Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: The Pool, the Polls, the Parade, and the Fracturing Binary
Trump's Meltdown, Electoral Earthquakes, Putin's Tankless Pageant, and the Collapsing Tower: The Week That Was May 3-9 2026
This week the towers cracked everywhere at once - in Westminster, in Washington, on Red Square, in Canberra - as the duopolies that have ordered the West for generations split open; the strongmen lost the power to perform their own myths, the single inherited tongue we have all been speaking began breaking into many, and beneath the chaos of an old order coming undone, a new one began stepping quietly through the cracks.
The news right now feels like describing the demolition of a skyscraper - not ordered or sensible, it’s just one big kaboom. As the collapse continued this week, Donald Trump ordered the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial be painted bright blue at a cost of $6.9 million to taxpayers, during one of the worst energy and affordability crises in history caused by his reckless war in Iran. After someone spray painted the numbers “86 47” across the surface - the same numbers for which Trump’s DOJ just indicted former FBI director James Comey for posting online - Trump had a total meltdown, posting a series of AI slop images to social media, one depicting him and his cabinet bathing in the reflecting pool, another of himself holding six wild cards from Uno captioned “I HAVE ALL THE CARDS,” and another of his head as the fifth sculpture on Mt Rushmore, among others.
Then Trump took a motorcade to inspect the painting of the reflecting pool, a squadron of cars driving over the surface of the emptied monument heavy enough to have sprung the very joints he’d just paid to have sealed. This the same week Republicans tried to sneak a provision of $1 billion for Trump’s ballroom into the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill - the same ballroom Trump previously promised would be “100 per cent paid for by me and some friends of mine” on a site he demolished without permission seven months ago.
Though his posts suggest he’s holding all the cards, when it comes to the debacle in Iran, Trump’s holding the worst hand possible in a war he seems both desperate to end but can’t help constantly restarting. After he announced Project Freedom - a US military operation to escort merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz - Iran promptly blew up a few passing ships, and despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring the war was over, Trump cancelled Project Freedom and US forces began firing on Iranian oil tankers as Israel struck Beirut. The war’s over, but it never started, but Trump won it, but he needs to keep bombing. Hands down please, no more questions.
Trump’s administration insists it didn’t need congressional approval for any of this because the war “terminated” on April 7, but when asked how it could have terminated when the United States is still enforcing a blockade and exchanging fire with Iranian destroyers, Trump told reporters, “Well, it’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody’s even challenging it.” Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in the Iraq war, said this week, “Trump’s claims that hostilities have ceased were bullsh*t. He is lying to the American people and prolonging his disastrous war of choice, and he’s doing it illegally.”
Even the CIA called the lies out this week, confirming that Iran still has roughly 70% of its missile stocks, though Trump has been telling reporters Iran is “crashing” and is down to 18% of its missile arsenal. Though Team Trump asked the world’s two largest commercial satellite imagery providers to withhold images of the Middle East while the war (that’s not a war) is ongoing, journalists cross-referenced Iranian state media imagery against European Union satellites to verify that American bases in the Middle East have suffered far worse damage than the Pentagon has admitted. Global affairs journalist David Rothkopf wrote in The Daily Beast: “Not since Vietnam have we seen a more systematic effort by an administration to lie about the nature, costs, consequences, and results of a war than we have seen from the White House on Iran.”
All the lying has resulted in a new poll this week saying 59% of Americans now believe Trump does not have the mental sharpness to lead the country, and 67% think he doesn’t carefully consider important decisions. With his approval rating now in the low 30s heading into midterm elections, Republicans are scrambling to render votes irrelevant, redrawing electoral maps across the country after the Supreme Court neutered the Voting Rights Act last week. Tennessee eliminated Memphis’ only majority-Black congressional district and turned every congressional seat in the state Republican, and the Virginia State Supreme Court struck down a map voters recently approved to claw back Democratic-leaning seats from Republican gerrymandering. The fix is going in nation wide.
To distract from all the chaos, Team Trump released a series of government files relating to UFO’s this week - we’re allowed to know about the aliens before we can know what Trump’s hiding in the Epstein files - and they oversaw the unveiling of a 22-foot gold statue of Trump at his Miami golf course. Just totally completely normal stuff.
While all of this was unravelling in the United States, voters across England went to the polls in local elections that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called “a truly historic shift in British politics,” as Reform gained 114 councils, while Labour lost 31 councils, and the Conservatives lost 8. According to Sky News, if this week’s national vote shares were applied to a UK general election, the far right-wing Reform party would now hold a majority government. As Reform took Sunderland - the UK Education Secretary’s own constituency - and Tameside, the Greater Manchester council that contains the former Labour Deputy Leader’s seat, the British two-party duopoly that has held for over a century collapsed in a single night.
The same shape arrived in Australia, when far right-wing party One Nation won a special election, claiming the party’s first ever lower house seat in a federal election - a milestone its been chasing for thirty years. The result confirmed what the polling has been showing for months: the two-party duopoly that has ordered Australian politics for generations is cracking on the same axis as the British one. The same fracture appeared in Israel as well, where polling this week showed Netanyahu's Likud bleeding voters as the opposition bloc splintered into competing factions racing to merge before fall elections - the same duopoly cracking along the same axis.
And also this week, Vladimir Putin oversaw the strangest Victory Day parade Russia has held in living memory, without the usual tanks, missiles, or any major heavy weapons because those assets were needed at the front in Ukraine. Ironically, the event to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II took place on the very day his own war on Ukraine became longer than the war he was commemorating. Russian internet was shut off and most international press was disinvited, so the world couldn’t see the dismal display of North Korean troops marching in formation alongside depleted Russian forces, due to 350,000 Russian troops having now died in Ukraine. The pageant of imperial might Putin has used for decades to project Russia’s military power could not, this year, find any military power to project. The strongman could no longer stage the strongman.
If this week’s news makes you feel like nothing connects, no one’s in charge, and the language we’ve always used to describe what’s happening no longer fits what’s actually happening, then well done, you were paying attention. This is the sound of an old story playing out again, one of the oldest stories there is. A tower built on a single tongue, ascending toward a borrowed truth, has stopped being able to hold the weight of what is below it. The single language we have all been speaking together is breaking into many. The unison is over. The scattering has begun.
Some will tell us this scattering is a curse, but there is an older reading of the same story - one carried in the mystical traditions, one rarely told - that says the exact opposite. And under the sky we are now living beneath, that older reading is beginning to look like the truer one.
So if you’re feeling flooded by the news or worried for the future and want to know what comes next, then read on, dear friend. As always, the sky is showing us exactly where we are and where we are headed. Let’s look up and find the way through, together.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
The Fracturing Tower of Babel
In the oldest story we have about how the world fractures, a unified humanity builds a tower toward the sky, speaking one language and ascending together toward a truth held above them by an authority none of them question. And at the moment of the tower’s near-completion, the story tells us, the unison breaks, the languages multiply, the people scatter, and the tower falls, ending the era of the singular ascent.
Most read the story of Babel as a punishment - as if the fracture was a curse and the plurality was some kind of exile - but there’s an older reading, carried in mystical traditions, that says the exact opposite; that the tower was the slavery, and the single language was the bondage, and the shared ascent was the very thing preventing every individual within it from becoming anyone in particular. And what fell, when the tower fell, was not paradise but an imposed simplicity, and what rose in its place was the harder and more honest possibility of speaking what was actually true.
For most of the modern era, we have lived inside our own version of that single language. Ours has been the language of the binary that asked which of two sides we were on. Good or bad. Hero or villain. Right or wrong. Us or them. With us or against us. We have spent centuries building a tower of that binary, climbing it one ideology at a time, sorting every person and every story and every nation and every figure into one column or the other, telling ourselves this was clarity, speaking one tongue all together.
But that binary tongue can no longer hold what is in front of us. Reality has begun refusing the columns, and as a result the tower is fracturing and is rapidly coming down. There’s evidence of this everywhere, read by most as an unmitigated catastrophe; the fracturing of trust, of media, of alliances, of nations, of friendships and families across political lines, and of the very sky that has held our shared reality together. But just as the story of Babel can be read in two different ways, we must now ask ourselves if this fracturing represents a curse or a beginning.
The oldest reading of Babel suggests that when the tower falls, the people don’t need a new one. They don’t need a new single language imposed from above - just a fuller and more honest way of speaking that the binary was always hiding from them. They need to stop sorting reality into columns whilst ascending toward a borrowed truth, and start standing on the ground they actually occupy, no longer looking up to a leader but inward for the wisdom once outsourced, holding the truth in both hands.
As we live through this great fracture, as the binary tower falls, what was once a tribal choice - pick one or the other - is now increasingly splintering into a spectrum of options many of us are not prepared for. It’s happening from the top of the tower to the bottom, from the halls of power in Washington to the shopping aisle of Walmart, from the pinnacle of politics, to our hearts, to our homes, to the heights of Hollywood and everywhere in between.
None of us is immune from the fracture, and as the tower comes down, we are all being asked to look less to the figure on the throne and more to the truth we must hold in both of our hands.
It Ends With Us, But It Started with Them
Evidence of the fracture showed up in Tinseltown this week, as the years long bitter court battle between actors Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni ended in a settlement rather than a trial. This might seem like tabloid gossip on the surface, but dig down into the details and you’ll find it’s one of the most poignant examples of the fracturing binary this news cycle has to offer.
The saga began back in 2023 during the filming of It Ends With Us, a movie co-produced by Baldoni’s own company, Wayfarer Studios, and Sony’s Columbia Pictures, with Baldoni doing double duty as both the director and the film’s male lead, appearing opposite Lively who was cast as the female protagonist. When filming stalled for five months due to a writer’s strike, Sony was eager to get cameras rolling again after bleeding money for almost half a year on a half-completed movie, but production hit a snag when - just as the strike ended - Lively presented a seventeen-point document that threatened to stall production even further.
Lively’s list proposed a set of professional safeguards directed specifically at Baldoni and another producer - protections around intimacy choreography, no improvising of kissing, no more sexual commentary, no nude images shown on set - responses to problematic on-set conduct that Lively says occurred earlier in the year. Sony's executives privately described it as a hostage note - one even privately referred to her as a “f**king terrorist,” deeming the seventeen-point list the leverage move of an actress who had decided to seize control of the film. But with Sony watching their money pour down the drain, the production contractually agreed to all of Lively’s provisions, and filming resumed.
Though Lively’s list was accommodated, the bad blood it generated never was, and by the time the film opened in August 2024, the fracture was visible from the outside. Lively asked Sony that she not be on the red carpet at the same time as Baldoni, not be photographed with him, and not be seated near him at the premiere screening. Sony complied, and when word came that Lively was approaching the carpet, Baldoni was ushered off the press line and escorted, along with his wife, his parents, and the rest of his family, down to the basement of the theatre where they were held there for over an hour in a windowless room, while Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the rest of the cast walked the pink carpet upstairs. Baldoni's family was then taken to a separate, smaller screening room - not the main theatre - to watch the film, and instead of Baldoni, the director, introducing it, Lively did.
When Lively and other castmates quietly unfollowed Baldoni on Instagram in the days after the premiere, internet sleuths noticed, and social media lit up with gossip that something had gone badly wrong behind the scenes. Lively, meanwhile, copped flack for using the film’s publicity tour to launch her haircare line and pre-mixed cocktail brand, a move widely criticised as tone-deaf and exploitative given that It Ends With Us is about a woman trapped in an abusive marriage, not shampoo and spiked lemonade.
Behind the scenes, in emails and texts that would only become public later, Sony executives called Lively’s decision to launch her haircare brand alongside the film “epic-level stupid” and said she had “brought it all on herself,” posturing that Lively “orchestrated all this drama in a totally unsavvy and amateur way” and was now mad it had backfired.
But while all of that played out in private, the film played to public acclaim, making $351 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. Whatever went wrong on set, went right at the box office. But the opening of the film was just the beginning of a much larger fracture.
Blake v Baldoni
In December 2024, just a few months after It Ends With Us premiered, Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department against Baldoni, alleging sexual harassment on the set of the film. She followed it with a civil complaint in New York federal court alleging that Baldoni had improvised intimacy that had not been choreographed, made sexual comments around women on set, and brought up his own sexual history including a “previous pornography addiction.”
Lively further alleged that, after she had raised her concerns, Baldoni and his team had orchestrated a coordinated digital smear campaign to retaliate. After the New York Times published its own investigation, public sentiment, which had been broadly hostile to Lively for the better part of six months, swung in days, and suddenly Baldoni was the villain.
In January 2025, Baldoni filed a $400 million countersuit naming Lively, Reynolds, her publicist, and the New York Times for defamation and extortion, accusing the paper of relying on Lively’s narrative without proper scrutiny, and framing Lively’s conduct as a calculated effort to seize control of the film. But by June 2025, a federal judge threw out Baldoni’s countersuit on the grounds that the reporting was protected, allowing Lively’s case to grind on through discovery.
Texts and emails were subpoenaed, and in late January this year, a flood of documents was unsealed, fracturing the surface of the case into something neither camp wanted to look at directly. The Sony executives’ messages were among them, and so were Reynolds’s and even Lively’s messages with Taylor Swift, and Baldoni's own texts venting to castmates about Lively. None of them made anybody look good. Suddenly it appeared that nobody on either side truly had clean hands.
Then, just last month, a judge dismissed Lively’s sexual harassment claims entirely, leaving only three claims in play; none of which were against Baldoni personally, but against his production company and the PR firm his team had retained. A trial was set for May 18, but this week both sides announced a settlement.
A three-year-long battle resulted in no money changing hands, just the release of a carefully worded joint statement acknowledging that “the process presented challenges” and that “the concerns raised by Ms. Lively deserved to be heard.” Lively’s lawyers immediately framed this as the end of the fiction that she had fabricated her claims, while Baldoni’s attorney told the press his client was “ecstatic” - two completely incompatible victories were declared as both sides waived their right to appeal and walked away.
That evening, Lively went to the Met Gala in full glam, and her husband posted a happy-couple selfie on Instagram, while the internet quietly tore itself apart deciding who had ultimately been victorious, and debating whether her thirteen-foot Versace train was a triumphant return or a sherbet-coloured disaster, or whether her direction of the assistants carrying it was confidence or mean-girl energy, or whether Anne Hathaway, photographed standing next to her, was guilty by association.
With the settlement less than a day old, the camps that had formed into either Team Blake and Team Baldoni suddenly splintered into a cacophony of online noise as observers reached for the familiar binary - either Blake bad, Baldoni good, or Blake good, Baldoni bad - holding either one but not the other at the expense of the inconvenient truth.
Black and White in a World of Grey
The discourse online in the wake of this week’s settlement felt like the fracture of the old binary tower, as many reflexively reached for definitives that were simply no longer there. In a world of increasing grey that’s used to everything seeming black or white, Team Lively cast Baldoni as the wicked villain, ignoring the examples of Lively using her power badly, while Team Baldoni cast their hero as the victor, overlooking evidence that he played a retaliatory game with Lively’s reputation.
In the effort to organise into the old binary camps, many forgot they have two hands to hold two opposing truths at once, and felt the weight of landing at a definitive verdict that was hardly definitive. It’s the binary habit that we learned in the crumbling tower - choose a side and flatten the truth into something simple enough to carry in our pockets. We've been raised to sort life into those columns - the hero and the villain, the saint and the sinner, the goodie and the baddie. It’s the mechanism we have used to avoid sitting with the fact that the person who hurt us also loved us, that the leader who inspired us also lied to us, that the parent who shaped us also broke us. That’s uncomfortable work, so no wonder we’ve mostly refused it.
But in our fracturing system, we are beginning to discover the most uncomfortable truth of all - that there are no good people and there are no bad people, but just people, capable of both, often doing both, sometimes within the same hour. The kindest person you know has been cruel in some room you never saw. The cruellest person you know has been tender in some way you’ll never understand. We are all of us walking around with capacity for both, all of the time, and what we call character is not which of the two we are, but which we keep choosing. But holding that truth makes sorting things into columns almost impossible - it makes the binary harder to reach for, and that’s why the tower it’s been built on is crumbling down all around us.
History and the headlines have long offered us examples of humans not easily sorted into good or bad, though we have sorted them all the same. Pablo Picasso was perhaps the single most influential artist of the twentieth century, whilst also being a man whose cruelty to nearly every woman in his life is as well documented as his art. John Lennon was a peace icon and the voice of a generation, who - by his own admission - hit his first wife and was a largely absent father to his eldest son. Steve Jobs built the most valuable company in history whilst also being famously cruel to subordinates and denying paternity of his own daughter for years.
Mother Teresa was a global icon of selfless care for the poor who also ran shelters that provided substandard medical care while she received millions in donations and accepted private treatment for herself in expensive Western hospitals. Coco Chanel revolutionised twentieth-century fashion, freed women from corsets, and built an empire that still defines how women dress, and was also a Nazi collaborator who attempted to use Aryan laws to seize her perfume business from her Jewish partners.
Madeleine Albright was the first female US Secretary of State - a feminist icon - who said that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under American sanctions was "worth it." Lance Armstrong was a cancer survivor and hero to millions, and also an industrial-scale doping fraud who spent years viciously destroying the credibility of anyone who tried to tell the truth about him.
Each of these people who gave the world something that mattered also did things that caused lasting damage - some more significantly and horrifically than others - but rather than hold both truths at once and carefully weigh their sum, we often flattened and filed them away as either good or bad, hero or villain, discarding the evidence that didn’t fit the file we chose.
What we called clarity was really just a refusal to see. It’s how we have kept the binary intact and held the tower in place, by not looking at the grey we are holding in our hands, or that’s staring back at us in the mirror. The shades that live in Picasso and Mother Teresa and Lance Armstrong live in us too - good and bad in the same body, the same week, sometimes the same hour. It’s the human condition - we just prefer to see it in them, where we can render a verdict and walk away, than to see it in ourselves, where the verdict has nowhere to go.
And so we look away, and we make our choice - one or the other, black or white - and the tower stays intact. At least it has, until now, as that tower is falling.
The Man in the Mirror
Perhaps one of the most polarizing modern examples of the binary dichotomy is Michael Jackson, whose name is back in the headlines more than a decade after his death thanks to the recent release of the biopic film tracking his rise to superstardom in the 1980s.
The film, produced by Jackson’s estate, has courted almost as much controversy as Michael did when he was alive, for the fact that it attempts to paint an intimate portrait of one of the most famous men in modern history without actually allowing us to hold the whole truth of who he was in both our hands. While the film was touted prior to release as being a “no holds barred” look into the life of one of the music industry’s greatest icons, when it landed, it turned out to be anything but. It accurately highlights Michael Jackson’s extraordinary talent and unmatched musical genius - there’s a reason his claim to the title “King of Pop” remains unchallenged - but it fails to address that Michael was accused repeatedly of sexually abusing multiple children, or the allegations, investigations, trials, acquittals and settlements that stalked him for decades prior to his death in 2009.
The film, according to critics, appears to be an effort to clean up Michael Jackson’s image for a new generation, to bring his music back into relevance again without mentioning the allegations they have long been synonymous with. As a result, alongside the release of the film has come a flood of social media posts from fans - both new and old - declaring that it somehow confirms Michael’s innocence, and that Michael was always the victim of a vicious witch hunt, that he was someone with only pure intent that those with dirty minds preyed upon.
Since the film premiered, Jackson’s defenders have railed online that his trials produced acquittals, that his accusers were only ever after money, that Michael was childlike, possibly even autistic and wired for platonic love, and that those who believe the allegations are projecting their prurient adult minds onto a soul that simply did not work that way. And while each of those claims has its own merit, they deserve to be weighed equally against Michael’s own words and behaviours which never made it into the final cut of this new film.
The film doesn’t address the allegations made in 1993 by a 13-year-old boy who accused 35-year-old Michael Jackson of sexually abusing him repeatedly, who spent extended time at Jackson’s home and, by his own account and by the accounts of others, slept in Jackson’s bed on multiple occasions. The allegations triggered a criminal investigation, a police raid, and a civil lawsuit which Jackson settled for approximately $23 million, none of which this new film offers us the opportunity to hold.
Nor does it allow us to hold the fact that, after a decade of being relentlessly dogged by rumours that he was a pedophile, in 2003 Jackson allowed cameras into his private life for eight months to film a documentary that a studio executive would later describe as “the longest suicide note in history,” for the fact that it revealed there were still children sleeping in Michael Jackson’s bedroom. The cameras filmed a 12-year-old cancer survivor, holding Michael’s hand and leaning against his shoulder, describing how he had spent the night in Jackson’s bedroom, after Jackson had said to him “Look, if you love me, you’ll sleep in the bed.”
Though Jackson clarified that he had slept on the floor that night, when asked why a 44-year-old man should be sleeping alongside a child he was not related to, he answered variously, saying "I've slept in the bed with many children….It’s very charming, it’s very sweet, it’s what the whole world should do." Jackson’s admissions triggered a new police investigation that led to him being charged with seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering alcohol to a minor for the purpose of committing a felony. Though the trial held in February 2005 ended in an acquittal on all counts, Jackson was visibly broken, and he died four years later of acute propofol intoxication at the age of fifty.
The recent biopic allows us to hold exactly none of this material, ending its story before the scandals broke that absorbed the final two decades of Jackson’s life. This new film packages every moment of Michael Jackson’s magic - the moonwalk, the glove, the hat, the jacket, the music - into a tight nostalgic reframe of history, cleaning up the picture by deleting the uncomfortable truth so only the myth remains. That’s all it allows us to weigh.
And when presented with that pristine picture that carefully omits the man’s own actions and admissions, no wonder fans rush to his defense - they are not defending the truth as much as they are defending the way they felt when they first heard Thriller, and their right to still feel that way despite the allegations. It’s hard to hold the euphoria of the man’s music and his myth, whilst also holding the reality of his life behind the curtain - the two seem poles apart, because they are, which is perhaps why the new film doesn’t even offer us the choice of holding both. It makes the decision simpler by withholding the whole truth, thus making the reach for the binary easier amidst the crumbling tower.
Two Hands and the Weight of the Whole
But, just like in the battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, two things can be true at the same time without cancelling each other out, because our world is not black and white, and never has been. A wounded child who never grew up can also be a vector of harm; the first does not excuse the second, and the second does not erase the first. To insist on Michael Jackson’s absolute innocence is to erase the children who say they were harmed, and to insist he was a monster through and through is to erase the wounded child who became the man who became the myth.
As the tower we were all raised in falls, we are being asked to develop the discipline to hold the truth in both hands and weigh its sum without reflexively letting what’s in one hand simply cancel the other. The love we have for the man’s music is not erased by the harm, nor is the harm erased by the music. Both still stand, no matter how uncomfortably, and our instinctive reach for the binary will no longer serve as the tower comes down.
Is it possible to look at Blake Lively and see both a “victim” and a “terrorist” and allow that both may be uncomfortably true? Can we look at Michael Jackson and see both a “monster” and a “myth” and allow both readings to equally stand? Must we always choose one or the other? Must we always land on black or white? Or can we find a way to hold the grey in two hands, and hold the discomfort as we weigh their sum?
It’s this inability to hold conflicting truths that built the tower of the old world, and it’s what’s now causing it to crumble. It’s what built the country whose institutions were once the envy of the democratic world, and what allowed its people to look at a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, multiply-credibly-accused, on-tape-confessing man and elect him to the highest office on the planet - not once, but twice.
Trump did not arrive by accident. He arrived because the muscle that would have stopped him - the muscle that lets a person hold an inconvenient truth about a figure they otherwise admire - had already atrophied, in tens of millions of people, across the decades in which we taught ourselves that loyalty was clarity and that the evidence that did not fit our chosen narrative could simply be filed away. He is not the cause of that atrophy, but the consequence of it. He is what arrives when a culture has spent generations practising the binary, by using only one hand and refusing to weigh.
And now, in the midst of this collapse, we are being asked to hold more than just some squabbling celebrities, or a fallen popstar, or a wannabe king - we are being asked to weigh the whole truth in both our hands of the very structure of the world in which we were raised.
We are being asked to hold the two truths of America. In one hand, the great champion of democracy, the shining city on the hill that liberated Europe from fascism, and rebuilt Japan, and stared down the Soviets, whilst in the other, the country that overthrew democratically elected governments and called torture “enhanced interrogation,” that invaded sovereign nations on intelligence its own analysts knew was false, and walked away from the rubble without apology.
The same demand is being made of us with Israel. In one hand, a nation born from the ashes of the Holocaust, founded as a refuge for a people hunted across continents for two thousand years, whilst in the other, a state currently conducting a campaign in Gaza that historians and human rights bodies are increasingly calling a genocide. Both are true, and we must hold both in our hands and weigh them. To hold only one is to lie to ourselves about something, but to hold both is to feel something close to grief, because the founding wound and the present harm are connected, and the connection is the part nobody wants to look at, but it’s what’s making the binary choice increasingly impossible.
And even Iran - when held with two hands - is both a regime that brutalises its own people and hangs dissidents from cranes and beats women to death for showing their hair, and a nation being bombed by an invading foreign power, watching its children die under munitions paid for by the same country that promises us all democracy. Both are true - the regime and the bombs, the brutality in both directions.
Person after person, ruling after ruling, nation after nation - we are being asked to weigh with both hands, holding convenient truth next to uncomfortable truth, not black or white, but mostly grey. On a global scale, as the tower comes down, we are being asked, in this moment, to stop pretending that one side is the side without harm and the other is the side without humanity. To hold the love we have for the founding stories alongside the truth of what those stories have always concealed. To learn that we don’t have to stop loving the song to admit the singer hurt children, or stop believing in democracy to admit our democracy has been a propaganda exercise abroad as often as it has been a beacon.
We do not have to choose between the wound and the harm - we just have to hold both in our hands.
The Sky That Topples the Tower
For the last twenty years, we’ve been living under a sky that produced the tribal binary we’ve all been choking on. From 2008 until 2024, Pluto, the planet of buried rot and forced excavation, was moving through Capricorn - the sign of structure, hierarchy, institution, and established order, tearing through every tower we had inherited. The Catholic Church and its abuse scandals. The banks after the financial crash. Hollywood after Weinstein. The political establishment. The media class. The universities. Pluto in Capricorn forced the corruption of every authority structure to the surface, one institution at a time, until almost no tower remained that we could still trust.
While Pluto was excavating the institutions, Uranus was lighting fires in the people. Uranus in Aries from 2010 to 2018 was the radicalisation of identity - the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the rise of identity politics on every side, the assertion of “my truth” against the system. Then Uranus moved into Taurus in 2018 and the radicalised identities hardened into embodied stances you would not move from - the cancellations and the counter-cancellations, the entrenched positions, the dug-in tribes.
And underneath all of it, Neptune sat in Pisces - the sign of merger, dissolution, and the loss of the individual self in the collective ocean. Neptune in Pisces was the medium that made tribal contagion possible at the speed of social media. It was the water in which the merger of self and group became indistinguishable, in which a single accusation could travel through millions of phones in hours, in which what the individual thought and what the tribe thought became the same sentence.
That was the sky that produced MeToo and the cancel cycles and the red-blue chasm and the woke wars and the vaccine wars and the screaming-match version of every political conversation we have had for a decade and a half. It was a sky that required the tribal binary sorting of everything into either good or bad and no in-between, because the institutions had been revealed as rotten and the only way to feel safe was to choose a side and merge with a group that would tell you what was true.
But that sky has now moved.
In 2024, Pluto left Capricorn and began its long passage through Aquarius - the same planet that excavated the institutions is now turning its attention to the binary tribes themselves. For the next twenty years, Pluto in Aquarius will do to the movements what it did to the towers - surface their corruption, reveal their authoritarianism, and expose what they’ve been hiding. The progressive and conservative movements, the wellness communities, the activist groups, the political coalitions - every tribe formed during the Capricorn years is now going to be X-rayed in turn. The tribes will not hold - they’re now being cracked open.
Just last month, Uranus left Taurus - the sign of dug-in stance - and entered Gemini, the sign of plurality, multiple perspectives, and the breaking of single-narrative dominance. This is the transit that fractures the consensus inside the tribes, and it’s why the MAGA coalition is already cracking, and the progressive coalition is too. It’s why nobody can clearly decide if Blake or Baldoni won, and why every man and his dog suddenly has a new take on the King of Pop. Heterodox voices are proliferating in every direction, and the same person now turns out to agree with the right on some things and the left on others, and the single-stance loyalty oath is becoming impossible to maintain because Gemini will not let any one narrative dominate the mind. Uranus in Gemini is the pluralisation of thought happening at speed.
At the same time, Neptune has left Pisces and entered Aries - the sign of the I am. The merger has ended, and the collective ocean has receded, and what is now being imagined, dimly at first but with growing clarity, is the sovereign self that exists separate from any tribe. Neptune in Aries is the dream of who we are when no one’s watching - the slow recovery of the individual mind from the collective hive that swallowed it during the Pisces years.
And riding alongside Neptune, Saturn - the planet of structure - has entered Aries too, conjoining Neptune at zero degrees of Aries earlier this year for the Genesis Reset; the seed point at which the dream of the sovereign self acquired the structural ignition needed to actually become real. The new self, structurally seeded, in the same breath as the dissolution of the old.
Put this all together and you have the sky we are now living under.
Pluto in Aquarius cracking open the tribes.
Uranus in Gemini fracturing the single-narrative consensus inside them.
Neptune in Aries imagining the sovereign self that comes after.
Saturn in Aries giving that self its structure.
This is a completely different sky from the one that built the binary tribes, now asking us to leave them, as it brings the old tower down.
The discipline of holding both truths at once - the wound and the harm, the genius and the damage, the founding myth and the present cruelty, the regime and the children, the song and the singer - is the survival skill of the era we have just entered. The sky that built the tribes and the tower is gone, and the sky that is breaking them open is here, and the people who will navigate the next decade well will be the ones who develop the muscle to weigh on their own - to step out of the tribe, to stop merging with the group’s verdict, to find the note that is theirs and theirs alone, by holding the whole truth in both of their hands and weighing the sum of the grey.
Falling Pyramid, Rising Circle
For most of the modern era, truth came down from the top of the tower. A handful of newspapers, three television networks, a couple of political parties, a few church authorities, and the credentialed class that ran the universities told us what had happened, who the good guys were, which figures to admire and which to condemn. We did not have to weigh anything ourselves - the verdict was already in by the time we encountered the story. Our job was simply to receive what had been decided and to sort ourselves into the side that received it most enthusiastically.
That tower of the old world was built like a pyramid - the shape of the wounded masculine. And by masculine I don't mean men, just as by feminine I don't mean women; these are energies, not genders, that live in all of us. The pyramid is hierarchy, verdict from above, one voice at the top telling everyone below what is true. As it collapses, the temptation is to read its fall as the end of the patriarchy and the rise of the matriarchy, as the end of men leading and the rise of women, the inversion of the same shape with new faces at the top. But that’s just the same pyramid wearing a different costume - same hierarchy, same single voice, same verdict from above, same demand that everyone below merge with the chosen line. The wound only changes hands.
What’s actually being born is a different shape altogether. Not the inversion of the pyramid but its dissolution into a circle, where no-one is above or below, where the healed masculine holds the container and the healed feminine holds the contents, and where each of us stands alongside each other, learning to hold the truth with both hands and weigh it without being told its weight from above.
As the pyramid has been cracking, our instinct has not always been to step out into the open and learn to weigh on our own, but to grab onto the nearest smaller pyramid we could find and hum along inside it. That is why the last decade has felt like a tower splintering into binary tribes, because it was. As the big tower started coming down, smaller towers formed - the red and the blue, the woke and the anti-woke, the vaxxed and the anti-vaxxed, the Zionist and the anti-Zionist, Team Blake and Team Baldoni, the MJ and the anti-MJ, the MAGA and the anti-MAGA. Each tribe was a pyramid in miniature where we could still have someone telling us what was true; where the verdicts were still pre-decided, and the heroes and villains were already sorted, and we did not have to weigh - we just had to be loyal. The tribes of the last decade were the cocoons we built when the building we used to live in started falling down.
Only now, under this sky, may we discover those cocoons are no longer necessary - that two things can be true at once, and we can hold them both. It is possible to love the music of a man who harmed children, just as it is possible for a woman to be intimidated in the workplace whilst at the same time misusing her power. It is possible for a man to be the victim of a smear campaign whilst at the same time running one of his own, just as it is possible to yearn for a strongman to take down a corrupt system whilst also seeing the damage he is doing in the process. All of that becomes uncomfortably possible the moment we step out of the binary and hold the truth with both our hands.
And that is what the sky is now asking of us - it’s the work of the circle that’s forming as the pyramid comes down. Not to find a better tribe or build a new pyramid, but to leave the pyramid game altogether and step out of every cocoon and stand in the open with our own two hands and weigh.
This is what Saturn and Neptune at zero degrees of Aries was actually seeding. Aries is the ignition of self, and the whole point of the conjunction was that the new self has to come first before any new collective can form. The dissolution of the old structures and the birth of the sovereign individual are the same event. Before harmony, individuation. Before the choir, each singer finding the note that is theirs and theirs alone.
This is what the older reading of Babel was always pointing toward. The fall of the tower was not the curse the new reading made it out to be - it was the liberation. The multiplication of tongues was not exile from paradise but release from a borrowed unison that had been preventing every individual within it from sounding their own true note. What the ancient story called the scattering of languages, this sky is calling the sovereign voice. The work is the same work. The fracture is the freedom.
The Song We are Learning to Sing
In the old world, in the old tower, we lived in a single-note existence where everyone hummed the same melody, even when they disagreed about the lyrics. The melody came down from above, and we hummed along, and the harmony of the culture was the harmony of unison - everyone singing the same line. The work of the next era is to go inside, and to find the note that is ours - not the note the tribe handed us, or the note our parents sang, or the note our country expects, but the note that is ours and only ours, the one we were each born to sound - and then to sound it, honestly, with all its complexity and contradiction, with all our willingness to hold both truths at once.
That note will not match the note of the person sitting next to us, and that is exactly the point. The new harmony - the one the sky has been preparing us for - is not what happens when we all sing the same line, but what happens when sovereign voices, each true to their own pitch, find that their distinct notes resonate. The dissonance becomes the chord and the disagreement becomes the music. The complexity, held without flattening, becomes the sound of a civilisation that has finally grown up.
There will be a lot of wrong notes before the harmony arrives, and we are hitting a lot of them right now. The shrillness of the discourse, the cancel reflex, the inability to hold the same situation in two hands and weigh it - these are all wrong notes being sounded badly. They are the sounds of a culture trying to find its way down the scale, missing the keys, fumbling the timing, learning by failing in public. But these wrong notes are not failure - they are just practice. The harmony is on the other side of them, but only for those who keep singing.
We will stumble on our way as we seek to find the harmony, and we will not be spared the wars or the elections or the cruelty or the further fracturing of the consensus we used to share. The pyramid will keep falling for years and the tribes will keep insisting on their unison, and all the while the wrong notes will keep ringing out.
But somewhere in the wreckage, a sovereign voice is finding itself as a circle starts to form. Somewhere in the silence after the tribal chant fades, one person stops humming the inherited melody and finds the note that is theirs, and then another, and then another, in the ever widening circle. And eventually, the eyes of one person who has learned to hold complexity will meet the eyes of another who has learned the same thing, and they’ll recognise each other across the circle, and without trying, without coordinating, without needing to agree on anything, they’ll sing.
That’s the world we are walking towards, and what the sky is now asking of each of us.
May we each find our own note.
May we find our way into the circle.
And may we each muster the confidence to stand in it and sing.
If you need some support as we step boldly toward a new world, come join me in the Daily Lighthouse. I’ll be there, each day with you, or if you prefer it in an audio listening format, head over to the Resonance Room.
See you next Sunday, friends. Until then, have COURAGE, and stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
Onwards!
I know many changes are to come in my life. One of the underlying messages I get over it is to be a true to myself as I possibly can be; that is, go with what is true to me and not with what is simply acceptable to the crowd. I find it difficult to discern this.
An extraordinary perspective from above the battleground - thank you.