From Long-Term Waves to Rapid Vibrations:
The Motor of Life?
In Chapter 5, we saw that the Wave Principle operates over decades. In Chapter 9, we read theories
of how ideas, images, hopes and fears propagate through a population. Can we tie these two facts
together?
How is it that social wave structures develop over the very long term? After all, the people who were participating actively in society many decades ago certainly are not doing so today. How can
something that people did years or decades or even centuries ago have anything whatsoever to do
with what is going on in the society now?Before formulating an answer, Iwould like to present a paragraph from a newspaper column on the
aftermath of a football game from sportswriter Mark Bradley that will illustrate my answer. In November
1984, the Florida Gators won the Southeastern Conference football championship for the first time in
the fifty-year history of that university's participation in the SEC .
Here is how Bradley described the scene.And when the scoreboard clock struck zero, five decades of frustration burst into five minutes
of glorious joy. Gerald Wilkins, a reserve linebacker, sprinted to midfield, flung himself to the turf
and writhed in ecstasy. Elaine Hall, the coach's wife, leped to kiss Lomus Brown, the defensive
tackle, on the cheek. On the chilled sideline, Alonzo Johnson bent at the waist and clutched his
belly with his hands, trying to hold the moment inside. When he straightened up, it was clear he
had failed: the rough, tough Florida linebacker was crying, weeping not only for the SEC
championship the Gators had won, but for the fifty others they hadn't. Fittingly, it didn't come easy.
To have waited fifty years and then won easily wouldn't have purged Gator souls the way Saturday's
victory did.What on earth was going on here? These players were kids, nineteen or twenty years old. They
had not even been alive for most of the previous games. They had been playing football at the
university an average of only two years, so were unassociated with 96% of the previous seasons.
The people in the stands, many of whom were students, could not have gone to every game for
fifty years and cried over the losses. What happened?Think about Bradley's phrase, "purged Gator souls." What had taken place was a cultural
transmission of the experiences of the University of Florida's football team through fifty years
to all the associated students, commentators, university officials, coaches, players and fans.
anyone who became involved with the university had been fully indoctrinated with the history
of the team, undoubtedly in a matter of months. Each person readily incorporated and assimilated
all of that information, and his limbic system processed it into a gut emotional feeling. The sum
total of those feelings erupted orgasmically at the end of the 1984 season with such energy and
emotion that it was as if each participant had personally lost or witnessed the loss of everyone
of those championships until that year and had experienced the anguish that went with it.
I think that in the same way, transmission of all kinds of cultural experiences and values takes
place over the years, over the decades, and even over the centuries. Social mood and experience
has a memory. That is why waves continue to form at the highest observable degrees.
Their antecedents provide the raw material for each new impulse and correction. Waves, then,
represent a kind of forward-weigthed summation of the human experience.Related articles:
Socionomics Foundation Wins National Research Competition
The American Political Science Association recently announced that the Socionomics Foundation's questions about social mood were among those chosen from more than 1,100 proposed queries to be included an upcoming research project funded by the National Science Foundation. To read the press release concerning the award, visit www.socionomics.org/press/ANES.
Making History:
An Interview with Film Director David Edmond MooreDavid Edmond Moore of Eyekiss Films in Atlanta recently completed a documentary on socionomics titled History's Hidden Engine, which is freely available for viewing or download at www.socionomics.net/films/history/.
The Science of History and Social Prediction Best-selling author Robert Prechter’s revolutionary two-book set, Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction spells out a historical correlation between patterned shifts in social mood and their most sensitive register, the stock market.It also presents engaging essays -- representing over 20 years worth of research -- correlating social mood trends to music, sports, corporate culture, peace, war and macroeconomic trends.
