A successful astrologist is not really an astrologist at all. He is rather a clever and ruthless psychologist who knows how to pander to his readers’ weaknesses, their vanity, their fear of failure, their arrested emotional development and their laziness in order that he may amass a loyal following. Therefore, a good astrologist, by virtue of knowing his readers’ debilitation and decrepitude, must have contempt for the very people he “serves.” Does he at least pity his readers? No, he cannot pity them for if he did he would not exploit them with lies. So let us be clear. The successful astrologist scorns his readers, he is a liar, and he uses his psychological insights to exploit the weak.
If the astrologist’s moral bankruptcy does not offend you, if you are confident that you have no scruples to speak of, and if you would like to earn a lucrative income by “reading the stars” for the emotionally-crippled masses, then there are a few principles you must learn in order to start your successful astrological enterprise.
The first thing you must do is call your horoscope a “forecast” while providing absolutely no “forecasting” whatsoever. In its place you must provide encouragement, moralizing, and trite platitudes that are so general that anyone, no matter what their sign is, would benefit. Common words of moralistic advice and encouragement are as follows: You are working too hard and need to stop and smell the roses. You’ve become too lazy and indulgent at home and should replace your TV-watching and general sloth with a meaningful hobby like reading, yoga, or vegetarian cooking. Someone at work is stealing credit for your ingenuity and hard work and you should distance yourself from this parasitic employee in order to protect your interests. It’s time to delicately approach your boss about your overdue raise. You have needy people in your life who, because they sap your energy, you need to stop hanging out with. You have relationships, family or otherwise, that need nurturing, or at least a short phone call. You need to cut down on your junk food and start flossing your teeth like your dentist told you. Your relationship would benefit from a good talk, clearer communication, and improved intimacy. Your grumpiness at work must be dealt with either by an attitude change or by looking for a new job. Guilty feelings and other types of emotional baggage from a past relationship are adversely affecting your current one. You don’t really need that new wardrobe you’ve been lusting over at the shopping mall. Wait until you lose those unwanted pounds before you go on your next clothes shopping spree. You’ve been getting too stressed out at work lately. Unwind by treating yourself to a spa treatment and a enjoying a pedicure and full-body massage. You’ve been denying yourself adequate sleep lately. Getting a couple more snooze hours night will really recharge your batteries. Your big ego and bull-headedness are hurting your relationship. Stop trying to be right all the time and instead try to improve understanding with your mate, even if it means admitting you are a little wrong. Settling for a compromise is in your best long-term interests than expending all your energies to get your way.
The above examples show that you are not a “forecaster” in any sense of the word. You’re actually a third-rate life coach, doling out a spattering of common sense, a commodity that your readers are sorely lacking. Luckily, they have you to provide it for them. I’d recommend you make a list of 365 of these common sense homilies and recycle them so that you don’t repeat yourself more than once a year. Once you’ve collected 365 pieces of “advice,” you simply shuffle them throughout your different astrological signs and do your best to avoid repeating yourself too often.
In addition to giving cheap advice, must also learn to flatter your readers by appealing to their vanity. You must convince them that their belonging to their astrological sign makes them exceptionally intelligent, passionate, sexual, sensitive, caring, creative, artistic, and romantic. Many of you will worry that because you are telling all your readers that they are exceptional in these regards, that that means none of them are exceptional. This would be a problem if your readers had any brains or critical thinking skills that allowed them to see the illogicality of your bogus horoscope. But thankfully they do not and even if they did have the smarts to see through your charade, their vanity blinds them to this fact.
If you are worried, however, that your readers are becoming leery of your sugar-mouthed flattery and recognize you for the phony butt-kisser that you are, then you may want to upgrade the sophistication of your flattery by veiling it in the form of a kind and tender admonishment. For example, tell them that they’ve been too absorbed in addressing the problems of others and as a result have been neglecting their own issues, which have been festering lately. Thus criticizing your reader for his “neglect” is really a subtle way of telling him how compassionate he is toward others and how sometimes his compassion gets the best of him. Or you might gently scold your reader for being “too passionate” in his relationship which is suffocating his mate. In this way, you are flattering your reader’s need to believe he has exceptional “passion” when in fact he is emotionally needy and constantly craves approval and attention.
The final thing you need to remember about your reader is that he is essentially lazy but at the same time feels entitled to a life of romantic fulfillment, financial gain, and spiritual contentment. Your job is to make sure your reader never feels he has to get off his butt to accomplish these things. All he has to do is sit back inside his astrological cockpit and let the “stars do their work” as he rides gloriously along his grand cosmic journey. Thus in the name of astrological fatalism, you are encouraging your readers to live a life of passivity, laziness, and self-absorbed naval-gazing, even as you taut their alleged unique astrological virtues and make them feel special.
If this morally-depraved enterprise appeals to your unscrupulous entrepreneurial leanings and you feel you can address the infantile needs of the common astrological believer, then you have indeed found a lucrative market for which there is no shortage of dupes who will greedily devour your flattering, platitudinous “forecasts” and give you a reliable livelihood for which there is no end.
Recent Comments