Reply #17: Because we have internalized ruling class consciousness and believe our system is unchangeable.

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The entire thrust of our society is geared toward, what in the 19th and early 20th century was called "bourgeois ideology": the notion that the world is comprised of unchangeable objects put in motion by natural law. It takes an incredible amount of mysticism (invisible hand of the market, American values, justifiable wars, etc) to keep this system together. To a certain degree, it takes a good amount of labor policy to keep us this way: the redefinition of everyone from carpet cleaners to strippers to professors to nurses as either "management" (petit bourgeois--medieval throw back to Kingsman) or "independent contractor" (petit bourgeois--medieval throw back to troubadour, itinerant craftsman). The business schools have read enough Marx to know that unrest is best squashed by mimicking feudalism--where the working-class (generic humanity) is decentralized and unable to congeal into a force to reveal that it is not eternal or natural but a force that it is sustained by and for, not a few kings, but a somewhat larger spread of modern industrialists.

But this system considers itself immune to history. It believes that its the end of history. Without a historical and material understanding of the world, our only tool of battle is secret ballot and public outrage (which is easily put down by advanced military technology and private ownership of media outlets.)

Of course, Iranians aren't at a different phase than we are. They are not more advanced than we are in this respect. But while we are fighting our way through a capitalist system that uses the mixed consciousness of nouveau-feudalism to ward off class consciousness of the average joe and joann, Iranians are still directly fighting the vestiges of feudalism: theocracy, the God-King, extreme enforcement of the veil. They have seen others do this and win, so it is impossible to convince them that they can't fight it.

In short: they are fighting to join modern global capitalism and we are fighting to have a democracy within global capitalism (which is fighting its own mathematical collapse through any and all possible imperialist expansion into any and all underdeveloped markets.)

And TV doesn't help.