I am so honored to be onstage representing TED's growing recognition of the importance of its immigrant diaspora community.
I am an Iranian-American, a kind of free-range Iranian, lucky to be here with all of you and free to embrace all my native culture’s positive elements: the poetry, the music, philosophy and hospitality, every day, in ways that many Iranians inside Iran cannot. But I also love having the bow of my identity stretched between two seemingly opposed poles of "Iranian" and "American," because that gives the arrow of my life a unique perspective on things.
I want to share a couple of American ideals that explicate this multicultural dichotomy in me. The first is independence. In America, independence is foundational, the bedrock of our freedom that makes us all, all us Americans, feel exceptional. Unlike my Iranian side, where everyone is in everyone's business, I'm free, maybe even driven, to pursue my own happiness, and that feels so liberating.
The other is continuous improvement, the idea that you can always do better. America is a do-ocracy that is always inventing, reinventing herself. We make mistakes, and keep on growing and growing. That's why it's so exciting to be an entrepreneur in America -- we're free to try to build anything our hearts desire. For me, these days, it's taking on our corrupt political duopoly and working to democratize democracy itself. Isn't it amazing that as an American, I just get to do that, without fear or permission?
But I'm Iranian too, and I have the ancient wisdom of Iranian mystics, Ferdowsi, Hafez and Rumi, running through my veins. So each of these American traits give my Iranian psyche cause for pause and reflection.
For instance, independence is great, but if I'm truly independent, then I don't need anything or anyone. That's kind of lonely. Iranians are congenitally hospitable and tribal. In fact, the word Iran itself is a portmanteau of the word “Ir” and “An,” where “Ir” comes from the word “yar,” literally “friendship” or “love,” and “an” comes from “ostan,” or “land of.” Shout-out to our cultural cousins from Ireland, another land of love.
Anyway, where does this love and friendship fit into my Statue-of-Liberty-esque, freedom-loving American psyche? Love requires connection and interdependence, as we found out earlier. And interdependence is, well, kind of un-American. After all, Americans never had a Declaration of Interdependence.
(Laughter)
So my Iranian side begs for me to differ here. As my beloved Sufi uncle Behzad used to say, "Love is the ether the universe swims in." So without love, we literally have nothing.
So to be independent, or to be in love? That is the cross-cultural question for me. And what about the American ideal of continuous improvement? That seems downright productive, if you ask my American side. But again, my Iranian side disagrees. I remember a magnet on my mom's fridge: “If you’re ever going to be happy, you must be happy now.” Hinting at a tiny existential problem: it's always "now."
And of course, we have the Iranian mystic poet Rumi imploring us in ode after ode to get drunk and out of our minds so we can become blissfully present in the wow of now.
So should I work to create a better future, or be drunk and happy now? Another multicultural paradox.
(Laughter)
Or is it? Maybe I've been setting up a false dichotomy all along. There’s no real Iranian or American on this stage, here in me. After all, I'm not some LLM trained in a lab on a discrete set of cultural memes. I am that still magical, mystical, fractal of universal consciousness known as human being. I am a point -- thank you -- a point at the center and circumference of the infinite sphere, as my favorite author, the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges once wrote. And as a magical, mystical life -- an MML -- we humans are uniquely free to embody whatever useful paradoxes we find, whenever it suits us. We can choose to be culturally American or Iranian or both, no matter where we are from, and can even have a favorite author who is neither. And as an MML, we can simultaneously be both independent and free, while deeply connected by love to everyone and everything, always striving for a better future, while also happy together, here, now, wow.
(Cheers and applause)
