Mostafa Mehrayin is a sociologist of culture whose thought gives special attention to “love” as a social and interpersonal phenomenon and in relation to the “Other”. His principal fields of study and teaching are discourse and phenomenology.
In his view, the greatest crisis of our society is not the crisis of despotism but a crisis of love and compassion.

In my view, Mehrayin is one of the most important thinkers in contemporary Iran and perhaps among its most profound. Those who follow my work know that I am not generous in selecting thinkers whom I regard as worthy of sustained attention, and I have never previously used such descriptions for any other contemporary Iranian thinker. Only after listening to dozens of hours of his classes and lectures and reading his written work do I regard this personal judgement not only as warranted, but as necessary in order to invite the younger generation to listen to and study him.

Mehrayin began from sociology, but the range of his study and thought also includes philosophy—especially existential philosophy and phenomenology—as well as the psychoanalytic tradition.
For me, having studied medicine, psychiatry and philosophy, and having in the past year, out of concern for what is happening in Iranian society today, once again put on the clothes of a student in middle age and begun writing my research thesis in a sociology doctorate, the dance of his thought across these three territories of the world of ideas is familiar, deeply attractive and admirable.

If your image of a sociologist of love is that of a mystical thinker pursuing abstract matters, reconsider it. His thought is not only deeply practical and connected to the pains of our society; its internal coherence may also promise influence and durability within the sphere of Iranian thought and the future of this land.

Aristotle describes inaction, or *akrasia* as rendered here, as a lack of will to act despite knowledge of what is right and what ought to be done. Rollo May, like his contemporary Erich Fromm, emphasises the relationship between “will” and the heavy burden of human freedom and develops his idea through the following example.
The catatonic state in severe mental illnesses such as advanced schizophrenia is a condition in which a patient enters absolute immobility. May describes how a catatonic patient may become physically frozen not because of indifference to the world but because of an overwhelming sense of responsibility, awareness of freedom of action and the anxiety produced by it. The person becomes immobile in order to experience less suffering and anxiety.

The point is that the inactivity of a large part of society—the group we often call the grey stratum—has its roots not in lack of awareness, but in a sense of powerlessness and helplessness before the events of life. How, then, can we be freed from this helplessness?

Rollo May’s answer is brilliant.

In his view, when will manifests itself only in negation—for example, when we focus our activism exclusively on protesting against and opposing a political system—after a time our being becomes fused with our protest and with the non-being of what we oppose. Resistance then becomes not a strategy for change but our identity, and the hatred contained within it will defeat our highest ideals. Resistance rooted in love as will, by contrast, will transform our world.