February 2013

6 Swearing on Twitter predicts Iranian protests

9 Book Review: Mood and Markets, by Peter Atwater

A GAtherinG

STORM

Could We ReallyBe Headed There Again?

The Socionomist A monthly publication designed to help readers understand and prepare for major changes in social mood

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SOCIONOMICSINSTITUTE

The Socionomist—February 2013

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A Gathering StormAided by Extreme Negative Mood, Political Developments in Greece

Bear a Striking Resemblance to Those in Germany Before World War IIBy Chuck Thompson

Nazi salutes.Praise for Adolf Hitler.Swastika-like banners.

A rising political party known as Golden Dawn is resurrecting such practices, all hallmarks of Hit-ler’s Third Reich, in modern-day Greece, which has suffered a dramatic, five-year stock market decline.

The 1989 Elliott Wave Theorist special report noted that bear markets are fertile ground for political shifts away from indi-vidual liberty:

In the formalization of the negative mood within a bear market, one or more of the new parties is likely to represent ideals inimical to individual liberty (such as socialist, racist, fascist or fundamentalist). In some cases, such as Russia in the ’teens, Germany in the ’thirties, China in the late ’forties, Cambodia in the ’seventies, and Iran in the late ’seventies, such parties have achieved power.

Likewise, Golden Dawn is riding a wave of extreme negative mood, and its tactics are reminiscent of those employed by Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party.

Golden Dawn capitalizes on fear and anger. It pro-motes xenophobia. And, like Hitler’s worker’s party, it targets—and seems to appeal to—the young.

Golden Dawn Exploits Fear and Anger, Which Are Emotions Connected to Negative Mood

From 1927 to 1932, Germany suffered a disastrous stock market decline, falling 73% over five years (see Figure 1). Six million people were unemployed, and the government was weak. Germany suffered outside financial pressure in the form of reparations required by the Versailles Treaty and consequences of its in-volvement in World War I.1

Adolf Hitler argued that the German government betrayed its people by signing the Versailles Treaty.2 He promised that if he were elected, the nation would stop paying the reparations.3 The position appealed to the German people’s anger and helped the Nazi leader become chancellor in January 1933.

Modern-day Greece has experienced an even larg-er five-year decline than 1920s-1930s Germany did, falling 88% since 2007, and the country has suffered a debt crisis. As a condition for bailouts aimed at help-ing Greece recover, the European Union has imposed tough austerity measures. The Greek government has implemented the measures. Meanwhile, the deepening negative social mood has fueled protests against the measures.

Forget the Payments: Nikolaos Michaloliakos, head of the Golden Dawn party, has called for Greece to renege on its debt and disregard its bailout commitments.

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Nikos Zydakis, editor of the daily newspaper Kathi-merini, says Greece is in an economic depression like that experienced by Germany in the 1930s.4 More than 90% of Greek households have experi-enced income reductions, with the average drop 38%. Unem-ployment in Greece now stands at a record 26.8% and is nearly 60% among Greece’s young adults. In November the Greek Parliament imposed tax hikes and spending cuts demanded by creditors. Supermarket sales in the country declined by 500 million euros ($669 million) last year,5 and people are burn-ing wood because the price of electricity has risen and taxes on heating oil have increased.6

Zydakis says the nation is “cracking. When that happens, all the barriers to extremism fall.”4

Like the Nazi Party a cen-tury ago, Golden Dawn is push-ing for Greece to cease its for-eign payments—in this case, to renege on its debt and its bail-out commitments. As Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Mich-aloliakos, has said, his party will “fight to free Greece from the global loan sharks.” And he has condemned the Greek “traitors” whom he says are responsible for his nation’s financial woes.7

The party has also prom-ised to cancel household debt for the unemployed and low-wage earners. Such posi-tions have worked in Golden Dawn’s favor. EurActiv.com says the party has “manipu-lated a weak Greek state and disastrous austerity manage-ment by European bureaucrats to become, according to recent polls, the third most popular political party in the country.”8 Figure 1

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After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi propaganda stressed to both civilians at home and to soldiers, police officers, and non-German auxiliaries serving in occupied territory themes linking Soviet Communism to European Jewry, presenting Germa-ny as the defender of “Western” culture against the “Judeo-Bolshevik threat,” and painting an apocalyp-tic picture of what would happen if the Soviets won the war.10

Xenophobia is a Key to Golden Dawn’s PropagandaJust as it capitalized on anger over reparations,

Germany’s Nazi Party also used fear of outsiders to its advantage. Its core philosophies included racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, all of which were espoused in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. The Nazis also published the fiercely anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer. The US Holocaust Memo-rial Museum writes:

Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric appealed to despondent Germans who were desperate for a better life. And, as Figure 1 shows, the German stock market rallied strongly after Hitler came to power in 1933.

However, instead of experiencing a flowering culture and prosperity, Germany’s fascist, authori-tarian regime plunged the nation into a long war. In the November 1999 issue of The Elliott Wave Theo-rist, Robert Prechter noted that,

… major wars virtually always erupt during or immediately following “C” waves of Elliott wave corrections above Cycle degree. The Revolution-ary War took place during wave (c) of the Grand Supercycle bear market from 1720 to 1784. The Civil War broke out shortly after the end of wave c of the Supercycle bear market from 1835 to 1859. World War II started during wave c of the Supercycle bear market (in inflation-adjusted terms) from 1929 to 1949. In every case, a rising social mood eventually brings an end to the war.

The policies of Hitler’s regime reflected and then rigidly imposed philosophies espoused during the bear market. In effect, the regime successfully insti-tutionalized the extreme negative mood that was in play when Hitler came to power. One result was the dramatic growth of the Hitler Youth even during the positive mood period, with membership rising from 2.3 million in 1933 to 7.7 million in 1939,9 the year that participation in the organization became man-datory. World War II began in 1939, six years into the German stock market rally.

In his 1985 report, Popular Culture and the Stock Market, Prechter noted that if negative mood takes

root throughout much of a society and reaches ex-treme proportions, society, or a body representing it, often undertakes collective action to institutional-ize existing policies, which then become more en-trenched during the positive mood period that follows. In some cases, mood extremes allow actions that im-pose structural rigidity on the society. And, because it takes time to mobilize machinery and play out the consequences of the actions taken at the mass mood extreme, the effects of this institutionalization may continue to be felt for a long time. Prechter wrote:

As an example, the collective mood in Germany in 1933 was so negative that its expression re-sulted in the election of Adolf Hitler. Although the underlying public mood was changing toward the less negative from that date forward, the consequences of that popular action took twelve years to play out because the representatives of the negative popular mood gained such great political power. The collective mood in the Unit-ed States also reached a negative extreme in 1933, the year the depression hit its depths. As one manifestation, enrollment in and disruptive activity by the Communist Party in the United States also peaked in the 1930’s. In contrast to the German experience, however, those forces never achieved political control, so the improv-ing mood was allowed to express itself in the years which followed.

Alan Hall further developed this idea in his Socionomic Nolan Chart. For details, see the two-part study at http://my.elliottwave.com/Publications/SOC/2010/1004/1004SOC.pdf

For Germans, the Rising DAX Became a Missed Opportunity

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Studies says Golden Dawn blames unauthorized immi-grants for stealing jobs from Greek citizens. Intensely negative social mood has resulted in escalating suspi-cion, fear, hatred and violence toward immigrants:

Golden Dawn “citizen groups,” created to engage “pure” Greeks in the protection of Greek citizens from crimes committed by immigrants, have been ac-cused of chasing, stabbing, and seriously injuring im-migrants and anyone who looks foreign or non-Greek … . Golden Dawn members have also been accused of breaking the windows of houses or shops owned by immigrants, and beating them … . In the summer of 2012, Golden Dawn members, dressed in black T-shirts and holding Greek flags, reportedly visited an open-air market and smashed every stall belonging to persons they believed to be foreigners … .16

Frontex, an agency that monitors the EU’s external borders, says more than 55,000 illegal immigrants were detected in Greece’s Evros border region in 2011—a 17% increase compared to 2010.17 Golden Dawn has “proposed the construction of minefields between Tur-key and Greece to prevent further unauthorized migra-tion into the country.”16 Such views are unquestionably extreme. Yet, they are gaining traction in Greece—be-cause of the nation’s extreme negative mood.

Similar to the Nazis a century ago, Golden Dawn began running candidates long before the nation’s mood turned negative—in Greece’s case, all the way back to June 1994. Also as with the Nazis, Golden Dawn achieved success only after the nation’s stock market had crashed—in this case in November 2010,

Hitler’s Nazi party promoted a “na-tional community” to Germans. But not everyone was welcome in this new society:

Exploiting pre-existing images and stereotypes, Nazi propagandists por-trayed Jews as an “alien race” that fed off the host nation, poisoned its cul-ture, seized its economy, and enslaved its workers and farmers.11

At first, the Nazi Party had only lim-ited success. It won just 3% of the vote in December 1924, when mood was waxing positive and the German stock market was rising. But in November 1932, after the market’s huge 73% decline and in the midst of the Great Depression, Hitler’s Nazi Party suddenly captured 33% of the vote—more than any other party.1 That year, a Ham-burg schoolteacher named Louis Solmitz wrote about Hitler, “How many look to him with touching faith as their helper, their savior, their deliverer from unbear-able distress.”12

After he became Germany’s chancellor, Hitler be-gan a series of legal actions that stripped Jews of their rights. By 1938, Jews in Germany could no longer vote and had to carry identification cards.13 That same year, German Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth instigated the “Night of Broken Glass,” in which synagogues and Jewish-owned homes and businesses were plundered and destroyed. Thirty-thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and in the next seven years, millions more would suffer the same fate.14

Last year in Greece, Artemis Matthaiopoulos was among the first-ever Golden Dawn party members to join the nation’s parliament. Matthaiopoulos is the former bass player for the punk band Pogrom, whose songs include “Auschwitz.” The tune was named for the former prison camp where the Nazis killed an esti-mated one million Jews.

The band’s most popular song is “Speak Greek or Die,” an anti-immigrant diatribe that says:

You come to our country, you don’t have any work;You’re starving, you bums, and you eat children;You speak Russian, you speak Albanian, but now you will speak Greek.Speak Greek or die, speak Greek or die.15

Greece has become the host country for a huge number of illegal aliens. The Center for Migration

War on Immigrants: These men were photographed during a June 2012 press conference organized by the United Against Racism and Fascist Violence Movement. They said their wounds were the result of an attack by members of Golden Dawn.

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a few weeks before Hitler came to power, the organization had more than 107,000 members. Membership soared afterward, reaching 2.3 mil-lion by the end of 1933.19

The Hitler Youth focused on two age groups: 10-14 and 14-18.21 In 1938, Hitler de-scribed what he viewed as the benefits of reach-ing young Germans at such early ages:

These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years … And even if they are still not complete National Social-ists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months … And whatever class-consciousness or social status might still be left … the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that.20

The Jewish Virtual Library notes that once Germany was invaded during the war, “mem-bers of the [Hitler Youth] were taken into the army at ever younger ages, and during the Battle

of Berlin in 1945, they were a major part of the Ger-man defenses.”21

Like the Nazi Party, Golden Dawn goes to great lengths to appeal to youth. On February 2, the British newspaper The Independent said Golden Dawn was us-ing social media, the Internet and youth clubs to reach “patriotic youths as they watch their country’s sover-eignty being eroded by foreign creditors.” The paper interviewed a number of young Golden Dawn support-ers, including a 16-year-old boy who said that he and others like him fear they won’t be able to find jobs “because of all those illegal immigrants.” A 16-year-old girl related that an African immigrant had robbed her cousin. The paper said she was attracted to Golden Dawn because of its “Zorro-style savior tactics,” refer-ring to the masked hero who defends fellow citizens against villains and oppressive public officials.22 Last year, another British newspaper, The Guardian, wrote about a 29-year-old unemployed laborer who voted for Golden Dawn candidates because “they help deal with the immigrants.”4

According to The Independent, Golden Dawn’s ef-forts to reach the young are paying off:

Grassroots mobilization is its main recruitment tech-nique, and the party is actively involved in neighbor-hood initiatives, especially in areas that saw a rise of

after a 71% plunge. Party leader Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council. Then in 2012, with social mood still in a negative trend, Golden Dawn won 6.9% of the national vote and 18 seats in the Greek Parliament.16

That same year, an emboldened Michaloliakos de-nied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps during World War II. “There were no ovens, no gas cham-bers, it’s a lie,” he said. “Auschwitz, what Auschwitz?”18

Golden Dawn is Making Strides Among the YoungOne of Hitler’s key objectives was to indoctrinate

the nation’s youth in Nazi philosophies. In 1920 he au-thorized the formation of a Nazi Party youth league.19

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum says the Nazi Party considered youth a “special audience” for its propaganda messages:

These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking and hopeful. Millions of German young peo-ple were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities.20

In its infancy, the Hitler Youth’s reach was limited to Munich, and in 1923 it had just over 1,000 mem-bers. In 1925, membership totaled 5,000, and five years later it was 25,000. But by the end of 1932, just

Winning the Hearts of Youth: Golden Dawn has mounted a tireless and successful campaign to reach young people like this supporter, who is attending a pre-election rally in Athens.

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er’s rise to power came as a surprise to Ernst Hess, his former commander in World War I, and other mem-bers of his regiment:

[Hess] would often relate to the surprise expressed by Hitler’s former comrades when they heard that the maverick politician had been in their ranks. “What, Hitler? He was in our unit? We never even noticed him.” Hess then used to explain that Hitler had had no friends within the regiment, never said a word to anyone and had been “an absolute cipher.”23

Similarly, The Center for Migration Studies ex-presses surprise that Greece is now embracing a par-ty such as Golden Dawn. The Center points out that Greece fought against Germany and Italy in World War II, suffered its own fascist military junta (1967-74) and has a long history of emigration to Germany, the Americas and Australia.16 Furthermore, in 2000 Greece joined the 26-nation Schengen Area, where there are common rules on asylum and internal bor-ders are abolished, allowing for passport-free move-ment. Such a set of circumstances would not seem to favor the party’s rise, the Center points out.

The success of Golden Dawn’s effort to persuade a growing number of Greeks to adopt its extreme phi-losophies will depend on the continuation or worsen-ing of Greece’s current mood picture. Mood will also determine whether Greece’s government can carry out its plan to solve the nation’s debt crisis, main-tain order and avoid losing its power to parties at the fringes of the political spectrum.

Citations on Page 11

crime and strong influx of migrants. … Graffiti of Greek flags, nationalist slogans, and signs that bear a resemblance to swastikas have started appearing around schools. … The widespread anger that Greeks have experienced since the beginning of the economic crisis has been channeled to children and is shaping their psyche, experts say. Child psychologist Amalia Louizou explains that in such an environment, chil-dren are the easiest recipients of extremist messages.22

ConclusionIn Chapter 14 of The Wave Principle of Human

Social Behavior, Prechter provided a list of polari-ties that are common to negatively trending mood. Many of these polarities, including exclusion, anger, fear, protectionism and a desire to separate from oth-ers, were evident in Germany before Hitler came to power, and they are evident in Greece today. And just as the rhetoric of the Nazi Party accommodated these expressions in Germany in the 1930s, the rhetoric of Golden Dawn is doing so in Greece now.

Socionomics teaches that political extremists come to power near major market bottoms because the bottoms mark extremes in negative social mood. This is when “perpetrators are the most angry and dis-satisfied and potential defenders are the most preoccu-pied,” as Pete Kendall wrote in the March 1995 issue of The Elliott Wave Theorist. Thus, “an angry German electorate was disposed to empower an angry, vindic-tive leader,” according to the April 2005 issue of The European Financial Forecast. “If Hitler had never been born, another would have been chosen.”

Mood, not a stellar record of performance, was the engine that drove Hitler’s success. The Nazi lead-

When Emotions Ran High:Study Finds that Twitter Swearing

Predicted Iranian ProtestsBy Euan Wilson

Last year, The RAND Corporation released a report on Iran’s Green Revolution and its relationship to messages on Twitter. Their fascinating finding: “Surprisingly, [Iranian] people’s use of swear words on Twitter tracked more closely than any other indicator did with events and protests on the

ground, and it did the best job of forecasting when protests would occur” (italics added).

News coverage, protests, and shifting public favor of one candidate or another all performed less well at predicting protests, according to the RAND study.

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RAND’s report, “Using Social Media to Gauge Iranian Public Opinion and Mood After the 2009 Election,” was authored by Sara Beth Elson, Douglas Yeung, Parisa Roshan, S.R. Bohandy and Alireza Nader. The authors used “Linguistic Inquiry and Wordcount,” (LIWC, pronounced “Luke”) to examine language use in Iranian tweets. They looked at emotion-laden words, such as swearing, anxiety words and positive-emotion words. The authors then charted each of these expressions and compared them with major events in Iran in the months following the June 2009 election. They found that the incidence of swearing did indeed predict protests in the country.

It is an intriguing result, but is it socionomic? To find out, we com-pared the authors’ swearing graph to the Iranian stock market. We ob-serve that negatively trending mood predates both the swearing increas-es and the protests that followed (see Figure 1).

For instance, consider July 30, 2009. On that day, the Iranian government announced plans to crack down on mourners protesting the violent death of a protestor. Despite the government action, swearing continued to decline through the immediate period. Why? Because Iranian mood, as illustrated by Iran’s stock

Social media have developed into an impor-tant communications mechanism. News media regularly cite trending topics on Twitter. Data miners use Facebook posts to create maps on everything from server cluster failures to NFL playoff team preferences. And social media, par-ticularly Twitter and Facebook, played critical or-ganizational roles in such recent events as the Arab Spring, protests in Russia and Iran’s bitterly contested June 12, 2009 presidential election.

What Social Media Means to Social MoodBut as we reported in the January 2011 issue

of The Socionomist, social media are also emerg-ing as a critical metric of collective emotions (and to a degree, social mood).

Because mood influences the expression of emotion, trends in emotional expression can at times serve as corroborating sociometers, giv-ing social scientists, governments and individu-als a window into what social events may lie just ahead.

Figure 1

market, was trending positively. A similar situation occurred around October 7. A huge

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Maintaining the anonymity of protesters was a major concern during Iran’s Green Revolution. Many protestors took advantage of the fact that Twitter can be used without a fixed Internet con-nection. A prepaid phone can be used to send a text message to a Twitter account, which then posts the tweet anonymously.

Many sympathizers around the world rushed to help protect the identities of Iranians tweet-ing about the protests on the Internet. A global request to change one’s Twitter location and timestamp to Tehran trended strongly at the start of the protests in June 2009. The effect, in the RAND Report’s words, “[multiplied] the number of Twitter users who appeared to be in Iran, [and] these appeals helped protect those Iranian users

Is Social Mood Transmitted Across the World?who actually were in the country by making it far more difficult for state operatives to seek out and detain individuals tweeting against the establish-ment.”

The RAND study by necessity included mes-sages posted by the non-Iran-based Tweeters, yet significant inflation of the database did not undercut the metric’s predictive capability. We don’t know which Twitter users changed their location and timestamps: libertarian activists, expat-Iranians or everyday sympathizers. One thing is certain: their common attribute was an interest in and desire to contribute to events in Iran. This is important, because it suggests that proximity may not be a critical determinant of so-cial mood transmission.

decline in swearing occurred despite an unprecedented crackdown on protests. Again, throughout that period, Iranian social mood was on the rise.

Also consider the weeks of October 18-24 and November 15-21. During those periods, rates of swearing hit their study lows. Note that these two periods came on either side of the highest point in Iranian stock prices for the entire nine-month span. Now consider the end of the chart, here in late February: Swearing is again on the decline, and mood, seen through stock prices, is simultaneously reaching its highest point in over three months. Finally, consider the peaks in swearing. All occurred at lows in the market, indicating that mood was predominantly negative.

Why is this happening? Socionomic theory posits that increasingly negative social mood impels feelings of fear, anger, sadness and frustration. Swearing, in the aggregate, is an emotional response to those feelings. It is a conscious attempt to alleviate the uncomfortable emotions produced by negative, unconscious social mood.

A Socionomic Hypothesis and Closing ThoughtsThe story in the above sidebar suggests, at least

partially, that mood among Iran’s Green Revolution sympathizers was mirroring that of Tehran. Despite the fact that additional tweeters were posing as Iranians, the peaks and nadirs in aggregate swearing coincided with the Iranian markets. Does this mean that people watching and participating in the Iranian Twitter efforts from afar reflected Iranian social mood via their profane tweets? Maybe.

In the instance of Twitter users, the joining of a cause or group is an easy proposition. There is a group for everyone on Twitter. There is also a readiness in groups to accept newcomers, and from there, herding takes over.

These findings add further weight to the emerging conclusion amongst some members of academia that Twitter can be used to track the aggregate emotional state of societies. The findings also lend yet more support for the idea that trends in emotional expression can serve as sociometers.

This study raises another interesting question: Is geography a boundary for social mood in the electronic age? At least in this particular case, the answer is no.

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Book Review:Peter Atwater’s Moods and MarketsBy Euan Wilson

At the heart of Peter Atwater’s Moods and Markets, a 2012 book exploring socionomic theory, is the new idea of Horizon Preference.

Atwater explains: “It is as if our minds have been fitted with variable lens goggles that automatically manage our peripheral vision in three dimensions: a physical horizon, a time horizon, and a relationship horizon, where our vision in all three dimensions is based on our level of confidence. … Where we are and how we see and deal with the world around us is based on our mood along a continuum from ‘me, here, now’ to ‘us, everywhere, forever.’”

Essentially, at lows in social mood, people’s worldviews narrow. Perspectives become focused on immediate, individual survival. But as social mood trends more positively and the urgency of survival fades, worldviews become inclusionary and draw in more people, places and cooperative plans for the future.

Horizon Preference is an interesting new way to visualize what people are feeling and how they

relate to society. Optimism and pessimism offer clues about the status of social mood and thus the markets as well. From there, Atwater says, our awareness can help inform sound investment decisions.

Where social mood is and how we perceive it through our Horizon Preference is important, says Atwater, because opportunity is everywhere. In

the “us, everywhere, forever” times, business is all about collaboration, expansion, and service. Growth is easy and expected, and business owners and investors do well to take advantage. And during the “me, here, now” moments, business ideas are poised to thrive if they address those negative-mood-driven needs. This is a classic socionomic point, one Prechter frequently brings up: You can’t do anything about the direction of social mood, but you can make decisions to weather or take advantage of its changes. Atwater’s later chapters outline just how you can do this.

Atwater also discusses other classic socionomic points through the lens of the Horizon Preference idea. He provides some fresh takes on market peaks and bubbles, bottoming indexes, higher education, housing, corporate accounting and

more. His descriptions of the phases of a bottoming market are particularly interesting; you’ll definitely want to know the difference between the hoarding phase and the sacrifice phase, for example. Both are decidedly negative but differ

dramatically in timing and result. With insights such as these, Atwater has added to the utility of socionomic theory.

We recommend Moods and Markets as a welcome addition to the burgeoning body of socionomic literature. To order the book, visit www.elliottwave.com/wave/Peter-Atwater-Moods-and-Markets.

Peter Atwater

Where social mood is and how we perceive it through our Horizon Preference is critically important, Atwater writes, because opportunity is everywhere.

The Socionomist—February 2013

The Socionomist is designed to help readers understand and anticipate waves of social mood. We also present the latest essays in the field of socionomics, the study of social mood; we anticipate that many of the hypotheses will be subjected to scientific testing in future scholarly studies.

The Socionomist is published by the Socionomics Institute, Robert R. Prechter, Jr., president; Mark Almand, director. Alan Hall, Ben Hall, Matt Lampert and Euan Wilson contribute to The Socionomist. Chuck Thompson, editor.

We are always interested in guest submissions. Please email manuscripts and proposals to Chuck Thompson via institute@socionomics.net. Mailing address: P.O. Box 1618, Gainesville, Georgia, 30503, U.S.A. Phone: 770-536-0309.

All contents copyright © 2013 Socionomics Institute. All rights reserved. Feel free to quote, cite or review, giving full credit. Typos and other such errors may be corrected after initial posting.

For subscription matters, contact Customer Service: Call 770-536-0309 (internationally) or 800-336-1618 (within the U.S.).

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For our latest offerings: Visit our website, www.socionomics.net, listing BOOKS, DVDs and more.

Correspondence is welcome, but volume of mail often precludes a reply. Whether it is a general inquiry, socionomics commentary or a research idea, you can email us at institute@socionomics.net.

Most economists, historians and sociologists presume that events determine society’s mood. But socionomics hypothesizes the opposite: that social mood determines 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 © 2011, 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 hy-pothesis; and (4) the Socionomics Institute’s website, www.socionomics.net. At no time will the Socionomics Institute make specific recommendations about a course of action for any specific person, and at no time may a reader, caller or viewer be justified in inferring that any such advice is intended.

A Rare Moment in History:You Can Be Present at the Creation

Scientists and academic researchers are in the early days of a transformation in the accepted understanding of human behavior.

Driving the change are big data, social media, stagger-ing computer power and studies in fields such as neurol-ogy, behavioral finance and psychology.

Yet more than any other cause, the most important factor of this transformation actually amounts to what has been missing over the past 15 or so years—a satisfying, elegant theory that explains non-linear collective behavior.

Meet socionomics. More than any other line of in-quiry, the study of social mood holds the promise of an elegant solution that the world has until now been without.

Have we answered all the questions? No, but again—these are the early days. As with groundbreaking disci-plines of the past, socionomics today is a train that is just pulling out of the station.

Put simply: This is one of those rare moments in his-tory when you can be “Present at the Creation.” You can hear, first-hand, from the scholars and researchers doing the transformational work and from the professionals and prac-titioners who are putting the theory into action right now.

Attend The 2013 Social Mood Conference. You’ll join a gathering of minds unlike any other. From the Emmy Award-winning producer and CEO of Minyanville.com to the man who is responsible for Gallup’s groundbreaking World Poll, this year’s lineup features many of the bright-est luminaries in finance and behavioral research.

Speakers will include Philip Z. Maymin, assistant pro-fessor of finance and risk engineering at NYU-Polytech-nic Institute; Michelle Baddeley, behavioral economist at Gonville and Caius College and the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge; and Tobias Preis, associate pro-fessor of behavioral science and finance at Warwick Busi-ness School.

And then there’s Robert Prechter, who introduced so-cionomic theory and will be on hand throughout.

Don’t miss the chance to take advantage of this histor-ic opportunity. Don’t be left behind. To reserve your seat, visit www.socialmoodconference.com.

Meet the Founder: Robert Prechter speaks to attendees at last year’s Social Mood Conference. Prechter will speak and will also be present throughout the 2013 conference, set for April 13 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

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CITATIONS

A GATHERING STORM?

1Hitler comes to power. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/out-reach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007671

2Beer Hall Putsch (Munich Putsch). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007884

3Reparations: Nazi Germany. Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERreparations.htm

4Henley, J., & Davies, L. (2012, June 18). Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party maintains share of vote. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/18/greece-far-right-golden-dawn

5Dabilis, A. (2013, February 7). Austerity cuts Greek household income 38%. Greek Reporter. Retrieved from http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/02/07/austerity-cuts-greek-household-income-38/

6Greece: Pictures of Greeks scrambling for food sparks fresh anger over austerity measures (2013, February 6). The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/02/06/pictures-of-greeks-scrambling-for-food-hunger_n_2630617.html

7Qena, N. (2012, May 6). Greece Elections 2012: Nikolaos Michaloliakos, extreme right leader, warns Greek ‘trai-tors.’ The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/06/greece-elections-2012-nik_n_1490883.html

8Mokhtar, H. (2013, February 5). Rise of Golden Dawn: A presage of doom? EurActiv. Retrieved from http://www.euractiv.com/general/rise-golden-dawn-presage-doom-analysis-517582

9Nazi conspiracy and aggression, Volume 1 and Chapter VII, Means used by the Nazi conspirators in gaining control of the German state (part 46 of 55). The Nizkor Project. Retrieved from http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-01/nca-01-07-means-46.html

10Nazi propaganda. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005202

11Defining the enemy. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007819

12Making a leader. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007817

13Kristallnacht: Background and overview. Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from http://www.jewishvirtualli-brary.org/jsource/Holocaust/kristallnacht.html

14Kristallnacht: A nationwide pogrom, November 9-10, 1938. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201

15Greece welcomes newest mp: A ‘Nazi punk’ musician (2012, July 26). Ynet News. Retrieved from http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4260704,00.html

16Greece’s ‘Golden Dawn’ and the anti-immigrant platform (2013, February 4). Center for Migration Studies. Retrieved from http://cmsny.org/2013/02/04/greeces-golden-dawn-and-the-anti-immigrant-platform/

17Q&A: Schengen Agreement (2012, March 12). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13194723

18Neo-Nazi chief denies gas chambers existed (2012, May 15). IOL News. Retrieved from http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/neo-nazi-chief-denies-gas-chambers-existed-1.1297376

19The Hitler Youth. Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team. Retrieved from http://www.holocaus-tresearchproject.org/holoprelude/hitleryouth.html

20Indoctrinating youth. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007820

21Hitler Youth. Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitleryouth.html

22Savaricas, N. (2013, February 2). Greece’s neo-fascists are on the rise … and now they’re going into schools: How Golden Dawn is nurturing the next generation. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.indepen-dent.co.uk/news/world/europe/greeces-neofascists-are-on-the-rise-and-now-theyre-going-into-schools-how-golden-dawn-is-nurturing-the-next-genera-tion-8477997.html

23Mauss, S. (2012, July 4). Hitler’s Jewish commander and victim. Jewish Voice From Germany. Retrieved from http://jewish-voice-from-germany.de/cms/hitlers-jew-ish-commander-and-victim/