By Alan Hall, originally published
in the Nov. 2010 Socionomist
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the Complete Issue (1.16 MB)
When a researcher recently discovered that the United
States had deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalan men and women
in the 1940s with sexually transmitted diseases, President Obama and
the Secretaries of State and Health promptly apologized for the barbaric
medical experiments.
It’s no surprise that the officials were fast to express
regret. Socionomics has found that major social mood peaks prompt
high-level apologies for ignoble conduct during previous negative
mood periods, and mood is still relatively near a multi-decade peak
(see Figure 1).
Chapter 16 of The Wave Principle of Human Social
Behavior (1999) explained, “Major advances in mood invariably
produce overtures of reconciliation.” In the August 1995 issue of
The Elliott Wave Theorist, Pete Kendall reported:
In bear markets, anger, fear and the urge to destroy overcome
the social conscience. Remorse, on the other hand, is a bull market trait
born of the larger trend toward inclusionist impulses. Historic expressions
of it would be expected to appear at bull market tops, when the inclusionist
mood trend is at its extreme.
Kendall went on to explain that as the 1990s’ ebullient
mood drove stocks to their historic highs, it also created bull markets
in both regret and forgiveness:
The peaking social mood has brought apologies for a host
of transgressions that are decades, generations, and even centuries old
… . A group of ethicists and historians has decided that financial compensation
and a formal government apology is due victims of secret human radiation
experiments conducted in the U.S. during the Cold War … . Southern Baptists,
the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, have asked forgiveness for
defending slavery in the 1800s. (The sect was founded in 1845 in a show
of support for slavery.) The Catholic Church apologized to “every woman”
in the world for centuries of relegation to “the margins of society”; then
it apologized to the Czech Republic for the Catholic church’s role in the
16th Century wars that followed the Protestant Reformation; then it agreed
to join Protestants in ceremonies repenting for the Crusades against Muslims
and Jews 900 years ago!1
In the November 2007 issue of The Elliott Wave
Theorist, socionomist Mark Galasiewski charted historical apologies
and social mood as displayed by the DJIA and commented:
Historical apologies have increased dramatically in the
past 15 years, along with the stock market. The coincidence is not random;
both are driven by the wave of positive social mood that took off in 1982.
Apologies in 1998, 1999 and 2000 made the greatest three-year total within
the topping years, and there was a record one-year spike in 2002, when other
measures of sentiment, such as the number of S&P 500 futures contracts
held by small traders, also made their all-time peaks—see January 2007 EWT.
Since then, however, annual apologies have not kept pace with price, suggesting
that the wave of reconciliation that took off in the early 1990s is almost
exhausted. Once the bear market resumes, expect the public’s willingness
to acknowledge past wrongs to become itself a thing of the past. In its
place will be an impetus to act in ways that will require apologies later.2
A Wellesley College historian unearthed descriptions
of the 1940s Guatemalan campaign from the archives of Dr. John Cutler,
a government researcher who was also involved in the infamous U.S.
Public Health Service (PHS) study in Tuskegee, Alabama.
3 In Tuskegee,
Cutler helped chronicle the progression of late-stage syphilis in
399 black men while withholding treatment.
Both the Tuskegee and Guatemala experiments followed
a socionomic script. The Tuskegee project began at the 1932 low
in social mood, drew scrutiny at the 1966 peak following a whistle-blower
letter by a PHS investigator, and ended in July 1972 just before
another mood and market peak. 4 U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized
for it in 1997 near yet another market peak.5
Now we have learned that Cutler and his PHS team
also went to Guatemala. There, from 1946-1948—during a 22-percent
bear market in the DJIA and shortly after the social mood extreme
that caused World War II—he helped deliberately infect 696 Guatemalan
men and women with syphilis and gonorrhea via both injections and
prostitutes paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The project occurred while
the U.S. conducted the “Nazi Doctors’ Trial” in Nuremberg, Germany,
in which it “tried, convicted and sentenced a score of Nazi doctors
for performing macabre experiments on thousands of Jews during World
War II.”6
The Tuskegee and Guatemala experiments were part
of a wider trend that began at the 1932 low:
While secretly trying to infect people with serious diseases
is abhorrent today, the Guatemalan experiment isn’t the only example
from what [Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes
of Health], called “a dark chapter in the history of medicine.”
Forty similar deliberate-infection studies were conducted in the
United States during that period [1932 to 1972], Collins said.7
For more about the effects of negative social mood
during this era, see A Socionomic Study of Eugenics
in the November 2009 issue of The Socionomist.
The latest mea culpa is not the first time the U.S.
apologized to Guatemala for injuring its citizens during a bear
market. In March 1999, only months before the Grand Supercycle peak
in social mood, Bill Clinton, speaking in Guatemala City, admitted
that the U.S. “was responsible for most of the human rights abuses
committed” during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War in which 200,000
people died.8 The U.S. had sent military advisors into Guatemala
in November 1965, just prior to a Cycle-degree social mood peak.
As the subsequent bear market progressed, death tolls mounted and
the war accelerated to its “defining event,” the burning of the
Spanish Embassy in January 1980, the month of the low in the Dow/Gold
ratio.
Figure 2 shows the monthly DJIA and includes data
from “Institutional Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: a Quantitative
Reflection,” by Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer.9
The research shows that the level of state terror in Guatemala peaked
in 1982, the same year the nation’s army “killed thousands of civilians
in the west of the country and decimated hundreds of indigenous
communities.” Note that the peak in Guatemalan violence coincided
with the end of the 16-year Cycle-degree bear market in the inflation
(PPI)-adjusted DJIA—in keeping with socionomic expectations. For
a detailed review of the forces leading to such conflicts, see Euan
Wilson’s “A Socionomic Review of Civil War,” The Socionomist,
January 2010.
When social mood resumes its descent, the era of
the historic apology will fade. We recommend that you rush any requests.
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Citations
1 Prechter, R. (1995). August. The
Elliott Wave Theorist.
2 Prechter, R. (2007). November. The
Elliott Wave Theorist.
3 Reverby, S. (2010). “Normal exposure”
and inoculation syphilis: a PHS “Tuskegee” doctor in Guatemala,
1946-48. Journal of Policy History. Retrieved from http://www.wellesley.edu/WomenSt/Reverby%20Normal%20Exposure.pdf
4 Research ethics: the tuskegee syphilis
study. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.msu.edu/user/sw/ethics/tuskg.html
5 Gault, C. (1997, May 16). An apology
65 years late. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/may97/tuskegee_5-16.html
6 Valladares, D. (2010, October 12). Guatemala
to investigate human experimentation by U.S. doctors. Inside
Costa Rica. Retrieved from http://www.insidecostarica.com/special_reports/2010/2010-10/guatemala-us.htm
7 Neergaard, L. (2010, October 2). U.S.
syphilis experiments in Guatemala mental hospital in 1940s revealed,
U.S. apologies to nation. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/02/us-syphilis-experiments-i_n_747988.html
8 Kettle, M. (1999, March 12). Clinton
apology to Guatemala. Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/mar/12/jeremylennard.martinkettle
9 Ball, P., Kobrak, P., & Spirer,
H. (1999, March 12). Institutional violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996:
a quantitative reflection. American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS) Science and Human Rights Program ; InternationalCenter
for Human Rights Research. Retrieved from http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/en_qr.pdf doi: ISBN:
0-87168-630-9
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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, politics,
population, 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
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. At no time will
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