My recent studies on Factfulness and Amusing Ourselves to Death have brought me to life-changing conclusions, of such extents that I am not sure if I am ready to digest them right away. This conclusion is that a culture is only a fluid coming and going. I used to believe the other way around, that the culture by nature is a core that goes through different seasons. Iranians are the same whether in the Ghajarian era or in the Internet era. Yet Postman puts it so righteously that “Technological Change is Ecological Change.” that it is not additive, but everything changes at once. There is nothing that says today’s Iran has to be the old days Iran in a different look.
Yesterday, Zea showed me an event that shocked my beliefs to their cores. A woman doing a performance of a lifetime somewhere around Iran. She performed amazing music, in protest to the current state of affairs. What was shocking was how great she was, how great her crew was, and how great everything about this performance was. It was no longer an Orientalist view on a poor people; it was that people who had become great and did it all by themselves, not only coming no short, but going much further in that respect. I was so proud to see these wonderful people doing this. I could say, “My country has such great music."
I can sense that something wonderful has changed about this country. Iranians no longer see themselves as inferior people who wish to imitate a god-like Westerner, but rather strong people who have become confident in who they are, and just started to even reject those ideas.
Yesterday, I saw the graph of “Number of Children Per Woman” in Factfulness, and it made me so proud.
At the university, we ran a secret fund to pay for women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. Jaws drop even further when I tell the students where these young pregnant students traveled to: Poland. Catholic Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.
At the university, we ran a secret fund to pay for women to travel abroad to get safe abortions. Jaws drop even further when I tell the students where these young pregnant students traveled to: Poland. Catholic Poland. Five years later, Poland banned abortion and Sweden legalized it. The flow of young women started to go the other way. The point is, it was not always so. The cultures changed.
It is, at least, clear that a free media is no guarantee that the world’s fastest cultural changes will be reported.
It is, at least, clear that a free media is no guarantee that the world’s fastest cultural changes will be reported.
The fastest drop in babies per woman in world history went completely unreported in the free Western media. Iran—home in the 1990s to the biggest condom factory in the world, and boasting a compulsory pre-marriage sex education course for both brides and grooms—has a highly educated population with excellent access to an advanced public health-care system. Couples use contraception to achieve small families and have access to infertility clinics if they struggle to conceive. At least that was the case when I visited such a clinic in Tehran in 1990, hosted by the enthusiastic Professor Malek-Afzali, who designed Iran’s family planning miracle.
When the unexpected does happen, a kind of instinctive triage kicks in. You have to rely on your own internal “threat scale.” There are drop-everything events, and there are others when you say to yourself, This is serious, I need to be engaged right now, but I also need to extricate myself and focus on other things and return to this later. Sometimes, even though you’re “in charge,” you need to be aware that in the moment you might have nothing to add, and so you don’t wade in. You trust your people to do their jobs and focus your energies on some other pressing issue.