Saga Did the Jedi lose their way?

They weren't forced by the government, they were forced by circumstance. If they stayed out of it they risked the collapse of the greatest provider of galactic freedom and stability in tens of thousands of years of history.

 

I mean that presumes that the Jedi were required to lead the military in order for it to be effective, which is debatable.

 

It tells nothing since the problem was never that the Jedi are in a position of service to the senate.

 

Plus it’s worth considering that the Jedi kinda played a pivotal role the opening battle of the clone wars. Not sure they ever really had a choice once they put boots on the ground.

 

I think the justification has to be better than either a) they serve the Republic and therefore must follow orders, or b) they participated in a rescue mission that turned into a war, and therefore must remain leaders of the military which they battle.

 

I agree. It's why Dooku left the Order.

Jocasta Nu: "He believed that politics were corrupt, and he felt the Jedi betrayed themselves by serving the politicians."

 

I think the problem was them accepting a position of service to the senate, where the politicians rules, includes the corrupt ones.

If they wanted to work with the Republic, they should've worked with them as equals, no party is in service to each other. Once they started to serve under the senate and their politicians, they lost their way.

Spoiler

Even their temple is being on Coruscant was part of the problem, as Qui-Gon said in the new canon.

Spoiler

 

The senate is represented and ruled by the people, through the politicians that represent them. It's a fallacy to pretend that the people of the Republic are dissociated from the senate. It's the people who get to give them power or take it away.

The Jedi are not wrong for serving under the senate's rule. The problem is within the senate, and it's up to the people to do something.

 

This is a pretty naive. Political corruption often means that the people are powerless.

 

Naive?! Not at all.

The people are not powerless when they get to decide who has the power. Political corruption is merely a reflection of amorality and a false sense of impunity.

EDIT: Obi-Wan makes a great point in one of the episodes in TCW regarding that false idea of powerlessness, in that if the people stood up for themselves (instead of centralizing their resources and power so that someone else can take care of things for them, which is basically what the senate did in AOTC), the war would have been over long ago. Of course, Palpatine took advantage of that centralization of power, which is how he managed to get rid of the Jedi and turn the Republic into the Empire in one fell swoop.

 

You’re presuming that the people can easily affect change, and that the failure to affect that change means the government remains representative. There are numerous ways which a government nominally elected can fail to be representative and for the powerful to maintain their power, despite popular will for change, and one of these ways is political corruption. It seems to me that the Republic may have fallen to this (we can’t know the extent because we aren’t given those details). At the point which the government fails to be representative the Jedi have an obligation to disassociate from that government, or at the very least not lead armies in its name.

 

Nobody said anything about "easy". What I said is that the people have power.

Obviously elected governments can fail. That's not the point. The point is that because they are elected, they rely on the electorate. And the electorate are the people.

Except the point when the Republic fails to be representative the Jedi are being hunted down.

The Jedi's involvement in the war (which they are no fans of) is solely in service and defense of the Republic and its people.

 

But that doesn’t mean that the government is representative. They always have the power in the sense they can collectively resist the government, but a government is not always representative.

This presumes the electoral process has not been corrupted in any way and that the public are not being deceived. Both are doubtful.

Why does it stop being representative at that point and at no point before? I see no reason why Order 66 suddenly means the government is no longer representative - it seems that it ceased to be that a while before then.

 

I think the point was that the Senate had become so corrupt it was no longer adhering to the ideals Padme believed in.

 

The ''majority'' of the people, we don't even know how the ''majority'' of the senate is even selected by the ''people'' in the first place, what if just taking %21 of the votes is enough, since there isn't any other politician who can get more than %20 of the votes in a planet? Since that specific planet is divided in many factions? We don't know. Even if we assume the best, a politician gets %51 of the votes, but if there is another politician who gets %49 of the votes? But that politician who gets %51 of the votes is corrupt and what if people don't know that? It can happen.

And what if other politicians are stopping the other representatives of the people by using other kind of methods, and what if the true representatives of the people can't find enough financial foundation to create their own election campaign? We don't even know how Naboo selects their own representatives in the senate. Last time I checked, Naboo didn't even care about the Gungans people, and clearly Gungans didn't have any representatives in the senate until Episode I.

So it's obvious that the Senate ignores some of these ''people''. Not even mention the rest of the other planets, where there are many unusual and different cultures which would not align with the view of the Jedi or with other planets. Why even Trade Federation has a seat in the senate? How other planets chooses their leaders and their senators? As I said, we don't know what's going on with the other planets and with the other regions, so it's not that simple to say that people can do anything they want, they simply can't. There are still countless Crime Syndicates and illegal organisations in Star Wars, which of these crime syndicates and other illegal organisations are backing which politicians by helping their election campaign? We've no idea about any of this.

If the Jedi simply make themselves a servant to the Senate, then they are inviting a catastrophe. I've no idea how they even lasted 900 years (probably ignoring most of the things), my guess is that they probably lost control and truly become the servants in the last years of the Republic. At the beginning and in the middle, they couldn't be simply servants of the senate, my guess is that they had some kind of control but they lost that become servants, which means they lost their way.

And as we've seen from the Gungan example, there are probably thounsands of other species who would need help of the Jedi, but since the Jedi are only concerned with the planets who have senators and politicians in the Senate, the Jedi simply don't care about those people. This shouldn't be the the Jedi, they should be more than the servants of the politicians and the senate.

 

Yes and no. The “yes” part is that they began to take their position of power for granted and also, were not able to sense the dark side rising. They let their guard down. But, their core beliefs were still intact, so in that sense, no. They were just outsmarted.

 

What if their core beliefs were also questionable?

 

That wouldn't make any difference. Unless you're suggesting that the Jedi's behavior was always the same, of course.
The Sith's beliefs were without a doubt questionable, but they certainly didn't lose their way. They did things the Sith way until the end.

 

From Stover's ROTS: