2020: When Reality Calls

Reality is calling… Will America pick up?

About a month ago, I noticed that the US had less than 13% of the world’s coronavirus cases. As of today, we have over 33% of global cases. A country with only about 1/20 of the global population has about 1/3 of the global coronavirus cases, but just last October, America was rated the best prepared nation in the world to handle a pandemic-type health crisis, in a report issued by Johns Hopkins University.

What explains this odd situation, in which the world’s best prepared country appears to lag far behind all other developed countries in its pandemic-response efforts?

In this article, I’m suggesting that the answer is very simple: if you operate from an alternate reality, it’s very hard to have the effect you want to have on reality itself.

To be effective against an environmental challenge like the coronavirus, the leaders of the response must recognize how things actually are in the environment that they’re trying to manage and protect. That is, the leaders have to be receptive to facts and acknowledge the truth, so that they can engage with things as they actually are.

Accordingly, a leadership that habitually rejects facts—and habitually refuses to recognize how things actually are—has already discarded its best tool for being effective against a nonhuman challenge like the coronavirus. It’s really difficult to successfully manage your environment, if you are generally not in the habit of deferring to facts, deferring to truth, and accepting reality.

 

It’s hard to fix an environment that you don’t even acknowledge.

 

If we looked for people who routinely shunned reality, rather than deferring to reality, what would those people look like? It seems clear that they would misrepresent or distort the truth, ignore science, ignore experts, and generally not engage with facts that they didn’t like. They would, to the contrary, dismiss or deny such facts, rebuff experts, and repudiate science—or they would offer up an alternative set of assertions, as if those assertions were actual facts. They’d tend to discredit or reject those who did defer to reality and spoke the truth, and they might also strongly align with others like themselves for support, since being out of congruency with reality could pose constant challenges.

While this approach to life might be effective for persuading other humans to accept some alternate version of reality, even so, reality itself will remain unaltered by anyone’s misrepresentation of it.

If reality is unresponsive to our misrepresentations of it, though, this doesn’t mean that those false representations will have no ill-effects on those very people who misrepresent reality. Even if someone’s false representations were accepted by everyone, there would still be the problem that the only sure way to affect reality in the way you wish is to engage with reality as it is.

So, those who continually refuse to accept reality are unwittingly undermining themselves. They’re throwing away their own ability to effectively manage their environment (or, at least, to effectively manage the nonhuman elements of their environment, since lying can be an effective way of managing people). You can see, then, how it would be a big problem if a large portion of the population, or certain key leaders, continually refused to accept reality.

 

This kind of big problem is what we’re facing now.

 

At around Christmas time, I wrote in an article on gentlecompass.com that the Christmas eclipse was likely to trigger events that would show us the ill-effects of straying from our adherence to universal principles—principles like deferring to the truth and accepting reality. As it turns out, Christmas was precisely when the coronavirus was first emerging. We are now witnessing how the coronavirus tracks reality, because it is not subject to any opinion or misrepresentation of the truth. No one can call the virus “partisan,” or “unfair,” or marginalize it, as if it were being unreasonable.

The fact that the virus has forced us to stop all the busyness that constantly distracts us from what is meaningful, and has forced instead us to think about it, will turn out to be a huge blessing. This is because the coronavirus gives us some discernable reality to follow, in a time when deception has made so many things impossible to discern. The resulting clarity will ultimately bring to light who has been deferring to the truth and who has not–who has abandoned universal principles and who hasn’t. We’ll then see why an abandonment of principles is such a dangerous and tragic choice to make—something that I’ve warned about many times in recent articles.

 

Review of My Last Post

So much has happened since my most recent article that it was hard to know where to start this one. The coronavirus pandemic emerged just after my last post in late December, the stock market crashed, and people all over the world started staying home from work in an effort to short-circuit the pandemic’s spread. Things seem to have fallen apart since my Christmas post.

I now think that the Christmas eclipse I wrote about in that article was heralding the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying economic upheaval. As I mentioned then, the astrology of last Christmas had only happened twice before (that I knew of, anyway). Once was when the Carrington Event occurred (a natural event), and the other time was when the dotcom bubble burst and the markets tanked (a man-made event). I wrote at Christmas that we might see one or the other type of event again from that astrology, but I frankly didn’t expect both types at once!

Of course, I’m not saying that I foresaw the coronavirus and its economic impact back then; I’m just saying that the pandemic scenario matches what the astrology was broadly indicating then (scroll down in that article to the section titled, “The Christmas Eclipse and Next Week’s Highly Unusual Astrology” to read this description).

In my Christmas post, I also apologized for having predicted a stock market crash for last year. While I don’t want to claim now that my prediction was right, I do still want to connect some dots that I think are relevant. As I’ve written, Saturn and Ketu conjunctions (like the recent one that lasted from March 2019 through January of this year) create the kind of fear, uneasiness and discord that has triggered panic selling in the markets for at least the last 225 years. I thought those feelings would have led to a stock market crash by the end of last year, but I now think it’s at least possible (if not likely) that people’s left-over reservoirs of those feelings played a part in the severity of the recent 37% stock dive. I also think that those left-over feelings are being allowed to dissipate, as so many of us quietly stay home.

In an earlier post from last year, I said that I thought 2020 would largely be a year of “rebuilding.” It sure looks like we have a lot of rebuilding to do this year.

 

A Few Predictions for 2020 & 2021

In my last article, I mentioned that the precise ascendant degree of America’s chart could play a major role in determining if and when a stock market crash would happen in 2020, and I also said we had reason to believe that America’s ascendant degree was in early Sagittarius. The connection I was making here was simply that Ketu would be transiting over the early part of Sagittarius in 2020, and a Ketu transit over America’s ascendant degree (whatever that degree turned out to be) could trigger a crisis like a stock plunge in the US. For instance, Ketu was at about 9° of Sagittarius on 9/11 when the trade center was bombed. This suggested that America’s ascendant degree might be somewhere around 9° of Sagittarius.

When the stock market hit rock bottom on March 23 of this year, Ketu was again at about 9° of Sagittarius.  This is evidently not a coincidence, as Ketu has not hit that degree since September, 2001 (9/11). Some other difficult times in US history when either Ketu or Saturn were around 9° Sagittarius (suggesting that this may be the correct approximate ascendant degree) were:

September, 2001: World Trade Center “9/11” terrorist attack (Ketu at early Sagittarius)

Spring 1964: at the peak of the civil rights crisis in the US (Ketu at early Sagittarius; the Civil Rights Act was finally passed when Ketu was at 8 ½° of Sagittarius)

1959: Start of Vietnam Conflict (Saturn at early Sagittarius); the US and USSR test nuclear detonations underground and the Space Race begins

Late 1945/early 1946: when Stalin’s “Iron Curtain” descended upon Eastern Europe.

Fall 1929: the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the start of the Great Depression (Saturn at early Sagittarius).

Spring 1927: Stalin expels Trotsky from Russia and takes total control; Mao Zedong begins agitating for revolution (with his “Hunan Report”); the Mississippi River floods in what was then the worst natural disaster in US history (Ketu at early Sagittarius).

So, I feel fairly comfortable saying that America’s ascendant degree must be close to 9° of Sagittarius, and in fact, Mars was at this very degree this year on February 21, when the stock market first started to slide downhill.

But, a word of caution: just because the markets tanked in February-March and have since rebounded, this doesn’t mean that they won’t tank again. First of all, we’re not certain that America’s ascendant is 9° of Sagittarius. If it’s more like 5-6°, then America hasn’t hit the low point quite yet. Second, it’s also worth noting that, with the above listed Ketu and Saturn transits in early Sagittarius, America didn’t immediately bounce back after Ketu or Saturn passed beyond 9° of Sagittarius; instead, America felt a heaviness for quite awhile afterwards. This also suggests that the US still has months of discomfort ahead this year.

In any case, Trump is currently getting a boost of confidence and popularity from Jupiter opposite his 10th Lord (Venus), until about the first week of May. At that point, Mars will start to aggravate and inflame him for a couple weeks, just as Jupiter and Saturn go retrograde. This suggests to me that the coronavirus response efforts will continue to be effective for the rest of this month and into early May, and that Trump will either take credit for this, or he’ll benefit from the fact that the virus case numbers are peaking at lower levels than expected. But, in mid-May, the US may re-open the economy in what will later look like a somewhat premature move (perhaps that’s what will be hurting Trump’s public image in Sept-Oct this fall, as I’ll touch upon in a moment).

On that note, the fact that Jupiter and Saturn are going retrograde in the second week of May, and that they will again be conjunct and direct in Capricorn in late November and beyond, also suggests to me that the coronavirus relief effort has a second major wave late this fall.  I’m not sure if this means that there will be a second outbreak in the fall that necessitates another shutdown then, but I’m pretty sure it will at least mean that there is another major economic relief effort that is enacted at the end of 2020 and/or in the first quarter of 2021. Overall, I think the economic impact of the coronavirus will be to siphon off about $7 trillion from the US economy, probably in the form of an increase in the national debt, to about $30 trillion in 2021.

So, the US economy should be struggling throughout this year, and I think this will have a dramatic negative impact on Trump, leading up to the November election. In fact, Trump has Ketu within 2° of his Moon from late September all the way up to election day (the peak of that conjunction is in the first half of October, though, which I think will mark the low point in Trump’s public image). That’s also when retrograde Saturn effectively sits stationary-direct tightly opposite Trump’s natal Saturn (his subperiod lord) and his Venus (his 10th house lord, which rules his career), which puts him under strain and scrutiny then, too. I think this means that either: 1) Trump is taking a lot of flak then for the coronavirus response failures, or 2) Trump’s image will severely suffer at that point for something else that he has done. At the very least, he will be feeling quite low at that point.

Interestingly, if I’m right that Joe Biden’s ascendant is about 26° of Sagittarius, October is also when Joe Biden gets a big boost from Jupiter. This is a preliminary indicator that Joe Biden may win the presidential election, but unfortunately, we don’t have his birth time or his ascendant degree. I will do what I can, though, to track down his birth time soon, so that I can post a detailed forecast of the election later on.

 

What Does “When Reality Calls” Mean?

In titling this article, “When Reality Calls,” I’m partly making a distinction between a “reality check” and what’s happening now. At this historic juncture, reality hasn’t merely “checked” us; it is calling to us, repeatedly, in order to re-establish a line of communication with us. We need to answer, and then we need to listen carefully—and resist the internal urge and external pressures to hang up. That is, we need to maintain a stance towards reality wherein we listen carefully and defer to the truths that come to us. Our deference to the truth should trump our preference for untruths, not vice versa. That’s what reality is showing us this year.

 

Refusing to accept the truth deprives us of our ability to manage the reality that we’re denying.

 

Why Refusing to Accept Reality Is Childish

Have you ever seen a child try to escape their parent’s lesson on a topic by attempting to instruct their parent instead about that very topic? If the child doesn’t want to understand the topic, in other words, they might act like they already understand the topic. The child seizes the conversation by speaking over the parent and trying to hold back incoming information by flooding the conversation with his or her own version of the subject matter. When kids try this truth-jamming tactic, however, it’s usually just harmless and cute.

Unfortunately, though, some people never outgrow this truth-jamming approach. As adults, they refuse to defer to sources of information, and instead they try to jam the inflow of real information with their own counter-assertions. Such people prefer to continually re-engineer the truth, instead of allowing reality to inform them about what the truth actually is.

Those adults who still jam the truth are like children who never grew up, and the world becomes like the parent that they refuse to listen to. Think of all the learning they missed because they preempted their parents’ lessons. Did these children actually become adults, then, or are they just grown children?

As I mentioned above, refusing to accept the truth is an approach to life that disables those who adopt it. This approach inescapably makes one less effective at managing the environment. So, those who adopt the approach of denying the truth are more likely to need help from those who don’t deny the truth. They need others to manage their environment for them enough that they can still survive amidst their disconnection from reality. In other words, they make themselves like helpless children who can only survive because the adults maintain a hospitable environment for them. Crazy people are the extremes of this scenario, but it is still true to varying degrees with anyone who routinely rejects the truth.

This is worth unpacking a bit. The “adults” of a society are the members of society who, for instance, speak the truth and thereby preserve the effectiveness of language. The “adults” of a society are also the members of society who take responsibility for ensuring that society’s infrastructure works the way people need it to work. The “adults” are the members of society who treat others as they themselves would wish to be treated. They are also the ones who observe the rules that preserve the peace and the other good parts of the social order. They are the ones who obey the laws, so the police aren’t overwhelmed stopping dangerous lawbreakers, for instance.

 

In short, the “adults” are the members of society who uphold all the principles and rules that create and preserve the elements of our environment that make life survivable and better.

 

Following social principles is what creates and preserves our societal infrastructure, our schools, our laws and courts, and our national defense. Those who abandon those principles are, like children, not helping to create and preserve those vital elements of society that they need for their own survival and success.

 

Childishness and the “Cult of Self”

In my more recent articles, I’ve referred to how last year’s transits through Sagittarius by Saturn (Spring 2017 through January 2020) and Ketu (from March, 2019, until this coming fall) have resulted in what I call, “the Cult of Self.” More specifically, I’ve pointed out how a wide trend toward wholeheartedly and unapologetically committing to a selfish, self-serving, and narrowminded orientation has been sweeping the US. Like a norm-busting brotherhood and sisterhood of freedom fighters, those who have jumped aboard this trend are banding together for mutual validation and support, and this surging ideological network is the Cult of Self that I’ve been describing. What they are fighting against, however, are the norms and principles that they think have long made them feel shackled, excluded, inferior, and unrecognized.

But now I wish to highlight the hidden childishness that underlies the selfish orientation of the Cult of Self. I’m not doing this to humiliate cult members, but rather to paint a picture of them that might be more palatable than the picture that is so disturbing to many people.

 

Maybe seeing the Cult of Self as a band of misguided children will make the cult members seem a little more lovable to those who have been unable to find any love for them thus far.

 

Regardless, in last year’s article, I pointed out that even if some norm-busting is good, this doesn’t mean that more norm-busting is better, or that all norm-busting is good. Sure, a new-found sense of freedom from long-established norms might feel good, but that does not mean that such a freedom would not have any extremely bad effects. In fact, we are submerged in those effects right now.

Here’s the part of my earlier article that probably best summarizes the extremely bad effects of a widespread abandonment of norms and principles:

What about the norm of respect for truth? Respect for the law? Respect for law enforcement? Respect for the rule of law? Respect for the rules of Congress and for legal precedence? Respect for the rules of logical reasoning? Respect for an opponents’ reasoned opinions? Respect for the dignity of others? Respect for the definition of words? Refusing to uphold these norms will lead to the indiscernibility of truth, the degradation of law and law enforcement, the disruption of government, the failure of reasoning, the collapse of civility, and the breakdown of communication.

 

I don’t think that these are intended effects of the cult members’ norm-busting. Rather, they probably don’t even see these likely outcomes of their proselytizing and ascension to political power. Most likely, they are unwittingly motivated by the rush of feeling a new sense of empowerment, freedom, validation, infallibility, and kinship. As I said in my prior article, I have some sympathy for anyone who is finding such feelings for the first time. They’re probably just enjoying the rush and following it.

Unfortunately, following such a beautiful feeling does not guarantee that there will be no unintended pitfalls. Power isn’t good unless it is constrained by principles, and neither is freedom. Infallibility is only determined by what is actually correct, and not by one’s membership in a group that patently affirms that it is correct.

As for validation and kinship, the only kinship that is worthwhile is the kind that reinforces our better versions of our identities, and validation is only worthwhile if it reinforces those better versions of ourselves, as well. Kinship with noble people, for instance, and not with thugs, bring out and reinforces the good in us. Similarly, validation for your sincere and worthy parenting style will reinforce your good parenting skills and help raise a healthy human being, whereas being validated for wantonly abandoning your children at birth would not.

Just as denying reality makes one dependent like a child upon those who accept reality and defer to truth, so too does abandoning principles make one dependent upon other to uphold the principles that create and preserve that social framework that makes their lives work.

But when such childish people seize power, things will not go well for long. As their abandonment of principles slowly dismantles the social fabric, they will hail these changes as ‘progress” in the early stages. Eventually, however, the children will turn on each other in a kind of “Lord of the Flies” devolution, until it is clear that things were much better before the children took over. America is still in the “early stages” just mentioned, but if we wish to avoid being a Lord of the Flies country, we need to replace the children with adults in the next elections. I fear that failing to do so would, in due time. spell the end of America’s great democratic experiment. That outcome might be very harmful to the world.

So, love these children who know not what they do, but please also do what you can to wrest the reins from their over-reaching fingers in the meantime. May their dangerous childish ignorance give way to saintly childlike wisdom by your efforts and prayers.

Please visualize and pray for a world led by principled and selfless people, and please model a principled approach to life yourself. In so doing, you will selflessly serve even the childish Cult of Self by ensuring that the supportive fabric of society remains intact for everyone!

Don’t give up! Now more than ever, the world needs the efforts of those who can persevere in love and service! You are the adults, and the world needs you now!

 

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