A good friend of mine asked my views about the mentioned article. Here was my quick comment:
"This is a symptom. This is one aspect of living under a dictatorial regime which promotes consumerist culture as a way of diverting the energy which can endanger its existence.
The other thing is that people can see that the clergy, who are supposed to promote ethics and spirituality, are deeply corrupt and materialist. This also has knock-on effect on people's behavior.
This is one of the reasons Iranian society is experiencing an identity crisis, and the regime prevents a substantial public dialogue about it from taking place.
We need a revolution - not just a political one, but a spiritual and cultural revolution as well. There was a similar situation before the 1979 revolution, but attitudes and behaviors changed after. Weddings stopped being opportunities for showing off wealth. Dowries became more modest. However, as the initial aims of the revolution were repressed and the power-thirsty clergy reconstructed dictatorship in a new form (unfortunately in the hollowed-out shell of the revolution itself), things reverted back to where they were before 1979, and even got worse. What we see is a continuation of that.
We need a new revolutionary movement to again dismantle dictatorship and create new ways of promoting independence, freedom, democracy, development and social justice. If we can do that, then symptoms like this to a large extent will disappear."
Then my wife, Sarah Amsler, enriched my comments by sharing her thoughts:
" What if 'the revolution' became more like 'a new revolutionary movement' that was in the same general line as the others?
What if 'the revolution' didn't turn against itself, but was repressed?
I sometimes wonder whether this generation (which is multigenerational, including you and your elders and your grandchildren) is being denied a certain amount of creative license when current movements are treated as 'continuations' of others. To say there is a tradition of resistance is different than saying something unfinished should be brought to its 'logical conclusion'. I think there might be a tension between the notion of an unfinished project and a logical conclusion that others just inherit. I don't think the revolution you made is the unfinished thing. I think the struggle against tyranny is the unfinished thing, and actually, it doesn't have a 'logical' conclusion. It has a lot of possible conclusions and I wonder if some of them can't be visible so long as there is such a certainty about what they will/should look like and what principles and histories they should ally themselves with.
Also, I would ask whether the dismantling of this regime would in fact be a fix for 'symptoms' like this. I'm not sure it's only a symptom of this. Look at weddings among the middle classes here. And we are not even among the many people for whom they are totally about displaying status. This is about consumer capitalism among other things. A question might be how you imagine independence, freedom, democracy and social justice actually looking within the capitalist system -- or if the alternative will be counter-capitalist, how that is related to what the movement needs to be. I don't read much analysis of the Iranian regime that takes its capitalist or non-capitalist dimensions into account, but in the current situation this seems very important. Any intervention of the global financial suprastate (IMF, World Bank, etc.) following a revolutionary movement in Iran would I suspect be as catastrophic as it has been in any other post-revolutionary country. This is why I think the 'independence' thing is particularly important, but that the negative equilibrium argument is no longer appropriate or sufficient. It is more about autonomy from global capital?
Just some thoughts."
Then while we were having lunch we talked about it and I said that Banisadr's Economy of Tawhid, is a response to your concern. She said that people should know about that. So in order to get some idea about what Economy of Tawhid is I share his last introduction about the book:
http://iranian.com/posts/view/post/24441
And here is the Guardian article:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2014/apr/07/the-rising-price-of-love-in-iran
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