Psychopaths

I was watching a BBC programme on psychopaths late last night. They are people who, basically, do not feel empathy, so it is not a problem for them if they do awful things to other people.

Researchers have been doing brain scans on psychopaths, and there are areas of the brain that do not light up in the way normal people’s brains do. And they’ve also found a gene responsible.

Fascinating stuff. Incidentally I’m not anti-science, though I might sometimes give that impression. What I’m anti is science using its establishment power to insist that it is the only valid way of describing reality. In that way it is no different to the medieval Catholic Church.

Anyway, one of the researchers, James Fallon, who is a well-known brain scientist, decided to test his family for the psychopath gene. In his family there is a history of violent murderers. And guess who in his immediate family turned out to have the gene? You’ve guessed it, Mr Fallon himself. He was astounded, as he is not an obvious psychopath, yet when he asked his family, they all went actually there is something odd about you, something a bit detached, it’s like you are 2 people, and then he confessed that when something awful happens to someone, he really doesn’t care.

The reason he says he is not an active monster is because he had a healthy childhood. He reckons that the combination of an abusive childhood plus the gene is what is needed to create a real psycho.

The programme then moved on to a legal case in the US, in which a man had murdered his wife. In court it was argued that he’d had an abusive childhood AND had the psycho gene, and could therefore not be held fully responsible for what he had done: what he did was inevitable when you look at his brain and background. The arguments were accepted and the guy got done for some sort of manslaughter instead of murder.
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This is fascinating, for it raises all sorts of questions about free will and determinism and responsibility and is our behaviour just the inevitable product of brain chemistry? Being responsible for your actions in relation to others is fundamental to being human, so though that guy got off the charge of murder, the reason seems to imply that he did so because he is less than a human being, he is a mere animal.

And it’s not just that people are going to be getting off with things because you can prove their brains are f**$=d. The other side of the coin is that if someone does something harmful and the empathic part of his brain is functional, then you can insist that they were responsible for their actions. And it proves to the criminal that he has the capacity to act otherwise, to make different choices, and that seems to me like a good thing. And probably most criminals will be in this category. Even though a high percentage are psychopaths – in prisons it is around 25% - they are still a minority.

Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people last summer and shocked Norway, is not in my opinion a psychopath. He did it for political reasons but, importantly, he said that when he started the shootings, he found it very difficult, he had an instinctual resistance to killing which he had to overcome. A psychopath would not feel like this. Breivik made a choice: he wilfully ignored his own feelings, which is characteristic of the Aquarius Sun square Uranus that he has in his chart.

The programme explored the training of US marines, and the problems you get afterwards with soldiers who have been trained to kill. It can tip them over the edge and they can end up violent in their civilian lives. And they reckoned it was because killing goes so much against people’s natural instincts. Yes, we have testosterone which makes us aggressive and selfish and capable of killing, but there is also oxytocin which produces empathy. What people do have is a natural desire to protect, so the army trainers, instead of getting the soldiers to hate the enemy and to see them as sub-human, were experimenting with the 'protecting your people' motive. Either way it is a grisly business, but as George Orwell said: “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”

Perhaps psychopaths are there for evolutionary reasons, they are the ‘rough men’ that a community needs to survive. Psychopaths love to win, to rise to the top. Maybe that is why we glorify the warrior, in order to attract the psychopaths to the role they were made for. Just a speculation.

The programme also briefly looked at psychopaths in the business world, which is said to contain about 4% of them, as opposed to 1% in the population at large. An interesting point made here was that the psychopaths in prominent positions usually produce poor results, but through a combination of charm and force of personality they are able to talk their way out of this.

Evolution, Psychopaths and Fred Goodwin

Somewhere in our brains is an area associated with mystical experience – or, at a lower level, mere religious belief. So little is known about the brain that we don’t really yet know whereabouts this area is, or whether it’s generalised, or whether it’s a number of areas. But human beings have always had these experiences that point to a wider, deeper, unifying meaning to existence. It gets muddled up with a need for certainty and psychological insecurity and literal thinking to produce fundamentalist religion. But that sense of something transcendent is still there. Most Americans have it.

And it is a product of biological evolution. Evolution is a bodge job, but everything it produces is there for a reason, and usually finely adapted. We treat the 5 physical senses as telling us something about the world we live in, so why not that inner sense of transcendence?

Evolutionists can’t have it both ways. If you believe the story of evolution, then you have to believe that our sense of transcendence is telling us something real. Evolution does not produce characteristics for no reason. And it’s hard to squeeze this one into that ghastly mechanism of ‘survival of the fittest’, which reduces our modern creation story to a justification for capitalism, which is presumably what was (unconsciously) intended. A Creation Myth that reflects the zeitgeist. We understand part of the mechanism behind evolution, but only part.

Evolution is a great story, and what is more you can go out and find evidence for it in the form of exquisite adaptations and the fossil record. But it is not a scientific theory, for it cannot be tested in the laboratory or even very much in the field. There is enough evidence and elegance in it to satisfy most reasonable people. It represents a return to common sense in our idea of what constitutes proof. So evolution is both unscientific and affirmative of the value of religious experience. I think it is going too far to then say that God created the world: that is mere belief, it is something we cannot know by direct experience, and it therefore interferes with our actual experience. But in the Creationist vs Evolutionist debate, the former are ignoring the fossil record and common sense, while the latter (at their worst) are ignoring an aspect of brain evolution because it doesn’t fit their theories.
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I’ve just been reading a book called The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, subtitled A Journey through The Madness Industry. He’s the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is about the US Army’s exploration of the potential military applications of the paranormal. It seems that about 1% of the population are psychopaths, rising to about 25% in prisons (where they cause 60% of the violence) and 4% at the top of the business world.

It gives a new take on the idea that “We are the 99%”, particularly as the 1% could be conjectured to play a large part in what goes wrong in the economic world. That is why ‘free market capitalism’ is wrong-headed when it is allowed to go too far. There really are bad people out there, they’re very smart and they will cause a lot of trouble if you don’t regulate them! There's no point blaming them, though, for our ills. It's like blaming a big cat for doing what a big cat does. It comes down to regulation and why governments and the people who elect them don't do it properly. And it comes down to human gullibility and folly for electing some of these people as leaders.

There is a well-known 20 point test for psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. These are the characteristics:

Factor 1: Personality "Aggressive narcissism"
 Glibness/superficial charm
 Grandiose sense of self-worth
 Pathological lying
 Cunning/manipulative
 Lack of remorse or guilt
 Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
 Callousness; lack of empathy
 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Factor 2: Case history "Socially deviant lifestyle".
 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
 Parasitic lifestyle
 Poor behavioral control
 Lack of realistic long-term goals
 Impulsivity
 Irresponsibility
 Juvenile delinquency
 Early behavior problems
 Revocation of conditional release
Traits not correlated with either factor
 Promiscuous sexual behavior
 Many short-term marital relationships
 Criminal versatility
 Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning

The lack of empathy and grandiosity stand out for me. I’m sure there are also plenty of psychopaths in the political world, who put on an excellent show of cuddling babies at election time. When the empathy goes, all that is left is the predator who desires to win. I think a lot of gurus have psychopathic traits: disciples are there to feed the guru's grandiosity, and when they no longer fit in or are useful, they are quickly dropped. Jon Ronson also makes the point that if you are a psychopath from a poor background, you end up in prison; and if you are from a privileged background, you end up running a business!

I don’t know if Sir Fred Goodwin, ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has psychopathic traits. He was known as Fred the Shred for his ruthless cost-cutting style. He eventually led the bank to disaster, and had to be bailed out by the government. He walked off with a huge and controversial pension pot (which he eventually agreed to reduce), and in the UK he has come to symbolise everything that was wrong with the banking system. His successor at RBS (which is still mainly government owned) has just foregone a £1m bonus after huge political pressure and a lacklustre performance. Two days ago Sir Fred was stripped of his knighthood, which had been for ‘services to banking.’ I don’t know if I’m for against the honours system, but I like seeing excellence rewarded. It seems right that Sir Fred lost his knighthood, but it wasn’t entirely for the right reasons. Even George Osborne, the Chancellor, was justifying the stripping in terms of Goodwin being a symbol of what was wrong with the system. If you are doing something to someone because they are a symbol, then that indicates it is a witchhunt. It is the wrong reason.

But Fred was and is a symbol. He never admitted any wrongdoing, but you can’t afford to when you are the subject of a witchhunt. In the last few years he has lost everything: his career, his reputation and his marriage. It is Shakespearean watching somebody being destroyed like this. It was clearly his own doing, but it was also the mob.

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Fred was born 17 Aug 1958. He has Sun in Leo conjunct Pluto and opposite Chiron. When RBS had to be rescued in 2008, Neptune was in the process of conjoining his Chiron and opposing his Sun. Both Chiron and Neptune are associated with scapegoating, and Neptune and Leo are both associated with grandiosity.

Now as Neptune moves on to oppose his Pluto at 2 Virgo, the long process is completing with the loss of his knighthood, which is also a loss (Neptune) of his power (Pluto.) You never know with people. If the guy is irredeemiably superficial, then he will never recover, for he is virtually unemployable. But Sun-Pluto has a propensity towards depth, towards developing a basis in yourself that is authentic, that does not need the worldly trappings. The sort of destruction he has been through may be the necessary catalyst. You never know. John Profumo was the Defence Secretary in 1963 when it transpired he had been seeing a prostitute who also had relations with the Soviet Naval Attaché. He lied to Parliament about it, and was eventually disgraced. Profumo also had Neptune hard-aspecting his Sun at the time, and he went on to be awarded the CBE for charity work.

Back to The Psychopath Test. There is a story in the book (which I had heard before) where someone put American psychiatry to the test. He got a load of volunteers to go to different mental hospitals and act perfectly normally, except to say they occasionally heard a word in their head that said thud or echo. All these volunteers were quickly diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked up. It took them up to 2 months to talk their way out of the institutions. When the results were published, the profession was furious, and said that if they cared to do the experiment again, they would spot all the volunteers for what they were. The experiment duly went ahead, and the mental hospitals proudly declared they had spotted 40 imposters, only to be told that none had presented themselves!

It was a body-blow to the reputation of psychiatry in the US. And rightly so, for it is a pseudo-science. We know very little about the brain, let alone, for example, about the effect of psychiatric drugs on the brain. Yet they are administered freely. It can be a way of controlling embarrassing non-conformity in the population.

Ron Jonson also mentions the rise in the diagnoses of bi-polarity. He suggests that there are such strong pressures to conform in society, that if someone is different, then getting a label like bi-polar can be a way of helping that person to feel OK about being different. I've noticed that celebrities sometimes wear these diagnoses as a sort of badge. But maybe for them it is also a way of coping with fame. Keith Richards said that heroin addiction was his way of keeping his feet on the ground in the early years of the Rolling Stones.

Astrology in Wikipedia

I don't know if anyone knows much about editing Wikipedia. I don't. A year ago there was an edit war in the Astrology section, and eventually some of the astrology friendly editors were banned.

I put in an edit this morning, which I don't expect to last. This is how the introduction to Astrology concluded:

While astrology may bear a superficial resemblance to science, it is a pseudoscience because it makes little attempt to develop solutions to its problems, shows no concern for the evaluation of competing theories, and is selective in considering confirmations and dis-confirmations.

I changed this to "some consider it to be a pseudoscience" and added the following:

Astrology, however, pre-dates modern science. Its truths lie in the skilful reading of symbols and in the observation of human behaviour, in much the same way that a psychoanalyst or novelist would glean his or her insights. These kinds of human truth are not easily testable by the very particular methods of science.

It is not for astrology to show that it stands up to the scientific method of testing; the onus is on science to show that its methods are applicable to astrology.
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Aries and its problem with ageing

I admire the sign Aries. They are not unlike Capricorns in their desire to be at the top. Except with Capricorn it is a long game requiring years of training, whereas with Aries they have a brilliance and competitive spirit that can get them to the top very early in life.

Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, so they are newly born, they are fresh, naïve even, convinced that theirs is the best way. And they are relentless. The sign is ruled by Mars, and in debate they are always attacking. It is very hard for them to take on the other’s point of view: that is a quality of Libra, the opposite sign. It is rarely worth crossing swords with an Aries, even when they are clearly wrong, for they will fight and keep it up and keep it up until you feel worn down. Gentler souls can feel bruised and out of harmony with their Aries friend, but for him or her conflict is the stuff of life.

Aries qualities and attitudes are youthful, and it is often difficult for them to mellow as they grow older. Because the sign is the first of the zodiac, self-awareness does not come easily, even as they age. So they keep fighting, keep needing the challenge, and in a way this is refreshing and admirable. But you also want them to be able to stand back and have an ironic take on this continual need for challenge.

Otherwise life is likely to hit them with something. I know one Aries who has spent 30 years living in tough physical conditions, enjoying the battle and the romance of it. But it has taken a breakdown in his health that could have killed him to get him to move on. They are very tough, and will die for their cause, but that toughness can become obstinacy.
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It’s not just Sun in Aries. Moon in Aries can be the same. Bill Gates is a Scorpio with Moon conjunct Midheaven in Aries, opposite Mars. There was the early brilliance and desire to beat off the competition. What is interesting about Gates is that he has changed. He no longer runs Microsoft, and is instead putting his wealth into conquering malaria worldwide. It’s still a very Aries thing to be doing, but he is not fighting people in the form of other corporations anymore: his business had for many years a bad reputation for squeezing out and destroying the opposition.

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Steve Jobs had Moon and Mars in Aries, and he remained clearly Aries through to the end. Illness seemed to intensify rather than mellow him. And he seems to me of an example of an Aries who wouldn’t change, being hit by something that might just break the mould. But as I say, Aries will die for their cause, and in a way Steve Jobs did that. And it is now his company that has the bad reputation, in this case for controlling and overcharging its customers, and for having an unhappy, pressurised workforce.

You could say that Christopher Hitchens, who has just died of cancer aged 62, is another Aries who didn't mellow. He had Sun conjunct Mars, Venus and Mercury in Aries. Hitchens was a well-known literary critic and political commentator who couldn’t be fitted into any neat category. As he got older, so did he develop a crusade against religion. He certainly had a point, and he was entertaining, but reason was his god. Richard Dawkins, another crusading atheist, admired him. Hitchens was a champion of the New Atheism movement, which advocates the view that the evident truths of science have now reached the point where "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."

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To my mind, this is Aries at its worst. It would be understandable, if naïve, in a young Aries, but in a man in his 60s? It is Libra, the opposite sign, which has ‘the live and let live’ quality that Aries needs. Religion in a way is awful, but it is just another manifestation of mass unconsciousness, of collective dynamics, in a way that membership of political parties can be, or the blind worship of science and reason. It’s just part of the human condition. Aries perhaps more than any other sign is likely to be fighting its own shadow, and I’ve often thought that the New Atheism has, in its zeal and fundamentalism, the characteristics of a religion.

Religion does trap people, but it’s often where they are at, they need that kind of security, they would fall apart without it, so you need to let them have it. And, in its favour, it does advocate a view of reality that is non-rational (as well as often irrational, unreasonable.) It is saying that not everything can be reduced to reason, reason is just a tool, and there is a place, a need, for some kind of faith as a foundation, even though the object of that faith is often crude and intolerant of other faiths.

I have Moon conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius, so the idea of what to have faith in has always been important to me. Particularly because in our age, everything tends to get reduced to reason. But the quest for faith gets confused with the need for certainty (which science is just as capable of providing). And so you always have to look beyond the images and the doctrines and to your own experience, and to a sense that comes and goes that there is some kind of unifying beauty in the universe – or something like that – which can never be pinned down.

Hitchens had a yod in his chart, which is 2 planets that are sextile, and both inconjunct a 3rd planet at the apex of the triangle. I’m not sure I know what yods mean, but they are supposed to indicate some kind of fated element in your life that can never be resolved, but has to be accommodated.

A good example is in the composite chart of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which had Mercury at the apex, and Neptune and Pluto at the base: these 2 men were forced to communicate (Mercury) by the forces in their collective (Neptune and Pluto), but it was always a very difficult accommodation. Neptune and Pluto were, perhaps, the 2 wings of the party they represented, with Brown being Neptune and Blair Pluto. Or maybe the other way round.

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In Hitchens’ case, Jupiter in Aquarius was at the apex (faith in humanity), with Saturn (tradition) and Uranus (science) at the base. This suggests an ongoing attempt to reconcile religion and science. But Jupiter was square to his Aries Sun, suggesting that his crusading temperament may have got the better of that other dialogue.

In my piece Blair vs Hitchens, Religion vs Science, I gave a recent quote from Hitchens that to my mind is not consistent with the tone of his attacks on religion and to some extent sets the lie to them:

“… the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates.

I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I will mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon, I don't believe every civilised person could, if it ... much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. And we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony."

The Kissing Pope

Benetton have put up a series of ads of prominent people kissing. There is Sarkozy and Merkel:

And there is Obama and the Chinese leader:

And then there is/was the Pope and a leading Imam. Benetton took it down after the Vatican said it was taking legal action. No sense of humour, these Catholics. While it's still available, here is the offending image:

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The Pope has natal Venus in Taurus square to Neptune. He is sensuous and indiscriminate with it. But his Venus is opposite Saturn, so he is afraid of his sensuality and lets Benetton (and paedophile priests) do it for him. Unfortunately, his Saturn is in 9th House Sag, so he gets legal about it. With Nodal Mars in Gemini opposite the MC, he likes to pick a fight in public. Because his Mars is square Mercury-Jupiter in Pisces, he is not good at knowing which fight to pick, and with Mars square Uranus, he can be impulsive.

For a history of the pope and his potshots, see my blog from nearly 3 years ago, which begins:

Pope Benedict has done it yet again. First in 2006 it was the Muslims: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Then just before Christmas he announced that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment.

And then last week he reversed the excommunication of a bishop who is a holocaust denier.

In any normal job, he'd have been sacked years ago, and many of his priests would be doing lengthy jail terms for the sexual abuse of children. The Pope and many of his colleagues would also be in jail for concealing it. But this is religion, where the rules are different.

Steve Jobs and the US Midlife Crisis

I don’t use an Apple computer, but there is one in our house. It looks good, it works well, but I prefer my regular Windows PC. I was a bit amazed at the outpouring of hero-worship when Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, died a few weeks ago. I didn’t know what I thought, and I also knew that if I said anything critical, it would probably not go down well.

I remembered Obamania in 2008, when Barack Obama could do nothing wrong in the eyes of many otherwise intelligent, liberal leaning people all over the world. At the time I was told by one astrologer that my problem was having Saturn in Sagittarius, which meant that I was afraid of having faith! Actually, I think that Saturn in Sag has given me a long lesson in where to have faith and where not to have faith, and to always be critical.

Let’s be realistic about Steve Jobs: the man was on a mission to conquer the world with gadgets. And he was brilliant at it. This is understandable in a man in his 20s or 30s, but if he’s still doing it in his 50s, then somewhere he has got stuck. That sort of heroic mould belongs to young men (I won’t try and explore women’s psychology here, I wouldn’t know): they want to achieve something, they want to be recognised, they want to excel, and other people are probably going to get trampled on along the way. The actual value, in itself, of the thing they are achieving is secondary. It is the glamour of the thing, what it stands for, that matters. And how you go about achieving your end also tends to be of secondary value. Steve Jobs turned Apple into the USA’s biggest technology company, and he was also known for his anger, for humiliating and belittling people, and for putting his employees under a lot of pressure. Apple was known for not being a happy company. All this is classic young man warrior stuff, but in the body of a dying middle-aged man.
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It has been well-said that in the first half of life, men are ruled by Mars, and in the second half by Venus (and vice-versa, it is said, for women.) Mars is what I have already described. Venus is where you go hang on, what is this doing to me and the people around me? And what is the value, in itself, of the product? This changeover is part of the mid-life passage, which by no means all men go through.

It passes some by with no discernible side-effects, like Rupert Murdoch, for example, still trying to conquer the world in his eighties and still in good health. Some, like Bill Gates, change their values away from money and raw power and want to give back to society, which he is doing in a big way. He does have a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, so will always want to do something big. But all the same, in trying to free the world from malaria – which is hard to fault – he seems to still be in thrall to the glamour (Neptune) and obligation (Saturn) of achievement, albeit in a less crude form. These things are not black and white.

And then there are others who receive the wake-up call but choose to ignore it. Like Steve Jobs. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. It can be too easy to attribute someone’s diseases to what you criticise them for, what you don’t like about them. Sometimes cancer is just cancer. And maybe that’s all it was.

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But he was diagnosed as Uranus was starting to conjoin his Sun, and Pluto and Saturn were squaring his Ascendant. With this sort of concurrent demand for transformation, there has to be a connection. Because of our scientific culture, we tend to think in terms of simple cause and effect: Steve Jobs’ refusal to re-examine his life ‘caused’ his pancreatic cancer. But the relationship is synchronous, in the same way that astrology works on synchronicity, which Jung called an ‘acausal connecting principle.’ Two events with a symbolic relationship.

Astrology can help show these synchronous relationships, where one event is saying something about the other event. Not everything is synchronous, discernment is required. In Jobs’ case, not only do we have the transits, with their psychological, even metaphysical demands to awaken and re-examine; we also have medical astrology, in which Pluto and Virgo are associated with the pancreas, and Pluto was squaring Jobs’ Virgo Ascendant in 2003. Moreover, Jobs’ Sun was in the 6th House, affirming a general connection between his health and his realisation of his inner goals.

I suspect that Jobs was ruled by his Moon and Mars in Aries and that his Piscean Sun, which was unaspected, was used by the Moon and Mars for their own ends. Who was Steve Jobs apart from the companies he founded and built? It's hard to find out much about the man apart from his business career, suggesting an over-identification with that. It is possible to be fully and authentically identified with a project, if you are, say, an artist, but conquering the world with electronic gadgets? A Pisces Sun will eventually need quite different conditions than these to continue to move on and unfold.

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Apple itself was an expression of Jobs’ warrior cast of mind. Incorporated on 1st April 1976, it has Sun at 11 Aries in a Cardinal t-square with Mars and Pluto. Jobs’ Moon is at 7 Aries. This t-square is exceptionally dynamic. Uranus conjunct North Node makes it a mould breaker (Obama has this aspect in Leo), while the sign of Scorpio suggests issues to learn around money and power.

If a planet is unaspected, it can be hard for it to find expression, for the rest of the personality can put it to one side. It is interesting that Jobs was adopted. I knew someone who was adopted who also had an an unaspected Sun, and his life seemed to be for him a series of ‘important’ events that proved he existed. He was lacking a foundation. The nature of Apple is interesting in this respect, because it is not built on a stable product that can be developed over time, like say Microsoft or Google are. It is built on relentless innovation, the next big new thing. Jobs was always racing. What did he think would happen if he slowed down or stopped?

Jobs' Moon was also unaspected. The personal planet that was most joined up was Mars in Aries, which aspects 5 other planets. So one could say that it was Mars more than any other planet that ruled his life, subsuming both the Sun and the Moon to its desires and demands. The Moon, being in Aries, fitted well, but the poor old Sun in Pisces didn't have much chance. Jobs spoke about his life in terms of holding fast to what you want and going for it, and this is very Martian. As was his desire to conquer, to be the best, and his often unsavoury way of dealing with people.

Jobs was an American hero with a cult following. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the American ability to get things done and to re-invent itself and to think big. But you need something behind that, something you can come back to that is actually more important. Jobs heroic status in the US says a lot about that culture, that it is still adolescent. The US Neptune and Jobs’ Ascendant are both at 22 Virgo. He made technology (Virgo) sexy (Neptune).

I think America is starting to enter its mid-life crisis, which is a good thing, and Jobs may come to symbolise the end of an age – a golden age for some, depending on your perspective. Natally, the US has Sagittarius Rising and Sun conjunct Jupiter. Hence the expansiveness and optimism, but also the reluctance to grow up, to come down to earth, outside of all that futurism, and find who you are.

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When you enter the mid-life passage, things often stop working so well. This is happening to the US. It’s not just in a recession, which has happened before. China is at its door economically, threatening its pre-eminence, and that is new. It has had its credit rating lowered for the first time. It can no longer control the Middle East, the source of its energy, in the way that it has become used to. The US seems powerless in the face of Iran's nuclear ambitions. And the US progressed Saturn is, for the first time retrograde and starting to pick up speed, just as the US has experienced a Saturn Return. With Saturn, there is pressure to grow up, to move on to the next stage of life.

I have no desire to see America brought low, and America will remain wealthy and powerful for a long time yet. But its confidence is taking a knock and that is a good thing. Failure, or the perception of it, can bring out the best in people. And for America, its best may cease to mean economic and military eminence. What you’re looking for in the mid-life crisis is an ability to value things and people in themselves. With its Venus-Jupiter-Sun stellium in Cancer, America needs to learn to value itself for what it is, its own values and culture, regardless of its place in the world. You could say this is true of any country or individual, but with that stellium in Cancer, the US has a particularly rich and expansive home culture that, with the natal square to Saturn, has been undervalued.

Sun square to Saturn is a particularly difficult aspect when it comes to creating depth. With Sun square Pluto, for example, you will really suffer, or you may do something abominable, if you continue to seek power outside of yourself. But Saturn acts as a barrier that you cannot see through, a voice that tells you that reality lies 'out there' in position and prestige, and which may always seem to you a self-evident truth. You do not have the suffering of Pluto to make you question it, just the self-doubt of Saturn that keeps telling you your value lies in your achievement. It’s painful, but maybe not painful enough.

So the US will always have this niggling doubt about itself that it has been so good at covering up. This aspect is classically related to fathers and their achievement, or lack of it. The US grew out of, and rebelled against a burgeoning British Empire. It had something big to measure up to, and it succeeded many times over. But that niggle is still there. Look at the fascination with British Royalty, which says so much. When I do a chart, I focus on the major challenges. And in the US chart, Sun square Saturn stands out. The real measure of the US is not its ability to achieve, for that is a reactive pattern expressive of the Sun-Saturn aspect. The real measure will be when it can no longer be top dog – for China, with 4 times the population, will eventually beat it hands down. Will the US find another way of feeling at ease with itself? This is not easy for an individual, let alone a collective.

The Undead and Plutonian Change

3000 people took to the streets of Brighton dressed as zombies this weekend. Some of the anti-capitalist protesters in Wall Street have also dressed as zombies. Vampires, another undead phenomenon, have also been very popular in recent years. It’s not all just for kids, either. Anyone out there a True Blood fan?

The world is undergoing a major Pluto transit as it squares up to Uranus in the early cardinal signs, hard aspecting significant points in the charts of all the major powers. We are collectively undergoing a death, with much resistance and hanging on to the old, and maybe the young people dressed as zombies are acting that out for us. The young often sense the future better than we do, and maybe that’s because they are the future.

As you get older you get more ‘realistic’ and you try to stay engaged with it all and there is wisdom in that. But there is also wisdom in the instinctive youthful rejection of the adult world. It’s often inarticulate, but that’s no reason to dismiss it. There’s something for us in it, and it’s also a psychological necessity for them. The Occupy protests, which are occurring under the Uranus-Pluto square, are strongly resonant of the student protests of the 60s, which occurred under a Uranus-Pluto conjunction.

They are not just resonant, they are in a way the same thing one step on, being part of the same Uranus-Pluto cycle. The conjunction sows the seed, while the call to action is much more urgent under the opening square. The conjunction is a sign of things to come; the youth of the 60s saw the deep flaws in the system, but the economy was still boomimg. Now, under the dynamic opening square, the system is reaching decadence, and the protests have a more immediate relevance.
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Uranus and Pluto are often described as ‘evolutionary’ in their function. I think that is putting a human wish on them. They certainly bring about change, each in their own way, but it can be anything but ‘evolutionary’. The last Uranus-Pluto square of the early 30s resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. And then we carried on as before. Different empires, a few tweaks like the UN, but same basic values.

And it is the same with the present Uranus-Pluto square. Things are certainly under pressure to change in a Uranian-Plutonian manner. Deep structures are under threat, the balance of power is shifting eastwards, there is protest and revolution. But to say it is evolutionary suggests that what comes afterwards will be better, and who can judge that? It depends on your point of view. Or you can try saying that Pluto’s ‘real’ intent is evolutionary, it’s just that we ignore it so he becomes destructive or something. But Pluto is not human, and evolution is a human idea, a recent one at that.

We are seeing the cruel side of Uranus-Pluto at present. Col Gaddafi was shot on capture in Libya. Most Libyans are delighted. It’s understandable. The Libyan authority wanted him captured alive and put on trial. Then they would have shot him, a year or two down the line. Parade the monster in a cage for a while, like they do with Death Row in America, then kill him. I think the Chinese system is more humane: a prompt trial, and a prompt execution. And let the collective deal with its own shadow.

We are also seeing the Greek people treated cruelly. They are subject to inhuman austerity measures at the behest of the EU. They are rightly protesting, and the cost-cutting may just drive the economy further downwards. But who is being cruel? Is it Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader? She doesn’t strike me as the type. Is it the Greek Prime Minister? He just seems to be doing his best to save the country. By being a member of the Eurozone, Greece can’t simply default, declare itself bankrupt, which in a way was what Iceland did in letting its banks go to the wall, costing foreign investors huge sums.

It is a cruel situation, created by folly: the Greek government’s overspending in an era of cheap borrowing, and the EU’s creation of a currency without proper controls. You could say the humane thing for the EU to do would be to simply bail out Greece properly and write off enough debt for it to have a good chance, rather than just enough to survive until the next crisis. But looming in the background are exactly the same problems with Spain and Italy, but much bigger, much less affordable. So the EU is paralysed. And so is Greece: in order to default it would have to leave the Eurozone, and it would be on its own, a small indebted country in a world of empires, its trading relationships severely compromised. And behind it all is the dream of a United Europe under threat.

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The EU is in a classic Plutonian crisis. You cannot move, nothing will work, because the paradigm itself has to go. The founding vision for the EU was the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This chart has Sun at 4 Aries, Asc at 6 Libra and MC at 7 Cancer. Pluto has already hard-aspected all these points at least twice.

The way that Pluto change often occurs, especially when there is a lot of resistance (as in this case), is that the entity is destroyed from within by the crossings of Pluto, until all that is left is a shell that one day finds it no longer has the will to go on living. This is what has been happening to the vision of the EU in its present form. The astrology tells me that no-one really believes in it anymore, and that we are simply going through the motions. There is no underlying strength or will to continue. An important crisis meeting of all the leaders has been going on in Brussels this weekend, at the same time as 3000 people dressed as zombies marched through Brighton.

The Crazy Ones

Here's to Uranus, currently being empowered by Pluto:

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As Above, So Below; The Quantum Origins of Life

This picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook. It’s a great example of the idea of ‘As Above, So Below’, which is a symbolic truth rather than a literal truth. If you were to push the comparison between brain cells and galaxies, it would probably break down fairly quickly. All the same, the pictures are similar and the comparison has deep appeal.

Why? Speaking for myself, it makes me feel connected. It is a Neptunian experience. Why do our brains work like this? It is worth remembering that outer reality is a construct of our brains – space, time, left, right etc – and that includes the brain itself.

We forget this. We have created a dream, and the dream has become real. It is humanity’s enduring amnesia. Anything that reminds us of what we have forgotten resonates, it reminds us of home, of where we came from. And the universe, so impossibly large and far away, is at a deep level a construct of our minds. This picture reminds us of that, it reminds us that we are not just the brain cell, we are also the galaxy.

This is also why astrology works. The universe out there is just our minds writ large. If you can read it, it not only gives you self-knowledge, it gives you that sense of connection and homecoming. As with the brain/universe metaphor, astrology works on poetic/symbolic truth, so pushing the metaphors in the wrong sort of way, particularly with the literalising methods of science, will cause them to break down.

Strangely, literal truth and symbolic truth connect through astrology and other divination systems. Astrological truth can also be literal truth, such as ‘Given your work situation and the strength of the astrological factors affecting it, you will almost certainly have a new job in 6 months.’ But it doesn’t work the other way around: literal, observable truth doesn’t easily lead to psychological and metaphysical truths, not unless you’re sensitive with it, which is not part of the remit of the scientific method.

I bought an edition of the New Scientist recently, because it promised an article on the quantum origins of life. As usual, they were spinning an article out of a few maybes, and even then it was about biochemical processes using quantum effects, rather than on the origin of life. But the title was thought-provoking.

I view quantum theory as the point at which the scientific method starts to break down. Science is a model, and like a metaphor, it breaks down when pushed too far – like to the nano level and beyond. Or to the galactic level and beyond: look at the ‘dark energy’ fiasco. Quantum theory has required considerable ingenuity to make it work and even then, after 100 years, a coherent and proven model of that world has yet to fully emerge. The tinier the world that science explores, the more it explodes into multidimensionality and irrationality and indeterminacy.

So when I read about life having quantum origins, I thought that was about right. The ‘rules’ of consciousness are more similar to the rules of the quantum world than they are to the rules of everyday science. Perhaps you could also talk about the galactic origins of life, in that the ‘rules’ of the galaxy require it to consist of 96% unknowable, unobservable ‘dark’ energy, which is again rather like consciousness in the sense of its predominant ‘Unconscious’.
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Incidentally, I think ideas about humanity having been seeded by aliens is part of the same poetry as the brain cell/universe picture. We live in a literalising age, and people easily make fools of themselves when they insist this poetic truth is a literal truth. But that doesn’t make it mere fancy. Poetic truth, mythological truth needs to be experienced as real, as more real than literal truth. Get your head round that one!

So the more science pushes to the extremely large and extremely small, the more it is pushing at boundaries, boundaries between consciousness and matter. The scientific method is based on a hard distinction between inner and outer, on there being a solid, real world ‘out there’ that can be measured. An elementary training in philosophical thinking would make it clear that this outlook is a case of ‘let’s suppose for a moment’. But the undeveloped, the uncivilised human mind wants simplicity and certainty, and mainstream science seems only too happy to provide this.

Particularly with the nano world, it has been clear for a century that we are no longer dealing with a solid, separate, ‘out there’ world. Not just because of its indeterminacy, but because it is known that at this level you can’t separate the observer from the observed. This insight has not been carried through to mainstream science, perhaps because the effect of the observer is not so obvious on an everyday level, and because of its subtlety.

But on the nano level, we are dealing with a place where the connection between matter and consciousness is clear, and where the rigid boundary between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ starts to break down. Quantum Reality has huge philosophical implications that have been explored by some authors, but even after a century have not reached the mainstream in a rigorous way.

They probably never will, if you look at the history of religion. Religions tend to have a mainstream that is sustained by simple, collectively-held certainties, and a mystical heretical fringe composed of individuals who have their own unique relationship with the truth. Science is no different. It has many of the characteristics of religion. One of this year’s Nobel Prize winners discovered a new form of crystal, and had to endure years of ridicule before his ideas were taken seriously. That’s religion for you.