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.
Lots of highly detailed responses in the comments, and yet I’m still confused.
Light side = balance
Dark side = imbalance
Sith = dark side. Must get rid of Sith for balance.
I think that is precisely the misreading that led to the downfall of the Jedi order. The dark side of the force isn’t inherently evil, just as the light side isn’t inherently good. The Jedi did a lot of shitty stuff under the banner of being the good guys. Balance, I think, is having all aspects of the Force (that is, all living things) in harmony.
The misreading of the Jedi was
Jedi = light side
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.
@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 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.”
That was a Jedi problem, not a light side problem.
Did everyone share qui gon’s view that Anakin was going to do that? Or was it just him and obi wan?
Quigon was one of the few “prophecy” enthusiasts. The closest to his disposition was arguably his former master, Dooku.
Obiwan trained Anakin because it’s what Quigon wanted. And nobody could tell him otherwise because he was the first jedi to face a sith in millenia. Even YODA had never fought a sith lord at that point.
So ya even tho Obiwan’s emotional attachment to quigon was clearly what drove him to defy the council if need be, there wasn’t much they could do because Obiwan was galactically viral at the time.
A Sith kills a whole squad of Jedi in Acolyte. It’s a century before we hear Duel of the Fates for the first time, but nowhere near “millennia.”
Well, that’s like, Disney’s opinion, man.
Acolyte isn’t star wars. It’s a fan fic with a budget.
Best lightsaber fight ever in it. More story in one season than all of the sequels combined.
It’s good Star Wars.
Also shows how flawed and politically compromised the Jedi were at the time.
For all it’s (many) flaws, I enjoyed it overall, didn’t think it needed a second season though so no big loss IMO.
More story
lol
rofl @ ur lol
Balance to the Force meant basically all light side.
Trouble was that the Jedi have become arrogant and hypocritical. They were also corrupted by the dark side, they just weren’t realising it. They had become political puppets instead of guardians of peace and justice.
I wish George Lucas had been a little more overt about that.
Luke can use dark and light side force abilities. What makes him different from other similarly capable users like Darth Tyranus or Yoda is that he didn’t use the force to create a power structure. Everyone else, including Obiwan, was using the force to perpetuate an empire, a jedi temple, a senate, some sort of artificial construct that in would inevitably lead to imbalance in the force.
Luke trained Jedi with the goal of protecting life in general.
I always get kind of annoyed with Avatar’s squeamish around blood bending. Like, why? Why is that worse than hitting them in the head with a giant rock?
Either you accidentally replied to the wrong comment or you’re gonna have to connect the dots for me.
Oh, there’s a Nickelodeon TV show called Avatar: The Last Airbender where people have telekinetic ability called bending, but limited to a single element (Earth, Air, Fire, Water). There’s an episode where a character is forced to bend the water inside someone’s blood to prevent her from killing people and it’s made out as a step towards evil, like a dark-sided Force power, whereas it’s really just one more way to use bending to force people to your will, just like bending a rock at their heads.
Avatar has some impressive depth to it and the writing is impeccable; definitely and always a kid’s show first, but I discovered it as an adult so it has a lot to offer. Just make sure to watch the original animated series and not the Netflix live-action caricature (and not to be confused with Avatar: Dances with Wolves in Space).
Are you an AI? We were talking about Star Wars.
The way my brain works, unfortunately. You’re not alone. My constant context-switching bothers my gf too.
Edit: Though I guess I’m a little confused (and annoyed) about why you think this is an AI thing. There’s a pretty obvious connection between bending and the Force.
I think the answer to this is that George thought daoism seemed cool, but didn’t understand it.
Have you ever listened to the actual lyrics of “the final countdown” by europe. Star wars is pretty much just like that. Nonsense.
I can’t hear you over this AWESOME SYNTH RIFF
Dit doo doo doo dit dit doo doo doo
Lucas himself kept it pretty simple. From interviews and the movies themselves, his narrative is that the dark side is a corruption and abuse of the force. Think like burning through natural resources, instead of using renewable energy. The Force is not a finite resource in that way exactly, but corrupting the Force can have wider effects psychologically and sociologically. This may seem overly simple at first, but I don’t think it is when you consider just how evil the Sith actually are.
But you know, death of the author and all that. The expanded universe saved Star Wars in my opinion, and gave it a lot of much needed depth. There was a lot of info about lessons Luke had to learn about accepting all parts of himself, and learning how fear, even of himself, leads to the dark side. He hesitated using powers like force lightning or mind manipulation because of how evil it seemed. But he learned that it isnt an act itself, but the indention behind it that matters, as well as the rezoning behind it. Dominating another’s mind to aura farm is not the move, but a Jedi mind trick to save lives is acceptible,for example. This was expanded in more in the EU by those that walk a middle path, the Grey Jedi.
The Prequels reinforced this by highlighting how imperfect and ultimately impotent the Jedi order was at the time of Palatine’s rise.
While I don’t believe the discourse online that Anakin killing all Jedi and Sith WAS the balancing of the Force, the Jedi Order DID need to be reworked. Just like how religion in real life isn’t perfect and needs reform kn a regular basis, but we do need people to tell us to be nice to other humans and form a certain kind of social accountability. We certainly DON’T need an equal, “balanced” amount of people whose religion is mass genocide and “might makes right” to the degree that they kill their teachers (often guardians that raised them) as a rite of passage. Also, Jedi=/=good the same way religion=/=good. The Light Side is good. The Jedi, and religion, attempts to achieve goodness, but does not always succeed. The Dark Side, whether Sith or Dark Jedi, is fundamentally a rejection of accountability, the concept of goodness, and respect for the natural order of the universe. This so-called binary, ironically, comes from the idea that anything not approved by the Jedi order’s dogma is the Dark Side.
This overly emphasized social pressure is a big reason Anakin fell. In his mind it was “well I did x so I’m not a Jedi anymore, so that means I have to embrace the complete opposite of everything I once stood for because I hate myself for making a mistake”. And while Anakin is responsible for his own actions, the Jedi Order is not “good” either for setting him up to fail like this. He seems like (and is) an idiot who was easily fooled and manipulated. But like, Padme was the only one who fully accepted him for who who was, even after he admitted to thr Sand People massacre. She never even looked at him with fear or judgment. Palpatine was similar. And that’s a powerful thing.
But none of this means the Force decided “we need some more genocide and less people who care about trying to be good. Send in the chosen one.” That’s just dumb.
I’m not going to pretend there was any subtext to the sequels since there isn’t even a main text.
Source: used to be WAY too much of a Star Wars nerd.
EDIT:
In the scene you mentioned, Yoda warns him not to take his weapons, which Luke ignores. When Luke asks what is waiting for him, he tells Luke “what you bring with you”. Bringing weapons/violence to “win” at his training is missing the point of what Yoda was trying to teach him. Obviously violence IS sometimes necessary, and Yoda himself later tells him he’ll need to defeat his father. But the lesson is this: when your main tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So it’s more a Ring of Power situation where some powers erode your morality?
Yes, I think there’s something to be said about Anakin’s religion preventing him from integrating himself. He was overtaken by his Shadow.
Yes but also no. Due to all the good Star Wars video games and the emphasis on dualism, we think of force powers as abilities unlocked on a skill tree, and you have to choose to use or not use them, or it’ll make your dark side points go up. That’s not really the case though. Everyone uses the Force for telekinesis. Force Choke is just telekinesis, except increasing the pressure specifically around the throat. Sure, you can kill someone and be “good” or Light Side, even specifically that way theoretically. But let’s be honest here: it was a way for Vader to torture or kill underlings that questioned him to assert his authority to aura farm. Not out of love, not out of any sense of “I need to do this to make the world better”. So it is a “dark side power” in practice, because of your intention.
There is some debate about how Palpatine’s master (have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise?) was able to extend life. But at least one popular books says that it was by literally sucking the life energy out of someone else to extend your own life, increasingly having to kill more to extend your life by increasingly shorter periods. The same book states that this is how Vader survived and why Padme mysteriously died “of a broken heart”. Palpatine killed her to save Vader, as well as a bonus for him to have full control over him by severing his last connection to his old life. So yes, defying the laws of the universe of life and death, and using life itself (the Force that is a part of us all and we are all part of it) to inflict suffering, pain, and death, just to extend your own life (“you” really just being the Force too that exists for a small period of time, think Buddhism) is definitely a corruption of the Force for evil purposes. But if you were able to do this to sacrifice your own life to save multiple others, or even to save one person who can serve a greater purpose, perhaps that wouldn’t be seen as the Dark Side.
That’s a satisfying interpretation, but it does leave open the question of why the Jedi could not see it that way. They seem more than anything else to be an object lesson against simple-minded dogmatism.
The oversimplified explanation: they are stupid/unwise/shallow. I couldn’t have said it better myself than your last sentence, that’s exactly the narrative purpose of the prequel Jedi order.
They have the correct words memorized, but they don’t understand what it actually means. Anakin is able to quote “unconditional love is encouraged, it is just attachment that is forbidden”. When he goes to Yoda after having nightmares of the future, he tells Anakin that he must learn to let go of the thing he is afraid to lose, since it is just a part of life. Is any of that wrong? Not particularly, but was Yoda unconditionally loving him? Or did he uncaringly spout dogma at him when he could clearly tell he was struggling. No questions of what it was about, no follow up, no kind words, no empathy, no nothing.
Then there’s the clouding of the Force. So, they could generally see the future before this point, and now they can’t. And they don’t think this is odd or concerning? They’re not on their toes enough to expect a trap or a plot twist? Mace floats the idea of telling the senate in episode 3, many years after it started. Just because they are the ones that presuppose they are always trying to do the right thing doesn’t mean that they will always have the answers, always be strong, or even not just fooling themselves into thinking they have an honest heart for the truth. Pretending otherwise led to the downfall of the free world.
Yoda can rattle off “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” in Episode 1, but that’s exactly what happened to them. They feared losing to the Dark Side, feared losing their influence on the Republic, so they integrated further with the government, making both weaker (which always happens when you mix religion and government), which caused Anakin to doubt because they were so transparent, then completely abandon the ideology because he saw no place for himself in the world after making a single mistake.
I am all too familiar with the mindset as someone who was raised very Christian. Jesus himself even criticizes the practice of “tithing the mint and cumin, but ignoring thr weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Basically. the religious leaders of the time took the old law’s command to give a tithe (one tenth) of your income to God SO seriously that they’d dump out every slice on their spice rack into a table once a week, and carefully divide it into 10 equal pieces, and give a tenth to God. Yet they completely missed the point of religion, the concepts and real people that actually matter. Even for the small things, why did God want them to tithe their belongings? Not because he came down and grabbed it from the altar every night, but so it could go to people who needed it but couldn’t afford it. Yet the religious leaders neglected the orphans and widows in the community. The religious leaders wee “so good” by being “so dedicated” to thr tithing command, but guess whose job it was to distribute the tithes to the needy? Guess who actually kept it. They were too enthralled with the specifics (and their own additional dogma) that when God himself came, they killed him because they didn’t recognize his teachings as the same thing they “followed”. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, it is a universal truth about humanity, and unfortunately even so-called Christians have learned nothing from this.
Similar to Anakin, I left my local church of over a decade because my mom got cancer, and nobody said a thing about it to me. Nobody reached out after I left either. I called out one guy on it later, and he was basically like “yeah but she’ll go to heaven so no big deal right? I don’t know what you want me to say” Like yeah maybe, even if I fully believe that (which I’m not sure I do anymore) or in Buddhism where we all become a part of something greater, I still have emotions and it would sure be great if anyone cared enough to help me process them. If God gave us emotions, it was for a purpose, not to ignore them.
Yoda can rattle off “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” in Episode 1
The first time I heard that line from Yoda about sensing much fear in Anakin, I was pissed. Here’s this 9 year old slave boy, a child taken from his mother, his home, his everything and surrounded and poked and prodded by all these weirdos…of course he’s afraid you fucking idiot. How dare you spew that crap. To paraphrase a great Jedi, “Yes the Jedi deserved it, and I hope they burn in hell!”
I’ve learned that systems serve themselves, first and always. There is no better lesson of that than Christianity. The historical Jesus was basically a radical hippie, but he was buried first by Paul and then the institution of the Church, which didn’t even feel the need to purge the story of the Pharisees or the Good Samaritan from the Bible, two stories which obviously call out the negative religious impulses the Church is founded on.
Yes, emotions are there to be listened to. A big part of waking up is taking your feelings seriously instead of burying them or denying them or ignoring them. I fucking HATE Christian funerals because they spend almost all their time convincing themselves that God is Good and The Person is Happy in Heaven, and it’s absolutely a terrible way to deal with grief and maybe even anger. I went to a funeral for a woman who had been literally disemboweled by her mentally-ill son, and, yeah, you can imagine the questions about God that were not asked at the service.
By ignoring your emotions, the risk is that you either become a zombie, miserably unhappy and not sure why, or you get completely overtaken by your shadow, the parts you are trying to deny (what happened to Anakin, and what happens to all those gay evangelists caught in bathroom stalls).
I don’t know where you are on your spiritual journey, but I left Christianity to become an atheist and now I’m trying to build some spirituality back into my life to keep the suicidal nihilism at bay. Britt Hartley’s YouTube channel No Nonsense Spirituality has a lot of good ideas.
I’m sorry you lost your mom.
I agree. That’s why religion and politics don’t mix. Someone truly spiritual is bad at playing politics, a politician can rarely be genuine. So then it just becomes a self sustaining system that doesn’t do or help anyone.
I agree.
Right now I’m just done for now attending anywhere and mostly with studying anything, aside from a few things like looking into Hinduism a bit, visiting with someone to a different sect of Christianity, stuff like that. I’d be pretty surprised if there was no intelligent design or greater purpose to the world. I do believe some form of spirituality is important to the human experience. I’m not married to any idea at the moment though.
Thank you, that’s more than anyone else said :) I haven’t lost her yet, but it’s just a matter of time. A few more years at most.
It’s wrong to think there’s a good side and a bad side.
That’s like christians thinking they’re the good ones.
There’s no good or bad in taoismn
there’s no good or bad in star wars
good/bad is a Christian invention cause they love thinking they’re the good guys
can’t say what it takes to balance the force in star wars but I think you’re very corrupted by Christianity and are trying to project it in things where it shouldn’t
One side killed kids, enslaved a galaxy, and blew up multiple planets
The other lives in a swamp, and smokes too much Halfing Leaf
bOth SiDeS
Your philosophical sophistication surpasses your reading comprehension.
Yeah always confused me too, there hundreds or thousands of jedi vs 2 sith? Seems like balance would be the last thing the jedi wanted
The presence of the dark side/Sith is imbalance. The light side is balance.
Anakin killed every single member of both sides of that dualism, and then died on the process.
well in his defense… balanced.
Yes. It’s a classical oracle prediction.
Yes, I think the surest path to rescuing this aspect of the story is as Greek tragedy.
it’s like a vibe you know?
edit: basically like when someone says “this would be chill” only with jedis and shit.
I think the Jedi were incredibly stupid in Episodes 1, 2, 3.
They had a prophecy about one to bring Balance in a time when the Jedi were unquestionably dominant. Well Balance during that time, would obviously require the Jedi to be taken down. Anakin was that balance. The Jedi order was destroyed and the Sith began their period of domination. Creating Balance.The next obvious story for Episodes 7, 8, 9, would have been a the creation of a new order, neither Jedi or Sith, that fostered Balance within each member. That’s where Rian Johnson was going with Ep. 8. But the idiot Glass Union came back and shat the bed trying desperately to unravel all that. He decided to go back to the same old thing all over again.
Ultimately, Star Wars is made by a lot of authors with a lot of different visions and external pressures. I’ve heard three main interpretations:
- Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the Sith, because darkness is inherently evil. Vader fulfills this by killing the Emperor and becoming redeemed in his last moments, “destroying” the last Sith. (Ignore the whole fleet of off-screen Sith retroactively placed there by Expanded Universe works.)
- Bringing balance to the Force means making the number of Jedi and Sith equal, and Vader fulfills this by killing hundreds of thousands of Jedi.
- Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the black-and-white view of Jedi and Sith, which definitely seems to be the position of the Bendu (an ancient loosely-all-knowing alien who shows up in a handful of episodes of Clone Wars, but has been treated by the broader franchise as disproportionately important). Vader fulfills this by breaking the boundary between Sith and Jedi in his dying moments—or maybe the prophecy was about Rey after all. (Doesn’t this make the shot of Luke’s face inside Vader’s helmet the most interesting? Almost as though it’s saying both “there is evil in you, but there is good in him too.”)
Which is “right”? Well, you’d have to ask Lucas, wouldn’t you? Or Rian Johnson, or Dave Filoni, or the entire writing team of Knights of the Old Republic, or any of the thousands of people who’ve written for Star Wars… There’s not just one answer.
I think any of these could be true, from a certain point of view.
You talk as if these are the only options. Only a sith deals in absolutes…
I wouldn’t pick a fight with 'em if I were you. They have the high ground:
😁
There’s true and there’s satisfying. The third option is the only one that I find personally satisfying and the one least explored.
I’m happy not to read what authors have to say for the most part, just as I´d rather watch their movies than read their twitter feeds.
Anakin brought balance to the force, for a small amount of time, there was only 1 jedi and 1 sith
the Jedi were just terrible at reading prophecies
That’s not what balance means for the Force.
its balanced right? In the Republic, it was really imbalanced as there were thousands of Jedi but only two sith.
“Balance” when it comes to the Force doesn’t mean equal number of Jedi and Sith or equal amount of light side and dark side. That’s like saying balance is an equal number of non-cancer cells and cancer cells in a body.
The dark side is imbalance, it must be removed for balance.
Balance is just another name for the light side. The dark side brought chaos. The Jedi themselves were also unbalanced themselves because they were serving a corrupt government, so they wouldn’t have survived Anakin either way.
Apparently it meant kill all the super light-side users and all the super-dark side users, and just have ethically questionable middle-of-the-road force users.
