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You really are explosive during morning without any apparent reason. It’s just the planets testing your self-control. Keep calm. (31 December 1952, Cancer)
from the astrology column. incredible
[...] The possibility of acquiring money and property, or even the chance of making a start for it, is much more limited for most people today than it was rightly or wrongly supposed to be during the heyday of classical liberalism. [...] If one cannot gain property as of old, it is suggestively implied that by clever disposition of what one has, by planning and scheduling in a manner appealing anyway to compulsive persons, the same success may be achieved that is now denied to expansive business enterprise. Making charts, timetables, schedules, and similar formalistic ventures severe as substitutes for the actual money making. [...]
constant reference to property matters despite most readers not owning property, some sort of aspirational role? uniquely american, temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they feel like it speaks to them because they will own property one day
[...] He is neither expected to believe that he could earn it nor to accept that he can never have it. Thus he is spoken to and given unreasonable promises like a child. Obviously the columnist figures out that the reader’s wishes in this direction are so strong that he can get away with even such unreasonable promises on account of the momentary gratifications they provide though the reader knows in the depth of his heart that the promise will never be fulfilled. At this point the column profits from the same mentality which draws people to gambling, horse betting and similar devices for making easy money. Propensity for irrational material gain seems to be contingent upon the shrinking chances of making big money as a pioneer or on a rational basis of calculation [...]
[...] reassured that their background provides “correct answer to preoccupations, glumness.” On the surface this means that they can draw on their traditions in order to solve their problems – certainly not a very convincing promise. The real psychological message is rather “Think about the marvelous family you come from and you will feel elated and superior to those on whom you depend and who might have annoyed you.” [...]
family background provides correct answer to glumness which means remember how superior your lineage is (white, presumably)
The latter advice is sometimes administered under the viewpoint that one is able to overcome one’s own difficulties by identifying oneself with someone even worse off. Thus even humaneness is treated as a means rather than an end. It is as though finally the sphere of the internal itself were to be incorporated into the range of externalization by manipulating the active and passive phases of understanding. Inwardness is integrated into the machinery.
[...] there is much that is debatable, and a little that is frankly silly, in Adorno's work [...]
The tendency to occultism is a symptom of the regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional. Instead of defining both, in their unity and difference, by conceptual labor, it mixes them indiscriminately. The unconditional becomes fact, the conditional an immediate essence. Monotheism is decomposing into a second mythology. “I believe in astrology, because I do not believe in God [...]
[...] The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities: menacingly objectified labor assails him on all sides from demonically grimacing objects. What has been forgotten in a world congealed into products, the fact that it has been produced by men, is split off and misremembered as a being-in-itself added to that of the objects and equivalent to them. Because objects have frozen in the cold light of reason, lost their illusory animation, the social quality that now animates them is given an independent existence both natural and supernatural, a thing among things.
[...] Occultism is a reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification. If, to the living, objective reality seems deaf as never before, they try to elicit meaning from it by saying abracadabra [...]
[...] In occultism, the mind groans under its own spell like someone in a nightmare, whose torment grows with the feeling that he is dreaming yet cannot wake up.