Editor’s Note: Shahir Shahidsaless is a veteran Iranian-Canadian political analyst and journalist who writes about Iranian domestic and foreign affairs and the Middle East. He is the co-author of “Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace” and a contributor to several websites that focus on the Middle East.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
The dramatic recent plunge in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, compared to the dollar has triggered protests across Tehran and several other cities that have led to new speculation about the stability of the regime.
Given runaway prices and uncontrolled inflation in a year that also saw unprecedented U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the degradation of Iran’s regional partners, the unrest is hardly surprising. The free-market exchange rate is one of the few economic indicators the government cannot manipulate or conceal. Unlike official inflation, unemployment, GDP, the economic growth rate, or trade balances, the black-market dollar value is publicly visible and immediately reflects how precarious everyday life has become in Iran.
That visibility explains why the state constantly intervenes in the foreign-exchange market. By injecting the market with hard currency, the government tries to suppress the open-market dollar rate. The goal is twofold: psychologically, to blunt the perception of an economy in crisis; materially, to slow inflation, since prices across the economy closely track the free-market rate.
Yet the balancing act has become increasingly untenable as sanctions pressures intensify and the rial plunged to more than 1.4 million to the dollar, a 75% drop in just one year. Given that, because of government interventions, the managed exchange rate has historically lagged behind real inflation, official claims of inflation near 50% understate lived reality. The dollar’s trajectory suggests real inflation is at least 75%. This is what transforms currency anxiety into street protests as people grasp that the problem is not a single price shock but a deeper erosion of economic stability and state capacity.
In this atmosphere of uncertainty, it is instructive to compare today’s protests with the street demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 and the creation of the theocratic regime. This author has debated with analysts inside Iran about whether 1979 was an indictment of collective judgment. These analysts criticize those who participated in the revolution as “panjah-o-hafti” — referring to the Iranian calendar year the revolution took place — and asserting that the political illiteracy of the masses at the time led to the chaos Iran is facing today. They argue that a society cut off from reliable information caused the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” to fail at the very moment it mattered most.
What followed was not enlightened collective action but mass misjudgment, in which mobilization propelled the country toward outcomes fundamentally opposed to the revolution’s declared aims of freedom and independence. However, as the Victorian English scholar Francis Galton reminds us in his “Vox Populi,” crowds can be wise, but only when certain conditions hold. Those conditions are (1) diversity of viewpoints, (2) decentralization of knowledge, (3) relative independence of individual judgments, and (4) some mechanism for aggregating dispersed signals.
The Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran’s insight in “Private Truths, Public Lies” explains why authoritarian systems sometimes collapse suddenly. He shows how preference falsification — people concealing their true views because of social or material costs — can produce rapid cascades once enough individuals perceive that dissent is widespread. Iran in 1978–79 was a textbook case: The collapse of preference falsification produced extraordinary mobilization against the monarchy in a short period.
But Kuran also implies an important trade-off. The cascade that makes revolt explosive tends to undermine independence of judgment. Once a threshold is crossed, people align not because each has independently re-evaluated the situation, but because coordination under new perceived conditions becomes rational. Aggregation becomes coordination; deliberation gives way to herding.
That loss of independent judgment at peak mobilization points toward the epistemic danger the scholar Hannah Arendt identified in her seminal 1951 “The Origins of Totalitarianism”: Under conditions of social atomization, ideology can replace plural judgment by offering a closed interpretive system that promises certainty. The revolutionary Islam that crystallized around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the late 1970s absorbed diverse grievances into one moral narrative. It produced coherence, but with it a narrowing of permitted debate.
Iran’s protest waves since 2009, and especially the 2022 protests against compulsory hijab, reveal a strikingly different configuration. Contemporary Iran is saturated with information. Social media, encrypted messaging apps, satellite television, exile outlets, and ubiquitous citizen reporting generate a dense, decentralized public sphere. Competing narratives circulate rapidly; no single authority monopolizes interpretation.
This same environment that preserves independence of judgment also generates structural fragmentation. Mobilization emerges rapidly through social networks. At the same time, the formation of intersubjective consent around leadership and strategy becomes significantly harder.
Viewed through Arendt’s lens, this is the inverse of 1979. Then, ideological certainty swallowed plurality. Now, plurality persists, judgment survives, and that very plurality limits the ability of protestors to coalesce into a single, decisive political force. In short, contemporary Iranian crowds are, in many respects, epistemically healthier but politically less concentrated. That inversion helps explain a key paradox. Iranian society is way more informed and more connected than it was under the Shah; people see the economic breakdown and judge independently. Yet the ruling system endures. The problem is not ignorance or manipulation — it is the unresolved tension between collective wisdom, plural independent judgment, and collective force or coordinated coherent action. In 1979, Iran had decisive force but paid an epistemic price. Today it preserves judgment but lacks the unified force that overturns institutions.
This is where the question of leadership must be reframed. In today’s context, popular leadership does not and cannot control individual judgments or impose ideology. It refers to the capacity to mobilize, inspire, unify, and sustain collective action over time by providing continuity, strategic direction, and a focal point for coordination. Leadership, properly understood, is organizational rather than doctrinal.
Crucially, this conception of leadership stands in direct contrast to the 1979 model. Khomeini’s leadership unified action by imposing ideological convergence; effective leadership today would need to do the opposite: protect plural judgment while organizing durable collective action. Its function is not to instruct society what to think, but to make sustained, coordinated action possible over time.
Achieving this balance requires galvanizing broad support through personal appeal and trust. As sociologists have long noted, personal charisma can catalyze mobilization. Max Weber called it “the great revolutionary force,” reflecting its power to unite followers behind change. Zeynep Tufekci, a leading scholar of digital-era movements, argues in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas,” that even decentralized protests rely on trusted leaders with charisma to sustain momentum; without it, pluralist movements risk fragmentation and fail to turn episodic mobilization into lasting influence.
Such leadership can and must rest on broad, non-sectarian commitments rather than totalizing narratives: freedom under the rule of law, accountable institutions, economic stabilization, development, economic growth that restores dignity and opportunity, and reintegration into the global economy. These objectives are sufficient to unify action without dictating belief or collapsing disagreement into ideology.
The core obstacle facing Iran’s contemporary forces of change — forces that by every metric, including the regime’s own electoral participation figures (however methodologically questionable), constitute a societal majority — is therefore not a lack of awareness, information, or popular will. It is the absence of popular leadership capable of converting repeated protest waves into sustained political agency. In the absence of such leadership, mobilization will continue to erupt and dissipate, leaving independent judgment intact but political change unrealized.
External contingencies may interact with the leadership deficit identified in this analysis. Developments including the January 3 U.S. abduction of Venezuela’s president, President Trump’s public warnings of intervention should Iranian protesters continue to be killed, and Israel’s intelligence penetration of Iran, most visible in its assassinations of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders last June, underscore growing uncertainty about the regime’s capacity to rely exclusively on repression. This uncertainty is amplified by the unpredictability of U.S. policy under Trump, who has already crossed thresholds no previous American president did, from ordering the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 to authorizing direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year. The credible perception of possible external intervention can alter strategic calculations inside Iran. However, whether such shocks translate into political change still depends on leadership capable of rapidly coordinating action, managing risk, and converting sudden openings into sustained political agency.
In Iran Protests, Information Spreads Faster than Organization
By Shahir Shahidsaless
Middle East
Editor’s Note: Shahir Shahidsaless is a veteran Iranian-Canadian political analyst and journalist who writes about Iranian domestic and foreign affairs and the Middle East. He is the co-author of “Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace” and a contributor to several websites that focus on the Middle East.
By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project
The dramatic recent plunge in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, compared to the dollar has triggered protests across Tehran and several other cities that have led to new speculation about the stability of the regime.
Given runaway prices and uncontrolled inflation in a year that also saw unprecedented U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the degradation of Iran’s regional partners, the unrest is hardly surprising. The free-market exchange rate is one of the few economic indicators the government cannot manipulate or conceal. Unlike official inflation, unemployment, GDP, the economic growth rate, or trade balances, the black-market dollar value is publicly visible and immediately reflects how precarious everyday life has become in Iran.
That visibility explains why the state constantly intervenes in the foreign-exchange market. By injecting the market with hard currency, the government tries to suppress the open-market dollar rate. The goal is twofold: psychologically, to blunt the perception of an economy in crisis; materially, to slow inflation, since prices across the economy closely track the free-market rate.
Yet the balancing act has become increasingly untenable as sanctions pressures intensify and the rial plunged to more than 1.4 million to the dollar, a 75% drop in just one year. Given that, because of government interventions, the managed exchange rate has historically lagged behind real inflation, official claims of inflation near 50% understate lived reality. The dollar’s trajectory suggests real inflation is at least 75%. This is what transforms currency anxiety into street protests as people grasp that the problem is not a single price shock but a deeper erosion of economic stability and state capacity.
In this atmosphere of uncertainty, it is instructive to compare today’s protests with the street demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 and the creation of the theocratic regime. This author has debated with analysts inside Iran about whether 1979 was an indictment of collective judgment. These analysts criticize those who participated in the revolution as “panjah-o-hafti” — referring to the Iranian calendar year the revolution took place — and asserting that the political illiteracy of the masses at the time led to the chaos Iran is facing today. They argue that a society cut off from reliable information caused the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” to fail at the very moment it mattered most.
What followed was not enlightened collective action but mass misjudgment, in which mobilization propelled the country toward outcomes fundamentally opposed to the revolution’s declared aims of freedom and independence. However, as the Victorian English scholar Francis Galton reminds us in his “Vox Populi,” crowds can be wise, but only when certain conditions hold. Those conditions are (1) diversity of viewpoints, (2) decentralization of knowledge, (3) relative independence of individual judgments, and (4) some mechanism for aggregating dispersed signals.
The Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran’s insight in “Private Truths, Public Lies” explains why authoritarian systems sometimes collapse suddenly. He shows how preference falsification — people concealing their true views because of social or material costs — can produce rapid cascades once enough individuals perceive that dissent is widespread. Iran in 1978–79 was a textbook case: The collapse of preference falsification produced extraordinary mobilization against the monarchy in a short period.
But Kuran also implies an important trade-off. The cascade that makes revolt explosive tends to undermine independence of judgment. Once a threshold is crossed, people align not because each has independently re-evaluated the situation, but because coordination under new perceived conditions becomes rational. Aggregation becomes coordination; deliberation gives way to herding.
That loss of independent judgment at peak mobilization points toward the epistemic danger the scholar Hannah Arendt identified in her seminal 1951 “The Origins of Totalitarianism”: Under conditions of social atomization, ideology can replace plural judgment by offering a closed interpretive system that promises certainty. The revolutionary Islam that crystallized around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the late 1970s absorbed diverse grievances into one moral narrative. It produced coherence, but with it a narrowing of permitted debate.
Iran’s protest waves since 2009, and especially the 2022 protests against compulsory hijab, reveal a strikingly different configuration. Contemporary Iran is saturated with information. Social media, encrypted messaging apps, satellite television, exile outlets, and ubiquitous citizen reporting generate a dense, decentralized public sphere. Competing narratives circulate rapidly; no single authority monopolizes interpretation.
This same environment that preserves independence of judgment also generates structural fragmentation. Mobilization emerges rapidly through social networks. At the same time, the formation of intersubjective consent around leadership and strategy becomes significantly harder.
Viewed through Arendt’s lens, this is the inverse of 1979. Then, ideological certainty swallowed plurality. Now, plurality persists, judgment survives, and that very plurality limits the ability of protestors to coalesce into a single, decisive political force. In short, contemporary Iranian crowds are, in many respects, epistemically healthier but politically less concentrated. That inversion helps explain a key paradox. Iranian society is way more informed and more connected than it was under the Shah; people see the economic breakdown and judge independently. Yet the ruling system endures. The problem is not ignorance or manipulation — it is the unresolved tension between collective wisdom, plural independent judgment, and collective force or coordinated coherent action. In 1979, Iran had decisive force but paid an epistemic price. Today it preserves judgment but lacks the unified force that overturns institutions.
This is where the question of leadership must be reframed. In today’s context, popular leadership does not and cannot control individual judgments or impose ideology. It refers to the capacity to mobilize, inspire, unify, and sustain collective action over time by providing continuity, strategic direction, and a focal point for coordination. Leadership, properly understood, is organizational rather than doctrinal.
Crucially, this conception of leadership stands in direct contrast to the 1979 model. Khomeini’s leadership unified action by imposing ideological convergence; effective leadership today would need to do the opposite: protect plural judgment while organizing durable collective action. Its function is not to instruct society what to think, but to make sustained, coordinated action possible over time.
Achieving this balance requires galvanizing broad support through personal appeal and trust. As sociologists have long noted, personal charisma can catalyze mobilization. Max Weber called it “the great revolutionary force,” reflecting its power to unite followers behind change. Zeynep Tufekci, a leading scholar of digital-era movements, argues in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas,” that even decentralized protests rely on trusted leaders with charisma to sustain momentum; without it, pluralist movements risk fragmentation and fail to turn episodic mobilization into lasting influence.
Such leadership can and must rest on broad, non-sectarian commitments rather than totalizing narratives: freedom under the rule of law, accountable institutions, economic stabilization, development, economic growth that restores dignity and opportunity, and reintegration into the global economy. These objectives are sufficient to unify action without dictating belief or collapsing disagreement into ideology.
The core obstacle facing Iran’s contemporary forces of change — forces that by every metric, including the regime’s own electoral participation figures (however methodologically questionable), constitute a societal majority — is therefore not a lack of awareness, information, or popular will. It is the absence of popular leadership capable of converting repeated protest waves into sustained political agency. In the absence of such leadership, mobilization will continue to erupt and dissipate, leaving independent judgment intact but political change unrealized.
External contingencies may interact with the leadership deficit identified in this analysis. Developments including the January 3 U.S. abduction of Venezuela’s president, President Trump’s public warnings of intervention should Iranian protesters continue to be killed, and Israel’s intelligence penetration of Iran, most visible in its assassinations of senior Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders last June, underscore growing uncertainty about the regime’s capacity to rely exclusively on repression. This uncertainty is amplified by the unpredictability of U.S. policy under Trump, who has already crossed thresholds no previous American president did, from ordering the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 to authorizing direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year. The credible perception of possible external intervention can alter strategic calculations inside Iran. However, whether such shocks translate into political change still depends on leadership capable of rapidly coordinating action, managing risk, and converting sudden openings into sustained political agency.
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