Arguing From Your Own Ground

You cannot argue for anyone else unless based on your own strength and weakness.

Who is Iran, and who is the United States? Each answers that question with a flattering story. Iran tells of a revolution that freed it from foreign-backed rule and of decades under siege. America tells of liberty and a reluctant duty to uphold world order. We can study those stories, but we cannot adopt them, because no one sees from nowhere. Every judgment we make comes from where we stand: our interests, our costs, our strengths and our weaknesses. That is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the honest starting point, and the argument of this piece is that it is the only legitimate one: you cannot argue for anyone else unless you argue from your own strength and weakness.

Start inside a country. Democracy claims to leave direction to the people, but in practice direction is shaped by media and money. A guardianship system like Iran’s claims to protect the collective good from that distortion, yet the citizen who says “I oppose this policy because a war would cost me” is not being selfish. He is speaking from the one place he can truly speak from: his own exposure to the cost. Because people do not share the same objective, these disagreements cannot be settled by argument alone. One society builds a system like Iran’s, where the collective, as defined from above, outweighs the individual. Another builds one like America’s, where personal preference often overrides the collective. Each choice has its pros and cons, and each is first of all a choice made by those who live under it.

A system that rests on one person is not broken by that fact. It is flexible. A single leader can correct course faster than a divided legislature, and Iran’s leaders have, at times, admitted mistakes and changed direction. But the same flexibility makes everything depend on that person: on whether he sees the mistake, chooses to act, and is still there to act. Including the whole population limits the leader’s will, yet it also relieves him of carrying every failure alone. Shared decisions mean shared responsibility. Where a system sits between those two poles shows what it fears more: losing control or losing legitimacy.

Deeper still, no legal order can ground itself. A system cannot be judged entirely from inside; law cannot swallow itself. Something must stand outside the law for the law to stand at all, and Iran’s constitution says so openly by placing an absolute guardian above it. But speaking with that ultimate authority, speaking as God, can only be legitimate when there is more than one speaker. Traditional Shia authority knew this: believers chose among many jurists, and no single voice spoke for all. This is also the only honest meaning of “the people” in democratic theory. “The people” is not a real collective will that anyone can channel. It simply means: not a single person.

The same logic, carried to the global level, settles the question of the teacher. Who chose the United States, or the five permanent members of the Security Council, to teach the world how to live? No one did. Power did. Whoever argues on behalf of others, for their rights or their security, is in the end arguing from their own strength, and the weaker side argues from its weakness. Pretending otherwise turns interest into virtue. Since no state can speak from anywhere but its own position, the only arrangement that works is a decentralized one: sovereign states, many speakers, none of them the world’s single voice.

This argument has a weakness of its own, and in keeping with its thesis it should name it. Plurality among states can shield a monopoly inside a state, and a world without a single hegemon can still be a world of regional ones. Decentralization does not end the struggle of strength against weakness; it only refuses to dress one side of that struggle as the universal good. That refusal is the beginning of honesty between nations. Iran and America will each go on seeing themselves as they wish. The rest of us can understand both, judge both, and speak about both, but only from where we ourselves stand.