The period of time that Saturn spent in Capricorn between the years of 2017 to 2020 is what I think about as a kind of accountability process around accountability culture.

Black Lives Matter, which started years before 2017 but was still in the process of gaining visibility nationwide in 2017, was trying to demand accountability from police, community, from people who are all complicit in policing in some form or another. Then, there was #MeToo which was, at least what I saw of it, largely online. A bunch of us spilled our guts about our experiences of sexual violence, asking for accountability from the public.

Both movements were about addressing targeted violence. Both movements asked for the public at large to comprehend our own complicity with said targeted violence. MeToo was immediately co-opted by Hollywood and I remember that nihilism within the movement spread pretty fast.

We were asking for accountability from the public. “The public” is a loose concept. Habermas defines it as a gathering where a society negotiates with the state. We have a lot of trouble defining both of these things. What is the state? Is it the federal government, state governments, or the corporations that buy into both? Is society trying to negotiate with public servants, the military, or with private industry? What if the definition of a society was built to exclude people from the beginning? Where is accountability then? Can society hold the state accountable and where is the third thing that holds a society accountable?

Saturn in Capricorn wants accountability. I remember wanting it too. If I just show everyone I know why I’m hurting, if I just listen hard enough to people begging to be seen, then things will change. They have to. We have to build better structures for listening to each other, structures that account for everyone.

I still want accountability. This isn’t just something that I got over just because Saturn is no longer in Capricorn. We still need accountability but I see far fewer people asking for accountability from the public. I don’t think that this is because people have stopped needing acknowledgement and change. I think that we don’t trust the public anymore.

I think that accountability is about responsibility. We want a lot of different things from accountability. Some of us want empathy. We want people to know that we are being robbed and damaged and killed by society and the state working together. Some of us want control. We want to remind ourselves and everyone we know that we have collective control over our futures. Some of us want power which is different from control. We want to expose power dynamics and even them out because some people have more power within a system and more things to be accountable over, kind of like how parents have more accountability than their kids.

Saturn in Capricorn fights the impulse to look up for accountability. It has already been betrayed by those with the most power, hasn’t it? That’s why it is looking around instead of up.

A friend told me something the other day. When violence exists in a society, every single member of that society is responsible. I know that people younger than me are very sick of the public call outs and wanting something different but I want to express that this is where all of the public call outs in the late 2010s came from—the simple recognition that every single person in a society is responsible for our lives together and the simple hope that we might change.

That’s Saturn in Capricorn, those two simple hopes together. We are all responsible and we can change together.

And people’s egos do get involved with all of this. It happens. Our egos are in charge of control. Responsibility has to do with control. Capricorn has an ego. Sometimes, Saturn in Capricorn can be punishingly critical. Our egos can make us think that we have more control than we actually do.

This is ego: the ego wants to be a hero. Heroes imagine themselves taking on extraordinary responsibility and risk using sheer will. Heroes save people and so many of us wanted the adults in the room or the people willing to act like adults to come and save us. Your ego wants you to be a good person so it keeps trying to tell you to take accountability and teach accountability and to hurry up to save the world. But there is a difference between accountability and heroism. You might take accountability, you might apologize for the harm that you have caused, but you’ll never be a hero because heroes are not real people. Heroes are ideas of people.

Saturn is humbling. Saturn will cut a hero down.

Every single person in a society is responsible for that society’s violence and each person is just an ordinary person. Ordinary people can’t control every aspect of our lives. We get ourselves into trouble. We fuck up our words and we hurt each other. We get surgeries and we struggle to change our habits. None of us are heroes. A lot of people don’t know what we are talking about because we are full of contradictions and are trying to make better choices while dependent on the system that we complicit in.

I hear a lot of stories about people who felt like they have been unjustly shamed in their friend group for doing or saying things. I don’t have any stories like that to share. What I do remember is being in groups where people made asks that young and inexperienced facilitators couldn’t meet. I remember people asking for accountability for just reasons from the wrong people. I remember people asking for accountability for things from the right people at the wrong moments—right after sex, when intoxicated, or during a fight about something else.

The right keeps trying to compare call out culture to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China. I don’t agree. Call out culture was invented by Black femmes around 2011-2012 as a means to protect their digital spaces against online harassment. It’s not appropriate for every type of space because it wasn’t created for every type of gathering or organizing. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was a white terror event that came about due to the Sino-Soviet split. The co-opting of call out culture and the play out of the Cultural Revolution might have some shallow similarities but only because both are done by mobilizing groups of people.

The public is a gathering where society holds the state accountable. The state has been privatized and society was created to exclude most of us. What holds society accountable? Communication holds society accountable and communication is a game of telephone.

Demanding accountability while trying to mourn—that feels like 2017. It also feels like right now.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I look back at the years between 2017 to 2020 and I have a lot more compassion for the people I was around. A lot of organizers were in their early twenties. A good chunk of the people we were trying to build queer community with were teenagers and teens repeat a lot of words that they don’t actually know. I don’t think any of us had the maturity to hold the space that we wanted to hold for each other, myself included. A lot of us actually wanted accountability from our parents’s generation but we were too heartbroken to ask. That’s Saturn too, I guess. Accountability gets easier as you age. You blame people less.

I think that this is what Saturn in Capricorn helps us do—Saturn in Capricorn asks us to teach accountability where it is due. By doing that, Saturn in Capricorn is actually trying to create a public, a gathering place that everyone has a stake in. That’s what it’s fighting for. That’s also what it has the most doubt about. Hence, the ego. But accountability isn’t about blame. You can only take accountability if you believe in other people. You can’t take accountability for someone else’s actions. They have to do it.

Maybe you have less control than your ego thinks that you do. Maybe you have more control. Maybe Saturn in Capricorn can give you a proper assessment of just how much control and responsibility you have—maybe not. Did you know that scam artist Anna Delvey got caught during her Saturn return in Capricorn? How much public accountability did you witness in that procedure?

Saturn in Capricorn lives on. We haven’t received accountability yet. We still need it and we have been in this state of need for a long time together. Maybe accountability isn’t everything. There’s other things that we need just as much—support and communication and all that jazz. But accountability is also worth quite a lot. I’ve seen people give incredible empathy by offering apology and people give startling compassion by choosing to accept or refuse said apologies. Accountability is empathy when it’s real.