How Elliott Waves Unfold from Generation to Generation

I would like to present a paragraph from a newspaper column on the aftermath of a football game from sportswriter Mark Bradley that will illustrate my answer. In November 1984, the Florida Gators won the Southeastern Conference football championship for the first time in the fifty-year history of that university’s participation in the SEC. Here is how Bradley described the scene:

And when the scoreboard clock struck zero, five decades of frustration burst into five minutes of glorious joy. Gerald Wilkins, a reserve linebacker, sprinted to midfield, flung himself to the turf and writhed in ecstasy. Elaine Hall, the coach’s wife, leaped to kiss Lomus Brown, the defensive tackle, on the cheek. On the chilled sideline, Alonzo Johnson bent at the waist and clutched his belly with his hands, trying to hold the moment inside. When he straightened up, it was clear he had failed: the rough, tough Florida linebacker was crying, weeping not only for the SEC championship the Gators had won, but for the fifty others they hadn’t. Fittingly, it didn’t come easy. To have waited fifty years and then won easily wouldn’t have purged Gator souls the way Saturday’s victory did.

What on earth was going on here? These players were kids, nineteen or twenty years old. They had not even been alive for most of the previous games. They had been playing football at the university an average of only two years, so were unassociated with 96% of the previous seasons. The people in the stands, many of whom were students, could not have gone to every game for fifty years and cried over the losses. What happened?

Think about Bradley’s phrase, “purged Gator souls.” What had taken place was a cultural transmission of the experiences of the University of Florida’s football team through fifty years to all the associated students, commentators, university officials, coaches, players and fans. Anyone who became involved with the university had been fully indoctrinated with the history of the team, undoubtedly in a matter of months. Each person readily incorporated and assimilated all that information, and his limbic system processed it into a gut emotional feeling. The sum total of those feelings erupted orgasmically at the end of the 1984 season with such energy and emotion that it was as if each participant had personally lost or witnessed the loss of every one of those championships until that year and had experienced the anguish that went with it.

I think that in the same way, transmission of all kinds of cultural experiences and values takes place over the years, over the decades, and even over the centuries. … Social mood and experiences instill memories. That is why waves continue to form at the highest observable degrees. Their antecedents provide the raw material for each new impulse and correction. Waves, then, represent a kind of forward-weighted summation of the human experience.