The concept of power, & astrology

As a political astrologer, one should also have an excellent understanding of politics besides obviously astrology. It is especially true in the modern world now that political systems have flourished from monarchical systems. Many of the countries are democracies, and some are quasi-dictatorships but without monarchs: theoretically, after all, China is the “People’s Republic.” I find that many of my readers, while passionate about politics, do not understand the prime mover of politics: power. It is time to talk about power, both politically and astrologically. Be warned it could be a moderately long read.

The thought of writing this post came into my head from a certain prediction I had made regarding the recently concluded April-June 2024 Indian national elections. On some of my social media, before the election results came out, I had posted this particular summary of my predictions:

Picture: My social media post from May 28, 2024, summarising my predictions about the Indian election results and the scenario beyond. The Indian election results came out on June 4-5, 2024. Link to the original post on X is here.

Now, a couple of people took umbrage to this post and accused me of bias against the BJP (the ruling party), asking that why otherwise I would say that democracy is being strengthened in bad elections for the ruler. This indicated to me that the concept of power, not only astrologically—which I would not expect anyway from someone who is not an astrologer—but politically, too, is not well understood. This is concerning especially in a democracy, which presupposes that knaves will sooner or later hold power but will be kept in control by the system’s checks and balances, designed to keep the people’s wishes paramount over the ruler’s wishes any time. And, hence, let us understand not only what democracy means, but what power is, in any human (or even non-human) context, and how astrology deals with it.

The very basic definition of power is “the ability to act.” When we act, we exert our agency: it is thus we get to know, for example, that we are not the grass, ready to be mowed down, but a being that can mow down the grass. We derive our sense of being from this sense of agency. The baby produces a sound, a chuckle, and realises that they made a chuckle: the baby reproduces it again to test it out, delighted in their agency. This gives rise to our ego, our sense of identity. When this sense of agency is frustrated, we react with anger, irritation or just going into our shell or a depression. Sometimes we react with resolve and resilience, we fight. The baby may throw a tantrum. The student, unable to produce the result he expects to get in an exam, unable because his agency has been thwarted by a corrupt testing body, starts a protest. Under ideal conditions, everything grows, wants to expand: thus, if the parents are a bit too mild and giving way, the baby may start to dominate them and, what we call already as, start holding power over them. If the students are unable to stop the continuing corruption, it becomes a way of life, and the corrupt hold power over society. If the students are able to get a re-exam, well, then, they are able to check the power of the corrupt with some of their own agency, their own power: they are able to get a result from their action. Because, remember that definition: power is not “to act,” it is rather the ability to act. If the student is on a protest but is unable to move a corrupt government, they did act but, given that they were unable to get the result they wanted, they could not experience their agency. Thus, the more proper definition of power is the ability to act to get an effect (in the desired direction). And, hence, this is the complete definition from Merriam-Webster:

power—“ability to act or produce an effect.”

In day-to-day life, we often forget this basic fact and forget or ignore our own agency. Either we start feeling very lacking in agency, that is, powerless, or some of us, for example, often the rulers, start being deluded about the limits of their agency. The child might think they would jump and could fly high up in the sky, rather than falling down to the earth: an incorrect assumption of their ability to act, their agency, their power. The ruler might think they only have to show up and they will win every election possible, or people would do their bidding howsoever absurd it may be. (This especially happens because the ruler is surrounded by sycophants.) Both of these are alarming scenarios.

The very first thing that a good education system, whether it be from parents or in school and university, should emphasise is agency. No one can take your agency from you: it is possible that you may be made to feel that you have no agency, that you have no options to act, but it is this very hopelessness that generates further feeling of this lack of agency. There are some, who in the face of this feeling, would make a last push for agency, in self-destructive behaviour, such as violence to others or self-harm/suicide. Many criminals, including those who society gets too much worked up about and demands all kinds of punishments for them, are criminals simply from this act of attempted, misguided defiance. Many of them, if not already too corrupted by such a continual state, can return back to the moral codes of a society if only they could be made to feel some agency. That is why many criminals do end up reforming when given some meaningful work to do and try to get their lives back on track.

Agency is very important for a human being: without realising your own self, you can never feel satisfied, happy. There are often children of the very rich who live out lives like zombies, with no truly great satisfaction in life. It is because they have not been able to exert much agency. Their agency has got limited to want something and being provided that thing instantly. A very stunted agency, indeed. They feel stunted, powerless in a way, ironic to think given that they also claim to be very powerful and exert that limited power they have in a very twisted way. Think of some rich boy, getting the luxury car he wanted, and then just running rampant on streets, maybe killing someone and then through his agency getting away with it. But is it his agency? Or his parents’, his grandfather’s? It is not his. He is only as good as his name. He remains dissatisfied internally, as his agency, he knows from within, is, or seems to be, very stunted and limited. Why is he unable to reclaim his agency then? Dependence. On the comforts, the things, et cetera.

This is not just the rich boy syndrome. Every one of us, when we face questions of agency, are facing the same rich boy syndrome: the dependency syndrome, let us call it, rather. If a girl is unable to face her family and study more, it is her dependency on her family. It could be money, it could be her safety. If her family disowns her, where would she go? A guy wants to paint but he is stuck in some 9-to-5 job. Often, he even has saved enough to have some savings. But then he is still unable to leave this dreary job: how will his children go to a “good school,” what will he say to his social circle, what will he say to his parents, even? And thus be becomes dependent on his own children, even. Those children may even be babies, still discovering their agency, but a grown-up man, supposed to be independent (that is, his own agent) is dependent on them. Some of these dependencies are easy to break. What is a “good school”? Is a cowardly father a good education? The best education starts from the example you set to your children, not from the information provided in school. Some of these are difficult to resolve: where could indeed a girl go safely enough if disowned by her family? But one must always remember: luck often favours the brave. And that better be dead than living dead. Anyway, I digress. I think you already knew the concept of agency, but still if you did not think about it till now, it was here.

Now let us come to politics. Many people say they are not interested in politics. It is an absurd statement as everything in life, even in nature, is political. If similar charge would keep building up between two entities, whether it be two capacitor plates or two clouds, at some point one would give way (excited ions) and there would be a discharge. That is the politics in nature itself. And we are a part of nature. The little boy refusing to eat until his parents get him the real leather ball is playing politics. The parents trying to persuade him with OK, if you promise to drink milk, too, every night, then we would do that, are also playing politics. The parents convincing the shopkeeper in advance to tell the boy they have run out of the ball and then entering the shop and the shopkeeper saying that oh sorry, the ball’s no more in stock, that is great political stuff. Politics is exerting, or at least attempting to exert, control on something or someone else. Or, being subject to such an attempt. Exerting your agency on someone else: that is politics. In every sphere of our life, in the very nature itself, we are all subject to politics. If you have a doubt, go and have a look at the spider and how craftily he exerts his agency on the hapless fly.

However, what we ordinarily refer to as politics and politicians is when one person attempts to exert a direct control on society, that is, they attempt to subject society (i.e., a lot of people from the present or an imagined future) to their agency. Now, of course, a police officer, too, for example, can exert their agency on a number of people. But we do not call them as politicians. A politician is a legislator: that is, the power of creating systems and laws that attempt to exert agency on future people. Whom we call a politician, thus, attempts to subject future people, that is, people whom he does not even know, to their control. For example, if someone were to make a rule to not let more than two children be born to the same parents, they are subjecting future generations of that society to their action, until someone abolishes that rule. The school teacher, too, to take an example, exerts agency on the future, but not through legislation. As I said earlier, we all partake in politics at all times, and we all exert agency on the present as well as the future: the politician does it through laws, through legislation. It is important to understand this: that we all do this in our different ways, and that the politician is doing it in that way. Because often, we put politicians on a pedestal and start treating them differently.

And why do we do so? Because a schoolteacher may only be able to exert immediate impact on the students in their classrooms, a police officer in their district but a politician may be able to exert immediate, direct impact on a huge number of people, especially if it were to be the ruler of a country. A ruler may ban most of the currency notes of a country overnight, and almost every single person in the country would be affected directly. I emphasise “directly,” because when it comes to indirect impact, one can never estimate it, and the impact of artists, writers, seers, filmmakers, actors, philosophers, etc., can be tremendous and can sometimes translate to a celebrity status for some, yet it is an agency exerted on others indirectly, that is, by weaving deftly into your soul rather than by a brutal order, so we do not think of their power in the same way we think of politicians’ power.

The ruler, thus, exerts their agency on us, the people. A pretty direct impact. The ruler may be with good intent or not good intent, that is a different thing: but any ruler will attempt it. A ruler is called weak when they are unable to exert their agency well: they attempt to do so, but are thwarted. A ruler is called strong when they are able to exert their agency very well: they get the people (including other politicians) to do whatever they want to. Now, when it comes to the so-called strong ruler, everything is fine if people’s wishes are in accordance with whatever the ruler is exerting them to do. The ruler wants good roads, people also want to travel on good roads. There is no tension. The politics is not felt. Ideally, in this case, people should feel empowered, that is, they should experience their agency. Because it is they who are supporting the ruler, whatever political system it be, and in case it is a democracy, then the ruler is even appointed by them, directly (where president is the head of government) or indirectly (where prime minister is the head of government). But, often, the ruler may want to arrogate more power to themselves: that is, they may want to keep people feeling dependent on him, to lack agency. This is out of insecurity: the ruler starts feeling his/her own agency only through depriving others of their own agency. Power intoxicates, as they say. One should say, power can make one insecure! The baby girl loves it when her father talks to her, her mother talks to her. But when the mother and father talk to each other, she screams: she wants their attention exclusive to herself. Because the baby girl feels insecure: she probably is not even understanding what the parents are talking about. Her world revolves around her father and mother right now. Unfortunately, the ruler’s world also starts revolving around the people subject under him/her: if the subject (the voter in a democracy) starts to not pay attention to him/her or start taking an interest in another politician, the ruler does not like it. Thus, the ruler may make policies designed to keep people being dependent on him/her: this, he/she thinks, would keep the subject/voter in his/her “permanent” hold (he/she would prefer the word thrall). The subject/voter should never realise that they own agency. In a democracy, where the subject indeed holds a lot of agency through the power to vote, to keep this illusion of lacking agency becomes even more important: and hence, some rulers will refer to themselves, will project themselves as very strong. Even physically. Mao once even crossed the Yangtze river in a daring feat but also a very important one: once the subject is in thrall, they start feeling dependent on the ruler. Even if they start lacking trust, they will still feel dependent, but just helplessly dependent. Those who trust the ruler will feel dependent and in a state of awe and even worship of the ruler. The ruler will strive to perpetuate this illusion. They may give a lot of handouts, free ration, etc., to large sections of society, so the subject continues to feel that they lack agency. Their agency becomes an extremely stunted agency of getting the rations effectively, without being denied this “right.” It is ironic that this poor subject’s agency here is as stunted as the rich, car-rampant boy’s agency: and yet, the poor may be hating that rich boy after hearing about him on TV. Hate, after all, is another, and a very effective, form of creation of dependency and taking away of agency.

You must have watched revenge stories. In which, the revenge taker, if obsessed with revenge, feels empty after having taken the revenge. The revenge taker had become dependent on the very person he hated, he wanted to take revenge upon. Love and hate are both intense emotions: the difference between the two is that love, if really for the person rather than for one’s ability to love, does not create dependency, while hate does. But I digress, I must return.

To come back to rulers and their ways, the ruler will rarely be the just, ideal ruler, who does not want to create dependency. Blessed be that land where such a ruler lives even if for a brief time! An easy way to recognise such a ruler is by the agency he has afforded to others. Has he/she worked in consultation with the common people and their other representatives (e.g., opposition politicians), thus recognising their agency and respecting it and not violating it, or does he/she think him/herself to be greater or more special or more intelligent than the others and imposes his will on others, thereby robbing the others off their agency? Most rulers, unfortunately, come in the second category. Such a ruler, unable to see his own agency if not for the robbed agencies of others, is actually subject to the agency of those he rules (just like George Orwell felt obliged to shoot the Burmese elephant even when he did not want to), but he cannot see through that, for if he were to be able to be so wise, he wouldn’t have been insecure in the first place. This ruler thus tries to take away the agency of others, whereas some of the others try to reclaim the agency or protect the agency that the ruler has taken away or is trying to take away. Thus, there is this constant tension between the ruler and the ruled, the king/president/prime minister and the people. Thus, if the ruler’s power increases too much, one can say that people are feeling more and more dependent and lacking agency. On the contrary, when people’s power increases, it means that they feel more agents of their own lives, and the ruler is reminded of it. If this is a democracy, whose principle is power of the people, by the people, and for the people, this tension becomes paramount and manifest from time to time in national and regional elections. And thus, for a democratic system like India, when I said “democracy strengthens” and “bad elections for the ruling party,” it was very much in consonance with the principles of politics and nature itself: a ruling party that was already very strong before the elections, if further strengthened, would have been severely detrimental to people’s power and would go against nature itself, in fact, as nothing in nature can be everlasting, nothing all-powerful, except nature’s own march of time. (I consider time to be rhythm of nature, not a separate concept. More on the nature of time in some other, long post, or even several posts.)

Some also questioned my intentions that how astrology could show such a thing. I understood that these were those who have never practised astrology. For astrology very clearly discriminates between the ruled and the ruler, and the tension or harmony between the two, as the case may be, is clearly delineated by the planets associated with these. So while Moon is associated with the common people, the ruled, the Sun associates with kings and regal figures, Jupiter with nobles and venerable figures, Saturn with grim, brutal enforcers and Uranus with rulers of the “non-regal” kind. And a Wajid Ali Shah may be an (afflicted) Venus. Astrology is rich with symbolism, which all comes together to show the fate ahead: everything in life has a parallel in the astrological charts. So do not consider astrology as so poor, especially if you are already inclined to read an astrological post and thus have some degree of belief in it, as to question how something can be seen in an astrological chart.

It is very important for an astrologer to keep away their own opinions about anything, including political opinions, from the interpretation of a chart. Only then can they succeed. So, believe me, an astrologer is much more anxious than you to keep his bias away from the chart reading, because they want to get it right. I am, of course, talking of those astrologers who base their interpretations on the charts they cast and read, not of those who pretend to be astrologers but say whatever they think would happen from non-astrological reasoning.

Please feel free to comment and share, but please don’t troll. I would love to hear questions, opinions and thoughts of my readers.

And in case you have directly landed on this blog from somewhere, I publish my astrological predictions for more than 25 major countries of the world at https://palmistankur.com/

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