[ben_w]

You're over-estimating the average first-world experience; people on this forum are mostly much richer than the average of those who live in the same nations. People die in the UK from the heat and the cold, and yet religious beliefs are on the decline; the US is richer yet more religious than the UK.

Also, the theocratic leadership of Iran is not so fragile.

[simne]

> Also, the theocratic leadership of Iran is not so fragile

You're confusing leadership and economy. This is very significant difference - when economy suffer in first-world, whole world hear this from independent press, but when similar thing happen in countries like Iran, people are killed if try to open truth, because leadership pressures to open just info it think should be open and nothing more.

For example, when in North Korea happen great hunger, nobody outside country knows except CIA.

[simne]

And it is also important to notice - leadership consists of humans and humans could make mistakes, and in Democracy, exists feedback via human rights and via independent press, but in totalitarian countries both things does not exist, and also does not exist feedback, so, when totalitarian leadership make huge mistake, nobody could tell them and whole country become like uncontrolled auto, running into abyss on full speed, and very frequently this end with total fiasco.

[simne]

BTW people on this forum are mostly have much higher education, than the average of those who live in the same nations, and this is one obvious reason, why they are richer than average.

In countries like Iran, NORMAL higher education just does not exist. For example, I lived in USSR, where instead of Philosophy learned history of communists party. Imagine, what happen with other knowledge, which communists considered harmful - laws and rights, journalism, history, diplomacy - they just substituted whole parts of science with their surrogates.

Read. Use your rights to obtain real information, not surrogates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche