“The Republic of the Composition Error” by Mohsen Renani

When Ayatollah Khomeini declared on 1 March 1979 at the Fayziyeh School, “We shall make both this world and the Hereafter flourish…,” it was deeply pleasing to me, a thirteen-year-old adolescent raised in a religious family, and I saw myself as one of the most fortunate human beings who, by chance, had been born in a time and place that would grant him the paradisal advantages of both worlds. It took me twenty years to realize that this statement was the product of a logical argument marred by the “fallacy of composition,” and that it was improbable and strange that someone like the late founder, a philosopher-jurist, would overlook this subtlety in establishing such a great movement. Today, I consider all the existing crises in our country to be the result of this very “fallacy of composition,” which has since then flowed deeply through all the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s decision-making system. The initial point of the fallacy of composition’s infiltration into the post-revolutionary system of governance is precisely this notion of the possibility of a successful combination of “republic” and “Islamic,” as reflected in the Constitution.

On 13 November, in an online talk I gave titled “Why Don’t I Emigrate?” (at the invitation of a group of compatriots living abroad), I emphasized that the speech was in response to the question of why “I” do not emigrate. In fact, my discussion was at an individual and micro level, intended to make those considering emigration aware of the difficulties and harms of emigration for themselves and their children. Only in the final few minutes of this two-hour talk did I briefly touch upon the harms of elite emigration for the country and Iranian civilization. I said that when a society is drained of its elites and is also poor, its level of rationality declines, and it easily resorts to rebellion and destruction. These remarks of mine, delivered in the closing minutes with an emotional and impassioned tone, led me to say that with the departure of elites, society takes on a “gelatinous state,” which, with the agency of a poor and ignorant population, ultimately leads to ruin. Some friends interpreted this manner of expression as an insult to the poor and kindly brought it to my attention. While I fully accept that in a public speech whose audience encompasses a diverse spectrum, I should have chosen my words more carefully, and for that I apologize to everyone; this point, however, became a pretext to briefly analyze one of the most pervasive cognitive errors in our own society. That is, to claim that even if I had explicitly said that a poor society is an ignorant, rebellious, or violent society, it would not have been an insult to the poor.[1]

The fallacy of composition is one of the errors that occurs in logical reasoning. Its conventional example in economics is the “paradox of thrift.” When one person decides at the beginning of the year to spend less by year’s end than the previous year, they will be wealthier at the end of the year than the year before. But if all the people in a society decide at the beginning of a year to spend less by year’s end than the previous year, that society will be poorer at the end of the year than the year before.

In political science, too, the discussion of the “paradox of voting” that exists in elections is one instance of the composition error. This matter was mathematically proven seventy years ago by an economist named Kenneth Arrow. That is, in voting on an issue, even if all voters are rational and vote sincerely, there is still no guarantee that the outcome of the vote will be to the benefit of the whole society. Because even if individuals have truly voted based on their preferences and priorities, there is no guarantee that the decision emerging from the election will secure their public and collective interests. For this reason, in the paradox of voting, it is proposed that democratic people must elect a temporary dictator (called the president) so that he, in their stead, can discern the collective good and make decisions. The only problem is that these dictators who are elected change their words and thoughts after coming to power, or they engage in deceit during elections and make false promises, or after being elected, they try not to allow the next dictator (the new president) to be elected in a competitive environment. For this reason, in genuine democracies, both the term of a temporary dictator is limited and the electoral system is party-based, so that a temporary dictator cannot act contrary to promises, agreements, and rules, line his pockets, and then disappear, because his party bears responsibility for his conduct. That is, when elections become recurrent and party-based, parties control the temporary dictators so that they behave more rationally and, to some extent, in the direction of the collective good, in order to win again in the next election.

As an example, suppose the government wants to allocate a specific budget for investment in various academic disciplines and decides to determine the budget amount for each discipline based on the number of votes or points that discipline receives in a public poll. Suppose the government asks all citizens to announce, via text message to the government secretariat, the first three disciplines out of about twelve hundred university disciplines in which they desire the government to invest. It is naturally predictable that one of the medical or engineering disciplines will be among the priorities of the majority of citizens. In this case, these disciplines will receive the most points. That is, from the voters' perspective, the bulk of the higher education budget should be allocated to these disciplines, and about a thousand other disciplines will receive a very small share of the budget. Although each individual citizen has voted based on their own rationality and inclinations, the final outcome of the voting does not guarantee the long-term interests of society. Because society, for its welfare and progress, needs specialists in all disciplines, and the higher education budget must be distributed proportionally among all disciplines. Therefore, even today, when information and communication technology makes direct collective voting possible for decision-making on all public matters, the problem of the paradox of voting still persists.

From this discussion, I want to conclude that if we say that in a free society with free elections, the outcome of the people's collective choice is usually irrational, this is not meant as an insult to the voters. Each individual voter may behave rationally, but overall, the election result may be irrational. This is not related to the ill-nature of voters or their lack of rationality, but rather to the nature of public voting.

In fact, collective identities are entities different from the individual identities or the individuals who have constituted them. Because collective identities usually have their own specific behaviors that differ from the behaviors of their individual members. Therefore, judgment about a collective identity should not be attributed to the individual identity. For example, if someone says that Iranians are the only nation who changed their religion twice by the force of the sword, meaning they were not willing to stand by their religion at any cost and preserve it, this statement is not an insult to me as an individual Iranian.

Years before the Syrian civil wars, if the Muslims who are today members of Al-Qaeda or ISIS were asked whether they were willing to massacre, burn alive, or behead other Muslims, the answer would undoubtedly have been negative; yet those same individuals, when they found a collective identity and were placed in the context of collective action (as in collective voting), engaged in the massacre of other Muslims (the very task of social psychology is to show that collective behaviors follow a pattern different from individual behaviors).

The issue is the same regarding the poor. Therefore, my saying that “when a society is drained of its elites, the poor rise up in rebellion and destruction at critical historical junctures” contains no insult to the poor. It is an analysis of the outcome of the collective and protest action of the poor. Here, rebellion and destruction are attributes of the “collective identity” or “collective action” of the poor, not attributes of the individual poor person. It is like saying that the wealthy usually become so immersed in comfort that they lose their concerns related to their own human self-awareness. This, too, is no insult to a specific wealthy individual. Or if I say that a religious society is prone to hypocrisy, this is also no insult to an individual religious person. (Of course, when analysis is expressed in an emotional atmosphere, it may take on the color of judgment, which is how my words have been interpreted, and I now offer my deep apologies to every single Iranian who may have felt such an insult from my words).

Now let us return to the “Republic of the Composition Error.” It may be possible for me, as an individual, to raise my child to be a believer committed to religious rites, but if the government, as the manager (father) of society, wants to raise all citizens to be believers committed to a specific faith and rites, the result will be the faithlessness and laxity of the majority of society. For me, as an individual, it is moral, rational, and praiseworthy not to allow my child to marry an addict, but if I am a legislator and write a law prohibiting marriage to addicts, I have made an immoral, irrational, and damaging decision for society. The same applies to many jurisprudential injunctions (which are individual rulings within the domain of individual duties). If you bring prayer, fasting, hijab, and many other rulings from the individual domain into the public domain and make them compulsory, the first to suffer damage will be prayer, fasting, and hijab themselves. This is where we say that the “Islamic Republic” is a kind of composition error. A religious society must be religious on its own. That is, when the people of a society, one by one, are religious inwardly and from the heart, a religious society will exist. When you want to establish religion by force of law and police, the first to be harmed will be religion itself. Therefore, it may be feasible for an individual to simultaneously prosper in both this world and the hereafter, but at the level of a nation and by governmental decree, it is not feasible for both the worldly and otherworldly domains to prosper together; inevitably, one or both will suffer damage.

The issue of the composition error has harmed us in many other post-revolution policies as well. For example, the policy of agricultural self-sufficiency, which has been on the agenda of the highest officials of the regime over the past three decades and has been seriously pursued by all post-war governments, is a policy arising from the composition error. The self-sufficiency of an individual or a family may lead to the empowerment and independence of that family, but self-sufficiency at the national level leads to the destruction of that nation’s natural resources, the result of which in Iran has been the annihilation of the country’s underground water reserves.

Let me give the example of security. A family living in an unsafe environment may be able to secure itself by putting bars on all walls and windows, installing security cameras, reinforcing locks and doors, tinting the windows, keeping a guard dog, and even hiring people to protect and guard their home, and still remain a prosperous family; but if a nation wants to secure all its security by employing a large number of its youth in military forces, building advanced military equipment, and becoming first in military power among its neighbors, it will certainly become a poor and insecure nation. Because in the long run, instead of economic, welfare, social, and cultural investments, it is forced to divert its financial resources toward military affairs, which gradually reduces that nation’s capacity to create prosperity. In the modern world, military pacts and regional security cooperation were invented precisely so that nations would not be forced to impoverish themselves in order to create security.

The truth is that when, in the years following the revolution, the clerics moved from the seminary to practical politics, they brought the intellectual apparatus of the seminary—which was specific to the realm of individual believers’ conduct (fiqh is an intellectual apparatus for analyzing the realm of individuals’ personal behavior)—into the realm of politics—which is the domain of the behavior of collective identities—and thus ensnared the system of governance in a systematic composition error. And of course, the engineers (whose expertise also lies in micro, partial, and individual domains) greatly exploited this composition error of the clerics and utterly deceived them. In fact, what we face in Iran today is the joint achievement of the entry of clerics and engineers into the realm of politics.[2]

Let me summarize. The result of the set of policies of the “composition error” type that have been implemented in Iran over these four decades is that Iran, whose position in the world, both in terms of territorial size and population volume, ranks eighteenth and should naturally rank close to this position in other areas, is now not in its proper position. That is, although it has elevated itself to the tenth rank in the world in terms of military power, in return, in terms of economic power, it ranks 23rd (based on purchasing power parity in 2020; but according to the World Bank’s calculation and based on an exchange rate of 22,000 tomans to the dollar, Iran’s rank was 51st), in terms of per capita income (welfare), it ranks 103rd, and in terms of all other development indicators, it has attained ranks between 60 and 184 in the world. This outcome is the result of those composition error policies that have been implemented after the revolution, especially in the three decades following the imposed war. Accordingly, our governance system is more a “system of composition error” than a “republic” or an “Islamic” one.

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[1] My view on “migration”

[2] For further discussion on this, listen to this talk: The Collusion of Engineers and Clerics

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