Cycles and the Shape of Decline

Looking back over the writing I have done here on my astrology blog over the last decade or so, I want to pick up on one particular pair of essays that I think are worth revisiting and pursuing further.

This essay is meant to put a large framework around my astrological thinking. It also ties in with the work I am currently working on with mundane astrology and the world chart.

This is important to me, because I have learned that how a person does astrology, especially predictive mundane astrology, is strongly influenced by their worldview and their political perspective. In this essay I am laying out the large-scale frame that I use to make sense of the world.

The first essay is titled, The Shape of Our Thinking.

The Shape of our Thinking

Here I talk about how our thinking has shape, and how the shape our thinking takes is very important, and that there is a big difference between straight-line and cyclical thinking. The image which opens today’s essay sums it up visually; I will unpack it further as we go along.

This next essay is titled, Geometry and Polarity.

Geometry and Polarity

There I take that same concept of thinking in cycles and map that to talking about opposing polarities. One of the ways that straight-line thinking tends to deal with polarities is to think in terms of increasingly polarized opposites, where there are extreme swings from one to the other and increasing hostility between the opposites, reaching the point where all cooperation breaks down. (I sure hope that sounds familiar.)

Interestingly, both of these essays were written in 2016, another big election year, and the election where that interesting, larger-than-life, mythological projection screen named Donald Trump burst on the scene and turned our political reality completely upside-down.

Oh, my, it has been an interesting few years, hasn’t it?

I think these essays fit the world of 2016, and frankly I think that they are even more important and more obvious in today’s unstable world.

Back then I think these ideas were pushing the edge. I expect that there are a lot more people today that are willing to be aware of this than there were back when I first wrote these pieces.

Let me rephrase that – Back then I think these ideas were pushing the edge. Now I think we are coming very close to going over the edge, and some time soon I expect these ideas to go from reasonable speculation to obvious hindsight.

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I’d like to summarize my argument here.

Astrology conceives of reality in terms of repeating cycles of growth and change – alternating opposites like light and dark, summer and winter and so on – and of ongoing cycles through time, of birth, growth, flourishing, decline, death and decay, followed in a collective sense by a rebirth, and so on. That is represented by the wave in the above illustration.

The straight red line is our modern view of reality as conforming to Progress, where we just keep going up and up, getting better and better, always moving forward. The straight line and the wave are pretty much in sync on the upward slope, but on the downward slope they increasingly diverge.

Astrology looks at the world in terms of cycles, ascending and descending waves, and complementary opposites. Cyclical, circular, wave shaped.

By contrast, our modern world thinks of reality in single direction straight lines. This is the modern religion of Progress.

Much of the world around us behaves in ways that match the shape of astrology – cycles of growth and decay, movement in waves. Meanwhile we’re thinking in terms of straight lines.

Here’s the important point – when the shape of our thinking mismatches the shape of the world around us we get ourselves in trouble.

When the linear thinking you use to deal with the world gets increasingly out of sync with the reality around you, you are set up for a major correction.

To put a larger frame around this I want to mention one of my more important long-term major influences here, and to recommend his work.

Oswald Spengler – Decline of the West

Spengler’s most important work is in two volumes, titled, The Decline of the West. It is still in print, both in a one volume abridged edition, and a nicely done two volume paperback reprint from Arktos. It is a marvelous, rich, evocative and poetic work, and I highly recommend it.

Spengler’s thesis is based on an insight that he got from Goethe. Basically, countries and civilizations act like living beings, and like living being they have a life cycle.

Underline the word cycle here.

Like a biological organism, the cycle of a country and a civilization includes birth, childhood and growth, maturity, aging, decline and death. If you place multiple civilizations next to each other, as Spengler does very brilliantly in his book, it gives a great deal of insight into the phase our current culture is in

– which is, decline.

Spengler describes the underlying vision of our culture as Faustian, based on an idea of limitless expansion and growth, in terms of wealth, of territory, and of power. That vision explains the trajectory of the Anglo-European-American Empire that has dominated much of the civilized world in the past several centuries, and is currently in its old age, senility and decline.

Historically we are in a culture that thinks in terms of straight lines and perpetual progress and growth rather than in terms of cycles. That is a thoroughly Faustian view of reality in Spengler’s terms – to boldly go where no man has ever gone before (cue cheesy theme music here…)

Think perpetual progress, where the new is better than the old precisely because it is new, and the future is better than the past, precisely because it is the future. Consider how this ties in to a very strong cultural movement today to obliterate all traces of our historical and cultural heritage.

Astrology is a cyclical science, and it is all about cycles within cycles. I find Spengler’s thinking to very useful precisely because he thinks in terms of large cycles.

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Let’s return to the image that begins this essay.

The straight red line represents the current trajectory of our country, set on a path of what it assumes should be permanent economic growth – and, perpetual political and territorial growth, where we by rights are destined to rule the planet – benevolently, of course.

The underlying, wave shaped sine curve better represents our reality, and represents the worldview underlying astrology.

It is the gap between the straight red line and the curved wave of underlying reality that causes problems.

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The straight line model of the world works just fine where the straight line overlaps the wave – i.e., when things really are on the up curve. It works great while you’re young, you’re growing, you’re prosperous – when things are “looking up”. Here in the US we had the better part of half a century on that up curve, thanks to explosive growth from massive exploitation, and depletion, of fossil fuels.

However, as the two graphs get increasingly out of sync, the straight line model of the world becomes increasingly dysfunctional.

In a straight line model of the world we have no good way of thinking about that peak and decline part of the wave, so we don’t recognize it when we reach it, we don’t know how to deal with it, and we tend to take actions to keep the line going straight and up – but, the further out of sync the two lines become, the more we are setting ourselves up for a catastrophic correction of some sort to re-align them.

Actually, what is getting re-aligned is our perception of reality.

If we can’t think about something then we have no way to deal with it. It is off our radar.

I think that explains a lot of the political rhetoric here in America – and, for that matter, in Europe today. We all believe in Progress, in moving perpetually forward and upward, always growing, always becoming more prosperous and powerful.

We can never lose; we can never decline; we can never fail; we can never admit defeat, because that would mark the end of Faustian reality. The world makes a lot more sense when you realize that the people in power seem to think that they can never, ever admit defeat or that they’ve made a mistake.

In the straight-line Progress map of the world, if we are not growing, becoming more prosperous etc – or, worse yet, if we seem to be getting less prosperous, more unstable and so on – then something must be wrong, so we need to find a way to “straighten things out” so we can get on with the Business As Usual of perpetual prosperity and growth. Meanwhile, the actions we take to keep that straight-line illusion going become increasingly unrealistic and dysfunctional.

When you have a gap between your perception and reality, that creates a strain; if the two get too far out of sync you are setting yourselves up for a correction – otherwise known as, a crash.

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Most business that fail do so during their first major growth stage.

The tendency is to have a period of rapid growth, extrapolate forward linearly from that, and assume it will continue – and that involves ramping up on production facility, hiring more people, and so on. Then, when the cyclical shape of usual growth kicks in and demand starts to slow, you have a business that has over- built, over-reached itself and collapses.

That is what happens when you try to map a straight line, perpetual progress view of the world onto an underlying cyclical process.

It is that sort of cycle – overgrowth followed by crash, steep up slopes followed by steep down slopes rather than a smooth curve that works with the ups and downs – euphoria and depression, bubble and burst, boom and bust – that is precisely what we have been seen in our country for the last several decades.

If I use a picture to describe the current stage of my country in a whole lot of areas all at once, this is it.

It explains the financial markets. It specifically explains the housing market today. It explains the tech market, especially around the latest new media darling fad of AI, which to me looks an awful lot like the next big bubble.

It explains the prices I see when I walk into a food market, as I watch the Faustian dollar increasingly expand in volume to worthless nothingness.

It explains the state of a lot of our largest cities.

It explains our country’s foreign policy, including the wars we find our declining empire entangled in. Remember, by definition we can never, ever, ever admit defeat, because we are incapable of defeat and it is unthinkable – we are invincible, we are the Good Guys, and we are on the Right Side of History.

On a more individual level it explains why so many people have a hard time admitting and dealing with the reality of aging, decline of ability, and death.

In a larger sense, I think it explains the current trajectory in Europe and Great Britain, the core of the Euro-Anglo-American world empire that is approaching its demise.

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I hope it is clear that I am not talking about a massive apocalyptic end-of-world scenario, but rather a series of drastic downturn corrections – rather like falling off an unstable peak, and having a series of bumps before things settle down to a new trajectory at a much lower level than before. Some of those bumps will get pretty nasty, but they do not mean an apocalyptic end of the world.

If you’ve been around for awhile – I came of age in the sixties – you may be aware of having lived through this sort of drastic downturn followed to a return to what felt like a new normal, but at a lower level than before. This is not an all-at-once process but a series of steps with pauses.

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I hope it is clear that I am not trying to take any political sides here, other than to say that the most sensible course for our country would be to acknowledge that we are in decline and contraction, nationally and internationally, and to take steps to deal with that. I do not see anyone in politics that is aware of this or is willing to admit it, or to take any substantive steps to address it.

I also do not think that there is anything substantive that can be done politically to change the real trajectory that we are on, nor do I think that it makes any difference here in the US how the elections turn out. We are in decline, and we had best deal with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please buckle your seat belts and grab a tub of popcorn; we are approaching an area of turbulence.