So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed “to bring balance to The Force,” but I never understood what it meant.

Star Wars is extremely dualistic–there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.

The “good side”, the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide “balance” while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren’t. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.

I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that’s about as far as it goes.

I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke’s vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.

Can anyone square this circle?

Edit: It’s funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.

  • Septimaeus@infosec.pub
    6·
    2 days ago

    Taoish equilibrium

    While the most obvious explanation of the incoherency is that SW exhibits a mostly haphazard implementation of a philosophical aesthetic only loosely related to Taoism, an artifice on loan from the cultural fixations of the era, if we set that aside and assume the premise charitably in an attempt to reconcile, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion.

    The Jedi order of the republic represented a decaying and overextended ideal terminally corrupted by its marriage to the state and its crusades. The council’s inability to see the coming reign of fascism, a future “shrouded in darkness,” should have been evidence enough, but they were blinded even to that, and incapable of setting aside their Force goggles long enough to reasoning deductively about current events. A new order was thus necessary which entailed near-complete destruction of the old.

    That is to say, the council’s misunderstanding of the prophecy of “balance” as an event that could only increase their power and influence was just another symptom of their corruption. Their obsession with hierarchy and use of violence to maintain order in the galaxy through their various holy wars, for example, predicted the Imperial reign of fascist terror. Through that lens, restoration of balance required their apparatus be drawn to its inevitable conclusion and dismantled before the galaxy could begin anew.

    I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.