Alpha Dogs
After more than a decade of moving fast and breaking things, [Zuckerberg] should slow down and clean up the mess. — Andrew Marantz
We have an extraordinary chance this month to consider some of the key themes underlying world events of the past decade.
And what it might look like to take responsibility for them.
This includes you, Zuckface.
Ten years ago
April features planetary stations of both Saturn and Pluto, highlighting the longterm lessons those cycles have been doggedly trying to teach us.
Saturn, planet of responsibility, pivots retrograde on April 17th. Pluto, planet of destruction & renewal, retrogrades on the 22nd.
It was back in 2008 that Pluto (breakdown) first dipped its toe into Capricorn, a 15-year-long slog that promised a radical restructuring of public life. Astrologers everywhere were speculating wildly about what the planet of deconstruction in the sign of politics would bring to the world.
Now we know.
Strongmen
One of the transit’s more obvious expressions is the way it’s being personified 
. There’s been quite a spike in heads of state (Capricorn) who embody the forces of dominance and control (Pluto).
We’ve got ham-fisted butchers like the Philippines’ Duterte and Egypt’s Al-Sisi, and unapologetic tyrants like Hungary’s Orban and Turkey’s Erdogan. We’ve got cool, understated dictators like Japan’s Abe, China’s Xi, and, smoothest of all, Bad Vlad of Russia.
Ranging from the crude to the subtle, autocrats have ambled into seats of power. The media’s go-to term for these guys is “strongmen.” But their behavior suggests the opposite of strength.
Jailing dissidents, bullying critics and murdering journalists aren’t signs of confidence. Bullying, whether by tweet or poison, is a sign of desperation.
Huffing and puffing
The theme shows up equally in terms of personal style.
It seems not to have occurred to Silvio Berlusconi, or to his White House alter ego, that cavorting with porn stars and fake-tanning yourself the color of a rancid pumpkin do not make women think, “Yum yum yummy, what a healthy masculine ego.”
This sorry crop of alpha dogs is representative of a patriarchal model that’s running on fumes. When a cycle is on its last legs, its energy tends to flail around, huffing and puffing in reactive shows of force.
We’re watching a hierarchical paradigm (Capricorn) all cranked up on faux-vitality before petering out.
Crumbling foundations
On an institutional level, rot has been exposed within some of the most deeply entrenched aspects of public life.
Like a wrecking ball swinging at the pillars of the public forum, Pluto in Capricorn has been dismantling the foundational structures of established government, all over the world.
Because the USA is entering its Pluto Return right now (exact in 2022), this country is an especially pointed example of the process.
But watching it play out is complicated for Americans.
Churning froth
This is because it’s hard to see the system from within the system.
The system in question is a swirling maelstrom of hyperventilating culture wars: a public conversation that has lost its moorings.
We’re thrashing around in a churning froth of junk information, constantly updated without being coherently interpreted. Thus immersed, we’re hard pressed to understand the role of our epoch in history.
To get a perspective we need to escape the madness, and to do that, we need to question some deep collective assumptions.
Dualism
For example, our adherence to the dualistic perspective, which divides all experience into opposite pairs.
On the esoteric level, this perspective is the product of The Fall. That was when we left the 
Garden of Eden, a mythical metaphor for unity consciousness, to fulfill our collective destiny: that of achieving individuation. Saturn (separation consciousness) usurped Neptune (the unified field).
The Expulsion from the Garden gave rise to polarization (“the knowledge of Good and Evil”), which became the dominant paradigm of humanity.
For thousands of years, this worldview has been getting more and more extreme. But if we take a long enough view, we can take heart from the fact that, per Natural Law, things are coming back around (see this article.)
Binary model
Meanwhile, the dualistic paradigm is amped up to fever pitch in the USA right now, taking the form of blind binary partisanship.
This is a really dumb way to see things.
It leads to absurd dicta like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As if James Comey, so recently condemned by Hillary backers for springing that faux-scandal about her email server right before the election, is now a hero because he trashed Trump in his new book.
Or as if Jeff Bezos is suddenly a great guy, now that Trump is railing against Amazon.
Knee-jerk antipathies
Trump’s base will stand by him not because they believe Trump is on their side, but because they define themselves as being on his side. — Robert Reich
Critical thinking has been replaced, in this media climate, by a compulsion to define our position in terms of knee-jerk antipathies, some of which change from one news cycle to the next. Whipped up by the media as by the announcer at a prizefight, the public’s positions are as passionate as they are ungrounded in any understanding of ideas or policy.
At the moment, establishment Democrats are expressing great admiration for Comey, Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, Stormy Daniels, even John Kelly – all of them Republicans, most of them Trump appointees — as if these guys were lifelong advocates of liberal values.
Dynamically linked
Astrology teaches us that opposite pairs are dynamically linked. To resolve a planetary opposition, we consciously make those two parts of the self come together, as if they were conjunct.
Moreover, the great sages tell us that all opposites will sooner or later switch places.
Take Roseanne Barr. A couple of years ago, she was on a spitfire tear about the prison-military-industrial complex. Now she’s tweeting that the Democrats are running a child porn operation out of a pizza parlor.
To be continued.
