A Proxy for Thought

A Proxy for Thought

[https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Lebanon-Bombing-300x200.webp]Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms [https://twinwisdoms.org] Podcast [https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Lebanon-Bombing.webp] The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle the matter. A state that fights through surrogates, the reasoning runs, is a state that cares nothing for its citizens and everything for its foreign clients; it is therefore irresponsible, illegitimate, and ripe for removal. The conclusion is delivered the moment the word is spoken. This is the trouble with “proxy.” It is not an argument but a substitute for one — a proxy, if you like, for thought. It closes the inquiry it pretends to open. Begin with the obvious. No great power conducts its strategy by plebiscite. Alliances, clients, and forward partners are chosen in the rooms where intelligence officers and security advisers meet, not at the ballot box, and they are chosen by every state with reach beyond its borders. The United States has spent the better part of a century arming, funding, and fighting through others — through the Cold War, through NATO, through the bombardment of Yugoslavia, and now through the long supply line that keeps Ukraine in the field. If arming Kyiv to resist invasion is a legitimate exercise of strategic interest, the same logic cannot suddenly become criminal when Tehran arms a Lebanese movement to resist a force that has crossed Lebanon’s border. The principle does not change with the passport of the actor invoking it. The Hezbollah case sharpens the point. The movement was not manufactured in Tehran and exported to Lebanon. It grew from Lebanon’s Shia communities in response to Israeli invasion, with roots that predate the Islamic Republic itself. To call it simply an Iranian proxy is to erase its history, its grievance, and its agency in a single word — which is precisely what the word is for. I find it useful here to imagine the view from Mars: an observer with no stake in any flag, watching a species sort itself into rival alliances and asking only how these creatures may be judged by one consistent standard. From that vantage, the United States and Iran sit closer together than either would like to admit. Both pursue their interests through partners. Both insist their interventions are defensive and their adversaries’ aggressive. The honest question is not which state keeps allies, but whether we are prepared to measure all of them by a single rule. And here the demand for one standard turns out to be sharper than it first appears — sharp enough to cut the hand that wields it. For when a single legal measure is actually applied to this conflict — the kind of patient reading the April 2026 ceasefire and the law around it require — the findings are uncomfortable for everyone. The ceasefire bound Israel not to conduct offensive operations against Lebanese targets, preserving only a narrow right of self-defence against a “planned, imminent, or ongoing” attack. That is a thin exception, and the documented record overflows it: strikes on town after town, a “double-tap” attack at Majdal Zoun that killed rescue workers as they dug survivors from the first blast, a cluster of attacks on hospitals and medics, tanks ramming UN vehicles, warning shots falling within a metre of peacekeepers. A general claim to “full freedom of action” is not what the text permits. On the record, Israel breached the agreement, and several of these acts implicate the laws of war independently of any ceasefire. Lebanon, for its part, failed the due-diligence obligation it accepted, unable or unwilling to restrain the rocket fire that continued across the line — and the killing of UN peacekeepers on its soil, which the United Nations itself has said may amount to war crimes, is a wound of its own. But the same measure reaches Iran too, and this is the part a partisan diary would prefer to omit. Iran’s June strikes, whatever their strategic logic, rest on shaky legal ground. A treaty binds and benefits only its parties; Iran signed nothing, and so cannot claim that Israel’s breach of the Lebanon ceasefire was a wrong done to Iran. Nor do the strikes fit the demanding template the International Court of Justice set down for coming to an ally’s defence: the victim must declare itself attacked and must ask for help. Lebanon did neither. It pursued extension of the truce instead. A right of collective self-defence cannot be asserted on behalf of a state that has not claimed it. I record this not to retract the argument but to complete it. The discipline of one standard is double-edged by design. It denies Iran the clean vindication its defenders want, just as it denies Israel the impunity its defenders assume. That is exactly what makes it honest — and exactly what the word “proxy” is engineered to prevent. The trope lets you skip the law and arrive directly at the verdict you brought with you. So what, after all this, is the real asymmetry? Not innocence against guilt — no party here has clean hands. The asymmetry is impunity. On this record one actor struck first and most lethally, killed rescuers and medics, and expects to bear no consequence whatever; another is cast as the origin of all evil though it acted only after warning and after being struck. The scandal the law exposes is not that one side broke a rule and the other kept it. It is that there is no neutral arbiter to call the breach, and that the conscience of the watching world decides in advance whose violations will be seen and whose will be waved through. Violations pile up across three legal regimes at once, and the only thing applied consistently is the selective gaze. This is why I distrust the comfort the word offers. “Proxy” is not wrong because Iran has no partners — it plainly does. It is wrong because it is doing the work that thinking should do. It converts a hard question about who struck whom, under what law, to what proportion, into a slogan that has already chosen its villain. It is a thought-terminating word in a situation that demands the opposite. The cure is not a better label. It is the willingness to keep thinking past the label — to test the narrative we find most flattering against the strongest version of the case we like least, and to accept a standard even when it turns and indicts those we are inclined to defend. A conscience that only convicts the other side is not a conscience at all. It is, like the word that protects it, a proxy for thought. https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&linkname=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thoughthttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fa-proxy-for-thought%2F&title=A%20Proxy%20for%20Thought Subscribe: Newsletter [https://twinwisdoms.org/newsletter/] | RSS [https://twinwisdoms.org/feed/]

Not by the Back Door

[https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Global-Centre-for-Pluralism-300x193.webp]Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms [https://twinwisdoms.org] Podcast   [https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Global-Centre-for-Pluralism.webp] Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism holds that some readings are better than others, that a claim can simply be wrong, that a line runs between truth and falsehood — then it must be appealing to a standard. And a standard that binds across traditions looks like nothing so much as a universal. So, the charge goes, the moment pluralism refuses relativism it smuggles back in the very universalism it claimed to have left at the door. The smile marks a trap: relativism on one side, universalism on the other, and no honest ground in between. The grain of truth in this is real, and I shall not pretend otherwise. Pluralism is not value-neutral; it is a normative commitment, and it does invoke something that holds good across traditions. To that extent there is indeed a universal in play. But “universalism” names two quite different things, and the entire argument turns on holding them apart. There is a substantive universalism, which claims to possess the one truth that every tradition expresses in local dress — the perennialist conviction that beneath all the faiths lies a single transcendent unity, of which the visible religions are so many partial translations. And there is a formal universalism, which claims no such content: only that certain disciplines of inquiry — declaring one’s assumptions, stating what would refute them, granting the other the standing to answer back — bind everyone who would reason in good faith. The first is a thesis about reality. The second is a thesis about method. Pluralism needs the second and must refuse the first. The refusal is not fastidiousness; it is self-defence. Substantive universalism is the true back door through which difference is eliminated — not by force, but by flattery. It assures the Muslim, the Buddhist, and the Christian that their disagreements are superficial, that each is, without quite realising it, saying the same thing as the others. This sounds generous. It is in fact a quiet imperialism, for it claims to understand traditions better than their own adherents do, and the “common essence” it uncovers turns out, with suspicious regularity, to be the essence most legible to whoever is doing the uncovering. Frithjof Schuon gave this its classic name, the transcendent unity of religions.[1] The more honest name for it is the dissolution of the religions into a unity supplied from outside them. When Aldous Huxley gathered the spiritual classics and wondered why they should not all agree, he secured his harmony precisely by passing over the differences the traditions themselves regard as load-bearing.[2] In such a scheme difference survives only as appearance. That is elimination by absorption. Here the critic’s trap closes on itself. Mark Sedgwick, surveying these positions, notes that contemporary pluralism tends to drift towards what he calls naïve universalism — the comfortable sense that every tradition is beautiful and that, at bottom, they all say the same thing — and that this naïve universalism is, on any usable definition, indistinguishable from relativism.[3] The observation repays attention. Relativism erases difference by indifference: if every view is as good as every other, nothing is at stake between them, and difference goes idle. Substantive universalism erases difference by absorption: if every view is a veil over one reality, then difference is not finally real. Two opposite-looking errors arrive at the same address — the back door and the front of a single empty house. What was offered as the only alternative to relativism turns out to be relativism’s twin. This is why the most demanding account of pluralism sets itself against both, insisting that difference is to be embraced rather than overcome. As the late Aga Khan put it in Ottawa:[4] Connection does not necessarily mean agreement. … It does not mean that we want to eliminate our differences or erase our distinctions. … Pluralism does not mean the elimination of difference, but the embrace of difference. — His Highness the Aga Khan, Ottawa, 16 May 2017 The formulation is exact. Pluralism is not the discovery that we already agree; it is the costly practice of engaging those with whom we do not. Diana Eck compresses the same thought into a sentence: pluralism is not mere tolerance, and not relativism, but the real encounter of commitments.[5] An encounter requires two parties who remain, after it, themselves. So the critic is right that pluralism leans on a universal — and wrong about which one. The universal it admits is formal, procedural, and deliberately thin: not a truth that everyone secretly holds, but a discipline to which everyone must submit. In the earlier essay I put the test as plainly as I could — a defensible reading must declare its assumptions and say what would refute it.[6] That is Karl Popper’s standard, not Schuon’s.[7] It is universal in scope, since it binds every claimant alike, yet empty of content, since it dictates no conclusion, privileges no tradition, and leaves the substantive disagreements exactly where it found them, now conducted in the open. Isaiah Berlin, who spent a career arguing that genuine values can conflict beyond reconciliation and that this is emphatically not relativism, drew the line in the same place: to understand why another holds what we reject is not to agree with it, and that very capacity for understanding is what relativism, sealing each of us inside an incommensurable world, denies us.[8] This universal does not arrive by the back door. It comes by the front, openly declared, itself fallible and open to challenge — and its whole office is to keep the back door bolted, so that no tradition, mine least of all, can install its own content as the hidden essence of everyone else’s. None of this is easy, and that is the part most worth saying without ornament. The two errors are seductive precisely because they are cheap. Relativism asks nothing of us: pronounce all views equal, and the labour of judgement is abolished. Naïve universalism asks almost as little: pronounce all views secretly one, and the labour of engagement is abolished. Each buys its peace by retiring from the work. Genuine pluralism cannot. It demands deep knowledge of one’s own tradition and real knowledge of others; the patience to hold a contradiction open without collapsing it; the nerve to judge while conceding that no single civilisation owns the measures of justice, knowledge, or beauty; and the humility to be argued out of one’s position and changed. It is an achievement, not a default — and, like any achievement, it has to be earned again each time it is claimed. We happen to live in a moment that makes the discipline both harder and more necessary. The instruments we increasingly reason with are built to agree with us; they return our own assumptions in fluent prose and invite us to mistake the echo for insight. In such a climate it is easy to take the sound of one’s own voice for the universal, and the refusal to listen for respect for difference. Pluralism is the standing refusal of both. We can be pluralists without becoming relativists — but it is not handed to us. It is built, and rebuilt, by hand; and the back door stays bolted only for as long as someone is willing to keep watch. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aga Khan IV (Shāh Karīm al-Ḥusaynī). “Address at the Opening Ceremony of the New Headquarters of the Global Centre for Pluralism.” Ottawa, 16 May 2017. Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990. Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. “Pluralism Is Not Relativism.” The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/. Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945. Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Translated by Peter Townsend. London: Faber and Faber, 1953. First published as De l’unité transcendante des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sedgwick, Mark. “Pluralism and Perennialism.” Lecture, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 15 June 2017. [1]Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. Peter Townsend (London: Faber and Faber, 1953); first published as De l’unité transcendante des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). [2]Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945). On Huxley’s universalist register and its passing-over of difference, see Mark Sedgwick, “Pluralism and Perennialism” (lecture, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 15 June 2017). [3]Sedgwick, “Pluralism and Perennialism”; for the broader typology of monism, universalism, and inclusivism drawn on here, see his Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). [4]His Aga Khan IV,  “Address at the Opening Ceremony of the New Headquarters of the Global Centre for Pluralism” (Ottawa, 16 May 2017). [5]Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); the formulation cited is the defining statement of the Pluralism Project, Harvard University. [6]Daryoush Mohammad Poor, “Pluralism Is Not Relativism,” The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/. [7]Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); see also his The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945). [8]Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 1–19; and “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought,” in the same volume. https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&linkname=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Doorhttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fnot-by-the-back-door%2F&title=Not%20by%20the%20Back%20Door Subscribe: Newsletter [https://twinwisdoms.org/newsletter/] | RSS [https://twinwisdoms.org/feed/]

Pluralism Is Not Relativism

[https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/mirror-ai-drift.avif]Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms [https://twinwisdoms.org] Podcast [https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/mirror-ai-drift.avif] Sada Cumber [https://thescif.org/nsi-experts-weigh-in-artificial-intelligence-in-the-vatican-48bbb4fa4edc] is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it “corrodes trust, fractures shared reality.” True. But the most dangerous machine in a post-truth world is not the one that lies to us. It is the one that agrees with us. The systems we now use are built to satisfy. They mirror the vocabulary and the framework of whoever sits in front of them, and they flatter rather than test. This is called the sycophantic drift. Its political effect is exactly the echo chamber Pope Leo describes, except that the chamber now has a single occupant, and its walls are our own assumptions, fed back to us in fluent, authoritative prose. Disinformation splits us into rival camps; a flattering tool does something quieter and worse. It confirms each of us, privately, in whatever we already believed. So the dignity frame Sada invokes is necessary but, on its own, unfinished. The real question is how to build tools that make us more pluralistic without making us relativists, and the difference is everything. Relativism says every view is as good as any other and none can be wrong. Pluralism says there are many defensible readings, and each must declare its assumptions and say what would refute it. The first is the post-truth condition. The second is its cure. That cure is a design choice. An AI built as an answer engine collapses inquiry into a single confident verdict; an AI built as an interlocutor keeps the legitimate readings in view, names the frame it is reasoning within, and tells you what evidence would count against it. One closes the conversation; the other refuses to let it end too soon. That is how a machine can widen the space of reasonable disagreement without erasing the line between true and false. Get this wrong and the tool becomes our antithesis. It forms users fluent in borrowed conclusions and out of practice at reaching their own. As Leo writes, “truth is a common good and not the property of those with power.” A machine that quietly hands each of us a private truth has done precisely what the encyclical fears: it has turned a common good into a possession. Which brings me to where Sada and I most agree, and to what I would add. He calls for “moral formation, institutional trust, and civic resilience.” I would give that a concrete shape: a standing, continuing conversation — among states, international organisations, faith leaders, civil society, and public intellectuals — about what these systems are for and how they should be built. Not a framework signed once and then defaulted on, of the kind the nuclear order became, but an obligation that is renewed, that binds the makers first and most stringently, and that treats oversight as continuous, because the systems themselves never stop changing. The deepest safeguard, though, is one no treaty installs. It is the discipline of the person before the screen who treats an output as a claim to be tested, not a verdict to be received. Dignity, in the end, is not a setting we configure into the machine. It is the resolve to remain the author of our own conclusions — and to keep the conversation open even when the machine, ever obliging, would happily close it for us. https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&linkname=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativismhttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fpluralism-is-not-relativism%2F&title=Pluralism%20Is%20Not%20Relativism Subscribe: Newsletter [https://twinwisdoms.org/newsletter/] | RSS [https://twinwisdoms.org/feed/]

Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire

[https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/iran-war-us-trump-tehran-billboard-300x200.webp]Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms [https://twinwisdoms.org] Podcast [https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/iran-war-us-trump-tehran-billboard.webp] Revisiting the Moral Market WHERE I STARTED In March, before the ceasefire, I argued [https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-inside-outside-iran-and-the-emotional-market-of-politics/] that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where pain becomes a kind of currency, and recognising the other side’s pain feels like losing some of your own. The cure I offered was simple — try to see the other reality without giving up your own. I still think the picture was mostly right. The cure was not. You owe your own arguments what you would ask of anyone else’s: push them hard, see where they break, and change your mind when you have to. Mine broke under one push in particular — the one from political economy. The ceasefire has now given that pushback a real-world test. WHERE I GOT IT WRONG The objection is simple, and it hurts. I treated feelings as the cause and material conditions as scenery. But the calm I credited to the diaspora — its “luxury” of analysis and debate — isn’t a personality trait you get with safety. It’s something you buy. Distance is a commodity, paid for with a passport, money you can move, professional qualifications recognised abroad, and the legal right to leave. The ability to think things over depends on money. Once you see that, my “two languages” are not two cultures that cannot translate. They are accents of different social classes. I treated sanctions the same way — as one big squeeze [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-normalcy-we-must-defend/] on the whole country. They are nothing of the kind. They crush wage-earners, importers of medicine, and the sick, while they enrich the regime’s well-connected friends, because scarcity is profitable for whoever controls it. The fire does not burn the building evenly. Some inside are victims of the same machine that other insiders feed off. Inside and outside are not two sealed worlds; they are one circuit, joined by remittance, property, family money, and capital flight. Diaspora activism — which I politely asked to be “more honest with itself” — is not an attitude problem either. It is an industry. Visibility is the product, and it turns into grants, fellowships, platforms, and next year’s funding. You do not reform a market by asking the players to look inside themselves. I asked for soul-searching where the problem was income. The hardest part lands on my own best example. I credited Chile’s transition to the diaspora’s networks, legal know-how, and international contacts — and then I called the cure “empathy.” Those are assets, not feelings. The bridge was built of infrastructure. Empathy redistributes nothing: it does not break the racket that runs the sanctions economy, it does not open exit to those who cannot afford it, and it does not change who pays whom. WHERE ECONOMICS STOPS TOO This cuts both ways. If the psychological reading explains too much by feeling, the economic reading explains too much by structure. A theory that explains everything rules nothing out, which is another way of saying it can never be wrong — and that is the death of a serious argument. I have made the same complaint about other arguments [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-abdication-of-critical-thinking-why-scholars-abandon-rigour-in-politics/]: a claim has to earn its place [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-thesis-without-a-scaffold/] by surviving the cases that do not fit, not by serving as a master key. Pure economics fails that test in the same place psychology does. The clearest counter-example is one I have been documenting for two months: people act against their material interests for reasons of identity. The monarchist nostalgia loudest in parts of the diaspora would not put a single rial in its supporters’ pockets if it came true. The young men in SAVAK shirts at Western rallies [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-architecture-of-cruelty/] are not running a portfolio. Aryan myth [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-aryan-ghost-what-the-war-on-iran-should-teach-the-arab-world/] and dynastic longing are not side-effects of capital. Feelings cause things. The split is not either material position or inherited identity. It is both, each doing work the other cannot. So the revision is not a switch from feeling to economics. It is a refusal to give either one the final word. Feeling is often the way a material position gets lived — distance felt as calm, dependence felt as contempt. But not always, and not only. The honest question is not “is this damaged feeling, or class interest?” It is the actual problem in front of you, looked at without deciding in advance which layer has to win. WHAT THE CEASEFIRE SHOWS The ceasefire has turned argument into evidence. In March I warned that the push for regime change had mistaken a moment of Iranian weakness for a market opportunity, and that the people inside the burning building [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-burning-building-and-the-monitoring-room-iran-diaspora-and-the-moral-architecture-of-war/] would pay the entry fee — the Syrian mistake. That bet has, for now, lapsed. The war did not end in the collapse I feared. A deal is in sight. What this shows is that the moral market does not close when the shooting stops. It re-prices. The currency is no longer who cheered which strike. It is who gets to claim the peace, who tells the story of the reckoning [https://twinwisdoms.org/droplets-seeking-a-river-shared-humanity-and-the-unfinished-project-of-iran/], and whose words frame the settlement. The faction that mistook a platform for a mandate during the war is now tempted to mistake the ceasefire for its vindication. Inside, the same exhaustion that carried the war will carry the peace terms. The imbalance in who is actually at risk did not end with the fighting; it changed its name. This is also where the economic reading earns its keep most plainly. The settlement is a distribution question — who gets the sanctions relief, the reconstruction contracts, the reintegration — and recognition will decide none of it. But identity comes back, too: the fight over what Iran becomes now that the West has stopped being the referee [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-copernican-revolution-of-the-iranian-mind/] cannot be reduced to who holds the contracts. WHAT I WOULD SAY NOW What survives of the original cure? Less than I claimed. Not nothing. Mutual recognition is real and necessary, but it is the way a settlement might happen, not the settlement itself. Offering a change of feeling as the answer to a problem partly built by structure was the wrong kind of answer. Feeling decides whether the two sides are willing to cross the bridge. It does not lay a single brick. The test I would put in its place is harder and, what matters, checkable. For the diaspora, the question for any act of engagement is not whether it feels like solidarity. It is whether it actually transfers something — resources, risk, or standing — to the people inside. And: would the act survive if your own name were taken off it? That is a question with a real answer, and most performance fails it. This is not a call for the diaspora to be silent. A voice that actually transfers something is not vanity, and silence is not agreement [https://twinwisdoms.org/when-silence-cannot-be-mistaken-for-consent-a-defense-of-diaspora-voice/]. For those inside, the matching discipline is to resist the sweeping verdict — not everyone who left, left lightly, and exile is its own kind of damage. And for all of us, the first habit to break is the comfort of curated certainty [https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/] — the reflex that rewards the loudest claim over the truest. I will end where the evidence, not the feeling, points. The bridge between inside and outside is built of infrastructure — networks, expertise, transfers, institutions. Feeling may decide whether we want to build it. Honesty about what it is actually made of is the only thing that will keep it standing. https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&linkname=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefirehttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Ftrading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire%2F&title=Trading%20in%20Pain%2C%20After%20the%20Ceasefire Subscribe: Newsletter [https://twinwisdoms.org/newsletter/] | RSS [https://twinwisdoms.org/feed/]

Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?

[https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/pahlavi_refutation_image-300x169.webp]Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms [https://twinwisdoms.org] Podcast [https://twinwisdoms.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/pahlavi_refutation_image.jpg] On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts [https://www.kyivpost.com/post/77196] that the Iranian people celebrated when “the regime’s infrastructure” was struck by the United States and Israel [https://www.britannica.com/event/2026-Iran-war]. Three innocuous words are made to carry an enormous burden. They deserve to be unpacked, because beneath them sits a documented record that international bodies, human-rights organisations and Western newspapers — not the Islamic Republic’s propagandists — established months ago. Consider what “the regime’s infrastructure” actually denoted. On the war’s first day a strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab killed roughly a hundred and seventy people [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/16/us-responsible-for-deadly-attack-on-iranian-school-amnesty-international], most of them children between seven and twelve; Amnesty International [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable/] and Human Rights Watch [https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/07/us/israel-investigate-iran-school-attack-as-a-war-crime] treated it as a probable war crime. Over the forty days that followed, Gandhi Hospital in Tehran lost its neonatal unit [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/05/at-least-dozen-hospital-and-health-facilities-in-iran-hit-since-us-israel-attacks-began-who-says]; the century-old Pasteur Institute was hit [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/more-than-20-attacks-on-iranian-healthcare-facilities-since-march-1-who]; a pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, triggering nationwide shortages of insulin and cancer medicines; the Red Crescent counted some ninety thousand damaged or destroyed homes [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/iran-war-us-israel-continue-attacks-on-civilian-infrastructure]; water and power stations were struck [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/schools-water-industry-what-civilian-targets-have-us-israel-iran-hit]; a Tehran synagogue was razed during Passover [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/7/synagogue-in-tehran-destroyed-in-us-israeli-strikes-on-iran], its Torah scrolls lost. A neonatal incubator is not a centrifuge. A primary-school classroom is not a command bunker. To file all of this under “the regime” is not analysis; it is a euphemism doing the work that the facts will not. The claim also performs a quieter sleight of hand. It is true — and well attested — that some Iranians celebrated: at the killing of Khamenei [https://www.timesofisrael.com/some-iranians-celebrate-israeli-us-strikes-as-khamenei-said-targeted-his-palace-destroyed/], at the sudden vulnerability of an apparatus that had been shooting their children in the streets only weeks earlier during the winter protests [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-protests-biggest-in-years-against-ayatollah-what-to-know/]. That jubilation was real, and one need not pretend otherwise. But Pahlavi slides from “some rejoiced that the tyrant was dead” to “the people celebrated the destruction of infrastructure.” The first is a fact; the second is a fallacy of composition dressed as reportage — the diaspora’s relief and a genuine hatred of Khamenei projected onto ninety million people, more than three million of whom had by then been driven from their homes [https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/iran-islamic-republic/islamic-republic-iran-humanitarian-update-no-02-3-april-2026]. The disconfirming evidence is not obscure, and it does not come from Tehran’s spokesmen. It comes from his own former supporters [https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/reza-pahlavis-supporters-iran-are-turning-against-him]. By mid-March, Iranians who had once looked to him were telling reporters that his call to “celebrate in the streets” was grotesque — that they went to sleep unsure they would wake, that they flinched at every step outdoors lest the next missile land nearby. A claim elastic enough to absorb the dead of Minab and the displaced of Tehran and still emerge as “the people celebrated” is not a description of anything. It is a belief immunised against refutation — which is to say, propaganda rather than testimony. Whatever evidence arrives, the conclusion is already fixed. The venue sharpens the hypocrisy to a point. On 28 February, Pahlavi assured the world that the target was “the Islamic Republic… not the country and great nation of Iran,” and christened the bombardment a “humanitarian intervention [https://www.foxnews.com/world/exiled-crown-prince-calls-on-iranian-people-finish-job-cheers-trump-humanitarian-intervention].” Eight weeks and some two thousand civilian dead [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/30/schools-water-industry-what-civilian-targets-have-us-israel-iran-hit] later, the euphemism has hardened into a boast — delivered, of all places, in a city that knows exactly what it is to have your infrastructure turned to rubble by a foreign power insisting it strikes only the “regime.” The moral grammar Pahlavi rightly applies to Russia in Ukraine he inverts the instant the bombs fall on Iran. Attacks on civilian infrastructure are atrocities in Odesa and liberation in Tehran. One cannot hold both positions in the same week, in the same building, without forfeiting the claim to either. None of this is a slip of phrasing. It is the recurring substitution at the heart of the restorationist project: unable to demonstrate a constituency at home, it manufactures one rhetorically. The people are with us; the people rejoice; the people celebrate the ruins. The celebration narrative is a stand-in for legitimacy — far easier to assert from a podium abroad than to earn on Iranian soil. A movement that needs the destruction of its own country’s hospitals and schools recast as a festival has already confessed that it has no serious plan for the country that must be rebuilt from the rubble. The honest sentence is short and unflattering. A foreign campaign killed thousands of Iranian civilians, displaced millions, and flattened the schools, clinics and homes of the nation Pahlavi claims to lead — and he called it aid, and the survivors’ grief he reportedly called celebration. To say so is not to defend the Islamic Republic, whose crimes are real and catalogued [https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/27/middle-east-conflict-attacks-on-civilians-and-harms-to-children-must-end]. It is only to refuse the euphemism. The children of Minab were not infrastructure, and the silence of three million displaced is not applause. Sources are linked inline above. Principal references: Encyclopædia Britannica (war overview); Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (the Minab school strike as a probable war crime); The Guardian and Al Jazeera, citing the WHO (attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities); Bloomberg, citing the Iranian Red Crescent (homes and medical facilities destroyed); Al Jazeera (civilian targets, the c. 2,000 dead, and the Tehran synagogue); The Times of Israel (celebration at Khamenei’s death); CBS News (the winter protests); UN OCHA (displacement); Middle East Eye (Iranian reactions to the call to celebrate); Fox News (Pahlavi’s “humanitarian intervention” framing); and Kyiv Post (the Odesa interview, 30 May 2026). https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/x?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/add_to/telegram?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&linkname=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3Fhttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwinwisdoms.org%2Fwhose-infrastructure-whose-celebration%2F&title=Whose%20Infrastructure%2C%20Whose%20Celebration%3F Subscribe: Newsletter [https://twinwisdoms.org/newsletter/] | RSS [https://twinwisdoms.org/feed/]