will always seek causes larger than themselves — and that if democratic societies refuse to offer such causes, others will.
Orwell saw that the struggle was never just about bread, but about meaning. In Iran, in parts of Europe, and across the democratic world, we are watching a new conflict of values unfold: between authoritarian movements that promise purpose at the price of freedom, and democratic movements that risk their freedom to recover a sense of purpose. The outcome will depend not only on institutions or technologies, but on whether liberal societies can remember what — and whom — their freedoms are for.
Fred Petrossian is a European-based Iranian journalist, blogger and researcher.