Mapping Currents of Left-Wing Thought — Part 7 and Conclusion
Beyond Left and Right: Rethinking Iranian Politics
Aydin Areta

In the final part of the seminar, we consider why Iranian political thought cannot simply be fitted into the binary of left and right. At its foundation, this thought is centred on *rāsti* and truth, beginning from the point at which Herodotus tells us that the first thing Persians taught their children was “truthfulness.” This *rāsti* belongs to the horizon of *Asha*: the luminous order of the world, the bond between ethics and truth, and a way of living within a circle that separates politics from the mere exercise of power and binds it instead to ethical responsibility.

In this section we explain that an ethical sensitivity toward the suffering of the marginalized, those who have been silenced, government propaganda, the humiliation of individuality and the violence hidden within language can carry a horizontal and even left-leaning conscience. At the same time, Iranian thought stands at a distance from a politics that only dismantles structures and cannot build anything. Society is not created by criticizing power alone. It requires institutions, law, historical memory, shared narrative, ethical leadership and hierarchies grounded in merit. This thought is therefore neither infatuated with authority nor captive to structureless disintegration.

From here the central concept of the discussion emerges: meaning-centred verticality. This means a structure in which power must be bound to virtue, merit, justice and ethical responsibility. In the ideal form of Iranian political imagination, the king is not merely the possessor of force; he is the bearer of order, justice, *rāsti* and the shared world of the people. His legitimacy does not come from producing truth but from fidelity to truth; when the bond between power and *rāsti* is broken, legitimacy too collapses. In this sense, the historical imagination of politics in Iran, also reflected in the Shahnameh, is less a celebration of power than a search for a restrained form of ethical authority.

Finally, the discussion reaches individuation: society is not built from conformist, consumerist and passive human beings, but from people who have moved beyond the level of desire, fear, passivity and conformity and reached discernment, courage, responsibility and maturity. In this reading, Iranian thought supports neither structureless horizontalism nor unrestrained verticalism. It seeks authority without despotism, freedom without collapse, order without the sanctification of power, and plurality without nihilism. This is a path that can be called neither left nor right, but rather a historical horizon of Iranian political thought—what I call beyond right and left and, more precisely, *Luminous Axiality* / “Shid-Payegi” in the Iranian tradition of kingship.

YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/Au3Yh64hJWw