The Surrealism of Size

Most of us have the sense that something big is happening in the world right now. What’s going on in the sky certainly spells this out, especially the part about Neptune (universality) conjoining Jupiter (expansiveness). But a closer look at the meaning of this pair suggests that this Big Something we feel happening is more than big.

It’s a different kind of big.

Neptune (surrealism) and Jupiter (size) are easing into their spectacular first conjunction the end of this week. Gradually, subtly, underneath the surface of mass consciousness, a sea change is occurring in the public mind. A very ordinary concept — one closely tied to the literal, everyday world — is becoming extraordinary: the notion of quantity. It is slipping out of reach.

Take the “several trillion dollars” that are being given to the banks. (Not a literal offer. You can’t take them. Only huge financial institutions can take them.) It’s too much money to imagine. Can your brain make sense of even a billion dollars?

(Okay, this part may be just me. I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that over the past few decades, maybe since the dot-com boom, the term “millionaire” to mean “a really rich person” has been replaced in the vernacular by “billionaire”.)

These numbers have too many zeroes to fathom. They are the stuff of science fiction (Neptune). If humans are born with a special brain zone that can process “several trillion dollars,” I haven’t found mine. I put the phrase in quotation marks because I haven’t been convinced that it refers to something real. At the moment it remains an abstraction; the kind of sum that theoretical mathematicians alone can handle.

The premier symptom of the transit of Neptune (confusion) over the Sibly Moon (the American people) is the fact that the US populace is staggering around in a daze while their national treasury is being emptied out. Naomi Klein has called this process “the greatest heist in monetary history.” Over the centuries there have been plenty of official rip-offs, far less outrageous than this one, that have spurred populist uprisings. Yet there are no murmurs of revolution here (outside of a few nut jobs on the radio, whose rants are motivated not by ideas but by the fact that their team lost the big game last November). In the face of the gargantuan bailouts still taking place, the passivity of the victims — the taxpayers — is hard to make sense of unless we factor in that the collective mind has slammed up against an epistemological wall.

We know that thinking precedes action. It certainly precedes political action. The Neptune/Jupiter/Chiron cluster in Aquarius (We-the-People) that dominates the sky all through 2009 offers us a big clue as to why and where America’s collective consciousness is stuck.

In Britain, they’ve just fired the speaker of the House of Commons for the first time in 300 years for not preventing the legislators from spending a few thousand quid on garden manure. Here in the USA, by contrast, the kleptocrats who destroyed the global economy are being punished with the gift of hundreds of billions of dollars. No strings attached.

Americans are not responding intelligently, intuitively, or self-interestedly to the heist in Washington because the mass mind has blown a fuse.