“A World not Theirs” by Fatemeh Sadeghi
“The world seems upside down. How can we turn it back on its feet?” This is the question asked by Khadijeh, a semi-literate middle-aged woman, a few years back when I was doing a fieldwork in a poor neighborhood of Mashad, just a few Kilometers away from the rich shrine of Imam Reza in Khorasan in North East part of Iran. I had heard many stories, but this question shook me. While I was trying to digest Khadija’s words, I realized the deep understanding of these people of the realities of their life and how much disconnected are the ignorant technocrats that are surrounded by all kinds of surveys, censuses, and statistics. No wonder the question is stubbornly ignored and suppressed in today Iran. The more inequalities expand, the more it becomes unspeakable, unproblematic, and unquestionable.
Exclusion is the main challenge of the contemporary world. As John Grey recently notes “The end of the Cold War ushered in not a new order but an interregnum. Gripped by geopolitical rivalries and the struggle for natural resources, the world today has more in common with that of the late 19th century than the late 20th. Thirty-odd years after the fall of communism, the dominance of market values in Western states makes them dangerously vulnerable to new kinds of despotism”
In a context such as Iran the interregnum is not dissimilar to the colonial rule as the country is getting ripped by the corrupt elite, internal war on power, and external sanctions even before it is hit by the Covid- 19 pandemic. This is taking place while the country had been already suffering from poverty, sever unemployment, and draught.
What is being done, instead, is to wrap up the unbearable realities in ridiculous bureaucratic jargon, technocratic terminologies, and academic expressions that make the grid of power relations even more unquestionable. The main role of this apparatus is to normalize the upside-down world, justify policies and extremely unfair condition, and discredit legitimate demands of the ordinary poor as allegedly brainwashed by “external forces”.
Iran is approaching another presidential election, while elections have become a main part of this phantasmagoric world in which politics is a business and the basic of society is not shared values anymore, but market exchange. Elections have become increasingly meaningless rituals to perpetuate the existing situation. The more politics become disconnected from realities, the more prosperity echoes like a sound from far away.
The question, therefore, is not whether the masses will revolt, but when and how. For the destitute, living the upside-down world is not an option; it is like walking on head.
