astrology providing individuals with a means for learning to live with conditions beyond their apparent control

Astrology is  a symptom of complex, capitalist societies and in the widespread appeal of astrology there is an uncritical and unreflexive awareness of the extent to which individuals’ lives remain fundamentally conditioned by impersonal, external forces, over which individuals have little control. 

Society is projected, unwittingly, on to the stars  projected onto the stars in order  to obtain a higher degree of dignity and justification in which individuals hope to participate themselves.” 

According to Adorno, astrology contributes to, and simultaneously reflects, a pervasive fetishistic attitude towards the conditions that actually confront individuals’ lives through the promotion of a vision of human life as being determined by forces beyond our ultimate control. 

Rather than describing astrology as being irrational in character, Adorno argued that the instrumentally rational character of complex, capitalist societies actually served to lend astrology a degree of rationality in respect of providing individuals with a means for learning to live with conditions beyond their apparent control. 

He describes astrology as “an ideology for dependence, as an attempt to strengthen and somehow justify painful conditions which seem to be more tolerable if an affirmative attitude is taken towards them.