u/Real-Wash3031

The entire dollar system depends on Gulf oil being priced in dollars, which only works if the monarchies stay in power. Gulf sovereign wealth funds are sunk deep into Wall Street and the City of London. There are people whose entire financial world depends on these regimes not falling.

Britain, France, the US all sell arms to these regimes. USAID funded the University of Nebraska to produce textbooks for Afghan children filled with jihadist content and violent imagery to radicalise them against the Soviets. The same books were later used by the Taliban. These are also the same countries that drew the borders of the Middle East in the first place, largely at a conference table, largely with reference to their own interests.

The US backed Zia in Pakistan, a military dictator who Islamised the curriculum, crushed the left, and built the exact infrastructure that became the Taliban. In Egypt an elected government was replaced by a military coup and the West funded it without particular embarrassment. The US helped suppress the Bahrain uprising entirely. When Sheikha Latifa, daughter of Dubai's ruler, tried to flee by boat, the Indian coastguard intercepted her vessel in international waters and handed her back. In Indonesia over a million communists, secularists and leftists were killed in 1965 with the US providing the kill lists. Communists were branded as godless to mobilise religious organisations against them.

Mosaddegh in Iran was a democratically elected leader who nationalised oil and was overthrown by the CIA. Nasser was a secular Arab nationalist. The Afghan government before the Soviet invasion ran girls' schools. Saudi Arabia, with full Western backing, spent decades funding Wahhabi madrassas across Pakistan, Indonesia and Africa as a direct counterweight to secular and leftist movements. Western powers used Islamists against these movements because religious conservatives didn't threaten the oil.

Syria, Libya, Iraq are all more Islamist now than before Western intervention. And as for the people themselves : Pew Research finds majorities in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia saying democracy is the best form of government. The same Gallup polling shows these populations largely don't believe the US is serious about promoting it in their region. On the available evidence, it is difficult to argue that they are wrong.

Aren't we overlooking the systemic and structural forces at play when we attribute the absence of democracy in these countries purely to religion?

Many people are addicted to Alcohol and drugs. Some of them genuinely want to give up their addiction but can't

Is free real?

According to former Standford Professor, Dr. Robert Sapolsky:

>The core argument against free will is that human behavior is completely determined by a seamless, continuous chain of physical causes stretching back millions of years. In this view, there is not a single shred of independent human agency. Every action, thought, and decision is the inevitable result of prior physical events over which an individual has zero control.The Chronological Chain of Causality

>When a person makes a decision (such as reaching for a substance, or choosing to walk away), society mistakenly looks only at the exact moment of the choice. In reality, that action is just the final output of an unbroken arc of biology:

• Seconds Before: A behavior occurs because specific neurons fire in the brain's executive and emotional centers, heavily dictated by immediate sensory inputs and environmental triggers.
• Minutes to Hours Before: Those neurons were already primed by immediate physiological states—such as blood sugar levels, sleep deprivation, or a spike in stress hormones like cortisol.
• Days to Months Before: The brain’s structural pathways were altered by neuroplasticity—neurotransmitters rewired by recent trauma, systemic stress, or lived experiences.
• Adolescence & Childhood: The prefrontal cortex—the brain's impulse control center—takes a staggering 25 years to fully mature. A person’s childhood environment, socioeconomic status, and exposure to early adversity permanently shape how that physical hardware was constructed.
• In Utero: The fetal environment, maternal stress levels, and prenatal nutrition chemically tag the individual's DNA through epigenetic modifications, pre-programming their future baseline stress responses.
• Centuries Before: The culture a person's ancestors lived in (e.g., whether they were hunter-gatherers, farmers, or lived in an individualistic vs. collectivist society) dictated the parenting styles and social norms passed down through generations.
• Millions of Years Before: Evolutionary biology selected the specific genetic framework, neural structures, and hormonal mechanisms that the individual inherited.