The
underlying transit that the world is experiencing is the Uranus-Pluto square. A
new world is being born, whose form is not yet clear, but Trump and
Brexit are indicators of where things are going. Away from globalisation, towards protectionism and border controls. And maybe an economic crisis along the way.
At present
there are overlays of Uranus conjunct Eris, and Saturn square to Neptune.
Uranus-Eris describes the game-changing shocks to the system, the earthquakes, of which there
are more to come.
And Saturn-Neptune describes the ‘post-truth’ world which we are, for now, entering. A world
in which politicians win elections by telling bigger whoppers than usual, which then get whirled around social media. That
is what it amounts to.
But it's not that simple. It is right-wing politicians who are telling
the whoppers (in the cases of Trump and Brexit), and the liberals are fighting
back using their own cultural weapons, promoting the concept of ‘post-truth’ to
describe their political enemies.
I don’t like
the cold-heartedness of many right-wing politicians. But if the liberals had won by
telling bigger lies, I don’t think the Republicans/Tories would be promoting a word like ‘post-truth’ and getting it put in dictionaries, as if it were a description rather than a weapon. When Tony Blair lied about WMD, we weren't told we were entering a new era in which politicians told big lies. And what he (and GWB) did was lie in a much more serious way than anything that has happened this year.
While there will always be a few who believe the lies that politicians
tell, I don’t think most people do. People vote for the more charismatic
candidate, the one who connects best with people, for better or for worse. In
the case of Brexit, we had the appeal of Boris and Nigel Farage on one side,
and the relatively bland David Cameron on the other. And it was the same with
Trump and Hillary. (To say that doesn't make me right-wing: I'm not.)
This way of
looking at things is, of course, insulting to the intelligence of the voters, but
it is the way things go in elections time and again. You don’t even need
astrology to predict the outcome. As Churchill said, Democracy is the worst
form of government, apart from all the others. It is the ongoing Saturn (substance) vs Neptune (appearance) nature of democracy, and Neptune generally wins. It is how GW Bush and Obama each won the presidency, and how Tony Blair became the UK leader.
Saturn-Neptune
describes the fact that the debate has come to centre on the lies of
politicians. But it’s not the real issue, because politicians have always lied. Neptune is a hall of mirrors, it reflects back on itself.
And the same
people who are crying foul because of the lies of the Brexit and Trump
campaigns, have also been denying loudly that the Brexiteers and
Trump actually won. The political lies are (correctly) being called unusually egregious, yet the simple facts
of who won and who lost are being denied.
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The lies, particularly
in the case of Trump, have admittedly been exceptional. The man will say
anything that suits, and exaggerate and castigate to his heart’s content. (Though I also think
it is important to admit when he has a point, like when he said that Castro was a
dictator; otherwise our opposition is blind, and this kind of blindness is
surprisingly common amongst ‘educated’ people.)
But the pretence that Trump and the Brexiteers lost - or that the elections were stolen and invalid, or that Brexit won't happen, or that the electoral college won't elect Trump - has to me seemed to be
what is truly unusual about these events. Yes, Saturn-Neptune and bigger lies
from politicians, that is part of the picture, if anyone is actually listening.
'Twas ever thus. But this new element of outright denial of a basic fact by an educated
part of the population: that is what is truly different. Maybe we should be talking about the post-fact era?
I think it
shows just how polarised things have become politically, which is what one
expects from the larger picture of Uranus-Pluto. But I think it reminds us yet
again that being educated and being self-aware are not the same thing. I think that the sense of moral superiority that many liberals have also confuses the picture, like Trump/the Brexiteers can't have won because they're the bad guys, so how did they cheat us?
Being an
astrologer and being self-aware, at least in these polarised times, do not seem
to be the same thing either. At a major astrological conference in the USA in
October 2016, a panel of 12 experienced astrologers unanimously predicted that
Hillary would win (though some said that it was 11 out of 12.)
Either way,
this just doesn’t happen when you ask a bunch of astrologers to predict
something. And if they’re good, I’d expect most to be right. But I certainly wouldn’t
expect them all to have the same answer - in any other situation, it would be
called groupthink. But these were 'gifted' astrologers, we are told, so that can't possibly be what was happening!
And I don’t
think it comes down to method either, though I’m wandering now into the nature
of prediction. I think if you rely on method alone for
predicting, it will break down in time. Mercury the trickster comes in, this
was something that Jung found. No, there is also intuition involved, even in
how you decide which charts to use. It is the skilled intuition that is
essential, that is the real gift of the astrologer. But because it is personal,
it is also subject to personal wishes and the wishes of the collective.
This, I
think, is what happened. It can happen to all of us, and we can all get
predictions wrong. I do. But astrologers are well known for being politically
liberal. It was a fiasco, and soul-searching is needed.
It makes
astrology look ridiculous, and heaven knows we don’t need that. But the reason
I’m writing about it is that the issue was then surrounded by the same sort of
defensive denial that you find in the population at large, namely that Trump hadn’t won
the election because Hillary got more votes, even though everyone knows that it
doesn’t work like that.
This denial
compounded the fiasco. Astrologers, and diviners of all sorts,
need to be able to stand apart from their political preferences and collective
currents. This is really basic. And we will sometimes fail. But please at least let's be honest when we get it wrong.
