Article · Neptune
Neptune on the Cancer–Capricorn Axis
Why the strength of our “we” and the structure of our work form one axis
Pavel Medvedev · Published: · Updated:
This is a short article. There are no stories here, just the core of an axis explored in detail in Neptune in Cancer and Neptune in Capricorn. For an overview of all six axes, see Neptune: Eternal Contexts.
Parts and the whole
Neptune sees the same thing everywhere: parts and the whole. Each of us is part of something larger, and that larger whole lives through our participation. The Cancer–Capricorn axis shows it from two sides: within our “we”, and in the way our work is organized.
Cancer: the whole within our “we”
A “we” does not form by itself. Something brought us together: music, the work, a family lineage, a town. A school is a “we” because there is a musical life and we are developing it. Take away the music and all that remains is a staffing chart.
So the strength of a “we” does not come from how many people there are or how long they have known one another. It comes from whether we have brought the larger whole we are part of into our “we”, consciously, through a decision each of us makes. Are we all part of it? If one of us belongs to the organization but not to music, the others are holding the “we” together, while the work unravels in that person’s hands.
Neptune in Cancer — the life of the larger whole we are part of, within our “we”.
Capricorn: our values in the structure
Once the whole is present within our “we”, the way we organize the work stops being arbitrary. Positions, budgets, hours and responsibilities follow from the whole that brought us together in the opposite sign. What gets a place in the structure is not whatever happens to be profitable, but what we value in that whole: a rehearsal, a concert, repairing an instrument.
Capricorn is the only sign where the larger whole has a budget line. That line reveals whose values actually live in the work. A director who treats the school as a business has done the sums correctly — for a business. Tell him what we are part of, and the same figures fall into a different pattern.
Neptune in Capricorn — our values in the structure of the larger whole we are part of.
Why this is one axis
The whole within our “we” gives that “we” strength. Our “we” within the whole gives the whole a structure. Neither can stand alone.
A structure without a “we”: the position is filled, the paperwork is in order, but the whole is missing. The machine has been removed; the inspections continue. A “we” without a structure is a warmth that pays nobody’s salary and dies with the founders.
The axis is closed when both halves are present: first, “we are here for music in this town”; then, what it costs and who is responsible for what. The structure then sustains what brought us together, and our “we” outlives its founders.
What psychology calls it
Irving Janis called a “we” with no whole inside it groupthink: a cohesive group for which agreement among its members has become more important than the matter that brought them together. He studied disastrous decisions by US administrations — the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam — and found the same thing each time. People had protected their “we” and lost sight of what that “we” was part of. This is Cancer with the whole missing.
For Capricorn, there is Robert Merton. He used goal displacement to describe what happens in an organization when rules and procedures devised to serve the work become ends in themselves; ritualism describes dutifully following them long after forgetting what they are for. The director who has done all his sums correctly for a business is not yet a ritualist, but he is on that road: he judges what belongs by the spreadsheet, not by the whole.
There is a third name, the hardest of all. Jonathan Shay, followed by Brett Litz, used moral injury for what happens to a person whom a structure has made act against what they understand themselves to be part of: a soldier, a doctor, a teacher. This is not fear or guilt over a mistake. It is Capricorn that has parted company with Cancer: the structure of our “we” has demanded a violation of the whole for whose sake that “we” exists.
What psychology does about these problems, and what the axis adds, is explored in Six Problems That Already Have a Plan.