Download Print-Friendly Version

For years, living in Iran, I heard the same explanation repeated with certainty: the people in power were incompetent. Corrupt, shortsighted, incapable of governing a country with this much talent, history, and natural wealth. If outcomes fell short—if industry stagnated, if the economy destabilized—the conclusion seemed obvious. It was mismanagement.

That explanation endured not only because it was plausible, but because it was comfortable. Incompetence suggests error. It implies that the system has deviated from its purpose, and that with better decisions—or better people—it could still produce a livable future. It leaves intact a deeper assumption that is rarely examined: that the system is meant to work for those living within it.

Questioning the Assumption of Incompetence

As an engineer and entrepreneur, I tried to place myself outside politics. My work was technical. My goals were practical. I thought that if I focused on building something real, something useful, I could remain at a safe distance from the machinery around me.

That assumption did not survive contact with reality.

Over time, it became impossible to reconcile the logic I understood with the logic of the system I was living under. Cause and effect no longer aligned. Outcomes did not seem to matter. Decisions that produced damage were repeated without correction. What appeared inconsistent at first revealed itself as something more durable: a system operating by a different logic altogether.

At first, I relied on the same explanation everyone else used. The people in power are incompetent.

But that interpretation began to erode under observation. I remember laying out, in precise operational terms, the long-term cost of certain policies—economic degradation, institutional decay, loss of future capacity. These were not ideological arguments. They were straightforward projections. Yet they were met with indifference, as if the criteria being applied were entirely different from the ones being discussed.

That was the first real fracture in the narrative.

I stopped analyzing decisions individually and began looking at the structure itself.

My company changed with me. I no longer organized it for growth in the conventional sense. I organized it for endurance. The goal was not optimization, but shock absorption. Not scale, but survival. Resilience became the business model because volatility had become the governing condition.

Even then, I resisted abandoning the explanation of incompetence. It is a durable idea because it protects a deeper assumption: that the system has deviated from its purpose, rather than forcing us to confront the possibility that its purpose was never what we believed it to be.

I did not arrive at this conclusion through theory, but because politics became inseparable from daily life—professional constraint, private anxiety, ambient uncertainty—leaving no choice but to study it, as the economy itself had become political.

The more unsettling explanation was also the more coherent one: the system was not failing. It was operating according to a logic many of us had refused to name.

A Matter of Ideology, Not Execution

To see that logic requires abandoning a central assumption of modern political life—that governments are primarily organized around improving the material conditions of their populations. Many are not. Some systems are organized around ideological continuity, strategic positioning, internal control, or elite preservation, and they will accept broad social cost if those objectives require it.

Recognizing this is not only an analytical shift. It is a civic one. It forces a reconsideration of how individuals, communities, and societies interpret what they are seeing—and what they choose to do with that understanding.

Iran is not an anomaly in this regard, but a particularly visible instance of a broader class of systems in which stated objectives and operating priorities diverge in systematic ways.

In Iran, power cannot be understood apart from ideology.

The Iranian regime is not merely authoritarian; it is political-theological. Authority is not justified through performance, but through doctrine and continuity. Legitimacy is anchored not in outcomes, but in preservation.

In this sense, ideology does not replace geopolitics; it structures it—defining which strategic objectives are pursued, and which costs are considered acceptable.

That orientation extends beyond national borders. For decades, the state has invested in regional influence, strategic depth and ideological alignment. Whatever language is used—deterrence, projection, expansion—the implication is the same: domestic welfare has never been the primary constraint on decision-making.

Once that becomes visible, much of what appeared irrational becomes internally consistent.

Resources are not misallocated by accident. They are directed elsewhere. Economically viable activity is sidelined not because it is misunderstood, but because it is secondary. Public exhaustion is not necessarily evidence of failure. It is evidence of where the system is willing to place the burden.

This is the distinction many people resist. Incompetence implies correctable error. Intent implies structural alignment.

It is more comfortable to believe that the system I grew up inside was broken than to accept that it was functioning—just not for me, not for people like me, not for the population it claimed to serve. That reorientation did not happen all at once. It required setting aside an explanation I had once found genuinely consoling.

Once that shift occurred, the pattern became difficult to ignore. I began to recognize the same structure in places that had nothing to do with Iran.

Confronting the Real Objectives

In contemporary political discourse, incompetence has become the default explanation for systemic outcomes. When wars expand, when economic strain deepens, when instability spreads, the reflex is to assume failure in execution.

Sometimes that is true. But its repetition across fundamentally different systems should raise a harder question: what if the outcomes are not mistakes, but expressions of underlying priorities?

A system cannot be evaluated if its objectives are misidentified. Yet this misidentification persists because it is easier—and because it is useful. It preserves the assumption that stated goals remain aligned with public expectations, and that deviation is accidental rather than embedded.

At the level of public life, this has consequences beyond policy. It shapes how people assign blame, where they direct their attention, and whether they see themselves as observers or participants in the systems around them.

I remember the moment that realization shifted from analysis to recognition. What followed was a kind of disappointment that does not fade, only settles.

For years, I watched world powers—despite access to intelligence—either refuse to confront this reality or avoid it altogether, as acknowledging it would require action and carry real cost. Instead, they responded in familiar terms, treating the system as if it were malfunctioning: applying pressure, offering incentives, pursuing negotiation.

But if the system is operating as designed, those strategies begin from a false premise. They attempt to correct behavior that is structurally reinforced. What appears as failed diplomacy or ineffective pressure is often something else entirely—a mismatch between reality and the assumptions used to interpret it.

If a system is structurally aligned against the outcomes external actors seek, then strategies built on inducing alignment are not just ineffective—they are misdirected from the outset.

Over time, that mismatch produces consequences of its own. What is not understood is not contained. Pressure accumulates, conditions harden, and the system adapts without changing direction.

At that point, instability is no longer episodic. It is structural.

Iran has lived within that accumulation for years. What was once assumed to be contained is no longer contained. Conflict, economic disruption, and strategic instability now extend outward, shaping risks far beyond its borders. This is no longer a distant system under strain. It is part of the environment others must now operate within. It is no longer somewhere else. It is at everyone’s doorstep.

For years, that trajectory remained visible but unaddressed—not because it was misunderstood, but because confronting it carried a different kind of cost. Treating the system as if it could be corrected allowed for continuity: of policy, of expectation, of response. It preserved the assumption that pressure would eventually produce alignment, even as evidence suggested otherwise. What was deferred was not recognition, but consequence. And over time, that deferral became its own pattern—one that allowed the system to persist without interruption, while the cost accumulated beyond it.

And so, the pattern held.

Pressure accumulated. Adjustments were made at the margins. Each cycle resolved nothing and carried forward more instability than the one before it.

The Cost of Misreading Intentions

What is different now is not the pattern, but the cost of continuing to misread it.

Yet the instinct remains unchanged. Even now, the dominant response is to identify visible actors, assign failure, and move on. It is a form of understanding quick enough to avoid recognition: that repeated outcomes are rarely the product of repeated mistakes. They are the product of stable structures operating as designed.

What follows is less intuitive and more demanding. At the level of policy, it requires abandoning the expectation of alignment and proceeding from sustained divergence. At the level of public judgment, it requires something more difficult than outrage: discipline. The refusal to collapse structural dynamics into familiar language. The willingness to sit with conclusions that offer no immediate resolution.

This is where the failure extends beyond the halls of power and into the streets. The instinct to explain away systemic outcomes as mere incompetence is not just an analytical error; it is participatory. It functions as a psychological safety valve, allowing societies to remain loud and ‘engaged’ without ever being truly unsettled. We trade the terrifying clarity of intent for the comfortable noise of outrage—filling the air with demands for better ‘management’ while the structure itself continues its work, unexamined and undisturbed. It produces a theater of certainty in place of the discipline of understanding.

Repeated outcomes are rarely the product of repeated mistakes. They are the product of stable structures operating as designed.

To recognize that is not to endorse those structures, nor to accept their permanence. But it does remove a particular illusion: that escalation of the same responses will eventually produce a different result.

The more uncomfortable implication is this: misreading is not neutral. It carries a cost. It delays adaptation, distorts decision-making, and extends the lifespan of the very dynamics it fails to understand.

This is not only a question of governments or policy. It is a question of how societies see, interpret, and respond to power—and of the limits they place, often unconsciously, on what they are willing to confront.

If there is a point of departure, it is not in speaking more loudly, or more frequently. It is in seeing more clearly—and accepting what that clarity demands.

Not all systems are meant to correct themselves. Some persist precisely because the expectations placed upon them were never aligned with what they were built to sustain.

The post The Logic Behind Iran appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Moral responsibility is personal. However useful group categories may be for describing history or power, they cannot do the work of moral judgment. Treating people as guilty because they belong—to a race, class, religion, nation, party, or institution—turns justice into collective punishment, and it makes violence feel permissible against “representatives” rather than against perpetrators.

Why Justified Violence is Spreading

These examples reveal how dangerously blurred the moral line has become between justified violence and terrorism. Increasingly, those who commit crimes are excused, while ordinary law-abiding people, working unglamorous jobs in average towns or simply attending a place or worship are painted as guilty of society’s ills and, in some eyes, worthy of death. Such thinking only makes sense when guilt and innocence are determined not by individual actions but by membership in a group.

Under this logic, violence becomes a kind of moral accounting: if you belong to the wrong class, race, religion, or “side of history,” you are fair game. That logic did not arise in a vacuum. It can be traced through intellectual traditions that assign guilt and innocence categorically rather than personally. 

This essay looks especially at one of the most influential theorists of “liberating” violence, Frantz Fanon, and argues that the Christian Just War tradition provides a much-needed antidote, restoring moral lines and individual responsibility. 

Who is Frantz Fanon? Why He Matters Now

This logic of categorical guilt runs through modern theories that split humanity into two camps: the oppressors versus the oppressed in Marx, or the colonizers versus the colonized in Frantz Fanon.

Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” praised by Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornel West as a revolutionary manual, has become particularly influential. Written in the context of anti-colonial struggles, it presents decolonization as a total, existential confrontation in which violence is not merely permitted but celebrated as cleansing and necessary.

Today, its vision of collective struggle and sanctioned violence echoes in the defense of Hamas atrocities, in the celebration of political assassination, and in online rhetoric that treats whole populations as legitimate targets. When activists speak of “decolonization,” some use it as a euphemism for eliminating entire communities. Those who do follow Fanon’s thinking shift moral judgment from individual acts to group identity, whether they knowingly rely on him or not. 

Fanon’s Case for Revolutionary Violence

The “Wretched of the Earth” both justifies and normalizes intense violence. The first line declares, “Decolonization is always a violent event.” A few pages later, Fanon says, “Decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,”  and he warns of a “human tide” that sounds eerily like the French Reign of Terror. 

Fanon says the colonized are filled with “blood feuds” and “fratricidal blood bath(s).” Decolonization “is clearly and plainly an armed struggle.” Violence is not a tragic last resort but the very heart of liberation:  “For the colonized, this violence represents the absolute praxis.” He even concludes that “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonialist.”

Fanon makes this explicit:

“If the act for which this man is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonial individual or colonial asset, then the demarcation line [between right and wrong] is clear and manifest.”

The moral line, in other words, is not drawn by what you do, but by whom you do it to.

Fanon Minimizes Religion and Classic Liberal Values 

When Fanon does quote Christian teachings, he typically invalidates or twists them. Teachings of love and harmony, for example, are simply part of the “confusion mongers” that make exploitation easier in Fanon’s view. 

In quoting Christian language about how “The last shall be first,” Fanon insists that “the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation.” In this view, love and reconciliation are not virtues, but obstacles to the necessary bloodshed.

Fanon also racializes Christianity, calling it the white man’s church. He treats broader values from the Christian moral tradition the same way. Without evidence, he asserts that “government agents use the language of pure violence.” Discussions of Western values supposedly cause the natives to tense their muscles, grab a machete and sharpen their weapons.

In this framing, appeals to rights, due process, mercy, or moral restraint are dismissed as hypocritical covers for domination. What Christians and many classical liberal thinkers defended as moral guardrails become, in Fanon’s hands, part of the enemy’s arsenal.

Where Categorical Guilt Leads

All this matters because the values Fanon ridicules helped establish the guardrails against the kind of bloodbath he justifies. Those same values also offered moral correction for the abuses that are often used to excuse violent outbursts.

When you shift from individual responsibility to collective guilt, those guardrails vanish. We saw this when Hutu extremists in Rwanda called Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches,” and ethnonationalist propagandists in the former Yugoslavia branded entire villages as traitors and thereby legitimate targets. 

Fanon’s own words (that I repeat here for emphasis) make this logic clear:

“If the act for which this man is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonial individual or colonial asset, then the demarcation line is clear and manifest.”

Even when the violence is mass slaughter and rape against innocent families, Fanon’s reasoning can collapse moral distinctions to make all Jews guilty by association, and all terrorists as virtuous by category. It allows ISIS to massacre Yazidis.

That is why Americans witnessed some activist subcultures making gliders their logo. (Gliders are how the terrorists traveled to the massacre at the Nova music festival.) The same moral confusion produced social media posts insisting that the barbaric savagery of Hamas was simply “what decolonization looks like.” 

The same collective guilt theory helps explain why some rationalized away the assassination of a health care executive, and others the assassination of a state House speaker. If “the system” is murderous and anyone associated with it is a “legitimate target,” then the ordinary moral prohibition against murder loses much of its force. 

In short, the problem is the same one I have described elsewhere, writing about ”Visions of Glory”: once people begin labeling themselves as part of a righteous group and their opponents as zombies, it becomes easier to justify killing them. If the world is divided into saints and monsters, why not exterminate the monsters?

When Fanon describes decolonization as naturally violent and the colonized existing in an “atmosphere of violence,” it becomes natural to strike out—not as a tragic last resort, but as an almost automatic cleansing reaction. 

The Just War Antidote

The antidote is not to pretend oppression doesn’t exist, nor to indulge in vague moralizing that condemns all force equally. The antidote is the clarity of Just War principles and the wisdom of earlier thinkers who took both justice and peace seriously.

Within the Christian West, the Just War tradition developed clear questions to distinguish between justified force and murder:

1. Is there a genuinely just cause, not mere revenge or envy?
2. Is force authorized by a legitimate authority?
3. Is it a last resort, after less drastic means have been tried?
4. Is the response proportionate to the wrong suffered?
5. Are we carefully discriminating between combatants and noncombatants? (This is perhaps most crucial for our purposes.)

The Salamanca School was a 16th and 17th-century Iberian intellectual movement that developed ideas such as natural law, international law, human rights, and indigenous rights. 

One scholar from this school, Francisco Suarez, wrote that violent revolt is only justified “if essential for liberty, because if there is any less drastic means of removing him (the tyrant) it is not lawful to kill him … always provided that there is no danger of the same or worse evils falling on [the] community as a result of the tyrant’s death.” Here, violence is only permitted under extreme conditions—and even then, only when it will not unleash still greater horrors. 

Early modern thinker Hugo Grotius wrote about the same right to revolt if the king alienates his people, but also warned potential usurpers that it would lead to gory factionalism and “dangerous, bloody conflict.”

In similar language, the Book of Mormon prophet Mosiah recognized the danger of revolt when he argued for the end of the monarchy: 

“Ye cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.”

In contrast to Fanon, Christian thinkers who helped shape classic liberalism acknowledged both the danger in revolution and the rights of the oppressed. They tried to channel righteous anger into morally constrained resistance, not open-ended slaughter.

Fanon dismissed the talk of rights as the “ersatz,” or fake struggle of elites, something he described as ”insipid humanitarianism.” Yet those supposedly insipid beliefs are stronger than any of Fanon’s theories because they clearly address the morality of revolution and darken lines he blurs. 

Historically, those principles often led to reform rather than repression. Salamanca School scholars advocated for the human rights of natives. The Grimké sisters and Christian abolitionist missionaries argued from biblical morality against slavery. Missionaries and reformers exposed the abuses in the Belgian Congo. Despite being minimized by Fanon as mere abstractions, these advances inspired by the Salamanca School (and their religious underpinnings) were often a reforming counteragent to colonialism.

Just War thinking insists that you are not guilty merely for belonging to a category. You are guilty—or innocent—based on what you actually do. 

Applying Just War to Today’s Cases

Once we recover Just War principles, recent cases of violence look very different from the narratives that excuse them.

Consider Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians. No grievance, however real, can justify intentionally targeting families at the Nova music festival or in their homes. A theory that calls this “decolonization” fails the most basic Just War tests of discrimination (you may not deliberately target noncombatants) and proportionality (you may not answer injustice with indiscriminate slaughter).

The same is true of the shooting at the Latter-day Saint chapel in Michigan, the attack on a Catholic church, the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting, and the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, Melissa Hortman, and Brian Thompson. In each case, the victims are treated not as human beings with their own moral status but as stand-ins for an entire allegedly guilty class—Latter-day Saints, Catholics, African Americans, conservatives, liberals, or corporate elites.

Just War criteria force us to ask simple but powerful questions:

• Are these particular people directly responsible for grave injustices?
• Is the danger that supposedly requires violence clear, immediate and grave? Can that danger or injustice be remedied using non violent, legal or civil means?
• Has every less drastic means of redress been exhausted?
• Will killing them likely avert greater evils, or will it unleash still more chaos and retaliation?
• Are we distinguishing between those actually doing harm and those who merely belong to the same profession, religion, racial, or social group?

In these modern cases, the answer to those questions is obviously no. They can only be justified inside a framework, like Fanon’s, that treats entire classes of people as guilty and their deaths as morally clarifying.

Recovering Individual Responsibility

The antidote to the recent uptick of violence is not to invent new theories or to indulge in vague moralizing, but to return to the clarity of Just War principles and the wisdom of earlier thinkers. As both Christian tradition and the Book of Mormon warn, revolution comes only “through much contention, and the shedding of much blood.” That is not a license to glorify violence, but a sober caution to resist collective guilt and hold fast to individual responsibility.

We are judged by our own sins, not by the accidents of class, race, or category. If we truly wish to resist the age of blurred lines and confused morality, we must recover the values of love, harmony, and conciliation that Fanon dismissed—and recognize that peace is found not in collective vengeance or random shootings, but in clear moral standards rooted in justice.

Collective punishment erases the very accountability that justice requires. To draw the line between justified defense and terror, we must recover the conviction that every human being is a moral agent, answerable for his or her own actions before God and neighbor. 

The post Collective Punishment Erases Individual Responsibility appeared first on Public Square Magazine.