Venus Retrograde through the Signs

It occurred to me the other day that I might have a go at doing some Sun Sign astrology, by making predictions for each sign for the month of November. It turned out as I did them that I was focusing on Venus, because it is going backwards in the sky at the moment, getting us to go back and re-examine various issues, before moving forward with them later in November as Venus changes direction. Venus is connected to relationships, finances and values. With Sun Sign astrology, you assign a house to each sign, with the Sun Sign as the 1st house. So if you are a Capricorn, then Venus, which is in Scorpio, will be in your 11th House, 2 Houses before the 1st House which is Capricorn. You then bang together the meaning of Venus and the meaning of that House and take into account they’re a Capricorn and see what comes out. That’s the astrologer’s art – banging symbols together!
Venus retrograde is currently in Scorpio, moving into Libra on the 7th of November. So the emphasis for the last few weeks has been on experience which is maybe uncomfortable but real, that cuts to the core of an issue. As Venus moves into Libra so will we be more able to see and to articulate what has been happening as we move from Scorpio’s underworld into the Libran realm of conscious weighing up and understanding. Then there will be resolution as Venus moves once more into Scorpio at the end of November.

Aries
For some weeks now you have had the shadow side of your relationships rather in your face. As an Aries you don’t like to be introspective, and you are quick to blame others when something goes wrong. But Venus retrograding in Scorpio has made you look at your own part in those marital fights. The hardest part of this will be over as Venus changes sign on the 7th and backs into sunnier Libra, when the focus shifts to your ability to operate in partnership. Your strength as an Aries is your fresh, unique way of seeing things, and ability to get things done; your downfall lies in not letting others in, and therefore not allowing the simple clarity of your vision to be modified by the actuality of things, which is always more complex and shaded. So this Venus retrograde cycle, which continues right through the month, is an important time for you to learn more about relationship and what it can contribute to your understanding. The New Moon in Scorpio in the middle of November, just before Venus goes Direct, could be an important turning point, a moment of personal insight.

Taurus
As a Venus-ruled sign, you have a natural warmth that draws people to you. Venus has been retrograding through your 7th House of Relationships, and will be for another week. The basis of your relationships is instinctual, and often that serves you well. But sometimes it doesn’t, when what you think of as intuition is your own fears and neediness speaking. This disempowers you in relationships. So now is a time to stand back a bit from feeling, and weigh up others and your relationship to them as others might. The emphasis over the last few weeks may have been discomfort that you do not understand, but as Venus moves back into Libra on the 7th, so will your underworld journey move into the light of day. From the middle of the month you will feel able, in the light of this new understanding, to re-empower yourself and your relationships as Venus once again enters Scorpio and there is a New Moon in Scorpio.

Gemini

Venus in Scorpio is passing through your 6th House of Work and everyday life. Geminis have an interesting relationship with Scorpio, because Gemini itself is light and dark, consciousness and shadow. Geminis tend to display the light, but they have an undertow that needs to be properly honoured. This is where Scorpio comes in. Venus in Scorpio is challenging you in the workplace and in your everyday routines. As a Gemini you can get by on sparkle and talent as you juggle several different things, never quite doing any of them properly. (If you make an arrangement with a Gemini, prepare to be juggled and then maybe cancelled at the last minute!) To the extent that you are like this, you are likely to have been coming unstuck over the last few weeks. Venus is challenging you to go deeper from the point of view of your values – the importance to you of doing things well and in a considered fashion. And also your motives. This is perhaps the bigger issue. As a Gemini you can get what you want through charm and manipulation. Venus in Scorpio wants straightforwardness and honesty, even if it is not to your immediate advantage. Integrity is the keyword here.

Cancer
It is not always known that Cancer is one of the creative/artistic signs, and it does so from a very emotional place. As Venus has backed through your 5th House, so have you been digging deep for new inspiration, for the seed of something real. From around the 7th of November, you will be thinking about how to express it in a way that is harmonious and beautiful. Venus will turn Direct on the 19th, shortly after the Scorpio New Moon on the 16th, and that will be the time to put pen or paint to paper. Recent weeks have also been a time of thought around children, their place in your life, and their ability to bring out the worst in you. This period of reflection will lead to a new harmony in your home life from the 7th as Venus moves into Libra.

Leo
As a Leo, the search for, and expression of, your unique individuality is paramount. Venus retrograde requires you to go back to your roots, your family background and inquire how that has made you what you are. This is not a denial of your uniqueness, but an acknowledgement that you do not stand alone. Venus in Scorpio is doing an Underworld journey, not natural territory for a Leo, but one which gives a sure foundation for your ever-youthful talent. As Venus moves into Libra next week, so can you begin to understand this difficult territory you have been in for the last few weeks.

Virgo
As a Mercury-ruled sign, Venus retrograding through your 3rd house is not unfamiliar territory. It is your mind and the way you think that is being challenged – particularly since Venus is relationship, your tendency to be remote from others, to be in your own mind-based world, is being prodded. This may come through the actions of neighbours or siblings. But also your need to be useful, to be of service is being challenged: now is a time to look at who and what you are serving, and not to let your own need to be busy and useful stand in the way of a critical stance. As Venus moves into Libra next week, so will it be time to look at your values, and particularly issues around self-worth, which your desire to be helpful can be a cover for.

Libra

As an idealist who wants to create a better world, it is important that you learn to get your hands dirty, or apparently so, and where better to do this than through money? For the last few weeks money has been rearing its ugly head, and what you are and are not prepared to do to earn what you need. As I write, an unnamed UK firm has appeared in the news for supplying Arizona with the drug needed to execute prisoners on death row. This is just the sort of issue to get you thinking right now. As Venus moves into Libra on the 7th, the emphasis will broaden into a general consideration of what really matters to you, and how you express that – and what is the dividing line between genuine reflection and dithering procrastination.

Scorpio
Venus has been moving backwards through your 1st House of self-expression. You are good at getting your way through being defensive rather than offensive, moving sideways rather than directly. But how do you treat other people in the process? A sense of power is all-important to you, but at what cost? On the other hand, Venus may be showing you the opposite, that you hand your power over in order to please others. In either case, there is a question of integrity, either towards yourself or towards others. In the last few weeks the experience has been mainly one of discomfort, but as Venus moves into Libra and your 12th House next week, so you will be able to withdraw and reflect and understand your patterns, and emerge renewed in the second half of the month.

Sagittarius
Venus is passing through your 12th House. This is a place of withdrawal and introspection, which is uncomfortable for an outgoing Sagittarius. But in some ways it’s exactly where you need to be. You have your eyes set enthusiastically on the horizon, but you are not always very vigilant about why you are doing what you are doing. Motive can seem like a tiresome detail. So Venus is taking you into the watery depths, into pure experience, if you like into reality, instead of the beliefs or ideologies which can pass for reality. The 12th House provides the experiential background for your natural abode of the 9th House.

Capricorn
You have been finding out who your real friends are, and you weigh this up in a very practical way. Are they loyal to you, do they take their turn to buy a round of drinks, would you lend them money? As a Capricorn, you can be a worrier, and when Venus is highlighted, as she is now, you will tend to worry about money. Capricorn likes everything to be solid, and money, so important to Capricorns, is anything but solid. So you have a problem! After the 7th, as Venus backs into Libra, you will start thinking about money and career/vocation. You are very capable, but does your salary reflect your abilities? And what about vocation? You are very good at achieving conventional success, but what sort of impact on the world would you really like to have?

Aquarius
There are 2 types of Aquarian: the conventional, Saturn-ruled types, and the unconventional Uranian types. Yours is a sign of the mind, and career is where you get your hands dirty, where you put your brilliant ideas into action in the world and meet reality. This deepens you. If you are the more conventionally-minded Aquarian (which you are unlikely to be if you are reading this), then career is not a problem for you, as you fit in well, albeit slightly eccentrically. But like the Capricorns, Venus has been stirring up that cosy conventionality, getting you to think about what sort of impact you really want to have on the world. As she moves into Libra next week, you will be able to see the bigger picture of your life more clearly.

If you are an unconventional Aquarian, then it is time to make some of those forward-thinking ideas real. What sort of impact do you want to have on the world? It can be just as cosy to sit in your unconventionality, at odds with a world that does not seem to understand you. Venus is attempting to take you out of this Aquarian hubris and complacency and asking you to connect with other people in a real and ordinary way. As Venus backs into Libra next week, you will feel like you are back on home territory, contemplating the bigger picture of life – but leavened by a new appreciation of real people and the real world.

Pisces
Venus is currently in your 9th House, causing you to re-assess your personal relationship with God! And he’s darker (Scorpio) than you thought! Joking apart, Venus has been backing through your 9th House, getting you to look at your beliefs, your notions of what is ultimate, and asking you to include Pluto, ruler of Scorpio and Lord of the Underworld. Though you may as a Pisces have a strong sense of the interconnectedness of things, and the ecstasy that comes with it, Scorpio requires an embodied spirituality, one that recognises the sacredness of ordinary, material reality. And Venus also wants you to claim your power in relation to any teachers or traditions or belief systems you have aligned yourself with. Also, it is not enough to have a sense of the mystical reality around us: it needs to some extent to be put into words as ‘higher truth’. This will hone your intuition, separate what is dreamy complacency from what is real and insightful. As Venus moves into Libra next week, she will be moving into Pluto’s House, so the pressure will continue, but you will be more articulate with it.

The Dark Side of Positive Thinking

(And the Dark Side of the Law of Attraction.)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

The Rooneys, David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson

Wayne Rooney is a big football celebrity in the UK, though I don’t expect my American readers (who are in the majority!) have heard of him. On the other hand his club, Manchester United, is owned by the Glazers, who are American and have sporting interests in the US, so maybe you have heard of him. For myself, I hadn’t heard of OJ Simpson until he was suspected of murder.

I don’t take foreign celebrities as seriously as I take English celebrities. Somehow the English celebrities are more real and more likely to make my head turn. I would find it very hard to be on normal behaviour in the presence of one. I don’t think I’ve ever met a celebrity, so I wouldn’t know how to recognise one. Some couples have an agreement to be faithful to each other unless they have the opportunity to spend the night with a celebrity.

All this is Neptune’s realm, and being an outer planet, we are all subject to his influence on a collective level whether we like it or not. If you have a strong Neptune, then you can influence the collective, you can become a celebrity. Mr Obama has Sun square to Neptune in the 9th House (religious teacher) and Bill Clinton has Neptune Rising with Mars and Venus. So Bill Clinton’s fame had/has a strong romantic/sexual element (which fame often does anyway.) With Neptune Rising, he found it hard to be in control of himself,

whether it was Monica Lewinsky, which made the US a laughing stock the world over, or the loss of the nuclear activation codes, leaving America unable to respond in the event of nuclear attack. As I said, Neptune is a collective planet, and Bill Clinton’s strong personal Neptune acted as a comical counterbalance to American hubris. (You can see why some people think Dionysus, the Fool in the Mythic Tarot, would be a more appropriate mythical figure for the planet we call Neptune.)

Wayne Rooney was born 24 October 1985, birth time unknown. He has earned his celebrity, being a world-class striker.

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His wife Coleen has also become a celebrity (unearned). Her Sun is widely square to Neptune, in this case describing how her fame (Neptune) comes through her husband (Sun in Aries, a good sign for a sporting hero.)

Wayne Rooney is also currently famous for wanting to leave Manchester United and for seeing a prostitute while his wife was pregnant. Coleen’s natal Venus (relationships) at 1 Taurus is loaded, being conjunct the Node, opposite Pluto in Scorpio and trine to Mars and Neptune. The hard aspect to Pluto is the big challenge, describing both her attraction to power and the humiliation it is dragging her through.

Like Hilary Clinton, who has Venus in Scorpio square to Pluto, she may put up with any amount of this if Wayne Rooney (who has Pluto and Uranus coming up to hard aspect his Venus) does not leave her. Pluto/Scorpio is concerned with what is real rather than what is nice, and maybe some people with this aspect can put up with all sorts because there is also something real that keeps them there. Or they are too in love with the power that comes from being with this person. Or both. In the case of Hilary Clinton, it seems like both.

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Astrologically, Wayne Rooney’s connection with fame is through the square from Neptune to his Mars, which is appropriate for a sportsman. He has been with Manchester United since he was 19, and he has been with his wife since he was 17 (they married 2 years ago.) You can see why he is kicking against both his marriage and his club. He is talented and ambitious and needs to find his independence as an adult. This is psychologically necessary for him, and it is often a messy process.

It was the same with his famous predecessor David Beckham (who like Rooney has natal Mars square Neptune.) Prior to leaving, both developed a difficult relationship with their legendary club manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Ferguson once threw a boot at Beckham in the dressing room, leaving a cut on his forehead that required stitches. Now Ferguson is saying about Rooney that he cannot understand why he should want to leave after all they have done for him. That, of course, is precisely the point when you are a young male looking for independence. This is what Ferguson doesn’t seem to get.

Ferguson has an unaspected Sun-Mercury in Capricorn, and probably an unaspected Mars in Aries. Capricorn and Aries are both very male signs, and the Sun and Mars are the 2 masculine personal planets. So you can see the drive and leadership, but you can also see the unalloyed dominance that young men feel the need to get away from. Paradoxically, men like this can force you to grow up in ways that more understanding father-figures might not.

The 2 planets associated with father/authority are the Sun and Saturn. When Beckham left Manchester United in 2003, his Saturn Return was just starting, and Neptune was squaring his Sun. With Rooney, the bust-up is occurring earlier, and the astrology is not quite so obvious. But he does have natal Sun conjunct Pluto in Scorpio, as well as Pluto conjunct the South Node in Scorpio. So his personal power is all important to him. Either he claims it, or he will never become himself. This is true of everybody, but it is a particularly central theme for Rooney. Pluto is finishing a transiting sextile to his Sun-Pluto, and Neptune will soon start to trine it. So the transition isn’t as hard as it might be, despite the war of words in the press. As for his Saturn, Neptune is about to finish squaring it.

Both the Pluto and Neptune transits have been going on for a couple of years, so this move by Rooney (which hasn’t yet been officially announced) has been brewing for a while, it is the end of a process.

With natal Sun-Pluto in Scorpio, and its need for personal power and integrity, one can see why the breakaway process has been occurring at a younger age for Rooney than it did for Beckham. And in both cases we see major transits to both the Sun and Saturn, the planets of father and personal authority.

STOP PRESS: STRAIGHT AFTER I HAD WRITTEN THIS, ROONEY SHOCKED EVERYONE BY DOING A U-TURN AND SIGNING A 5 YEAR CONTRACT WITH MAN UTD. I THINK THIS MAY BE A DESPERATE MOVE ON HIS PART, COMMITTING HIMSELF TO TRY AND FORCE CLARITY ON A SITUATION WHICH IS NO LONGER CLEAR FOR HIM. LIKE STAYING IN HIS MARRIAGE. On the other hand, maybe he has now stood up to Ferguson enough to feel that he is his own man? I reckon, though, that this is not the end of the story.

The Importance of Being Wrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWmubq-XOxw&feature=related

Astrozeitgeist Update

Up until recently there has been an embarrassment of aspects in the sky, in the sense of so many different things going on from Jupiter outwards that it has been hard to know what to say: Jupiter opposite Saturn, conjunct Uranus and square Pluto; Saturn opposite Uranus and square Pluto; Uranus square Pluto; and Neptune conjunct Chiron. All the planets from Saturn outwards (including Chiron) making hard aspects with one or more of the others. Phenomenal.

Moreover, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto all came together as a t-square this summer at the beginning of the cardinal signs to create what Lynn Hayes called the ‘Cardinal Drama’. It was a time for powerful new beginnings such as we will not see again in our lifetimes. I saw a lot of it happening in the lives of myself and my friends. Anything major that you began this summer has a significance that you cannot begin to understand yet.

And this was the same on the world stage. Admittedly I was left scratching my head this summer, thinking well everything seems to be carrying on as usual, where’s the Cardinal Drama? But as I said, it was about beginnings whose significance we may not see for a long time, we may not even know they were beginnings. But there were a number of shifts: the BP oil spill, which may effect oil policy profoundly in the long term – or ought to – or it may just be bad news for BP; the war of the West, led by the US, against Islamism seems in Afghanistan to have shifted towards an acknowledgement that the Taleban, the arch enemy, have to be negotiated with; and Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country under pressure from the Islamists, has slipped further into crisis.

Politically, we have seen in the US the rise into electoral credibility of a quite extreme right-wing charismatically-led movement, the Tea Party. Economically, the recession has not gone away, turning it into the much-feared ‘double-dip’ recession. All the above events may come, with hindsight, to be seen as tipping points that occurred around the Cardinal Drama.

We seem to be in what has aptly been called The Great Recession, and this fits with Pluto’s presence in Capricorn since the western economies went into crisis. Pluto governs wealth and power, both of which have their basis in the economy, and Capricorn is neither boom nor bust. So the boom went, but we did not have a Depression, which is the opposite extreme. Capricorn wants realism, an honest day’s work, and we will continue to have a hangover until we have paid for the party and wealth is again based on productivity rather than on financial engineering, debt and inflated house prices. There is no sense at the moment that a different model is going to come about: just the old model but with a return to some older rules for the bankers to stop the same crisis occurring again.

For now. Because Uranus is starting to square Pluto, we cannot expect just to sit out this recession and see a return to the old prosperity that had been basically uninterrupted since World War II. This is the Great Recession. Something very different is coming in, a new economic era. We are collectively expecting a return to the old prosperity, but that is not what is going to happen. The astrology clearly tells us otherwise. The one thing you can be certain of with astrology is that hard outer planet aspects mean big change. You can even say quite a lot about the nature of that change. What you don’t know is where that change will take you in the inner and outer events of your life. If you did know, you wouldn’t be able to live the change. And it’s the same now on a collective level with Uranus and Pluto, which will not exactly square until 2012.

The Saturn-Uranus opposition lasted for 2 years and finished in August 2010. Coinciding in its very early phase with Pluto’s entry into Capricorn, and with Saturn ruling Capricorn, it explains why Pluto’s entry into Capricorn was economically so dramatic and unsettling. Normally you would expect a gradual manifestation over some years of Pluto’s presence in a sign: indeed, we still have that to come with Pluto in Capricorn - we haven’t yet seen his true influence there yet!

Saturn-Uranus oppositions and conjunctions seem to invariably coincide with dramatic and revolutionary change, which is in the nature of Uranus when it gets its chance through the manifesting, shaping nature of Saturn. The conjunction in 1988/89 saw the USSR coming to an end; and the opposition of 1965/66 saw the enactment of civil rights legislation in the US, liberalising measures in the UK, and the era of protests. With the world’s financial system almost collapsing, we have certainly also been through a period of dramatic change; but with the Uranus square Pluto following hard on its heels, Saturn-Uranus may come economically to be seen as preparatory rather than as the full change itself. Politically, Saturn-Uranus has the seen the election of the first black President in the US as well as revolutionary healthcare legislation, however watered down; and in the UK we have seen the first coalition government since the Second World War.

Saturn has been squaring Pluto since last autumn, and will finish next month. Hard aspects between Saturn and Pluto usually coincide with a swing to the right in US politics: the empowerment (Pluto) of conservatism (Saturn). The conjunction of 1982, for example, saw the rise of Reaganism; the opening square of 1993/4 saw the Republicans under Newt Gingrich take control of Congress; and the opposition of 2001 saw George W Bush come to power. Under the present square we have seen the rise of the Tea Party, representing a particularly strong swing to the right. In the UK, the Conservatives have gained power for the first time in 13 years.

In Germany, as I write, the usually moderate Angela Merkel has said that multiculturalism does not work, that different races cannot live happily side by side. (This is also part of a new assertiveness by Germany, as Pluto comes up to square its Sun and MC.) At the same time, we have seen France expelling gypsies, to widespread condemnation by other members of the EU.

Pluto is also coming up to square France’s Sun. Both of these events represent new right-leaning trends that we would not have seen happening a few years ago – they are not just me picking out events that happen to describe Saturn-Pluto, which you can always find!

There has been a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction since April 2010 that will finish in February 2011. It has been taking place in late Pisces/early Aries. Jupiter expands whatever it touches. Uranus means many things, but scientific progress is one of them, so these conjunctions are usually periods of scientific breakthrough. This has been particularly noticeable in astronomy, with all sorts of new telescopes coming on line, both ground-based and spaced-based, and lots of new discoveries being made about the wider universe.

Particularly interesting is the possibility of life-as-we-know-it being discovered on other planets. Astronomers have just discovered the first ‘Goldilocks’ planet, which is similar in size to the earth and at such a distance from its Sun that it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water and therefore it is ‘just right’ for life as we know it to exist. You can tell the type of elements and chemicals existing on the surface of a planet by the wavelengths of light coming off, so it would only seem to be a matter of time before a Goldilocks planet is discovered that gives off the signature of the type of organic chemicals that we associate with life.

It would not be a direct observation of life but a strong inference. Who knows, scientists may also see the signatures of other complex chemicals, maybe say silicon-based, that suggest not breast implants but life-not-as-we-know-it!

Discovering life elsewhere would be a huge event that would deeply change how we see the universe and our place in it. It would therefore be very appropriate if it occurred not just under a Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, but one that was taking place both at the end of Pisces (the infinite sea of life) and at the beginning of Aries, the zodiac place par excellence of new beginnings.

Uranus is also associated with lightning, so Uranus-Jupiter is associated with big lightning bolts! (Jupiter is the Roman Zeus, who wielded a thunderbolt.) With this conjunction taking place opposite the US MC at 1 Libra, the public face of the country, what could be more appropriate than the success of the photographer who waited 40 years to get this photo:

Jupiter, as king of the gods, is also a law giver, he tells us what is right and wrong, and so he is associated with ethics. There has been a square from Jupiter to Pluto (wealth and the power it gives) for much of this year, a time when legislation has been enacted in the US to curb the activities of the unscrupulous end of the financial system.

The final part of the Cardinal Drama has been the opposition between Jupiter and Saturn, which began in May 2010 and will finish next March. The Jupiter-Saturn cycle, before the discovery of the outer planets, used to be the main cycle for describing changes in the world. It is now perhaps not so clear what is its precise place in the scheme of things. There are plenty of articles on Jupiter-Saturn, but none I can find that say exactly what it means if you subtract the outer planets. It would seem there is a whole lot to think through!

Let’s speculate for a bit. Saturn and Jupiter both concern worldly rulership. Saturn is government and the laws that need to be brought in to keep society working. It is conservative. Jupiter is expansive, and it represents ethics and ideals and progress. Both planets are visible to the naked eye, so they are conscious, they represent humanity’s collective attempts to govern itself and to progress. They represent that part of collective life that we can consciously influence and be responsible for. When Pluto comes along, we have to surrender to our Fate (while remaining responsible.) With Neptune, we need to be open to some new dimension of consciousness. In both cases there is an evolution occurring that is beyond our knowing. But with Saturn and Jupiter, we are in charge. At least, sort of, and only since the outer planets came along (I’m trying not to offend the gods here!)

So we are looking at cycles of government and any conscious collective current that brings change. And we are looking at the tension between Saturn and Jupiter: between the past and the future, between the need to conserve and the need to progress, and also between natural law and human law – between human nature as law of the jungle, and human nature with its capacity for ideals.

To fully understand a hard aspect between 2 planets, you need to look at the cycle that began with their conjunction. In the case of the present opposition, the cycle began with a conjunction in Taurus in 2000. So we know immediately that the cycle has a lot to do with money (Taurus.) 2000 saw the end of the dotcom bubble, and the gradual lowering of US interest rates to offset its effects. At the same time, the US government had been pushing the big mortgage lenders to move into sub-prime lending. And there was a lot of money sloshing around the western world looking for better returns on investment that banks or shares could give. In late 1999, just before the conjunction, the US passed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which ‘modernised’ – i.e. deregulated – large parts of the financial industries.

So events around the conjunction of 2000 set the stage for what is happening now under the opposition. It was a case of too much Jupiter and not enough Saturn. Legislation to rein in the financial industries – Saturn - has been passed in the US under this opposition. The first half of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle is traditionally expansive, and the second half contractive, and this seems to be what is happening. And the crisis has so clearly been something of our own making, something we are responsible for and can learn from. Of course, the outer planets are also coming along and taking the whole thing somewhere else. But the Saturn-Jupiter aspect of the crisis shows humanity its own part in it: too much Jupiter in Taurus, and not enough Saturn in Taurus. And the two intertwine. Jupiter, for example, in its wish to provide poor people in the US with their own houses, did not take fully into account human nature in its natural, unreformed state (Saturn), and the fraud and the greed and the ignorance that would lead to a crisis. So Saturn also caused the crisis, because Jupiter was not properly ruling it. If one planet malfunctions, you get a contribution from the malfunctioning aspect of the other planet.

Changing Education Paradigms

Tony Blair's Emotional Intelligence

Yesterday I was in Waterstones flicking through Tony Blair’s memoirs, lamely entitled ‘A Journey.’ And I stumbled upon the famous bit where he describes his successor Gordon Brown as having zero emotional intelligence. I’m sure he’s right, in a way. But it got me thinking a bit about what the term means, because I never thought Tony Blair’s uncritical acceptance of men like George Bush and Silvio Berlusconi showed what I think of as emotional intelligence (EI).

There is no set definition of the term, and what we find in Wiki is probably as good as any: Emotional intelligence (EI) describes the ability…. to identify, assess, and control the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups.

One reason Tony Blair said what he did about Gordon Brown was because of Gordon’s lack of instinctual connection to the people and what they wanted. So Tony was right from the point of view of the Wiki definition.

But I think this definition is terribly superficial, in the same way that IQ as an ability to solve puzzles at speed is also very superficial. Far more important with the intellect is the ability to reflect over time, to weigh up courses of action and their likely consequences (a strength of Librans!)

With EI, or EQ (Emotional Quotient) as it is sometimes called, I think that what matters is the ability to perceive, and respond effectively to, the needs of those around you; and this would be based on self-knowledge and a shrewd assessment of the people around you (often a Libran weakness in their desire to be ‘fair’!).

What I am talking about are grown-up qualities. The usual definition of IQ favours clever schoolboys and aspergic computer nerds; and the usual definition of EI favours power-crazed manipulators.

I think that to be of value, the definition of IQ needs to point in the direction of wisdom; and EI/EQ needs to emphasise the ability to put others first. I find it extraordinary that you can have a definition of Emotional Intelligence that does not recognise the importance of moving from the self-centredness of a child towards a more altruistic outlook. It says so much about the competitive ‘me’ culture that we live in, me and ‘my’ achievement.

This sort of movement is basic to astrology and to any sane understanding of human development. In astrology, you have the early signs from Aries to Virgo that describe the individual and his/her early development. But then from Libra onwards you are talking about a progressively deeper engagement with the Other, firstly on an individual basis, and then with the society you live in.

Going back to Tony Blair, I think he was and is no doubt very good at engaging people and getting them on his side. And very quick-minded too. High IQ and EQ. And no doubt George Bush could be personally charming and affable. But George Bush’s motives were often clearly not those of a responsible leader.

He put himself forward for the job when he was ill-qualified to do so, he had a complex of issues around his father and proving himself, and he didn’t care very much for people outside of his own narrow tribe. I have no objection to Tony Blair personally liking the man, but George Bush is someone with whom you would need to be very wary of engaging in joint ventures, which Tony Blair did with gusto. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, backed away from George Bush once he was Prime Minister, and I don’t think this was just political posturing: it showed a higher EQ than Tony Blair, whatever Gordon’s failings in personal relationships and in popular touch.

It was the same with Silvio Berlusconi. The man is clearly a self-centred clown who is used to getting exactly what he wants in large doses, whether it is money, power or women. Yet in his memoirs Tony Blair goes on about what a great guy he is. Like GWB, he might well be personally fun to hang out with. But only because it suits Berlusconi. You couldn’t trust a man like that.

It’s like Tony Blair knows how to live in the world of power, he knows how to relate to the people in it. That is a kind of EQ, and I’m sure he’s a lot better at it than I would be. But he doesn’t understand his own love of power and love of being around it. He thinks he is this regular, unideological sort of guy who wants to help the world, and being at the top is the best place to do it. And he thinks the rest of us just don’t understand what great guys people like GWB are once you get to know them. Blair is kind of touching in his naivety.

Tony Blair is an object lesson in how capable and bright someone can be, and yet how deluded they can be about their own motives, how lacking in emotional development, how lacking in EQ in a real sense. I would trust Gordon Brown any day over Blair. OK, he was power-seeking as well, and not lacking in personal blind spots. But you feel a more genuine desire to help underneath it all, and more humility. Tony Blair sees the world in fairly black and white terms – good versus evil, right versus wrong. It gives him certainty and therefore conviction.

The primary appeal of his Roman Catholicism is that it bolsters his sense of certainty and of being one of the good guys. Blair is intensely ideological, even though he thinks otherwise. One thing you can be sure of when you encounter someone who sees the world in black and white terms is that they are emotionally primitive. George Bush had the same sort of primitive emotional life. That is why the two got on so well, despite being from incompatible political backgrounds.

So I think Tony Blair has no right to say that Gordon Brown has ‘zero emotional intelligence.’ He’s right that Gordon is abysmal in certain vital ways. But there’s more heart there, which of course is not relevant under the usual definition of EI/EQ.

Jung's Psychological Types and the Astrological Elements

Jung’s Psychological Types can be a good way of understanding people. He divides consciousness into 4 functions: Thinking and Feeling, Intuition and Sensation. The first pair are evaluating functions, the second are perceiving functions. Our weakest faculty will tend to be paired with the strongest. I have several friends who never seem to get things done, are always losing things, always late etc. It can sometimes drive me to distraction, and then yesterday it occurred to me that they all have a strong Intuition function, that is part of what draws me to them, so of course they are going to be weak on Sensation. Now I can forgive them! And my Sensation function being stronger is probably part of what they (secretly) like about me. That doesn’t, however, make me hopelessly unintuitive, for I think I am reasonably balanced among the functions: a bit more inclined towards thinking over feeling, and probably fairly balanced between intuition and sensation. The system is a bit more complex than this, and you can also add in extravert and introvert. I think on balance I am an introvert who has spent much of his life trying to be an extravert! But if you’re going to write a blog, it helps to be an introverted thinking type!

Incidentally, Jung classified himself as an Intuitive-Thinking type (there is usually a 2nd function from the other pair that we are also strong in, though not quite so much.) He freely acknowledged that when younger, he wasn’t very aware of the reality around him (Sensation)!

Jung’s functions correspond to the elements in astrology: Fire-Intuition; Earth-Sensation; Air-Thinking; and Water-Feeling. But you can’t just read off the psychological type from the birth chart. I know someone with Sun conjunct Saturn in Capricorn who is weak on Sensation, which isn’t what you’d expect. And I know someone else with Sun conjunct Saturn in Capricorn who is over-identified with his Sensation function. In both cases you could read it as Saturn, inhibiting in the first case, and making the person over-identified with material things in the second. So we know that Earth/Sensation is important from the Sun-Sat-Cap, but Saturn also tells us that there is likely to be an issue there.

In astrology we find the elements in the sequence Fire-Earth-Air-Water, which then repeat twice, corresponding to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer etc, as well as the Houses in their numerical order. So the journey of development through the signs from Aries to Pisces is also a journey through the elements.

Fire is Intuition because it has a vision, it can see what is possible, it knows what is possible beyond what the senses are telling us. The other elements are more obvious.

So we begin with Aries, the vision of something new, with birth, with a sense of ‘me’. Then with Taurus we have a sense of the material world we have landed in and a sense of ‘mine’, ‘my body’. Then with the Air function of Gemini we are able to separate ourselves out, to get a sense of ‘me’ as discrete from what is other. With Cancer, we develop a feeling relationship, a sense of belonging with others around us.

The first cycle is now complete, and there is a complete individual present who has something unique about him/her, and which is given expression to through play/creativity. This seed of something unique brings us back to Fire and to Leo. This creative spark is then grounded, given form, it becomes part of our everyday life, through Earthy Virgo.

In recognising our own uniqueness and putting it ‘out there’ we come up against other people, and we recognise that like us, they have their own individuality. This is a standing back and looking quality, an Air quality, and it is about relating, so it is Libra. We have moved from self development and self expression to realising that there are others out there to be taken into account. And we engage with them, we get to know them, we get a feel for them – watery Scorpio.

So there is a pattern here, in that the fullness of each stage is water: once our vision (Fire), our manifestation (Earth) and our Insight (Air) have reached down into the watery depths, then there is completion, we have fully embodied the process.

Then there is the final round of the elements, as we move from Sagittarius/9th House to Pisces/12th House. Again, the spark happens with Fire, the move into something essentially new. This time, out of firstly the fullness of self-knowledge (Cancer) and then knowledge of others (Scorpio) there is a push towards more universal knowledge, towards understanding our place in the wider scheme of things; and also the beginnings of a desire to give back what we have learnt, to contribute to the wider society. This spark is Sagittarius/9th House. And then we take our place in that wider society (Capricorn/Earth).

But to take that place of responsibility, thought is needed, an awareness of all the different sections of society, some of which may be quite alien to us, is needed, and this is Aquarius/Air. Again, this awareness has to be taken from the head to the heart, from Air to Water, if it is to be real, and so we arrive at Pisces, the place of Empathy and Compassion for all, and where engagement with wider concerns have changed us into a vehicle for the transformation of the collective; the individuality that took us so much trouble to develop earlier in the journey has on the one hand given us the integrity to lead others, but it has also become a limitation, it has now been discarded as another, wider, difficult-to-describe consciousness emerges. It is difficult to describe because generally we are not it except in flashes. But because the self and its needs are temporarily put to one side, a lot more dimensions of consciousness are open to us, as the situation requires. A bit like if you are doing an astrology reading, and you’re right in it, right in the other person’s world, then insights flow, you go where did that come from? Anything that is done disinterestedly has this sort of possibility in it.

Going back to Jung and his psychic functions, what we see in the astrological elements is a process of Intuition (Fire), Sensation (Earth), Thinking (Air) then Feeling (Water). But Jung also made a distinction between perceptive and evaluative functions. So this suggests that the first 2 elements in each cycle of development, Fire and Earth, are sort of givens, they come to us, we perceive them – the vision (fire) and its possible relationship to the world around us (earth); whereas the second 2 elements are evaluative – through thought (air) and feeling (water) we then weigh up and process what life has put our way. And I think life is often like this. It sort of moves on of its own accord, new situations and possibilities present themselves, but then we have to work it through, we have to work out whether to go there and what the consequences are likely to be, and we also judge it on a feeling and ethical level.

I don’t think Jung intended his functions to be used this way, but in creating them he was clearly giving a new twist on the ancient idea of the elements. Returning to my starting point, I think both Jung’s types and astrology can give us a more sympathetic, genuinely understanding view of people. You can see what appear to you as people’s faults more as a natural consequence of the way those people are constructed; and you can also see the inherent strengths of that construction, that can be obscured by the judgements that we, and society, are liable to make.

Visual Astrology: the Basics

Below is part of the latest Visual Astrology newsletter by Bernadette Brady, which you can subscribe to here. This edition gives some of the basics, which is quite handy. Modern western astrology doesn't use individual stars (which are often rich in ancient mythology), but rather uses the patterns they make, the zodiac signs, and sees meaning in them. In the last few millennia, however, that has increasingly become a fiction in terms of what we can actually see in the sky. Bernadette Brady's visual astrology is an attempt to restore the relationship between the astrologer's art and events that are visible in the sky. You can feel a sort of primordial power, that tends to be missing in modern astrology, when you can relate events on earth to events you're actually looking at in the sky.

Seven things astrologers should know about Fixed Stars

Bernadette Brady M.A.

At the conference I was asked about fixed stars. I tend to get asked similar questions whenever I am talking to astrologers. So with this in mind I have compiled a list of seven things to know about fixed stars!

1. Why do stars matter in astrology?
The stars and their patterns in the night sky have been a blackboard for the projection of humanity's stories and mythology for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. Symbolically therefore they are just as vital and rich with meaning for astrology as the planets and the tropical zodiac signs.

2. Are the brighter stars more important than the dim stars?
The importance of a star in astrological use is not its brightness but rather the amount of mythology linked with the star.

The brightest star in the sky is Sirius at magnitude -1.42 and the dimmest stars that are still active astrologically have a magnitude of around 3.5 to 5. Stars like Acubens, the alpha star in the constellation Cancer, has a magnitude of only 4.25, so it is very dim to our eye but it is 'bright' with mythology. One unit of magnitude is about 2.5 times more light. So if Acubens in Cancer is a 10 watt light bulb then Sirius is a 1000 watt bulb or 100 times brighter than Acubens, yet Acubens is just as 'strong' in charts as Sirius.

3. What was the original way that astrologers worked with stars?
The Egyptian and Mesopotamian manner of linking stars with planets was to observe when a star and planet 'touched the earth' at the same time.

The image of a cross within a circle was and still is a symbol for how the earth touches the divine sky. In religious expression it is used to show how the mortal world can become divine or how it touches the divine, as can be seen in the two ancient crosses given below. In astrology this sacred union is represented by the angles of the chart - Ascendant, Midheaven, Descendant, and IC.

If a star and a planet were both on this cross at the same time this is known as a paran relationship, a union of the divine star with the more worldly planet and the very earth itself.

The Saint Thomas Kottakavu Church at North Paravur, India. This cross is engraved on granite stone believed to have been made around 880 C.E.

Cross in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. The cathedral is dated from the 4th century CE.

This original method slowly fell into disuse because it was impossible to reconstruct the star risings and settings without an astrolabe set for the latitude of a person's birth. Thus by the time of the decline and disuse of the astrolabe in the 17th century, we see the final abandonment of working with parans in astrology. However, with the advent of computers in our current era we are now easily able to return to this original method and sacred concept.

4. How many stars and planet combinations are usual for a person's chart? - Using an orb 2 minutes of time, most people will have 12 to 18 star and planet parans active in their astrology.

5. Why are the stars called 'Fixed'?
The stars are called 'Fixed' because for a set location a star will rise in the east in the same place on the horizon every single day. It will also set in the same place on the western horizon every single day. This is different to the planets that rise and set at varying places on the line of the horizon, constantly shifting their location of rising or setting. The planets are 'the wanderers' ('planetoi' in Greek) and the stars are fixed.

6. Where do all the star names come from?
Stars names come largely from the Sumerian, Babylonian cultures or the pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean people. Many star names start with the letters 'Al' such as Aldebaran, the great red eye of Taurus the Bull, or Al Rescha the Sacred Knot of Pisces. 'Al' is Arabic for 'The'. Other stars may start with Ras as in Ras Alhague in Ophiuchus or Rastaban in Draco, where the word 'Ras' is from the Arabic for 'head'. The word Deneb, as in Denebola in Leo or Deneb Algedi in Capricorn is the Arabic work for 'tail'.

The oddest-named star in the sky is Sualocin, the alpha star of the constellation Delphinus, which was named by Piazzi Palermo in 1814 after his assistant Nicolaus Venator who helped him after he nearly lost his eye sight. Do you see how Piazzi gave his assistant via his name a permanent place in fixed star history?

7. How many stars are there in the sky?There are about 4000 - 5000 visible stars (magnitude 6 or brighter) but on any one night, with a dark moon and no light pollution, you will be able to see about 1500 stars.

However, with paran fixed star work in astrology we focus on the 'bright' mythological stars and we work with about 64 stars, each of which has shown a consistent pattern of mythological expression in charts.

Barefoot Economics

Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef: US Is Becoming an "Underdeveloping Nation"

If you haven't got time to listen, below is the transcript. First, here are his 5 economic principles:

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

And here is what he has to say about poverty:

What I have learned from the poor is much more than I learned in the universities. But very few people have that experience, you see? They look at it from the outside, instead of living it from the inside.

And you learn extraordinary things. The first thing you learn, that people who want to work in order to overcome poverty and don’t know, is that in poverty there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive. Every minute, you have to be thinking, what next? What do I know? What trick can I do here? What’s this and that, that, that, that? And so, your creativity is constant. In addition, I mean, that it’s combined, you know, with networks of cooperation, mutual aid, you know, and all sort of extraordinary things which you’ll no longer find in our dominant society, which is individualistic, greedy, egoistical, etc. It’s just the opposite of what you find there. And it’s sometimes so shocking that you may find people much happier in poverty than what you would find, you know, in your own environment, which also means, you know, that poverty is not just a question of money. It’s a much more complex thing.

The Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: While President Obama is reporting looking into tapping a former corporate executive to become his next top economic adviser, many economists question the path the United States is on. Last week, during our trip to Bonn, Germany, I had a chance to speak with the acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef. He won the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. I began by asking him to explain what barefoot economics is.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud—not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.

So I discovered that I had no language in that environment and that we had to invent a new language. And that’s the origin of the metaphor of barefoot economics, which concretely means that is the economics that an economist who dares to step into the mud must practice. The point is, you know, that economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty. And that’s the big problem. And that’s why poverty is still there. And that changed my life as an economist completely. I invented a language that is coherent with those situations and conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is that language? How do you apply economics or have those situations explain economics changing?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: No, the thing is much deeper. I mean, it’s not like a recipe typical of someone in your country, fifteen lessons or satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. That’s not the point. The point is much deeper. You know, I would—let me put it this way. We have reached a point in our evolution in which we know a lot. We know a hell of a lot. But we understand very little. Never in human history has there been such an accumulation of knowledge like in the last 100 years. Look how we are. What was that knowledge for? What did we do with it? And the point is that knowledge alone is not enough, that we lack understanding.

And the difference between knowledge and understanding, I can give it as an example. Let us assume that you have studied everything that you can study, from a theological, sociological, anthropological, biological and even biochemical point of view, of a human phenomenon called love. So the result is that you will know everything that you can know about love. But sooner or later, you will realize that you will never understand love unless you fall in love. What does that mean? That you can only attempt to understand that of which you become a part. If we fall in love, as the Latin song says, we are much more than two. When you belong, you understand. When you’re separated, you can accumulate knowledge. And that is—that’s been the function of science. Now, science is divided into parts, but understanding is holistic.

And that happens with poverty. I understood poverty because I was there. I lived with them. I ate with them. I slept with them, you know, etc. And then you begin to learn that in that environment there are different values, different principles from—compared to those from where you are coming, and that you can learn an enormous amount of fantastic things among poverty. What I have learned from the poor is much more than I learned in the universities. But very few people have that experience, you see? They look at it from the outside, instead of living it from the inside.

And you learn extraordinary things. The first thing you learn, that people who want to work in order to overcome poverty and don’t know, is that in poverty there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive. Every minute, you have to be thinking, what next? What do I know? What trick can I do here? What’s this and that, that, that, that? And so, your creativity is constant. In addition, I mean, that it’s combined, you know, with networks of cooperation, mutual aid, you know, and all sort of extraordinary things which you’ll no longer find in our dominant society, which is individualistic, greedy, egoistical, etc. It’s just the opposite of what you find there. And it’s sometimes so shocking that you may find people much happier in poverty than what you would find, you know, in your own environment, which also means, you know, that poverty is not just a question of money. It’s a much more complex thing.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think we need to change?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Oh, almost everything. We are simply, dramatically stupid. We act systematically against the evidences we have. We know everything that should not be done. There’s nobody that doesn’t know that. Particularly the big politicians know exactly what should not be done. Yet they do it. After what happened since October 2008, I mean, elementally, you would think what? That now they’re going to change. I mean, they see that the model is not working. The model is even poisonous, you know? Dramatically poisonous. And what is the result, and what happened in the last meeting of the European Union? They are more fundamentalist now than before. So, the only thing you know that you can be sure of, that the next crisis is coming, and it will be twice as much as this one. And for that one, there won’t be enough money anymore. So that will be it. And that is the consequence of systematical human stupidity.

AMY GOODMAN: So, to avoid another catastrophe, collision, if you were in charge, what would you say has to happen?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: First of all, we need cultured economists again, who know the history, where they come from, how the ideas originated, who did what, and so on and so on; second, an economics now that understands itself very clearly as a subsystem of a larger system that is finite, the biosphere, hence economic growth as an impossibility; and third, a system that understands that it cannot function without the seriousness of ecosystems. And economists know nothing about ecosystems. They don’t know nothing about thermodynamics, you know, nothing about biodiversity or anything. I mean, they are totally ignorant in that respect. And I don’t see what harm it would do, you know, to an economist to know that if the beasts would disappear, he would disappear as well, because there wouldn’t be food anymore. But he doesn’t know that, you know, that we depend absolutely from nature. But for these economists we have, nature is a subsystem of the economy. I mean, it’s absolutely crazy.

And then, in addition, you know, bring consumption closer to production. I live in the south of Chile, in the deep south. And that area is a fantastic area, you know, in milk products and what have you. Top. Technologically, like the maximum, you know? I was, a few months ago, in a hotel, and there in the south, for breakfast, and there are these little butter things, you know? I get one, and it’s butter from New Zealand. I mean, if that isn’t crazy, you know? And why? Because economists don’t know how to calculate really costs, you know? To bring butter from 20,000 kilometers to a place where you make the best butter, under the argument that it was cheaper, is a colossal stupidity, because they don’t take into consideration what is the impact of 20,000 kilometers of transport? What is the impact on the environment of that transportation, you know, and all those things? And in addition, I mean, it’s cheaper because it’s subsidized. So it’s clearly a case in which the prices never tell the truth. It’s all tricks, you know? And those tricks do colossal harms. And if you bring consumption closer to production, you will eat better, you will have better food, you know, and everything. You will know where it comes from. You may even know the person who produces it. You humanize this thing, you know? But the way the economists practice today is totally dehumanized.

AMY GOODMAN: You don’t think the earth will force this different way of thinking, that we’re reaching the end?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Oh, well, yes. Yes. I believe, you know, that—well, there are some important scientists that already are saying, I believe. I have not reached that point yet. But some believe, you know, and state that it’s definite: we are finished. We are finished. In a few more decades, I mean, there will be no humanity anymore. I don’t think we have reached that point of it, but I believe that we are pretty close to it. I’ll say that we already crossed one of the three rivers. And if you look at it and what is happening everywhere, I mean, it’s quite frightening how the amount of catastrophes are increasing all over the place, you know, in all manifestations—storms, earthquakes, you know, volcanoes erupting. I mean, the amount of events is growing dramatically. I mean, it’s really frightening. And we continue with the same.

AMY GOODMAN: What have you learned that gives you hope in the poor communities that you’ve worked in and lived in?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Solidarity of people. You know, respect for the others. Mutual aid. No greed. I mean, that is a value that is absent in poverty. And you would be inclined to think that there should be more there than elsewhere, you know, that greed should be of people who have nothing. No, quite the contrary. The more you have, the more greedy you become, you know. And all this crisis is the product of greed. Greed is the dominant value today in the world. And as long as that persists, well, we are done.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you’re teaching young economists, the principles you would teach them, what they’d be?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that further.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Nothing can be more important than life. And I say life, not human beings, because, for me, the center is the miracle of life in all its manifestations. But if there is an economic interest, I mean, you forget about life, not only of other living beings, but even of human beings. If you go through that list, one after the other, what we have today is exactly the opposite.

AMY GOODMAN: Go back to three: growth and development. Explain that further.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Growth is a quantitative accumulation. Development is the liberation of creative possibilities. Every living system in nature grows up to a certain point and stops growing. You are not growing anymore, nor he nor me. But we continue developing ourselves. Otherwise we wouldn’t be dialoguing here now. So development has no limits. Growth has limits. And that is a very big thing, you know, that economists and politicians don’t understand. They are obsessed with the fetish of economic growth.

And I am working, several decades. Many studies have been done. I’m the author of a famous hypothesis, the threshold hypothesis, which says that in every society there is a period in which economic growth, conventionally understood or no, brings about an improvement of the quality of life. But only up to a point, the threshold point, beyond which, if there is more growth, quality of life begins to decline. And that is the situation in which we are now.

I mean, your country is the most dramatic example that you can find. I have gone as far as saying—and this is a chapter of a book of mine that is published next month in England, the title of which is Economics Unmasked. There is a chapter called "The United States, an Underdeveloping Nation," which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And your country is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans, you know, are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations. People living in their cars now and sleeping in their cars, you know, parked in front of the house that used to be their house—thousands of people. Millions of people, you know, have lost everything. But the speculators that brought about the whole mess, oh, they are fantastically well off. No problem. No problem.

AMY GOODMAN: So how would you turn that around?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Well, I don’t know how to turn it around. I mean, it will turn around itself, you know, in catastrophic manners. I mean, I don’t understand how there isn’t—millions of people can all of a sudden go out in the streets in the United States and begin destroying things, I don’t know. That may perfectly happen. You know, the situation is absolutely dramatic. Absolutely dramatic. And it is supposed to be the most powerful country in the world, you know, and so on. And even in those conditions, they continue with those stupid wars, you know, and spend more, more, more millions and trillions. Thirteen trillion dollars for the speculators; not one cent for the people who lost their homes! I mean, what kind of logic is that?

AMY GOODMAN: Acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, a Right Livelihood laureate. I spoke to him in Bonn, Germany, last week. Among his books, Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics.