Carissa Véliz’s New Book and a Major Global Health Report Recast Prophecy as a High-Stakes Political Battleground

Carissa Véliz’s new book argues that prophecies are not harmless forecasts but political terrain — the places where societies argue over whose vision of tomorrow will count. That framing landed sharply this week as a major international health assessment set out a sobering map of dangers ahead, the product of commissioners who examined almost 400 distinct risks to human health and then narrowed them to two existential threats and 15 “major catastrophic” ones. The process, participants say, revealed something that rarely makes the headlines: the fiercest battles are not only over which futures are possible, but over what kinds of prediction deserve trust.

In public life, “prophecy” is usually imagined as the province of mystics — astrologers, sorcerers, and magicians. Yet modern institutions also depend on prediction, from disease surveillance and climate modelling to intelligence analysis and actuarial science. The difference is supposed to be that scientific forecasts are accountable to evidence. But the line between reliable foresight and persuasive storytelling can blur when uncertainty is high and stakes are existential.

Astrology is a useful test case because it borrows the language and tools of science while largely rejecting science’s self-correcting discipline. Modern astrology often presents itself with technical-looking star charts and references to astronomical bodies. It generates expectations about the natural world: that the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and constellations influence — or at least correlate with — events on Earth and the contours of personality. For believers, the “evidence” is frequently experiential: an uncanny match between a horoscope and a life event, or the feeling of being described with intimate precision by a birth chart.

Researchers who study scientific reasoning note that these trappings can mimic what science does at a distance — offering explanations and predictions — without meeting the standards that make scientific claims dependable. The key question is not whether an idea sounds systematic, but whether it can be tested in a way that could prove it wrong.

Some astrological claims are so elastic that they are effectively unfalsifiable. Vague predictions (“change is coming,” “a conversation will alter your path”) can be retrofitted to almost any outcome, giving the impression of accuracy without risking disconfirmation. However, researchers have also pointed out that astrology can be framed in ways that are testable if it makes specific claims. If zodiac signs meaningfully shape traits like authority or charisma, for example, then measurable patterns might appear in professions where those traits are selected for or rewarded. One well-known analysis examined whether scientists disproportionately belonged to signs that astrologers describe as favourable to scientific thinking and found no such bias — a result that undercuts the claim that zodiac categories map onto real psychological differences in a way that would shape life outcomes.

The strongest evidence against astrology’s predictive power comes from controlled testing designed to remove the cues and expectations that can contaminate subjective judgement. In a widely discussed double-blind experiment published in the scientific literature, astrologers were asked to match personality profiles to natal charts under conditions intended to prevent guesswork and “cold reading.” The results did not support the idea that astrologers could perform better than chance. Subsequent assessments have echoed the broader pattern: when astrological predictions are converted into precise hypotheses and evaluated rigorously, the signal disappears.

In science, being wrong is not a scandal; it is routine. The scandal is refusing to learn from being wrong. Researchers emphasize that scientific fields evolve because ideas are modified or abandoned when contradictory evidence accumulates. Astrology, by contrast, has shown little tendency to adjust its core premises in response to negative findings. Nor does it function like a scientific community: critical peer review is not central to professional advancement, and practitioners can build careers without publishing results for scrutiny or presenting at meetings where methods are challenged. After repeated failures to demonstrate validity, scientific interest in astrology as a serious explanatory framework largely withered, and there are no documented cases in which astrological theory has driven new discoveries about the natural world.

So why praise astrologers, sorcerers and magicians at a moment when global health experts are warning about existential risk? Because the real subject is not celestial influence but the social power of prediction. Forecasts — whether delivered by algorithms, commissions or star charts — are tools that shape behaviour. They can concentrate authority, justify interventions, steer resources and narrow what futures people imagine as achievable. The peer review of major risk assessments, experts say, is often as much about interrogating assumptions and incentives as it is about debating numbers: which hazards count, whose lives are weighted most heavily, and what uncertainty should compel action rather than paralysis.

Astrology’s persistence, despite weak empirical support, highlights a human reality that health planners ignore at their peril: people seek narratives that make uncertainty livable. Scientific institutions earn trust not only by being correct more often, but by showing their work — stating what would change their minds, exposing methods to criticism, and updating conclusions as evidence shifts. In that sense, the ancient arts are a mirror, reflecting what happens when prediction becomes persuasion without accountability.

Why it matters

Global health decisions increasingly depend on forecasts, from pandemic preparedness to environmental risk. Distinguishing evidence-based prediction from unfalsifiable storytelling is not academic: it affects budgets, public trust and lives. Understanding why non-scientific “prophecies” remain compelling can help scientists and policymakers communicate uncertainty without surrendering rigour.