Saga Good and evil, yin and yang, and the balance of the Force

There has been some discussion in the Unpopular Opinions thread about the nature of the Force and whether evil is truly necessary in equal measure to balance out good, similar to the Taoist concept of yin and yang. I thought it would be best to move the discussion to a new thread.

Well, I don't think that's true. For example, take selflessness and selfishness.

Without any form of selfishness, life itself wouldn't even be able to exist. Life feeds on and destroys other life in order to sustain itself. It selfishly seeks to propagate its own genes through reproduction. It depends on the death of old life in order to make room for itself.

On the other hand, if selfishness was all there is, life would also cease to exist. If life consumed everything in its path without regard for the larger balance of the ecosystem in which it exists, it would destroy everything surrounding it, and ultimately itself in the process. If life didn't sacrifice some of its own energy and resources in order to generate and sustain offspring, its genes wouldn't be able to propagate and there would be no new life.

So you see both sides of the equation are necessary. And both sides of the equation can be reformulated to make an argument that they are in fact their opposite--some of the selfishness in life can be seen as contributing to selfless ends, and some of the selflessness in life can be seen as contributing to selfish ends. That's the point of yin and yang. Both sides contain the other. There really is no absolute distinction between good and bad--that's only a matter of human perception. The only dichotomy that is real is that of balance versus imbalance.

The Jedi play a very particular role in this complex cosmic construction. They are the keepers of balance, and thus they live their lives in a very particular way. They are themselves selfless, but in being selfless they tolerate a certain level of selfishness in the universe, because they know that it's a necessary part of this cosmic construction: "Greed can be a powerful ally." And of course even Jedi are not completely selfless in life, because of course they too must eat and breathe and look out for their own well-being in order to have any effectiveness. The moment a Jedi does achieve true, complete selflessness, they shed their physical form and become one with the immaterial Force, which is utterly amoral and strives only for balance.

You're confusing what is true from a purely human perspective--"Evil instincts are malignant and to be avoided"--with what is true for the universe as a whole. Human morality is a function of the way we evolved as social animals. "Good" is what is good for the propagation of the species and "evil" is what is bad for the propagation of the species. For us, these distinctions are as true as anything, but they have no meaning for the universe, or the Force.

For example, for humans, murder is bad because its allowance would create a social norm which makes it more likely that you or your close relatives would also be murdered. Thus, in order to reinforce this and similar moral concepts, human beings evolved something which we call a conscience. Over the millennia we've elevated these concepts to the level of metaphysical truths, and as our perception of ourselves as a unified species has expanded so has the limits of our empathy--but in purely objective terms these concepts are merely evolved survival mechanisms particular to the kind of social species that we are. For a shark, which is much more of a solitary predator, such moral concepts would have no meaning--nor should they have any meaning to a shark, because they would be nothing but an impediment to being the ideal shark.

Our job is simply to be the best humans we can be and to play our role in the cosmic construction in a way which promotes and sustains the balance of that construction. But part of promoting and sustaining that balance is recognizing that our personal perceptions of good and evil have limits, and cannot be applied on a universal scale in the same way that we apply them on a personal scale. What we call "evil" is actually necessary in some measure for the world we live in to exist. This is in fact the metaphysical truth that is revealed through the good-hearted Luke Skywalker's act of sparing the evil Darth Vader. By refusing to abuse his power to utterly eradicate an evil which has already been subdued, Luke unlocks the inherent good which lies within that evil, through which the true agent of imbalance (the Emperor) is destroyed, and harmony is restored to the universe.

 

The 'Dark Side' is essential, but not necessarily in equal measure, for balance.

 

I would also go so far as to postulate that complete stasis does not necessarily constitute balance, per se. For example, I'd say if it was always 60% good and 40% evil, forever, that would not be a true living balance.

I think a relatively ongoing flux or see-sawing, as we see in the saga and it's history, is part of what balance means.

As a specific example; after the supposed extinction of the Sith and the foundation of the Galactic Republic, the Jedi Order eventually reached a point of stagnation. And consequently, by extension, you could also say the use and growth of the Force in the galaxy did as well. This proved to be a liability, which the darkness naturally took advantage of.

It's in the swinging from one pole to the opposite that generates the motion and thus the "breathing" of the balance.

One might say the prophesy of bringing balance to the Force ultimately meant ushering in a new fluctuation. Life is movement, movement is life. Living balance and harmony require interaction.

And the Force ultimately leaves the direction the galaxy will go in to the inhabitants and the autonomous, personal choices they make. Be it based in selfishness or selflessness. Neither ever ultimately able to be eradicated. At least, seemingly. "Life finds a way". Yet in order to make room for the next generation (another example of life in motion), there must be death.

Anakin was either going to go to the dark side, or transcend the current stagnation of the Jedi Order. Either way would've brought movement. And in the end he did both. The latter with the help of his family.

Evolution is driven by competition and cruelty, but it's also equally driven by cooperation and compassion (in it's many animal & human variants), precariously balanced, one continually compensating for the other. Also, likewise, what do we see in the wake of the biggest tragedies? The biggest response of compassion. But also sometimes a large-scale call to conflict for the sake of protection.

This also ties in to the Newtons' Third Law of Action: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Are you saying wanton death and destruction is necessary? No, there should always be a constant striving towards the development of consciousness. But there will probably always be someone who wants to find a way to take advantage of any blind-spots for personal gain. And when that happens a way needs to be found to neutralize that. Will there ever come a point where consciousness has evolved to the degree where there are no blind-spots? That's the question, I suppose.
*(Part of consciousness is realizing that in hurting the things and people around you, you also hurt yourself. Something which bad guys in fictional stories and real life never seem to either get, or care about).



I guess the only way for us humans to learn not to touch the stove is to touch the stove.

 

"The burned hand teaches best", to quote Gandalf the White.

 

Funny you should mention yin and yang!

One of my favourite shots from AOTC

Spoiler: bigass image

And on the topic of balance in general, light and darkness, etc, one of my favourite TFA moments! Excellent use of symbolism here

Spoiler: another bigass image

Ah, now this resonates with me. Before the ST came along, I was on board the whole "the Force is just the light, the dark side is an inherent imbalance that cannot coexist" train

A lot of old EU sort of went with an angle of both aspects being natural and necessary parts of the Force. Or something like "there is no real light or dark, just the way the Force is used."
It sometimes appears the ST is going with this approach as well. Impossible to say for sure until TROS is out, and even then, I suppose it's possible it might not be made entirely clear. But I'm much more open to some kind of "both are there" philosophy

There is nothing wrong or evil about death itself; "Death is a natural part of life." Of course, murder is another topic, but obviously, not all death is murder. So I guess the big question here, and the point of my rambling.... will we get a universe in which (metaphorically speaking) the dark side is an embodiment of death? Or is it forever confined to be a murderer?

 

I thought about how an essential cycle of life and the Balance of the Force are interconnected. The first thought was obvious - yes, the dark side of the Force is associated with the fact that every living creature dies sooner or later. This is a natural process.
But here is the problem. One of the main purposes of the Dark Side of the Force is to cheat death and thus destroy the natural cycle of life. Death is the natural order of life, but the Dark Side is not associated with the natural order, but with its deformation and distortion, as well as with its ignoring. Thus, the Dark Side is antagonistic to the Force, not only in terms of morality, but also in the material sense.

 

That line to me seems to fit well to what Lucas had mentioned about the balance in the past. It also fits to Jedi being supposed to let the force flow through them, while the Sith don't adhere to that idea at all.

There is no darkness in dying or even in killing in itself, after all, it is part of what makes nature run in the first place. Without predators who keep the prey in check, the prey can run rampant on the environment (in a way they are predators to plants ). At the same time, predators are kept in check by the amount of prey, their numbers will drop if there isn't enough prey to feed them. All of that is perfectly normal.

What goes beyond that concept is where you find the darkness. A predator who kills not because he is hungry or needs to build up reserves for winter (or a similar reason), but because he can, is not in line with a balanced nature anymore. A Sith would thus not be someone who lives inside the general circle of life, but someone who tries to subject it to his will.

Though there is one element that hasn't really been touched upon in Star Wars beyond a rare instance: what about a creature that needs to devour more and more life to keep itself "alive"? This would be more like an addiction, something forced upon yourself instead of a decision made by yourself. Not that you cannot have created that addiction by yourself, but once it exists, it is something that slips outside of your own control. It would probably fall under being an abomination and something that needs to be gotten rid of, but it would still be something outside the general evilness. KOTOR II played with that idea in the form of Darth Nihilus, though the general element of evil is still there, so it may not be a 100% fit. Still, you could have a being that unbalances things not because it wants to, but because it is its nature.

 

A good point, and one I'm made before myself, but I think it's important to keep in mind that what Lucas is attempting to do is to harmonize the Eastern and Western schools of thought into a coherent, universal philosophy. Taken in this context, I think Lucas's statements where he does things like conflate the concepts of yin and yang with the concepts of God and the devil should be taken not as a misunderstanding, but his own personal, artistic interpretation of things.

It is true that yin and yang are not simply about good and evil. However, I would argue that yin and yang can be fairly argued to encompass that dichotomy, provided it is understood exactly what is meant by that. As I said, good and evil are ultimately human judgments that have been imposed on a natural order which is essentially amoral. What human concepts of good and evil ultimately boil down to is the difference between selflessness and selfishness, a dichotomy which I would argue has more objective meaning in the natural world, as I've outlined. So good and evil do exist in that sense and are legitimate expressions of yin and yang. It simply must be recognized that they only have that particular meaning from a human perspective (or, more broadly speaking, the perspective of any social animal which has evolved a similar conception of morality, as science is increasingly finding to be the case even among non-human species).

To say that evil is in some sense necessary is not to condone or encourage acts of depravity or cruelty, or to abdicate the responsibility to prevent them from occurring. In a larger ecological sense, it means just what I've said it means, which is to recognize that death, consumption, predation, and the pain that comes along with those things is a natural and necessary part of life. From a more limited human perspective, it means recognizing that the impulses and tendencies which give rise to evil are a natural part of every human being, and that the utter eradication of those impulses and tendencies is neither possible nor desirable. There's a difference between seeking to prevent atrocities and seeking to prevent even the possibility that any atrocity might ever be committed by a human being. The former is a moral imperative, the latter is a moral delusion which is the precursor to totalitarianism.

I would argue that, by the very definition of "balance," it absolutely is necessary in equal measure. But "equal measure" doesn't mean that you need to have a million Hitlers committing Holocausts going on in order to balance out a million Gandhis spreading peace, or anything as crudely formulated and morally abhorrent as that. It's a much broader idea pertaining to spiritual potentialities and degrees of freedom.

Put simply, you want to teach people to stop being greedy, but you don't want to get into a situation where you've made it impossible for people to choose to be greedy. Because then what you've created is an inhuman society. That's the kind of society Lucas (of course inspired by other obvious sources) depicted in THX 1138. It's a society where everyone gets along, everyone is safe, and no one ever hurts anybody, but it's at the cost of things like human emotion and human choice. There's no greed or selfishness in that society, but it's only because greed and selfishness have been pharmacologically eradicated through compulsorily administered pills that dull emotion. There's no joy in this enlightened society because it's not something which has really been achieved. It's something which has been imposed. When the main character decides to stop taking his pills, he's targeted by the society because he becomes a threat to it--he represents the possibility that something may go wrong, that utopia may fail, that the social harmony of the larger group may be sacrificed to one single man's desire for self-expression. And he is all of these things--but he's also free, which is something no one else in his world is.

The idea is that humanity is a package deal. You can't have the potential for true enlightenment if you don't also have the potential for damnation. The potential is where the balance lies. If the pull to the dark were lesser than the pull to the light, then choosing the light wouldn't be much of an accomplishment. It wouldn't mean anything. It would be like having someone give you a pill that solves all your problems. And if you create a society where people's worst instincts are all forcibly curbed rather than freely resisted, you've created an artificial, lifeless society.

The ideal society is one where the curbs placed on undesirable behavior are properly balanced against freedom of choice. What this ideal society looks like is obviously up for debate, and it's by no means clear where the appropriate place to draw the line is. But that balance is what the Jedi represent.

Well, that's essentially what the Sith represent. It's why Lucas calls them a "cancer." It's something which consumes everything around it until nothing can survive and everything dies. That's not evil in the sense that it's the other side of the coin from good. It's evil in the sense that it's inherently disruptive to balance. Because of the way humans (especially Westerners) tend to conceptualize things, we often use "evil" to refer to both concepts--Lucas himself seems to use the word inconsistently--but there's a distinction there.

A creature like that cannot be allowed to exist, because in doing so it negates all existence, including its own. That's why the Sith must be destroyed in order for there to be balance.

 

@Oissan

In the novel Master And Apprentice, something a little along these lines is briefly touched on. Qui-Gon has discovered a pocket of slavery while on a mission and is trying to convince Yoda to enlist the Jedi and/or Republic to intervene and put a stop to it.

"Why do we allow this barbarism to flourish? The Republic could use it's influence to promote abolition in countless systems where the practice flourishes. How can we fail to do this?"
Yoda remained silent for a few moments before saying, "Know of the planet Urro, do you? Devour their weakest children they do."
"They're arachnids, whose instincts are unstoppable."
"What of Byss?" When Qui-Gon shook his head no, Yoda said, "When their elderly grow too old to regenerate, beat them to death they do to conserve their resources."
Qui-Gon's patience began to wear thin. "This isn't about imposing human ethics on non-human species, this is something humans do to one another. An atrocity we should put an end to."

It seems a bit of permissiveness is afforded to certain species who have customs and instincts which most other species find deplorable, as long as it doesn't extend to other species outside their own. As far as a being with a voracious instinctive addiction, I guess it depends on the era and who is in charge. In the Republic I suppose the Senate would vote to decide. Plus, I would imagine there would be a danger in somebody using such a being as a weapon or something.
There may also be some species who hunt said creature, or have some other customary way of their own for dealing with it. The Zillo Beast comes to mind. The Dug's ancestors hunted them to extinction, and warned future generations that one would return to destroy their entire civilization. When one was found during the Clone Wars the Dugs intended to destroy it, but the Jedi (and Senator Amidala) wanted it saved because it was the last of it's kind. But Palpatine wanted it killed and studied because it's armor was impervious to blasters and lightsabers.

 

Sometimes. Fortunately we have the ability to learn from watching others touch the stove. We also have the ability to imagine what will happen if we touch the stove, even if we’ve never seen anyone else do it. We also have the ability to pass on what we have learned, to accumulate knowledge and lessons. These abilities separate us from many animals and give us a bit of hope for the future.

 

How much light and dark is fairly unquantifiable, which is why it's defined as balance which does not mean equality.

I will say, however, that the idea of internal balance of an individual does not mean someone who is equally caught between the light and dark. It appears to be the concept of 'intergration of the shadow' which appears to be the light side having acknowledge the dark side in order to have it under control.

 

Indeed....a "balanced breakfast" doesn't mean equal parts of each food group....it means certain amounts of each.

 

Food for thought: "Nobody who is evil thinks of themself as evil. They always believe they are doing good, even when they are not." - George Lucas, "Chosen One" Documentary:

 

Well, your answer is in there. Palp's ultimate goal is gain as much power as possible, and he doesn't care who he hurts in the process. In fact, he takes great pleasure in tricking others into doing his bidding for him, which results in giving him more power. Does his desire make him evil, or his methods? Or both? Who doesn't want to have control over a given situation to make things "better"? Where's the boundary between good and evil in that scenario?

That said, there's the question that many modern "bad guy" movies poses.....is this necessarily "evil" (like the original Freddy Kreuger, Jason Vorhees, or Michael Myers), or is there some contributing/motivating factor, such as a loss, lack of empathy, or biological impairment that's behind the actions? Not wanting to get into a religious debate here, but as an example there are some Christians that atttribute evil actions to "the devil made me do it", rather than putting the blame squarely on themselves. I've heard a lot of people complain that the later sequels of Nightmare, Friday 13th and Halloween tend to "humanize" the characters a bit too much, and it takes some of the fear factor away. Then again, it can also make people uncomfortable to see what makes a person turn "evil".

Side note: I just found out that my wife's friend knew a person who recently killed her three children and almost killed the husband. It's really freaking her out because she never would have expected such behavior from this woman. Now everyone's wondering what made her do it. Was it "evil"? Anger? Pain? No one knows yet.

And animals can show sentience and empathy:





Hell, one of the best scenes in ROTJ is when we are shown that the Rancor is more than just a terrible monster....he was actually someone's pet. It makes one wonder how he behaves around his master.



So, "evil" can definitely be a matter of perspective...the fact that people can disagree on what evil consists of demonstrates that.