Despotic regimes become especially interested in expanding the discourse of *tār-kubi* as their social ideology declines.

Hannah Arendt makes a point in *The Origins of Totalitarianism* that is profoundly familiar and intelligible to contemporary Iranian society.
Arendt is presented here as saying that totalitarian regimes provide their societies with news and information that are shamelessly ridiculous and filled with stupidity—a stupidity obvious even to the simple and healthy mind of an ordinary citizen.

Such regimes do not hesitate to insult the sanity of society because they have already devoted every effort to destroying that sanity. They tear apart the fabric of intelligible truth within society and reweave it according to their ideology. In this way, individual citizens gradually become unable even to hear the voice of their own “simple and intelligible truth of mind”, preparing them either to accept the “post-truth woven by ideological government” or to become indifferent to its enormous emptiness and meaninglessness.

The aim of despotic regimes in supporting and expanding *tār-kubi* is not to destroy or hide truth, but to create social indifference toward it. If you see social media—and Twitter in particular—suddenly saturated with sensational, empty and insignificant material, never assume it is accidental. *Tār-kubi* does not appear only in posts devoid of social meaning; it also emerges in comments, conversations and the circulation of empty information, whether in support of or in attacks upon social activists and opponents. The ultimate aim is to make thinking and meaningful social conversation impossible by trivialising meaning itself.

Every day we are confronted by a flood of endless information on social media, a large proportion of which is nothing more than *tār-kubi*. We may not be able to stop the flood or its pervasive triviality, but as aware individuals within society we can withhold our attention from it and return to the truth of life—a place profoundly filled with pain, but real; a place where perhaps we can rediscover the meaning of life through living our own time passionately.

Aydin Areta