2014-07-23

Socionomics In One Chart

When you're in a melancholy mood, you listen to melancholy music. In a happy mood, you seek out happy music. As social mood declines, people seek out dark entertainment over light. A variety of shows, going back to the Sopranos at the start of the 2000s, feature either dark content or a villain as hero. More recently, Dexter, Breaking Bad and Hannibal. The mood in shows is also darker, such as True Detective which had the same mood as Hannibal, even though the cops were the main characters instead of the serial killer.

Television Ventures to the Dark Side
A falling transition occurs just after an extreme in positive social mood. The sweet spot for this kind of creativity seems to come after the initial setback of the new bear market bottoms and during the first major stock market rally that follows (wave B in the Elliott wave model). The decline creates a newly introspective frame of mind, and the advance provides the mental energy to put that introspection to work.

This year’s top shows have similarities to popular rock music in 1967-1968. Then, a falling transition produced artistic music, with similarly complex influences and innovative arrangements. Bright “psychedelic” lights accompanied moody lyrics. Bands epitomizing the style included The Beatles, Big Brother, Blood Sweat and Tears, Chicago Transit Authority, Cold Blood, Cream, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana.

This time around, the same type of mood transition is leading to similarly layered TV drama. Today’s heroes are actually antiheroes: conflicted, complex and compromising, yet viewers cheer for them. Women, as predicted in Robert Prechter’s 1985 report Popular Culture and the Stock Market (1985), are taking on strong, central roles of leadership. Villains are becoming sympathetic, to a degree. And moral ambiguity abounds.

When if comes to politics, people seek division rather than unity. The result is this striking chart of how much spouses are angry at their wife or husband due to their allegiance to another political party.


This has generated a lot of explanations, a lot of which you can guess are mainly partisan even if thinly veiled by academic rhetoric. The reality is more simple—negative social mood. There's a clean spike right around 2008, the explanation is too obvious to miss.

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