2012-06-07

Social mood, pandemics and permanent cultural shifts

One of the big ideas of socionomics is that mood affects events, not the other way around. The arrow of causation runs from mood to events: people are unhappy so they start fights (wars), the economy sinks and stocks plunge. Common wisdom is the opposite: people are unhappy because there is a war, the economy is weak and stocks plunged.

Where does the line end? For example, can birth control be separated from social mood, or is it actually one piece of the larger social mood? Most people believe birth control led to the sexual revolution, not that some type of sexual revolution was inevitable based on previous grand supercycle peaks in social mood.

Most simply, it seems there are a lot of coincidences around changes in social mood and rather than being coincidences, they may in fact be a result of social mood.

To wit: Drug-resistant gonorrhoea has spread across the world, say health officials
"Gonorrhoea is becoming a major public health challenge," said Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, from the WHO's department of reproductive health and research. She said more than 106 million people were newly infected with the disease every year.

"The organism is what we term a superbug – it has developed resistance to virtually every class of antibiotics that exists," she told a briefing in Geneva. "If gonococcal infections become untreatable, the health implications are significant."

If left untreated, gonorrhoea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirths, severe eye infections in babies and infertility in both men and women.

It is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world and is most prevalent in south and south-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of cases is estimated at around 700,000 a year.
If the arrow of causation is running from social mood, sexual attitudes are changing and people aren't becoming more traditional because of drug resistant STDs, drug resistant STDs are allowed to develop because people are becoming more traditional. Society has a limited amount of time and resources to spend on scientific research and when the bulk of the public wants consequence-free or consequence-reduced sex, time and money are spent on it. When they do not, time and money are focused elsewhere.

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