Last week, when bombs were falling over Iran, I saw a post on social media that posed a harrowing question to Iranians: Would you rather have a stranger kill your abusive father, or have him continue to live and abuse your family?
While the question is hypothetical, the post struck me as a painfully precise metaphor for the anguish Iranians are enduring following recent attacks from Israel and the United States.
I, like so many other Iranians, am caught in the devastating paradox of this moment: witnessing a hated internal oppressor — a regime in which people can be killed because of what they wear and what they believe — being attacked by a reviled external aggressor, a state engaged in a campaign of devastating and indiscriminate violence against the population of Gaza.
Now, as the fragile cease-fire between Iran and Israel holds, Iranians are crushed by the emotional weight of pondering the future of their country. Many, like me, have been gripped by a moral paralysis: a schadenfreude at the death of a brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander curdling into grief for the innocent lives lost, and rage that a hostile foreign power would terrorize millions and kill hundreds in Iran to achieve its aim.
I grew up in Iran during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, a brutal conflict that landed in a nation already scarred by a century of foreign intervention, most notably the 1953 C.I.A.-backed coup. During those years, I experienced how the Islamic Republic weaponized morality to justify continuing the war while simultaneously inflicting fear and violence on its own people. This formative experience has guided my 15-year career as a scholar of moral psychology, investigating how our most sacred values can paradoxically lead us to intractable conflict and hate.
In this moment of deep uncertainty for my country, my studies of the dark side of human morality have helped me make sense of the fraught moral calculations of a nation.
The internal conflict is a fundamental clash of worldviews tied to our very identity. To understand the magnitude of this struggle, one must first understand the unique psychological power of what researchers call “moral” or “sacred” values. Research by myself and my colleagues demonstrates that moral values aren’t mere opinions. They are deeply held beliefs that are profoundly intertwined with personal and collective identity. People feel outrage when these values are threatened or discarded by others.
The dilemma of the abusive father and the murderous stranger perfectly captures this clash between two competing moral worldviews — the moral value of self-determination battling the moral value of liberation. It is a conflict I have witnessed across a striking spectrum of reactions from Iranians since the attacks, in both personal conversations and on social media.
On one side is the moral value of liberation from the Islamic Republic. For some of the most seasoned dissidents — those who have endured imprisonment, torture and exile — the Israeli strikes carry a dangerous, fragile hope. They see the death of a high-ranking Revolutionary Guards commander not as a casualty of war, but as a righteous, if small, step toward salvation from an oppressive regime. From this perspective, any action that weakens the architects of their suffering is a necessary catalyst for the long-awaited collapse of the Islamic Republic, a moral imperative overriding all other considerations.
On the other side is the moral value of self-determination. Many Iranians, who share the same dream of a free Iran, cannot accept its potential birth through foreign invasion. For them, shaped by a century of foreign interference and the trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, the principle of “no foreign intervention” is an inviolable line. They believe liberation must come from within, and the idea of another country’s military killing their fellow citizens, even in the name of freedom, is indefensible.
The agonizing choice, therefore, is not between kin and stranger, but between competing moral universes. An act of deliverance for one is an act of blasphemy for the other. To be an Iranian in this moment is to vacillate between them — torn between a longing for an end to tyranny and a deep-seated fear of what such a deliverance might cost. Any possible resolution constitutes a profound violation of the self, a kind of identity death.
Layered atop this choice between national self-determination and freedom is the most fundamental value of all: human life. This presents its own impossible calculus in a war that has, as of this writing, already claimed at least a thousand lives in Iran, according to an independent human rights group, a significant portion of whom are innocent civilians.
Now, with a cease-fire in place, the dilemma has shifted. The Iranian community is mired in debates on whether this fragile peace should persist, which risks the regime, like a wounded and raging animal, taking its revenge on the people of Iran. Already, the regime has threatened a wave of internal retaliation against those who speak out against them. But if the attacks resume, more innocent people would almost certainly be killed in the uncertain hope of finally cutting the “head of the snake.”
Stoking this dilemma has been a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic’s propaganda for over 40 years. The regime has relentlessly hammered home a single threat: without its rule, Iran will shatter like Syria and be divided by its enemies. This argument intentionally transforms the desire for liberation into a gamble with national survival, amplifying the moral paralysis that serves its hold on power.
This psychological dynamic emphasizes the futility of external calls for regime change from outside actors like the Israeli or U.S. governments. Such appeals immediately trigger our sacred value of national self-determination, paramount over liberation for many Iranians. It turns a potential ally into an extension of the “murderous stranger,” inadvertently strengthening the regime’s narrative that it is the sole defender of the nation, deepening the paralysis that already grips the populace.
In this fractured social landscape, the pervasive language of moral outrage, while used to express passionate commitment to these competing values, proves to be self-defeating and divisive, preventing Iranians from forming a unified front against the regime.
One must, then, return to the initial question of the abusive father and the murderous stranger. Its power is not as a logic puzzle demanding a solution, but as a cry of pain from a people caught in this very psychological trap. The most humane response is not to try to solve the puzzle, but to acknowledge the shared agony of being forced to live through it in the first place.
Observers should not mistake Iranians’ moral paralysis as proof that we are simply passive observers of the crisis gripping our country. And for Iranians, acknowledging this shared agony is the only path forward — we need a psychological shift, not a political one. It requires seeing the fierce passion for a competing moral value not as intractable disagreement, but as its own expression of our desperate love for the free Iran so many of us yearn to see.
Morteza Dehghani is a professor of psychology and computer science and the director of the Morality and Language Lab at the University of Southern California. His research examines how extreme forms of moral worldviews can lead to prejudice, violence and hate.
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