Long-Term Pulsations in Social Behavior
Discussion
CARLOS A. MALLMANN and GUILLERMO A. LEMARCHAND:
“Intuitively it is rather obvious that the appearance of these long-term patterns of social behavior are of an interactive nature.
As we show later, there is a large set of empirical work that shows a long-wave pattern in different indicators that are exogenous to the rules that economists postulate that govern the economy. We consider that these non-economical long-wave patterns are indirect evidence of the moods of social motivational concerns of different societies.
Societies are evolving systems which have their own holistic processes and their component interacting subsystems such as, for example, the political and economical subsystems. It is at the holistic level of societies where self-organizing temporal and spatial patterns emerge which have manifestations in all of its subsystems. Our concep- tual framework refers to the long-term billow-like dynamic processes at the holistic level of societies and to their manifestations in its subsystems.
For De Greene, this sort of evolving macro-psychological system or order parameter expresses the origin, growth, diffusion, saturation, exhaustion, and decline of collective ideas in diverse domains, namely: political, military, religious, scientific, technological, economic, social, artistic, etc.
We could find in these ideas the roots that will allow us to develop a theory capable of connecting the individua lpsycho-social-motivational rhythms with the collective ones.
The individual members of the society contribute through their cultural and economical activities to the generation of a general ‘‘field’’ of societies with cultural, political, religious, social, and economic components. This collective field determines the socio-political atmosphere and the cultural and economic standard of the society and may be considered as an order parameter of the system characterizing the ‘‘rhythm’’ in which the society exists.
Reversely, the collective field strongly influences the attitudes and rhythms of individuals in the society by orienting their motivations, activities, by activating or de-activating their latent positive and negative qualities and capabilities, and by extending or narrowing their scope of thinking and action. One of the features of this sort of cyclic coupling of causes and effects is that self-accelerating as well as self-saturating processes result and can be measured. Our mathematical model explains the reasons for the oscillatory behavior.”