The Neptune Return in 2009 – Part III

Aquarius is a sign that, among other things, is representative of the commons, that is those things that we all share and which we feel should be beyond property rights. This is because Aquarius is symbolic of the group purpose, and is concerned with what can foster fellowship and collective motives. Around the time of its discovery in 1846, Marx was developing his ideas of the collective responsibility, and right, to allocate the shares of labour and capital according to collective need. With Neptune conjunct Saturn at this time, we can see how, in the decades following, the idealistic vision of socialism attempted to share out the burdens of labour, the pains of wealth creation and the struggles of penury, as though such necessary difficulty was really a part of the commons.

Of course there was a major problem with the actual attempts to manifest this vision, as can be readily observed in the history of Stalinist Russia, the severe repression in Maoist China and the ultimate failure of communism and a centrally planned economy to meet people’s needs. Why did it fail? Whole books have been written in answer to such a question, but here I would like to suggest one theme, related to Neptune’s placement in Aquarius. Inherent in visions of the socialist utopia is an assumption of equality amongst individual members of society; everyone contributes labour, and everyone reaps a reward. As Marx said ‘from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.’ And in some very basic ways it is true that individuals are equal. Everyone counts as one in a census; everyone gets one vote in a democratic election (except children), and everyone has a right to life (except people sentenced to capital punishment). But in other fundamental ways, they are quite unequal. Some people are successful athletes, some people are talented playwrights, some people are disabled from birth and some people are untrustworthy scoundrels. In communist societies it was common for talented university academics, with clearly superior skills in a particular research field, to be forced to work in mines or as cleaners, whereas well-paid positions in the governing bureaucracy were given to individuals with little native talent or educational achievement. This, of course, while attempting to achieve as homogenous a society as possible in terms of the balance of labour and reward, simply resulted in mass depression, resentment, misallocation of resources and gross inefficiency as the spark of individual creativity was snuffed out on the altar of ideological conformity. Neptune’s solvent, while in Aquarius, is the ultimate liberation of being freed from social expectation based on accident of birth, gender, nationality, clan or calling. It is the bliss of total freedom to direct one’s life according to one’s own values irrespective of what prevails in one’s social surroundings. But it is also the anaesthetic that dulls and deadens the burning fire of identity, of uniqueness and character, and renders individual people into random statistics, demographic units and atomized units of humanity suspended in a mist of anomie.

Observe our current society in the developed world: thanks to information technology we have tools at our disposal as individuals that can afford us enormous power to access the audience of the collective, that have brought the locus of information exchange and power transaction from distant authority to individual IP address. The implications of this for global evolution are profound and productive of vastly complex networks and social structures which can create enormous positive change to our common property – whether this be the noosphere or the atmosphere. And yet, we see epidemic rates of depression and prescription of psychotropic drugs, escapist leisure pursuits engaged in on a massive scale, such as internet role-playing games and virtual worlds, internet pornography and even the huge social networking phenomenon where individuals outcompete each other for how deeply integrated into the hive-mind they can become. What is going on here? I think we are suffering from the intense stress being placed on the individual to interact with the entire world on a daily basis, a stress which is really unprecedented. It is like our individual puny brains are being forced to plug into the vast database that is the planetary consciousness, but it is so extraordinarily powerful that it makes each of us nauseous with the neurological overload. As Neptune’s first cycle comes to a close, I think we are witnessing the evolution of a new commons, a shared world consciousness, a worldwide web of networked brains, similar to the mass of neuronal interconnections in each individual brain. And as Neptune conjoins Jupiter this time around, what is shared is a higher consciousness, a deeper, grander understanding of our moral imperatives, our path to future health and prosperity.

More than any time in recorded history, humanity is in a position where we have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth that unites us all and which is inescapable: our oceans and our atmosphere (those fluid Neptunian realms of chaotic maelstroms with their capacity for seemingly infinite dissolution) are our commons. Nobody can lay claim to them or any subtantial part of them, because any effort to delineate boundaries within them proves as futile as building a sandcastle and expecting it to last. As we intoxicate our oceans and atmosphere with carbon dioxide and watch the temperatures rise and the sea inundate our coasts, are we aware of how we are suffocating and anesthetising ourselves into oblivion with the noxious vapours of unchecked growth? As climate change advances at seemingly ever-accelerating pace, increasing numbers of people are realising that the only realistic way of getting any control over this runaway process is by declaring the commonality of ownership and responsibility for the atmosphere and oceans, and then implementing fair agreements on how much of these commons each person, and by extension, each nation-state can use. This will mean that people in some areas of the world will be able to use more than they have (and hence may continue to industrialise), whereas others will have to reduce their use (and hence contract their economic activity). There is no other means of approaching the problem of common property that is fairer than this.

Will this be a new form of socialism, where the nature of the common resource has changed from labour and capital (Saturnian in essence) to planet-wide regulators of our weather and preservers of life (Jupiterian in essence), which is what the atmosphere and oceans are? Or, should we abandon the term socialism and simply categorise such an ideological stance as yet another Aquarian instantiation of the redemptive longings of Neptune, one which, as we witness the final closure of the first complete cycle of this hypnotic phantasm, strangely yet fittingly echoes the collective concerns at the time of its discovery? Neptune is the force that calls us to dissolve into a greater and more powerful consciousness by purifying the essence of our intentions. But it is also the force that seduces us into mindless automatons of collective emotion. It is both our curse and our blessing to be perenially faced with the choice between these two modes of using this powerful force. With this Aquarian anniversary, perhaps we should distill from the reality of our collective circumstances a vision of a more evolved planetary consciousness, one which more clearly connects individuals to their collective responsibility, and which honours the planetary matrix for the single system that it is, decentralised and interconnected. We should not despair of making a difference in a world of such vastly diluted individual influence, for the behaviour of chaotic systems is such as to surprise us with the potential locked within even the smallest of changes. If we wish to preserve our commons, our environment that supports us, then we must start by changing our view of ourselves, no longer atomized and powerless in the face of the enormous waves of social change bearing down upon us; rather, informed, clear-sighted and united in love of truth, evolving within our networks and groups and forming the vanguard of a new movement as much committed to the ecological and holistic as to the egalitarian and just.

© Agent 37 of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency