Today a coworker told me that I have a ritual of when and how I make coffee, and it has to be exact or I'm not satisfied. This makes me 'a typical Virgo'.

I'm a secretary: it's my job to make coffee. I'm a wage-slave: I have to drink coffee to get through the day. Today I made a second pot of coffee, something I rarely do; based on this single observation, my co-worker generalized to an entire personality trait, and thence to a spiritual category.

We all have daily rituals. We brush our teeth, shower & eat in the same way. It's because we've discovered the most efficient and/or most pleasurable method of accomplishing a task.

In anyone else, that would be seen as a personal preference. But according to astrological logic, my preference gets hardened into a personal characteristic, and then all my actions are seen through that light.

My 'to file' pile is months old. My desk is covered in coffee stains, which I try vainly to keep clear. Are those 'typical Virgo' characteristics?

I'm not angry about this - the comment was meant as a compliment. However, I am frustrated with the unquestioned acceptance of received wisdom. Let's try that without jargon: I hate it when people believe what they're told to believe.

How to create ideology

I've always been an atheist: spirituality & theist religion are the same false-hoods to me (well, human yearnings transferred into super-human categories, combined with the brain's propensity to find coincidences where none exist). I'll call the whole thing 'belief' for short. What makes me angry about belief is that it creates false connections between real phenomena. Marx called this the 'three tricks' of ideology:

#1) Separate the ruling ideas of an age from the people who rule. Give those ideas an independent existence.

#2) Once those ideas are 'free-floating', link them any way you want.

#3) Match people & events to those ideas, instead of the other way around.

Now people can read back into history what they want, and order everything they know according to an idea. People have always been greedy, war has always existed. Or people born in late August/early September are always perfectionists.

(I might add that is wholly different from Marx's method, in which he generalized from social observation to create the idea of class struggle. The concept of 'three tricks' is from The German Ideology, in which Marx roots ideas in the material world. The bit about ideology is at the bottom of this page.)

What do you think?

Believing in astrology is harmless - on it's own. But every belief has a context. In this case, the context is my coworkers who, like every other working person I've met, believe they're powerless. They're unable to confront real power, the relations of exploitation which they face everyday. Work is:

• the frustration of creativity
• using your energy for someone else's goals
• getting paid a fraction of your boss's salary
• having no control over your time

I know this explicitly. Every worker knows this implicitly, far more deeply than me. Socialists don't have to convince workers that capitalism sucks - spend your best years in an office and you'll know. But workers are misled, preached to, and sold powerlessness every day in the media, by government, by the sheer weight of daily routine in what passes for normal life. And when that fails, there's fear of losing your job, of being unable to survive, to keep you in line.

Faced with those pressures, people need an outlet. They don't have radical politics (which the powers-that-be are quick to pounce on as 'violent' or, worse, 'utopian' when they appear). But there are ready-made outlets: organized sport and religion. For those who think they're being individual and subersive, there's innumerable strains of belief (virus metaphor intended), all of which preach the same message: this world is evil, corrupt and most of all, incomprehensible. Retreat to the otherworldly. As soon as it avoids the question of power, of why we have to work shitty jobs our entire lives (and feel lucky for the opportunity), belief becomes just as normal & tedious as getting on the subway in the morning, no matter how it's dressed up.

Which is why I resent being called a Virgo. Because ordering your world according to belief categories, with no basis in our lived world, is an expression of powerlessness. It's saying "I can't understand the world, so Ican't change it. I'll make do with ready-made categories given to me on page D14 of the daily paper." It's accepting that power really should lie in the hands of our 'betters', who love belief as long as it lets them hang on to power. I reject any belief system that makes us accept this inhuman capitalist system more than necessary.

Luckily belief systems are never total: real life always shines through. While I was writing this, a coworker said:

"Wouldn't you like to have an 'undo' in your life? A button you could press that says 'undo'?"

The recognition that life is not the way it should be, and the 'utopian' desire that it not be fixed and provide the means to change, is always there, bubbling beneath the surface. When it breaks through, we make a revolution.