# Adorno vs. Mary Poppins

In the 1950s, Theodor Adorno carried over a bizarre task of analysing the discourse of over a year's worth of astrological newspaper columns, essentially to drive the point that outsourcing the responsibility in life's woes to an impenetrable supernatural force is a dangerous mindset that can just as easily legitimise any authoritarian intrusion in society.

At first glance it seems like the stakes escalated quickly in that thesis, but the more you allow Adorno to argue, the more you see the relationship. Still, to me, it always feels like something's off when the conclusion of an argument is that you should tell off the behaviour of millions of people. There's no fault to the discourse analysis he makes, but I think that coming up with a logical framework to justify the acceptance of "secondhand superstition" in one's life on the basis of why it makes sense as an ethics-driving metaphysics of a contemporary person who's had just as much ability to confront these ideas as him and I is something that deserves more effort. In other words, I don't think we can make progress in defending a scientifically-oriented anti-fascist society if we don't get off the high horses and give people some credit.

## Antiskid ethics

There's a public debate going on in many places in the world about the legality of online betting. The issue here, of course, is linked to addiction, so we're not arguing simply about what one rationally chooses to do, but our own inability to self-regulate. We know enough about addiction now to state that people respond to these stimuli, or "temptations", very differently depending on how their lives are going and how their very DNA is wired to respond. A gemlog post I recently read [1] raised the question of why, since most communities have long banned casinos, we have overlooked state lotteries. The parallel between this and Adorno's astrology bashing, to me, is that both are "slippery slope" arguments. Both the horoscope and the lottery are seen as entry ways to a more harmful behaviour, and it should be ethically impossible to dissociate them from one another.

Could it be that there's a human behavioural form of Zeno's paradox? A grain of sand is not a mount just as a small transgression does not equate a big one. The buddhists and their Middle Way seem to think so. About a decade after Adorno's warnings, Julie Andrews sang to us in the big screen that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down", and I think that we overlook how bitter the medicine of an ethical contemporary life truly is. The endless positivity of us, Byung-Chul Han's productivity people, is so so tiring. There's more than enough daily frustration to attribute some of it to Mercury's retrograde motion. Jokes aside, I genuinely think that just as prohibition in the USA did not solve alcoholism, we need a more clinical approach to the Freudian death drive epidemic bringing absurd far-right politics back to the mainstream. We'll just have to find the right sugar dose.

### Links
=> gemini://kunulo.smol.pub/2026-09-22-lottery [1] A national disgrace we've grown used to - Richard Hall