The Illusion of All the Roads Not Taken

Preface

In recent months and weeks, a phrase has been repeated in certain intellectual circles — especially among reformists and some members of the Iranian diaspora: “We have not yet tried every peaceful path.” On the surface, this sentence appears to carry a moral tone: caution, prudence, restraint, and the avoidance of violence. But beneath that respectable surface, it often functions as little more than a dignified cover for postponing justice, suspending responsibility, and prescribing passivity to a people who, under the pressure of sustained tyranny, have been deprived even of the possibility of ordinary life.

This discourse also reverses a fundamental truth: from the very beginning, it was the Islamic Republic itself that chose the politics of confrontation and manufactured crisis. Over forty-seven years, it has systematically foreclosed the real paths to reconciliation, normalization, and exit from conflict. To speak, then, of “paths not yet taken” is to ignore the fact that many of those paths were blocked long ago — not by the haste of the people, but by the regime’s own continuous choices.

And this is precisely where one must pause and ask: where does this call for patience come from, and who pays its cost?

The issue is not merely a tactical disagreement. It is a profound moral and political error. What must be criticized is not simply the judgment that “the time has not yet come,” but the whole intellectual apparatus that, from a position of safety and distance, turns patience before tyranny into a virtue for those standing in the heart of danger.

When Patience Turns from Virtue into Complicity

Any political order, so long as it still leaves open real channels for reform, accountability, participation, and change, may ask its citizens for tolerance and patience. But when those channels have not only been closed, but repeatedly tested and, each time, led to deadlock, repression, humiliation, and bloodshed, the call to “patience” is no longer a call to reason. It is a demand that submission continue.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has either hollowed out or turned into instruments of its own reproduction everything that might once have been called a “peaceful path”: reform, elections, media, civil society, lawful protest, national dialogue, and even the simplest forms of social breathing. The result has not been opening, but ever-deepening closure.

Across all these years, intra-systemic civil and political action, despite the sacrifices made for it and the hopes invested in it, has produced no lasting, structural, or guaranteed victory. Every limited retreat has been either temporary, tactical, or later reversed through a new wave of repression and recapture. Not only have independent civil institutions failed to take root; even the limited breathing spaces that once existed have gradually been destroyed. Independent political parties have been banned or captured. Free journalism has, in practice, never been allowed to exist. Censorship and internet surveillance have grown more severe with time. Everyday social freedoms — from freedom of dress to ordinary human relations — have been suppressed and never recognized as rights. Even where there have been temporary relaxations, as in the enforcement of compulsory hijab, what we have witnessed has not been recognition of freedom, but merely a temporary fluctuation in the technique of coercion.

The final result has not been the accumulation of freedom. It has been the accumulation of deadlock. What remains is a society exhausted, humiliated, impoverished, enraged, and, above all, deprived of a horizon.

In the tradition of liberal political philosophy, this is precisely the point at which patience ceases to be a virtue. John Locke, in the Two Treatises of Government, insists that government is legitimate only so long as it protects the natural rights of human beings. When government itself becomes the violator of life, liberty, and property, it breaks the political compact and, in Locke’s own terms, enters a “state of war” with the people. In such a condition, the problem is no longer the impatience of the people. The problem is that the government itself has destroyed the civil basis of obedience. Resistance, after that point, is not a passing emotion or a departure from reason. It is a response to oppression that has exceeded the bounds of endurance.

From this perspective, the claim that “we had not yet tried every path,” after so many historical tests, is not a sign of morality. It is a sign of political blindness. Forty-seven years of repeated deadlock have already answered the question.

The Ethics of Judging from a Distance

But this error is not merely theoretical. Its moral dimension is perhaps even heavier than its analytical one. Anyone who prescribes patience to a people living under the repression and killing of the Islamic Republic must first answer a simple question: what share of the cost of this patience do they themselves pay? Are they the ones who go to prison? Are they the ones who take the bullet? Is it their child who grows up in insecurity, poverty, humiliation, hopelessness, and psychological collapse? Are their home, memory, future, and body exposed to danger?

Much of this seemingly moderate rhetoric comes from people living in safe and prosperous cities in the West — people for whom power outages, economic collapse, daily humiliation, the risk of arrest, permanent anxiety, and the possibility of sudden death are not part of the texture of everyday life. For that reason, their judgment, however elegantly or morally phrased, suffers from a fundamental defect: they pass judgment on others without being exposed to the consequences of that judgment.

This is what may be called having “no skin in the game.” It is easy to prescribe patience, courage, or sacrifice from the safety of the sidelines. It is easy to speak of costs when someone else must pay them. Such a position, even when presented in the name of morality, can easily become a form of moral corruption, because distance and personal safety make it possible to prescribe virtue for the suffering of others. “Patience,” in the mouth of someone who does not pay its price, is no longer a moral virtue. It is cheap immunity of conscience.

Deferring Justice and Praising Negative Peace

The next error lies in the very structure of this discourse: “We understand the goal, but not the method”; “freedom is good, but not now”; “protest is a right, but it is still too soon”; “the regime is bad, but we must still wait.” This logic is familiar in the history of political struggle. It is the logic of deferring justice.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” directs one of his most fundamental critiques precisely at this posture. He speaks of “moderates” who are more devoted to order than to justice; people who regard tension as evil, even when such tension is the necessary condition for breaking the structure of oppression. His devastating sentence remains one of the most precise responses to this morality of postponement:

“This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”

King shows that the preference for “negative peace” over “positive peace” is the preference for the absence of tension over the presence of justice. This distinction is decisive for Iran today. Those who, from outside the field, demand the avoidance of tension are often defending nothing more than the quiet form of continuing oppression. For where injustice has become structural, the absence of tension is not a sign of health. It is a sign of successful repression.

The question, then, is not whether some people support freedom and others oppose it. The problem is that some still live under the illusion that freedom can be achieved without cost, without rupture, and without breaking the machinery of repression. At best, this illusion is naïveté. At worst, it is a civilized excuse for standing aside.

Passivity: Both a Mechanism of Tyranny’s Survival and a Form of Passive Injustice

The problem with the discourse of “we had not yet tried every path” is not only that it postpones justice. It also, consciously or unconsciously, legitimizes one of the conditions of tyranny’s survival.

Étienne de La Boétie, in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, shows that domination is not sustained by naked force alone. It is reproduced by habituating people to obedience, by endlessly postponing the act of saying “no,” and by internalizing the belief that “the time for resistance has not yet come.” From this perspective, passivity is not merely a psychological state or an individual choice. It is one of the social mechanisms through which domination persists.

But the matter does not end there. Judith Shklar, in a tradition of political thought that begins from the rejection of cruelty and humiliation, reminds us that when oppression has become visible and ordinary avenues of reform have repeatedly been tried and blocked, passivity is no longer neutral. It becomes a form of passive injustice.

In such a condition, the call for “patience” is not merely an analytical error. It turns the actual suffering of others into raw material for the moral caution of safe observers. What is offered in the name of prudence can, in practice, help reproduce obedience to tyranny and amount to a moral betrayal of suffering whose reality is no longer in doubt.

The Necessity of Living in Truth, Not in Lies, for Liberation

Repressive regimes do not survive by naked force alone. They require a network of habit, fear, pretense, silence, and everyday acceptance. Their endurance is not only the product of bayonets. It is also the product of the degree to which human beings agree, in different ways, to participate in the continuation of the lie. This is precisely what Václav Havel examines with exceptional clarity in The Power of the Powerless: the difference between “living within the lie” and “living within the truth.”

In this framework, passivity is not simply a personal choice or a matter of temperament. Persistent passivity, under tyranny, becomes one of the mechanisms by which the false order reproduces itself. Whoever justifies the continuation of the status quo in the language of prudence, in practice reproduces the very lie the system needs in order to survive.

The power of tyranny is rooted not only in the bayonet, but also in a network of surrenders and justifications — and this network is not confined to those inside the country. Whoever says “not yet,” “not now,” “maybe later,” even out of fear, comfort, or caution, helps prolong the life of the lie. The point is not that everyone is required to become a hero. The point is that one must not formulate the continuation of the lie in the language of virtue.

The power of the powerless begins precisely where a person refuses to reproduce the lie — even if their means are small, even if the cost is great. From this perspective, what is happening in Iran is not merely a political struggle. It is a rupture with an authoritarian order that seeks to make truth impossible. In such a condition, endless patience is no longer simply the postponement of action. It is a form of remaining inside the lie.

The Will to Freedom at the Edge of Death

The culmination of this truth could be seen in the uprising of Dey 1404. The people who came into the streets were not naïve. Did they not know what awaited them? Of course they knew. They knew — or at least believed with good reason — that they might be killed, disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, or left to die. And yet they came into the streets because they had reached a point at which silence, remaining, and enduring had themselves become forms of death.

They shouted because it was perhaps the last available way to announce their suffering to the world. This was not thoughtlessness. It was political awareness at its highest pitch, and freedom-seeking in its most radical form: standing before death, not out of a desire for death, but out of a refusal of servitude.

For this reason, the passivity of those who, at such a moment, still speak of “paths not yet taken” is not merely a mistaken analysis. At this point, we are no longer dealing only with analytical error, but with moral failure: the inability to recognize the moment at which refusal to resist ends up serving the machinery of repression.

Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on totalitarianism and evil, teaches us that great evil does not always appear with the face of a monster. Sometimes it appears in the normalized form of thoughtlessness, distance, and suspended responsibility. Where human beings flee from moral judgment, or defer political responsibility to an undefined future, evil can reproduce itself in the guise of caution. In such a context, passivity is no longer neutrality. When blood has been spilled and the truth is clear, passivity works, in practice, in favor of oppression.

Iran at the Edge of Death

Today, the question of Iran is not a matter of differing preferences over the speed of change. The problem is that a country with this history, this society, this human talent, and this accumulated suffering has been driven to the edge of death: in its economy, its environment, its social fabric, its collective psyche, the hopes of its generations, and its trust in the future.

A country whose youth are suspended between emigration, humiliation, addiction, suicide, and silent exhaustion is not a healthy country. A country in which joy is criminalized, truth carries a cost, and human dignity is trampled underfoot stands on the threshold of civic annihilation.

At such a moment, repeating the phrase “we had not yet tried every path” is no longer a sign of morality. It is a respectable formulation of fear and comfort. It is no longer a political analysis, but a psychological shield for those who wish to evade the responsibility of clear judgment. Those who are not themselves in the field, those who have no skin in the game, have no right to turn the suffering of others into a laboratory of patience.

Anyone truly concerned with morality must understand that after all this blood, all this imprisonment, all this humiliation, and all this historical deadlock, the call to passivity is no longer a call to refrain from violence. It is a call for the continuation of the regime’s one-sided violence. The question now is not why the Iranian people have reached the end of the line. The question is how there are still people, watching from afar, who prescribe passivity and standing in the line of death — and call it morality.

The truth is this: Iran is not dead yet, but it stands at the edge of death. And at such a moment, passivity is neither decency, nor wisdom, nor morality. Passivity is the highest betrayal of the blood of those free souls who, despite knowing the danger, stood in the field to open a path of salvation for this land.

References

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge University Press. Originally published 1689.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 1963.

Havel, Václav. “The Power of the Powerless.” October 1978.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Originally published 1951.

La Boétie, Étienne de. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Translated by Harry Kurz. Liberty Fund.

Shklar, Judith N. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Harvard University Press, 1989.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House, 2018.