 By Alan Hall | Excerpted from the February 2012 Socionomist
Originally published under the title “Touch Displays Society’s Growing Fascination with Patterns of Social Behavior” |
[Ed: Pop culture is reflecting a growing fascination with the patterns of social behavior.
[The Fox television series Touch, for example, which premiered on January 12, 2012, slakes a popular thirst for anticipating the future based on the mathematical patterns displayed in events of the past and present. In this February 2012 report, socionomist Alan Hall provides an explanation for this interest: When social mood is negative, people tend to embrace the idea that cycles of collective behavior exist and that patterns have power over most or all of history.
[Read on for an excerpt of Hall’s article.]
In Touch, Kiefer Sutherland, former tough-guy hero of “24,” plays a man whose highly autistic and mute son, Jake, can predict the future because he sees “patterns, mathematical in design, hidden in plain sight.”
The show’s trailer is replete with images of spirals and growth patterns.1 A few of the narrator’s quotes flirt with Elliott Wave theory:
- “What if our lives are part of a pattern?”
- “The universe is made up of precise ratios and patterns where everything and everyone is connected.”
- A Touch character, an expert on children who have special abilities with numbers, tells Jake’s dad, “Your son sees everything; the past, the present, the future. He sees how it is all connected.”
Part of a Pattern: Touch’s Jake sees all. [Courtesy Fox TV]
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In the remainder of this conside two-page article, author Alan Hall explains why ideas about patterns and cycles of collective behavior are becoming more popular now.
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Most economists, historians and sociologists
presume that events determine society’s mood. But socionomics hypothesizes
the opposite: that social mood regulates the character of social events. The
events of history—such as investment booms and busts, political events,
macroeconomic trends and even peace and war—are the products of a naturally
occurring pattern of social-mood fluctuation. Such events, therefore, are not
randomly distributed, as is commonly believed, but are in fact probabilistically
predictable. Socionomics also posits that the stock market is the best available
meter of a society’s aggregate mood, that news is irrelevant to social
mood, and that financial and economic decision-making are fundamentally different
in that financial decisions are motivated by the herding impulse while economic
choices are guided by supply and demand. For more information about socionomic
theory, see (1) the text, The
Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior © 1999, by Robert Prechter;
(2) the introductory documentary History's
Hidden Engine; (3) the video Toward
a New Science of Social Prediction, Prechter’s 2004 speech before
the London School of Economics in which he presents evidence to support his
socionomic hypothesis; and (4) the Socionomics Institute’s website, www.socionomics.net.
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