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Most accounts attribute the anger to the Pope’s quotation critical of Mohammed. But as the pope’s people are at pains to point out, he was only repeating what Manuel II said a several hundred years ago. If they needed a reason to be mad, they could point out that in the same speech in which Benedict held up Christianity as the "profound encounter of faith and reason" he quoted Manual saying, “God is not pleased by blood -- and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.”  But none of the  accounts that we read traced the hostile reaction to this slap at the rationality of Islam. As we explained a little over a year ago when the reputed desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantanamo Bay touched off a similar inferno (see Additional References below), in a bear market, reason gets devalued. At this point, anger is pitted directly against it.  Of course, as the market chugged higher in late 2005 and early 2006, furors over the Koran desecration and the depiction of Mohammed in an editorial cartoon blew over. It could happen again, but it probably won’t if the market falls hard. The pope is scheduled to travel to the Muslim country of Turkey in November. If the bear market bears down, the fury should be more persistent this time, which may well make it a rocky pilgrimage.

June 2005, EWFF
A short and apparently inaccurate Newsweek story about the desecration of the Koran by American guards at Guantanamo Bay triggered protests by Muslims around the world and rioting that left 15 dead in Afghanistan. “The big point that leaps out,” said the article’s author, “is the cultural one. Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that [the story] was going to create the kind of response that it did. They were caught off guard by the furor.” The “furor” is the new tone that the May issue of The Elliott Wave Theorist was talking about when it said, “Many more, and more extreme, expressions of negative social mood are on the way.” Of the 25 different components which The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior used to describe a negative social mood, the story, the riotous response to it and Newsweek’s eventual retraction, exhibit at least half of them: discord, exclusion, unhappiness, anger, fear, defensiveness, credulity, malevolence, dullness of focus, destructiveness, a desire for power over people, fuzziness of thinking and emotion and feelings of opposition toward others.

Another big underlying dynamic, an emerging religious fervor, is also in line with a shift from practical to magical thinking, which HSB identifies as opposite poles of a bull and bear market, respectively. Practical thinking manifests itself in a reverence for science while magical thinking involves “philosophic attacks on reason, collectivism, witch hunts, war making and a reverence for religion.” This emerging mindset is evident in the media’s fascination with the old and new Popes and the launch of new lessons on Satanism, demonic possession and exorcism at the Vatican. Business Week’s May 23 cover story ponders “Evangelical America,” which describes how business techniques developed over the course of the long bull market are now being used to transform the faithful and convert the lost. On Wednesday, a story about Germany’s rediscovery of religion says 400,000 “flocked to the city of Hanover for convention of Protestants, a record number that reflects a renewed national interest in religious values.”