No one can rewrite the stars…
….It's not up to you
It's not up to me
When everyone tells us what we can be
How can we rewrite the stars?
Say that the world can be ours
For the first time for a while I’m bringing the astrology directly back
into my posts; well, at least the principles rather than the practical prediction.
Personal astrologers are often asked how astrology works. And it is
usually a loaded question, full of righteous scepticism; the implication being
that astrology is a load of nonsense and the astrologer is, at best, deluded,
at worst, a charlatan. Whatever the attempted answer the questioner will continue
to believe that the poor deluded astrologer will one day wake up and smell the
free will.
But as the song lyrics above suggest, perhaps we have a lot less free
will than we might like to hope. You don’t need to believe a word of any
mumbo-jumbo to recognise the words “ it’s not up to you, it’s not up to me,
when everyone tells us what we can be”.
We don’t have to believe that “Hell is other people” to know how much we
are constrained by our family, friends and our wider society.
That is the environment of the personal astrologer though. For the
economic and political astrologer the situation is slightly different and
frankly even worse. Sometimes, as I am doing today, we find ourselves asking
does any individual really have a significant influence on the path of world
developments or are we all just cogs in a big machine, some brighter, shinier
and more noticeable than others perhaps, but in the end no more or less
effective? Never has there been a time to address these questions but in 2020
when Covid-19 has seemingly made so many of us victims of circumstances outside
our control.
But we will talk more about Covid elsewhere, this post is about wider
issues.
Take Donald Trump for example (yes, please do). He’d like to think he is
President of the US due to his own brilliance, but even his most avid
supporters contend that he is the product of decades of flawed economic and
political behaviour on the part of his predecessors and the wider governmental and
corporate networks. I would, in fact, support that contention, though I would
most definitely not suggest he is the right solution!
But it is not just him. In the last few years, prior to the catalyst of
economic destruction that is Covid, here in the UK we saw the collapse of two
listed companies, Carillion and Patisserie Valerie. In the former the problems
seem to have been bad decisions and deals, in the latter the problems were a
bad business hidden by fictitious accounting. On the surface quite different
situations, but both involved individuals who were under pressure from the
environment they operated in: to show growth, to appease their stakeholders, to
satisfy government departments , regulators, lenders, consumers, employees. In
the end we can see that the outcome was pretty much inevitable even if it
appears superficially that it was down to person M making decision R on day Z.
Organisational cultures don’t just matter they determine.
So it’s back to the deterministic astrology then.
When I say that something is likely to happen, in France or Mexico or
Turkey, it is not an event that comes out of the blue like a random meteor (
although arguably we should be able to see if one of those is about to strike
too, or at least the impact -pun intended !), it is the product of decades,
even centuries, of decisions, changes and even inventions and most of all of
group cultures, be they political, national, societal, or corporate.
Therefore, today’s climate of capitalism, debt and oil supported democracies,
environmental concerns and populations addicted to consumerism, prescription
and illegal drugs and more and more credit is not just the result of government
policies or capitalist greed but of the actions of all of us and our ancestors.
So where is it leading?
As I’ve mentioned before I see the end of the Pluto Neptune sextile as
the end of the 20th century consumption/oil/credit boom.
To mix our metaphors horribly, the Western
debt and consumption snowball cannot continue to grow, at some point the last
straw will break the camel’s back.[i]
So does that mean we are all on an unstoppable trajectory? Where we are
today is certainly a product of all our yesterdays, But perhaps we can make a
difference; change the destiny of not just ourselves but of whole communities,
corporations and countries? Change those
ingrained cultures that determine our collective fates. Where we are today is
still a product of all those yesterdays but where we are tomorrow is also the
product of the decisions we make today.
Yet, I am afraid my feeling, as I look at the overall results of this 12
year old project, is that things are hurtling inexorably towards the worst
conclusion. This astrologer is not deluded, merely very depressed!
However individuals are not programmed just to accept their fate. While
we remain uncertain of the future, we can, at least in theory, try to change
it.
So, whether you are someone who believes astrologers are deluded and is
determined to prove my predictions wrong, or you are a believer in astrology
but prepared to embrace the possibility that there are paths to follow as a
society that are as yet not part of our consciousness, my challenge to you is
to prove astrological determinism wrong by changing the cultures in which you
operate and thereby change our collective fates.
If so, you may prefer to reflect on the final chorus of the song
…It's up to you. And it's up to me
No one can say what we get to be
And why don't we rewrite the stars?
Changing the world to be ours…….
[i]
Part of the reason will be the collapse of a pyramid. In no arena is the
fact that we are all cogs in a huge wheel more apparent than in this
pyramid.
We all like to think we would recognise a Ponzi
scheme if one showed up at our door, yet we are all quite innocently living in
the biggest one ever. Of course this one isn’t a scam as such just product of
societal development. The word pyramid is the clue, though we are not talking
here about them in the context of Egypt and the Pharoahs, but in terms of population
pyramids.
We’ve all seen the pictures of the classic
population pyramid. But in the Western world they don’t look like that
anymore. They are increasingly
population rectangles.
Of course we don’t just have Western populations,
we’ve got Asian ones and perhaps African ones to support our consumption. For
the moment. But not forever. Just because centuries of western growth has been
gained by “enslaving” ( literally or effectively) other groups doesn’t mean
that it can continue indefinitely. The
fact that we have reached a dangerous level of overall population is also a
factor in the world drawing closer to the end of this phase,
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