Just Astrology

The best move I made for myself intellectually and socially since discovering the online astrology scene was to seek out people who use astrology in service of some deeper cultural project and avoid people whose thing is “just astrology.”

Prior to that, it was doing the same thing for meditation, but that was at least slightly better protected against megalomania. Not because it was less susceptible to it, really, but there were at least social conventions that made it impolite. Less so in the astro scene.

The danger with “just astrology” is that it appeals across cultural projects, so it enables outsized popularity, and then those people start to believe it’s not because they’re vague and shallow but rather because they understand the transcendent truth about all people.

The sad part is that the idea of an astrology abstracted out of a cultural project is a horrifyingly recent idea. None of the actual work that went into the development of the world’s astrological systems was done on that basis.

“Just astrology” — or, hell, “just meditation,” for that matter — is the exact same kind of extractive, exploitative, colonizer behavior we see everywhere else: taking the resources of particular peoples and using them to gain personal power.