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.
What is the “light side” of the Force if not Jedi propaganda establishing themselves as the only morally correct force users in the galaxy? Who is to say which parts of the force are good and which are evil? The failing of the Jedi isn’t that they assumed they were completely on the right side, but that the force has “sides” at all. The dark side exists in all living things, because the Force exists in all living things. To deny a part of the Force is imbalance.
I think you’re still looking at the Force like it’s a traditional dualistic phenomenon like we’re used to in real-world philosophy, like yin and yang, there can be no light without darkness, etc. But the sides of the Force don’t work that way despite their “light” and “dark” descriptors. The light side is the natural and balanced state. The dark side is an aberration.
I think about it in neither way. My point is that the descriptors of “light” and “dark” are our own (or the Jedis’ own) moralizations mapped crudely onto the nature of the universe. The Jedi describing themselves as “light” and others as “dark” is a recursive definition of morality and it leads to moral rot, because people start to believe that the rules handed down by the Jedi are actually morally perfect, and above question. It is definitionally authoritarian.
But isn’t that the point? The Jedi’s hubris was a large part of their downfall and the old Order needed to be done away with.
“You’re not the last of the old Jedi, Luke. You’re the first of the new.”
@queerlilhayseed @bjoern_tantau I think I’m okay with calling the side that uses technology to destroy entire planets “the bad guys.” Your Sith mileage may vary.
I think that’s an interesting distinction. I wonder whether the indigenous lifeforms of Coruscant would classify the Republic as good guys or bad guys.