For a country like Iran, whose history has been shaped by repeated colonial intervention, recognizing a decolonial path that considers non-capitalist alternatives would be a meaningful step.
Iran has been a major market for selling hope for a so-called democratic change, especially during Donald Trump’s presidency. The foundations of this market were laid by former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who, beginning in 1989, normalized the idea that accumulating wealth was not un-Islamic. What changed was not the state’s grip on the economy but the route its money took. Private companies soon mushroomed, and intermediaries emerged between the state and the workforce. Many were individuals with little formal education who needed only to establish a company through a simple bureaucratic process, secure a contract—often through nepotism—and collect state funds before taking their share and distributing the remainder to their workers.
Competition and consumerism became part and parcel of Iranian society. Islamic and mystical ideals of ascetic living were no longer in vogue. The resulting market niche was quickly filled by Western gurus promoting market-based spiritualities. Their formula was simple: use positive thinking as a weapon against life’s hardships. The promise was that the omnipotent human mind, through positivity, could attract everything from health to wealth. Islam did not disappear entirely from the picture. Some Iranian gurus began linking the prosperity teachings of figures such as Napoleon Hill and Anthony Robbins to sayings attributed to Imams and the Prophet (Davari-Torshizi, 2023). The whole phenomenon became a theology of growth—an (un)conscious attempt to advance the capitalist message of perpetual growth (Maddox, 2012).
Prosperity, too, took on a distinctly Western form. Gurus placed their cell phones on the dashboards of their Porsches and other luxurious cars, and, in husky voices, invited their followers to dream of driving them. From penthouses and villas, dressed in designer brands, they taught their audiences to dream big in the face of adversity. The display of wealth became more than an aspiration; it became proof that the promises of positive thinking supposedly worked.
Rather than fostering support or peaceful negotiation, decades of forceful U.S. intervention have left many Iranians—and others affected by Trump’s policies—locked in a defensive mindset. Trump’s violent interventions mainly invite and normalize violent responses, whether from the Islamic Republic or from Americans and Iranians who support him out of fear. Violence feeds and fattens fascism.
For many, however, reality amounted to little more than consuming images of the gurus’ own consumption. It was, and remains, a “clenched-teeth pursuit of happiness” (Nandy, 2013)— a continuous loop of resilience and self-renewal. In this theology of growth, Iranian believers had little to do with politics or society at large. Their responsibility, albeit unconsciously, was to resist the paralyzing effects of the sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe. The emphasis shifted from changing society to changing oneself. Poverty and hardship were no longer treated as political problems but as personal tests of resilience.
Although this was not the whole story, and there were also critical forms of resistance and struggles for freedom and democracy, the individualistic and capitalist version of resilience came to overshadow other forms. This became especially evident in January 2026, when thousands of Iranians, driven by despair, took to the streets to voice their democratic demands. The moment was ripe for selling hope, and Donald Trump made full use of it by promising support for the protesters. The market for hope-selling also drew in the opposition. Reza Pahlavi, who for many Iranians evoked the perceived prosperity of life before the Islamic Revolution, supported Israel and the US policy of forceful intervention, helping to reinforce this capitalist version of resilience.
Trump’s policy in this regard is twofold. He justified, and continues to justify, violence as a means of saving Iranian lives. He repeatedly accused, and continues to accuse, Iran’s leaders of sacrificing their own people to preserve their regime—precisely the charge that can also be levelled against him when it comes to preserving the capitalist regime. Trump presents himself as intolerant of violence and loss on the American side, whether human or material, yet claims the right to inflict both on Iran.
According to the absurd claim that American missiles and bombs strike only military targets, civilians were not supposed to be harmed. Yet innocent Iranians, including school children, paid the price. Nevertheless, prayers for the American savior persisted, finding expression in video clips selectively and purposefully shared by Iran International in which some people thanked Trump for bombing their own country.
Hope alone cannot sustain this political imagination. It requires its counterpart: the constant production of fear. Trump continues to reinforce the capitalist vision of Iran that began to take shape when Western market-based policies entered the country. Needless to say, many Iranians who look back nostalgically on the former U.S.-backed government, and who embraced this blend of Western and Persian growth theology, continue to dream of the so-called democratic future that Trump promises. Yet while presenting himself as the antidote to the Islamic Republic, Trump simultaneously carries the badge of horror himself, portraying the regime as an existential threat while relying on fear, military force, and the promise of further violence as the means of delivering salvation.
The greater the sense of existential danger, the more persuasive fascist measures might appear. In that sense, horror is not the opposite of hope but one of its conditions: fear creates the demand for the very savior who claims to offer rescue.
So what might bring change amid this chaos and confusion? Iran’s geography—especially its oil-rich soil—has long made it a profitable market and, consequently, a target of colonial ambitions. Yet colonization is not merely about occupying territory. It is also about shaping people’s language and thought to align with a capitalist agenda. The colonized mind can become so captive that it struggles to think or speak outside a colonial framework, sometimes even while believing it is resisting the colonizer.
Rather than fostering support or peaceful negotiation, decades of forceful U.S. intervention have left many Iranians—and others affected by Trump’s policies—locked in a defensive mindset. Trump’s violent interventions mainly invite and normalize violent responses, whether from the Islamic Republic or from Americans and Iranians who support him out of fear. Violence feeds and fattens fascism.
Anti- or decolonial hope may offer a way to redirect resistance. For a country whose history has been shaped by repeated colonial intervention, imagining and pursuing non-Western alternatives is no easy task. Yet simply recognizing that other forms of hope exist would be a meaningful beginning. It may sound utopian today, but it could open the way to a more genuine freedom.
To move in that direction, we need fewer ready-made answers and more difficult questions. What makes Americans and Iranians alike see Trump as a savior and tie their hopes to policies rooted in violence? To borrow from Charlie Chaplin, if we step back from the tragedy of life and glimpse its comedy, what alternative hopes come into view? What might a decolonial language look like, and how can it be learned? What non-violent—Western or non-Western—paths remain open to freedom and democracy? Do we vote, work for, support, and believe out of fear and hope created for us, or out of real fear and critical hope that we can recognize and create? And a fundamental, if rather philosophical, question: what have we done, and what can we do, instead of advancing catapults into launchers and ever more advanced life-denying technologies for preemptive attacks out of manufactured fear?
References:
Davari-Torshizi, Mehdi. 2023. The religiosity of the secular: The case of self-help. Journal for the Study of Spirituality 13(2): 119–131.
Maddox, Marion. 2012. ‘In the goofy parking lot’: Growth churches as a novel religious form for late capitalism. Social Compass 59 (2): 146–158.
Nandy, Ashis. 2013. Regimes of narcissism, regimes of despair. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Image Credit: Johnny Silvercloud, Public Domain
