"Discernment" is a special kind of wisdom. The Latin root means to separate or distinguish between; in the rare moments when I observe someone who CAN discern an event or situation, that person has my instant admiration.
Put bluntly, it's the ability to separate the facts from the B.S., to distinguish the cause from the effect. The ability to discern begins with your most basic assumptions. For example, do social events drive social mood? Most people say "Yes." It seems as simple as cause & effect -- "Bad news drives down consumer confidence," for instance.
But, what if the truth is the reverse, as in "Falling consumer confidence creates a thirst for bad news"? What if social mood is the cause and social events are the effect?
Those are huge "What ifs." They deserve serious thought. Imagine how much more discerning you could be if mood really is the cause, and events really are the effect. It's a radically different way of seeing the world. It presents a lot of big possibilities -- such as understanding that if there's a big shift in social mood, a big shift in social events will follow.
You could take advantage of changes no one else sees coming. And that's what socionomics is all about -- preparing to take advantage of changes no one else sees coming.
Yes, huge changes are happening already. And they are drastic in ways the overused political slogans never expected. Yet if anything, the political talk you now hear about "change" and the "public mood" are in fact pages from our playbook.
Let's be specific.
Public mood as a front-and-center topic is very recent. While the "hemline indicator" does date from the 1920s, it was considered Wall Street lore for decades. It wasn't until September 1985 that a national audience could finally read a full account of social mood as the engine of behavior. It appeared as the cover article in Barron's magazine, titled "Elvis, Frankenstein and Andy Warhol." It said:
The trend in stock prices is a reflection of popular moods within the investment community, and by extension, within society at large....Trends in music, movies, fashion, literature, television, popular philosophy, sports, dance, automobile style, mores, sexual identity, family life, campus activities, politics and poetry, all reflect the prevailing mood of society.
Robert Prechter was the author, and his analysis generated a lot of "buzz." A handful of academics were also studying investor psychology, in the field of behavioral finance. Yale economist Robert Shiller said this 1990:
Investing in speculative assets is a social activity…. It is thus plausible that investors' behavior (and hence prices of speculative assets) would be influenced by social mood. Attitudes or fashions seem to fluctuate in many other popular topics of conversation, such as food, clothing, health, or politics.
Other economists embraced behavioral finance, including Daniel Kahneman, who received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
There's more to this story; suffice it to say, Bob offered unique insights in describing social mood as a fundamental cause of social action. He's been writing about it virtually every month for three decades.
Now Bob believes the time has come to take the next big step, and that is where The Socionomist comes in. Instead of being "swept along" by social trends, you can anticipate them. You can indeed be prepared take advantage of the changes no one else sees coming -- and the trend changes range from politics to religion, mergers to marketing, fashion to medicine to security and beyond.