Why the Jedi Order is the Antagonist of Star Wars — Part 2
Let’s see how the Jedi get their Messiah.
And fail him.
This is Part 2.
Now.
Anakin hides his marriage with Padme and their unborn children.
In Episode III, when he’s having premonitions about his wife and children, Anakin is reaching out to Yoda, in search of advice.
Without, actually, telling Yoda about his fears for his family’s safety.
And that’s why Yoda gives him the worst possible piece of advice, ever.
If Yoda truly wanted to help Anakin, he could’ve counselled or sent him to someone who could.
Yoda could’ve acknowledged the anxiety and pain through which Anakin was going and put him at ease.
But Yoda is prevented from helping the fledgling Darth Vader, by his now icon status among Jedis.
This leaves Anakin with advice like “bury your feelings and forget all the tragedy that has ever befallen you or your family.”
And it doesn’t do any good, given that Anakin is afraid for his family.
Which leads to another core flaw of the Jedi order: fear is the number one enemy of a Jedi.
This is shown in all episodes, I to VI: fear leads a Jedi Knight to the dark side.
But in real life fear does many things, not just lead you to take wrong decisions.
- Fear can keep you alive,
- Fear can teach you caution,
- Fear can make you care for people that mean something for you.
Instead, for the Jedi, this is of little use. If you understand their philosophy, which roughly looks like this:
fear ⇒ anger ⇒ hate ⇒ suffering;
anger + hate + suffering = dark side
Given these concepts, you cannot help but wonder: did George Lucas make an error or something brilliant, when he created the Jedis?
If George Lucas assumed that this is how emotions work and wanted to make the Jedi some higher purpose, heavenly beings, then I believe he’s made an error, story-wise.
Fear is not only something that leads to burning hatred and “evil evil evil.”
Fear is not some inevitable domino that will trigger the end of the world.
But.
What if George Lucas made the Jedi Order a psychologically flawed cult, a cult that’s traumatising its own disciples? On purpose.
Then this is an artistic touch of craftsmanship that you can rarely find, given the Star Wars saga has one of the most debated lores in history.
The flaw in Jedi mentality
It’s very well known by now that Jedis restrict emotions of any kind.
Therefore even romantic ties.
So that means that love is another reason for which a Jedi knight can succumb to the dark side, given the intricacies of romantic passion.
For the Jedi, anything close to a romantic partner means loss of control and going down the path of perdition.
This means denying everything noble that love has got to offer:
- the will to move mountains,
- letting go of your ego and just being with your soulmate
- all the way to the selfless act of sacrificing oneself, so that the other may be safe from harm.
This all turns into an instability that the Jedi condemn and abolish.
It’s especially fatal for a boy transitioning into a man, caused by such emotions and intimacy.
You can also see this dysfunctional creed in Luke’s story, when old Ben Kenobi and old Yoda both try to instil the same thing in him: a Jedi master gets a hold of his emotions.
Both Obi Wan and Yoda instruct Luke to abandon Leia and company, otherwise he’d be overcome with vulnerability and open to the same path as his father.
That’s how the emperor managed to turn Anakin into Darth Vader.
And that’s how the real world is treating boys and young men: show that you’re vulnerable and you’ll be prone to being manhandled.
Or worse.
On the other hand, Luke separates himself from Anakin.
While they both receive the same stoic training of the Jedi and not always obeying their commands, Luke isn’t influenced by the Jedi dogma.
Of course, that is also due to the fact that Luke is actually older, giving his emotional range an advantage over Anakin’s.
Luke has known grief and loss, when his aunt and uncle died.
For Anakin, though, his emotions come in direct conflict with his Jedi training and conditioning.
He’s just a boy, compared to Luke.
This in turn generates anger, which turns into violence and horror, and an obvious justification why Anakin ends up slaughtering everything in his path.
At practically every plot point in Revenge of the Sith, it feels like if someone sat down with Anakin and worked on an actual solution for his fears instead of vilifying him for having fears, none of this would have happened.
All Qui Gon Jinn had to do was
- pay whatever currency he was asked for,
- emancipate Anakin’s mother,
- give her a nice apartment in the capital
- and allow Anakin to visit her now and then.
Anakin’s mind would have been at ease, he would’ve been emotionally secure, and he could have focused on his training.
That would’ve been great.
But if that would’ve happened, we’d never have had Darth Vader.
Jedi teaching has it all wrong, and this seems to be hinted by various Siths throughout the saga:
Emotional remoteness fuels rage and a feeling of impotence, which leads Jedi into becoming Sith.
While Luke openly refuses the path that Yoda has set in front of him, of sacrificing friends and family for the greater good of his training, Anakin hides his wife and unborn children.
Come to think of it, Luke Skywalker is better than any Jedi we’ve seen on screen BECAUSE of his unwillingness to sacrifice his emotions.
This is what ultimately makes him the best Jedi: he wants to save his father and forgive him for his transgressions, even if the Jedi never did.
And of course, this is what props us to love the Skywalkers so much:
They’ve come full circle and made peace, allowing Anakin to finally find his family, albeit for a short, fleeting moment.
The Jedi do more to turn Anakin into Vader, than Palpatine ever did
If you come to think of it, if the Jedi order didn’t have this strange idea of becoming a rock among rocks, devoid of any feeling and emotion, Darth Vader wouldn’t have happened.
And of course Star Wars wouldn’t have happened.
Which is why I believe George Lucas is a great storyteller.
Whereas the present trilogy is a mishmash of something that could’ve been great.
It’s interesting to see how Kylo Ren is very expressive of his emotions, in this new trilogy.
And what keeps dragging him to the Light are his feelings and his connections to his parents.
What turned him into Kylo Ren, in the first place, was Luke’s moment of pure rationality.
Luke even says that he regrets attempting to kill Kylo and wishes he had legitimately nurtured the kid, rather than simply letting him deal with it himself.
We’ll see in how many ways Kylo Ren is different from Darth Vader, in an upcoming article.
Ultimately, it is the tragedy of the prequels that put the Star Wars saga in motion.
The Jedi get their Messiah.
And they fail him.
Real life Jedi. As close as possible.
We’ve talked about how harsh and wrong the Jedis are in their approach.
But not all of their ways are flawed.
The Jedis are inspired by some of the most spiritual people this world has ever seen.
And one of those people that inspired George Lucas to come up with Jedis are the buddhist monks.
To close this up, here’s Alan Watts talking about the impossibility of masking our pain with passiveness and calm, in Out of Your Mind, Session 11 — The World of Emptiness:
[…] the Self is still playing the game of not being itself.
- fasting,
- doing all sorts of exercises,
- lying on beds of nails,
- sleeping on broken rocks,
to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life.
[…] all that was futile; that was not the Way.
But one day Buddha broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup, from a girl who was looking after cattle.
And suddenly, in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted.
He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track.
No amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish.
Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness.
You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you’re still tied to the wheel of becoming, by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehaviours.
— Alan Watts: Out of Your Mind, Session 11: The World of Emptiness
