Essay argues Iran’s ‘Bloody Dey 1404’ turned fear into collective action
A new essay circulating in Persian by an author signing as Zakaria frames Iran’s “Bloody Dey 1404” as a “heroic tragedy” that catalyzed fresh forms of collective action rather than leading to silence and withdrawal.
The writer proposes a model to explain why the response went beyond fear: decades of lived threats left society with a reservoir of pent-up psychological energy that was released when a large-scale danger loomed over the future. At the heart of the analysis is a three-step mechanism: a threat appears, fear follows, and then people choose a compensatory action.
According to the author, those actions shape the kind of experiences societies accumulate. He distinguishes among effective experiences that convert trapped psychic energy into inner strength; weak experiences that manage threats temporarily without building lasting power; and ineffective experiences—such as flight or accommodation—that leave energy confined, feeding a sense of power deficit over time.
Over many years, the essay argues, Iranians have confronted repeated direct and indirect threats. Lacking the means to overcome many of them, people often resorted to avoidance, compromise or endurance. That pattern, the author writes, stockpiled ineffective experiences, spreading caution and fatigue—and a chronic feeling of diminished power.
Yet under certain conditions, he adds, the same store of experiences can become a source of release. When a threat of collective scale emerges—described in the essay as endangering lives and the horizon of the future—that trapped energy can break loose. In the author’s telling, this is what happened during Bloody Dey 1404: alongside fear, new forms of bravery, anger and collective initiative surfaced.
As examples, he points to the mobilization of victims’ families, large gatherings at graves of those killed, the replacement of religious mourning with dancing and celebration in some instances, student activism, and reactions from certain public figures.
Zakaria grounds part of his argument in personal memory, recalling corporal punishment he witnessed as a schoolchild and other public floggings by uniformed forces—scenes presented as formative encounters with threat and fear. These experiences, he suggests, illustrate how early exposure to coercion imprints itself and shapes later responses.
The essay’s central claim is that the social energy needed for a major civic surge does not have to be newly created. Rather, it can be the return of energy long trapped by ineffective experiences, suddenly unlocked by an existential shock. On that basis, the author contends, the “epic tragedy” of Bloody Dey 1404 did not inevitably produce passivity; it helped generate collective action with new contours and symbols.