Topical Guide 938
Mark Dorset
Delusions: Astrology, Horoscopes
Folly: Astrology, Horoscopes
Folly: Human Hubris
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 21:
Albertine was reading, quite openly, the latest issue of Manhattan magazine. “Listen to this,” she said. “It’s my horoscope: ‘For years now, you’ve felt like you were riding on a roller coaster through an emotional nightmare on stormy seas. One day you’re up, next day you’re down. One day everything you touch turns to gold, next day you’re overwhelmed by literally myriads of kinds of tumultuous developments in your business and personal life. Due to the damage that these stormy experiences have done to your head, your heart, and your pocketbook, your emotions have been strained to the limit, and beyond that even. But cheer up! Soon your ship will come in . . .’ and so on,” she said, and she tossed the magazine aside. “Who reads this junk? Who writes this junk?”
In 1953, the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno conducted a study of the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper as part of a project examining mass culture in capitalist society. […] Adorno concluded that astrology is a large-scale manifestation of systematic irrationalism, where individuals are subtly led—through flattery and vague generalizations—to believe that the author of the column is addressing them directly. Adorno drew a parallel with the phrase “opium of the people,” by Karl Marx, by commenting, “occultism is the metaphysic of the dopes.”
A 2005 Gallup poll and a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center reported that 25% of US adults believe in astrology, while a 2018 Pew survey found a figure of 29%. According to data released in the National Science Foundation’s 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators study, “Fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in [earlier] years.” The NSF study noted that in 2012, “slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was ‘not at all scientific,’ whereas nearly two-thirds gave this response in 2010. The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.” Astrology apps became popular in the late 2010s, some receiving millions of dollars in Silicon Valley venture capital.
Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841, 1852):
We proceed to the consideration of the follies into which men have been led by their eager desire to pierce the thick darkness of futurity. […] It is happy for man that he does not know what the morrow is to bring forth; but, unaware of this great blessing, he has, in all ages of the world, presumptuously endeavoured to trace the events of unborn centuries, and anticipate the march of time. He has reduced this presumption into a study. He has divided it into sciences and systems without number, employing his whole life in the vain pursuit. Upon no subject has it been so easy to deceive the world as upon this. […]
An undue opinion of our own importance in the scale of creation is at the bottom of all our unwarrantable notions in this respect. How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars in their courses watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him!
See also:
Folly TG 28, TG 545, TG 767, TG 913, TG 933
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