Astrology and Media Manipulation

The Purpose of this Essay

As astrologers we do interpretation by mapping the symbolic language of astrology onto the data and information about the world around us that we experience. Astrology does not exist in a vacuum; it does not come alive until we relate it to our world. That leads to a very important point that I am going to meditate on in this essay.

Our astrology on any topic is only as good
as the news data that we are mapping it to.

In today’s world this causes some problems. Like it or not, the state of the news media today is now such that much of the news we consume is badly distorted, contains a great deal of falsehood and fiction, and is usually slanted to support a political agenda.

If we follow only slanted and distorted sources of news
then our astrology becomes slanted and distorted.

We need to be aware of this process, and of the distortion in the news and media we consume. We also need to develop skills for viewing media with a critical discernment, and with awareness of the persuasion process going on that is being used on us to shape our opinion.

What I want to talk about in this essay is how the same skills that make us good astrologers also make us easily susceptible to programming by the media. Tarot readers, psychics, and practitioners of other forms of divination are similarly vulnerable if that is their only way of looking at the world.

In order to be good astrologers today we really need to be media-aware, media-savvy, have some understanding of how our minds work, and of how the media can easily exploit that if we are not aware of the process.

This also means that, along with our skills as astrologers in seeing patterns of meaning, we really need to develop balancing skills that allow us to stand back, to sort, to question, to sift and to compare news sources. Those skills don’t come naturally, and for most of us, those skills are not naturally a part of our astrology toolkit. We need to consciously develop them. That takes work, it takes exploration, it takes learning, and it takes practice.

Kinds of Coincidence

I find it helpful to think about there being three different kinds ways of thinking about coincidence.

• meaningful coincidence
• meaningless coincidence, or randomness
• manipulated coincidence, where data deliberately is put out and juxtaposed in such a way that the person doing it is attempting to get you to draw the conclusion they want

It is that third kind of coincidence that makes astrologers vulnerable to manipulation, where we interpret a manipulated coincidence as being meaningful coincidence. When that happens we see what they want us to see, while thinking we are drawing the conclusions on our own.

In general, astrologers, tarot readers, and psychics are practiced at meaningful coincidence. We learn to use our minds that way. In order to stay sane and balanced we need to be able to recognize the other kinds of coincidence, and not assume that all patterns are meaningful.

To deal with just random coincidence, we need to realize that the meaning we see in the coincidence is coming from our minds shaping the material. The meaning does not exist in the data itself, it is given to the data by how we associate things.

We also need to be able to step back and consider that the coincidence pattern we are looking at might be deliberate and manipulative, put there by somebody who is trying to get us to think in a particular way. That is how the news media works.

Wet and Dry

In astrology we have the four elements as a core part of astrology symbolism. The elements are made up of two pairs of contrasting properties, hot-cold and wet-dry. I want to examine the properties of wet and dry here. Those properties can describe different ways of using the mind, and also different skill sets.

Wet connects, dry separates. Wet tends to fuse things together, dry makes distinctions. Wet is good at being immersed in something, seeing and feeling its overall pattern. Dry is good at standing back and getting perspective and questioning. You can think of wet and dry as being parallel to right brain intuitive synthesizing and left brain analyzing and reasoning.

What we think of as psychic powers are pretty much pure Wet; they set the rational mind aside and completely immerse in the connections that we see between things. Being psychic is all about meaningful coincidence, synchronicity, tying things together. Being psychic is also about trusting your intuitions and hunches without criticism.

Dry skills are all about skepticism, standing back, questioning things, stoppping and distinguishing between meaningful coincidence and just random coincidence.

As it is practiced today, traditional and modern astrology emphasize different ways of using the mind. Modern astrology is predominantly Wet. It has a strong intuitive and psychic component, and is often conceived of as using the symbols of astrology to stimulate and awaken the psychic powers of the mind. For some modern astrologers I know, learning to read a chart is training in using your psychic powers. I have clients who assume that I am psychic because I do astrology.

Traditional astrology takes more of a Dry approach. It is more about data analysis, weighing up things, drawing distinctions, tabulating, adding up strengths and weaknesses. That dry, analytic approach is the astrology that I prefer.

Modern is more wet and subjective, traditional is more dry and objective. Modern astrology immerses in the symbolism of the chart, traditional astrology analyzes the data. Those are very different ways of using the mind. Ultimately, though, astrologers in general need to have the skill of seeing patterns of significance. There is a wet component to all astrology. A purely dry astrology could not include any element of meaning.

How does this relate to how astrologers are susceptible to influence by the news?

Astrologers develop the skill of seeing how everything is Meaningful, how all the pieces tie together to point in one direction. The challenge facing us today is that, with the modern media, a lot of those pieces we see are deliberately put there to get us to come to a specific conclusion. The media chooses which pieces we see and which we do not see, and how they are arranged. We see signs in the road, and we forget that those signs were planted there deliberately to get us to walk in a particular direction.

A psychic sees a sign on the road and thinks it was put there as a sign from God. An engineer or other scientist might see the same sign and asks who put it there, and why. One accepts the meaning as is, the other questions where it came from and what it is trying to accomplish.

Being wet makes us easily influenced by the media. We need complementary dry skills to be able to stand back and question the patterns we are seeing, ask which are meaningful, which are just random, and which are deliberately manipulated.

Artists, Writers, Psychics, Astrologers

The writer, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams has pointed out that artists and fiction writers seem to be particularly susceptible to single-news-source influence, and to politically motivated fake news. Like astrologers, tarot readers and psychics, artists and fiction writers have primarily wet sorts of skill sets. They are practiced at seeing meaning everywhere, so they are more likely to buy into the meaning of news stories without questioning their source or veracity. On the other side, those with dry skill sets like engineers, scientists, statisticians, economists and such are more likely to question the media, to stand back and get some perspective, and to get alternate points of view.

Psychics, card readers, mediums, most astrologers, are all wet sorts of vocations similar to artists and fiction writers, and they share a similar kind of vulnerability to media manipulation.

A story – the Quaker religious group holds their group worship meetings with people sitting in silence, and they wait until a person feels moved to speak from inspiration by the Holy Spirit. One Quaker commented that it was amazing how the Holy Spirit seemed to read the local newspaper’s editorial page every morning.

Astrology, Politics and Media Bias

I have written before about how you can almost always tell a person’s political stance by watching how they do political astrology, and that in the overwhelming percentage of cases, the outcome of the astrology completely matches the political stance.

It’s pretty obvious why that happens when you stop and think about it. As an astrologer you need to apply the symbolism to a situation, to a set of data from the world. You do not practice astrology in a vacuum. If I am reading for a client, I need to get enough information about the client’s life situation to be able to map the astrology data to their life.

In applying astrology to political topics, our dataset is determined by the media we consume. The astrology chart does not exist in isolation, it needs to be mapped to a set of data in the world. We as astrologers do not exist in isolation from the media world that surrounds us.

In the case of political people and topics the data that comes to us from the media is already pre-shaped, slanted to support a particular political agenda. The conclusions are already baked into the data. When we apply astrology to that, the shape of the news media already pre-determines the conclusions we will come to using astrology. We think what the media influences us to think.

Why? Unless you make a conscious effort to do otherwise, you will tend to read only the news media that reinforces your own opinion. Actually, to be more accurate, the process is the inverse of that. If you read only one set of news media, one point of view, then that media is forming your opinion. It is not that you read the media that fits your bias, it is that the media you read determines your bias for you without your being aware of it. You are being told what your opinion is, and are likely completely unaware you are being programmed. This takes no effort, no awareness, no work, and it happens largely if not completely out of our awareness. If anything, persuasion is more effective and harder to counteract when it is out of awareness.

You feel like you are making up your own mind, when in reality your mind is being made up for you. The news tells you what you really think. And, if you are not aware of the process, you think you’re making up your own mind, while actually your mind is being made up for you.

This happens to pretty much everyone. Except you. Of course.

Astrology and the 2016 Election

This process of the media shaping astrology started becoming obvious to me in the astrology predictions I saw leading up to the 2016 election. The majority of astrologers predicted a Clinton victory back in 2016, which just coincidentally aligns with what the great majority of the news media was predicting.

It has become increasingly obvious to me that the astrology was just mirroring the bias of the astrologers, and that in turn was shaped by the biased message of the news media. The news media came first, the astrology came second.

After the election I was dismayed by the fact that the post-mortem analyses most astrologers made, trying to figure out why they got it wrong, completely ignored the subjective or media bias component, and instead focused their time and effort trying to figure what kind of technical astrology mistake they must have made.

Now, in 2020, it is extremely obvious that exactly the same process is happening, and that astrologers are predicting based on their bias – I’ve been watching that happen since at least mid 2019. If anything it is more extreme now, and the media is more extreme and blatant in its bias – either that or I am much more aware of the media bias now. Judging by what I see, we haven’t learned our lesson.

Examples

I want to give a couple of examples of this bias here.

In late 2019, during the Democratic primary debates, I recall reading an essay where the astrologer took the chart of Elizabeth Warren. Note that for Warren we have birth date only and no birth time, so the resulting chart is of very limited usefulness, with no houses and no ascendant. Still, that astrologer was confident enough to name her Madame President. Why? At the time that was the predominant message in the mainstream media, that she was the likely candidate, would win the primary and then go on to slaughter Trump. According to the mainstream media at that time, obviously ANY candidate would go on to slaughter Trump – just like with Clinton in 2016. The astrologer was merely echoing that week’s news. Once again the Holy Spirit read the editorial page.

Looking back, that post about “reading” Warren’s chart to declare her Madame President is so naive as to be laughable – and yet, I still see that level of blatant bias in many, many political posts that I see online.

I am sure I am not the only person to notice more than a few astrology posts in late 2019 that predicted President Trump was going to be impeached, which is the narrative that was featured by most of the mainstream media at that time. The Holy Spirit still reads the editorial page every morning.

The TDS Astrology Paper

I had another unpleasant and pretty extreme experience of political bias shaping astrology. This took place in a class on prediction that I teach at Kepler College, where I allow the student to choose their subject for the final study. One student chose Donald Trump. I advised him that he would need to take his own political leanings into account, especially with someone who calls forth such extreme feelings as Trump. I expected at least an attempt at objectivity and balance.

The paper was bad. It was painful to read, and very painful to have to review and grade. That person was a skilled astrologer, but he was completely unaware of how his intense hatred of Trump was completely controlling his astrology. It was completely obvious to him that all of the astrology data was pointing in a single direction, and for some reason that direction exactly lined up with his hatred of Trump. I am using the word hatred with full force here – he predicted that, by now, Trump would either be dead, in a solitary confinement maximum security prison, or in a padded cell in an insane asylum.

I had to take that into account in the grading – I flat out said in the review that it was obvious he hated Trump, and that bias was warping all of his astrology analysis. I am guessing, with a high degree of confidence, that he was likely shocked by my grading, and is likely now convinced that I must be an Evil Orange Man supporter myself, since I could not accept how his astrology analysis was so blatantly obvious and correct to him.

For me, standing outside of that person’s headset, it was obvious what he was doing. He was completely caught up in the anti-Trump bias that is so common in so much of the media today, and it just so happened that his opinion happened to align with that, and somehow all the astrology data just happened to align with that also.

After that I had to set a policy for my classes that I would not permit Trump to be a subject for the project. Thanks largely to the media, it seems that very few people can talk about his chart without their bias controlling their interpretation.

It is worth remembering that, as Scott Adams pointed out, being exactly right and being completely wrong feel exactly the same.

Being aware of your bias and attempting to compensate for it is part of skillfully practicing astrology, and for me it is part of being a mentally free, self aware person. It seems to me that those who are most oblivious to their bias are the people who are most caught up in media manipulation. From my perspective it looks like a media-imposed set of blinders that limits vision and limits thought.

For me, to be able to teach astrology well I need to develop the ability to stand outside of my own headset and question my own assumptions. I need to be able to evaluate a paper that is critical of someone I really admire, or admiring of someone I dislike. To do astrology interpretation myself I have to be able to view the astrology data as objectively as I can, even when it contradicts what I would like it to say.

That is a skill that we all need to practice astrology well. I maintain that is a skill that we all need to stay sane today. Without that skill we are prisoners of our own political bias, and that bias is being shaped, controlled and reinforced by the media that controls so much of our lives. The media tells us what we think.

Becoming Media Savvy

There are a couple of things we can do to educate ourselves on media and manipulation. I want to briefly list a few of them here.

– Read news from wide variety of sources. Read across the political spectrum. Compare notes. Do this for even a little while and it will become very obvious where the mainstream legacy media is omitting, deleting, distorting, and fabricating. Having multiple source with different points of view is critically important. If you consume only news with a single agenda then you are controlled by, and contained in, that agenda.

– Since this can take a lot of time, it helps to find people who are already doing this kind of digging and comparing. It is worth taking time to find news analysis sites, bloggers, podcasters and commentators whose intelligence and integrity you trust. VERY IMPORTANT: check more than one, and preferably check some you align with, and some you disagree with. Again, the cross-checking is vital.

– Educate yourself on the use of language and persuasion. Learn the kinds of persuasion techniques the media is constantly using on you. I will be writing on that more in the future – see the note at the end of this essay.

– As much as you can, become aware of your own biases. Become aware of your own filters. The only way to do that is to deliberately seek out information that goes against your own opinions.

I will be writing articles on each of those items, and I will add links to them here as I complete them.

Summing Up

To recap here, I think it is our responsibility, as astrologers in the modern media world, to become media savvy and to educate ourselves on how the media shapes and controls our thinking. If we don’t, our astrology becomes a simple mirror of whatever happens to be the most popular narrative in the news at that point in time. We need to realize that, without that awareness, we are at the mercy of the mind-control techniques being used on us daily throughout the media.