 By Alan Hall, originally published in the July 2011 SocionomistDownload the Complete Issue (1.48 MB) |
Artists take note: The socionomic insight offers you a strategic advantage in the marketplace.
A Very Gloomy Game: Thrones portrays a society that has plummeted into the chasm of deeply dark social mood.
As we showed in both our Beatles report in August 2010 and our Picasso study this April, superb artists can become cultural icons when they “give the public what they want, when they want it” (Robert Prechter, History’s Hidden Engine, 2006). Author George R.R. Martin is on that trajectory today. Martin’s dark and violent medieval epic, A Song of Ice and Fire, has been benefiting from the long-term social mood trend toward the negative.
HBO named its new television adaptation of Martin’s novels Game of Thrones after the first book in his series. The book series launched in 1996, became a niche cult hit and then saw its appeal jump mainstream in the mood decline following the 2000 peak. In a 2005 book review, Time magazine’s Lev Grossman proclaimed George R.R. Martin “The American Tolkien,”2 after John R. R. Tolkien, the English author of the immensely popular fantasy classics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. HBO filmed a Thrones pilot in 2009 but never aired it. HBO corrected its error in March 2010 due to the novels’ rising popularity and committed to produce nine more episodes. In January 2011, Thrones the book ascended to the New York Times bestseller list. In April 2011, the first TV episode drew 8.7 million viewers3; two days later, HBO committed to a second season. Subsequent episodes continue to hit new-season viewership highs. Also in April, Time declared Martin one of the most influential people of 2011.
At first glance, it seems puzzling that such a dark and violent story grew more popular while social mood was rising, but it is important to note that there are qualitative differences between a bull market and a bear-market rally. The social expressions of the latter are noticeably darker. The recovery rally from October 1966–November 1968 is a good example:
When social mood [entered] a major bear trend in 1966, so did ground-breaking horror movies. Night of the Living Dead debuted in 1968, the year after the last of that era’s Disney cartoon classics. It was so influential that it spawned two sequels (both produced during the bear market), several derivations and two books.4
The larger-degree mood trend was waxing negative during the 1968 rally, and this was evident outside the cinema as well; the year is infamous for civil unrest, political violence and wartime atrocity.
In Touch With the Times: Martin’s stories reflect today’s headlines.
Martin’s books now dominate Amazon’s top-ten best-seller lists in the U.S. and U.K., and Google searches for “Game of Thrones” have increased 24,000 percent since May 2010. The HBO series has room to run, as Martin has completed five lengthy novels in the series and is working on two more.
Tolkien was immensely talented, as is Martin. But talent and hard work alone cannot create an enduring cultural icon. To attract and enthrall a vast number of receptive minds, a work of art also must harmonize with the collective mood of society. Tolkien’s and Martin’s epics are cases in point.
According to Pioneering Studies in Socionomics, “Definitive morals and heroes accompany a bull market; blurred morals and mixed heroes accompany a bear market.”5 Tolkien’s masterpiece was almost entirely a bull-market work. It featured clear divisions between good and evil and a virtuous hero on a defining quest accompanied by good-natured hobbits, dwarves and elves. As you might expect, his book trilogy became massively popular near the mid-1960s Cycle-degree social mood peak—within a historic Supercycle bull market. The Lord of the Rings films—the highest grossing motion picture trilogy worldwide of all time—hit theaters in 2001, 2002 and 2003 after eight years in production, the entire process nicely bracketing the 2000 Grand Supercycle peak in social mood. Martin’s epic, in contrast, is a decidedly bear-market work. In fact, it makes Tolkien’s trilogy appear to be a pleasant fairy tale in comparison. It portrays a chaotic and unpredictable political struggle peopled with complex characters whose morals come in all shades of gray. It visits and revisits the grisly details of such themes as betrayal, immolation, hanging, beheading, amputation, poisoning, cannibalism, incest, disinherited bastard children, deformities and prostitution, to name just a few. Thrones garnered widespread acclaim during a Primary-degree advance in the stock market. But critically, the advance has been a bear-market rally that has occurred eleven years into a historic Supercycle-degree bear market.
Looking Further at Thrones
“Everyone but us is the enemy,” declares the aphorism in the advertisement for Game of Thrones on page one, capturing the spirit of opposition, fear and defensiveness that intensifies as society descends to a social mood low. In fact, the line practically quotes the September 1992 issue of The Elliott Wave Theorist:
In other words, at a peak, it’s all “we”; everyone is a potential friend. At a bottom it’s all ‘they’; everyone is a potential enemy.5
This attitude will get much worse, since now is not a social-mood low.
Perhaps most important, Martin paints a picture of a society fragmenting. Norms are normal no more. Even the seasons seem fractal: Winters vary dramatically in length and can last for a decade. Fear of a coming winter rises, yet the negative mood precedes the actual cold. New conflicts break old alliances, ancient grudges rekindle and society grows increasingly polarized as it slides inevitably into war.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, each month brings headlines that seem to echo Thrones. As Time’s Grossman writes, “Martin may write fantasy, but his politic is all real.” In truth, of course, both life and popular art are guided by a single, sure mood. From the sagas of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi, to the enslavement of Bangladeshi workers in Dubai, to Saudi Arabia’s beheading of an Indonesian house maid,7 to the rise of an American-led mercenary army in the Arab world,8 to the ex-Governor of California’s illegitimate child, to the widespread resurgence of spying9—reality today seems to be edging toward Martin’s fantasy.
Could Martin achieve the iconic status of Tolkien? His chances look good. Fans and critics alike agree that his mastery of writing equals Tolkien’s. Time writes, “Martin has an astonishing ability to focus on epic sweep and tiny, touching human drama simultaneously.”2 His sprawling story is well researched, detailed, enthralling and unpredictable.
Critical for socionomists is that his visions reflect the emerging negative social mood trend. Personally, after reading a few chapters of Thrones, it is difficult to completely separate one’s feelings about Martin’s fantasy from one’s feelings about the darker aspects of the ambient social reality.
If EWI is right about the size and duration of the bear market, Martin could very well become iconic. In fact, the 68-year-old author may see it happen during his lifetime.
Alan Hall writes for The Socionomist.
CITATIONS
1Rushfield, R. (2011, June 22). The superhero backlash. The Daily Beast, Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/22/green-lantern-thor-captain-america-x-men-the-superhero-backlash.html
2Grossman, L. (2005, November 13). Books: the american tolkien. Time, Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1129596,00.html
3Griffin, B.L. (2011, May 17). ‘Game of thrones’ ratings climb again. Airlock Alpha, Retrieved from http://www.airlockalpha.com/node/8497/game-of-thrones-ratings-climb-again.html on June 28, 2011.
4Prechter, R. (2003). Pioneering studies in socionomics. Gainesville, Georgia: New Classics Library.
5Prechter, R. (1992, September). The Elliott Wave Theorist.
6Prechter, R. (1999). The wave principle of human social behavior. Gainesville, Georgia: New Classics Library.
7Maid’s beheading in Saudi Arabia halts Indonesian domestic worker scheme. The Telegraph, Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/8593428/Maids-beheading-in-Saudi-Arabia-halts-Indonesian-domestic-worker-scheme.html on June 28, 2011.
8Yet another reason we’re unpopular in the Arab world (2011, May 16). The Atlantic, Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/yet-another-reason-were-unpopular-in-the-arab-world/238917/ on June 28, 2011.
9Spy files. American Civil Liberties Union, Retrieved from http://www.aclu.org/spy-files on June 28, 2011.
10Bowles, S. (2011, July 12). ‘Breaking bad’ shows man at his worst in season 4. USA Today, Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2011-07-12-breaking-bad-season-4_n.htm on July 14, 2011.
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.
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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 hypothesis; 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.
