The current Iranian system was not built by strangers from an alien planet. It was assembled, layer by layer, by its own people. Not all Iranians are complicit, but many—through ignorance, false certainties, transactional faith, and a culture of double life—have helped to stabilize the very structure that now crushes them. Calling the rulers merely “incompetent” is itself a form of denial: it pretends the problem is a handful of officials, instead of the wider social machinery that tolerates humiliation, rewards hypocrisy, and punishes integrity.