Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 1:56 pm
Sort of Sci-Fi, or, if you will, fantasy-related:
One thing I generally don't get about some plot lines in various works set in the Star Wars Universe is the idea that anger can always lead you to the Dark Side, even if the thing you're angry about is something that was done by the supporters of the Dark Side.
"Supporters of the Dark Side have murdered everyone I loved and cared about, and I'm really really angry about that, so now I'm going to join the Dark Side myself!"??
Sorry, I'm not following the logic there.
I've gone through three readings of this dark side thing, besides the run-of-the-mill spiritual these-emotions-are-good these-emotions-are-bad, and bad emotions turn you bad because they are bad (for the record, I feel as if it's regurgitated buddhism, but a lot of spiritual/religious traditions do the bad emotions / good emotions thing):
First, I read it like this:
it's technical. Like, it's not that the dark side of the force is some inherent direct metaphor for the functioning of the mind but, rather, that the force is just the kind of thing that, if you use it in certain ways, you become more angry and more hateful until you just go crazy evil mad evil bad mad mad bad evil bad darkness bad: this may not be the case for regular humans (or twileks or whatever), for whom "negative" emotions can be good, which is why force users are *different* from non-force users: the jedi have a distinct moral code for themselves which they don't -that i notice- try to make non-force sensitive people follow, because they're not dealing with the force, they're dealing with everyday life. the lessons of the force and the dark side and blabla are not directly applicable to everyday life anymore than the lessons of driving trucks, such as use the retarder instead of the breaks in long donwards slopes because you don't want to heat up your disks too much, apply to normal life. this is not unsupported in the text, I think: the jedi speak about the force as a dangerous thing, their light side ethics are not universalist, and crucially the good non-force-users in the universe do experience the breadth of human emotion without becoming psychos.
Afterwards I read it like this:
it's a cultural syndrome. It's not necessarily that some emotions are inherently bad, or that the force has particular characteristics that make you go psycho if you experience a normal human emotional range: rather, it's the strict ideology of crippling emotional self-repression these people are indoctrinated into from early childhood that has a way of causing this culturally-specific form of madness, the dark side: something like amok in malasya, or school shootings in certain countries. I think this has more support in the text, though possibly not intended. For one, the dark side looks like a concretely jedi phenomenon: and the jedi are pretty repressed people, not unlike catholic clergy except recruited in childhood to be soldier monks, which sounds... traumatizing, to say the least. there are in the lore a bunch of other force traditions, such as the dathomiri night sisters or the zeffonians, the rakata... and sure, they're described by present sources sometimes as "that ancient race fell to the dark-side" but they don't, to my knowledge, have sort of an endemic dark side that individual people turn into thing. in-universe, the gray jedi would probably like this interpretation, and their existence supports the notion that maybe dark and light are just stuff people made up, that the force is the force, and obsession with not being dark is like trying not to think of a pink elephant.
but finally, it could be
simply the way conflict functions: that is to say, that it isn't especially unheard of and that we shouldn't look for fancy metaphysical or cultural explanations: there are many stories, but to be a stereotypically chilean lefto let me shortly tell you to the story of
la Flaca Alejandra. possibly there's not a lot of english language material on the woman, so i'll summarize as follows: she was a prominent member of one of the bravest and most militant left-wing groups of her day at one date, and at a later date a terribly deadly collaborator of the pinochet regime, responsible for the fall of many good comrades. during the early dictatorship she commanded a guerrilla group, the
primer grupo politico-militar, part of the MIR's direct action force. she's described by her comrades as vivacious, strict, and totally commited to the Party, and she would later relate that she didn't have much of a personal life besides her left-wing political activism. eventually she was aprehended by the fascists, and after a few months managed to secretly send, in a cigarrette paper, the following message to her comrades and commanders:
"I could not resist the torture: I've acknowledged facts about the Party. please permit me to go away into asylum", or something to that effect. the MIR however had a strict no asylum policy. some time later she's formally released by the prosecutor, as she was a legal prisoner, and immediately abducted by the clandestine fascist secret police and brought into Londres 38. this one of the most famous torture centers of the dictatorship, the details of which I shan't tell of here for being far too sickening. In time she told all she knew and, afterwards, released from the torture center under surveillance she would recontact her former comrades, obtain whatever information she could, and then come back to the fascists to relate this information to them. as her value as an asset of the fascists grew, so did her privileges as a prisoner: at first no rape, then no torturte, a bed, then better food, etcetera. Eventually she was released and offered a job within the organization of Mamo Contreras, possibly the most infamous of the torturers and murderers of the regime, and she accepted. Part of a fascist cell with two other women, she became now a full security agent of the regime with an official salary, vacation days, advising other fascist hierarchs, writing up plans and proposals for how to increase the regime's popularity, obtaining recognition and even awards from pinochet's minister of justice, attending national security courses and seminars, the whole shtick. she had fully turned. as most of the collaborators, she was never prosecuted. as i understand it, she currently enjoys a comfortable retirement in easter Island, along with her husband, whom she met in the service of pinochet.
man, talk about turning dark, huh?
