Horoscopes are all dangerous, superstitious nonsense. Despite the lack of evidence to support their claims, mountains of paper continue to be wasted every day for the printing of their outrageously stupid fabrications. Even the paper you now hold in your hands promotes their illogical, harebrained lies. Heed my warning, stranger.
Horoscopes, which are forecasts of the future based on the positions of stars and planets during one’s birth fill readers with outdated primitive delusions. They are the product of astrology, an ancient system designed back in a time when our world was thought to be a disk, when people believed in the existence of witches—made from wood, of course—and when the origin of humanity involved two white people, a talking snake and evil fruit. Isn’t it time to move on from childish fairy tales and open up our eyes to reality?
Needless to say, your birth month does not determine your personality. Identical twins are not destined to the same fate. There are more than 12 types of people. I forgive our ancestors for their naivety, as they lived in a time when nobody had any idea what was going on, but a lot has been learned since their day—such that massive, luminous spheres of plasma thousands of light years away do not regulate my love life. Again and again, science has disproved this extravagant assertion—our character is not derived from an invisible personality radiation dependent on when we were squeezed out of our mothers’ sex organs.
But if we were to pretend the claims of the horoscope were “true,” so to speak, then we would run into the paradox of future predictions. While theorizing about atomic particles, early 20th century German physicist Werner Heisenberg, developed the now well-known uncertainty principle, which ties in well with this concept of future awareness. The principle posits the observation of an event will unavoidably end up altering that event—we can never know the behavior of something in its natural state. Likewise, the knowledge of one’s own future will unavoidably cause them to act differently, thereby altering the predicted future.
In the 1985 classic, “Back to the Future,” Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is both demonstrated and ignored. When the mad scientist, Dr. Emmett Brown also known as “Doc,” is gunned down by a radical Libyan group for stealing the plutonium needed for his time traveling machine DeLorean, the edgy and oedipal Marty McFly evades the danger by escaping to the year 1955. After reintroducing himself to the scientist in his younger days, Marty eventually discloses to Doc the information regarding his impending death. But when the night of the shooting arrives, Doc equips himself with a bulletproof vest to avoid his fate, thereby falsifying Marty’s original prediction and—similar to Heisenberg’s principle—altering the event by previously observing it. The movie illustrates that even if the predictions of one’s horoscope were true, the act of reading it would end up ruining its previous validity.
“Now why is it,” you ask, “I have to be such a cold, heartless cynic toward this trivial pastime?” Perhaps I’m just spiteful because my September birth date has labeled me as “the Virgin,” (don’t worry ladies, it’s not true). But as long as we’re unable to weed out fact from fantasy, to filter out lies from the truth, we’ll be susceptible to manipulation from scammers, liars or political leaders—none of which are mutually exclusive. The inability to question has always made propaganda such an effective tool, giving way to such atrocities as the rise of the Third Reich. Although not a believer himself, Adolf Hitler has even been quoted as viewing the system of astrology as a useful means of manipulating the masses. I’m not arguing astrology is a secret Nazi weapon created to bring death to humanity, but if you just believe what you’re told without some level of skepticism, your gullibility may likely be your downfall one day.
Manipulation aside, many people engage in astrology because it brings them comfort—whether it’s the glee that “today, you’ll meet a beautiful stranger” or just the common wish to be able to see the future. Even if this wishful thinking makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it results in a general ignorance toward life’s harsh realities. It fills your mind with delusion, or “an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite what is being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder,” as defined by the Oxford Dictionaries online.
Until we escape from the comfort of our society’s mass delusions, we won’t be able to understand how our world actually works and set out effective methods to improve it. As the astronomer Carl Sagan so brilliantly put it, “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
If we continue to phase out the harsh realities of the world with the cozy solace of our fairy tales, the harsh realities of the world will eventually phase us out.
So stop believing everything you read and start thinking for yourself, people. The sooner we stop reading horoscopes, the sooner we’ll escape the superstitious pipe dreams of our origins. And to my editors, stop disfiguring the backpage of The Daily Aztec with this crap—our lives are not predetermined; hairy, aging gypsy women cannot give us our destinies through crystal ball hallucinations and we are not all just a bunch of slaves to giant flaming space balls.
