Why were the Jedi archives not available/open to the general public?

This has been bothering me for a number of weeks now and I am finally bringing it up. Why weren't the archives of the Jedi order available to true tax paying citizenry of the republic, at least in some type of online holonet mode? It seems that keeping the largest repository of knowledge in the galaxy from the common people just smacks of bigotry and elitism.

Sure the can keep secret intricate details about the order and training, tactics,techniques and procedure but what about other stuff like galactic history, the planets and sectors of the galaxy, flora and fauna, technology, cultural and biological histories of the millions of know sentient species in the republic....etc? It seems from reading various sourcebooks and guides that the general public is/was pretty clueless in terms of details on galactic history, the Jedi order and the Sith.

It just seems that if the Jedi wanted to be more open a free thinking with the people and government they would open the archives and actually INTERACT with the common folk instead of shutting themselves and their info up in their little temples and monasteries.

It just seems like having the archives off limits to the people is liking shutting the Library of Congress of the Internet off to only scholars and government lackies with a security clearance.

 

Probably anything the Jedi would care for the public to know would already be out there through other sources, while they have a lot of stuff they'd rather keep secret. A running theme with the Jedi, though a little troubling as a theme, is their fear of the danger of people obtaining the wrong sort of knowledge. I've got no difficulty believing they'd wall off their private collection from the public. I don't think they want everybody knowing their secrets. And to try to sort out what they would and wouldn't share, and put it on the HoloNet for everyone to try to slice into the secured database, is way too much work for their limited resources.

 

Considering the dangerous and secret stuff like lore about the dark side and Sith holocrons are locked up I do jot really see an issue. I do agree that the order's penchant for secrecy and forbidding knowledge is pretty damn troubling.

 

The average joe is in Star Wars are pretty much sheeple. They are either portrayed as idiots or victims. I don't know about the Old Republic citizens per se but the New Jedi Order era citizens are incompetent when it comes to democracy, they are more willing to fight wars then to ensure a democratic system. For example allowing Admiral Daala to run the Galactic Alliance for more than a week. I mean hello, genocidal Imperial maniac! An Imperial in Star Wars is at best a fascist and at worst a Nazi, for any Imperial let alone Daala to be given control of the GA, when democracy is antithetical to Imperial beliefs is insane!!! The only Imperial I can see the average joe being okay with is Admiral Palleon because he A) ended the war, and B) helped save the Galactic Alliance from the Youzhan Vong. Doesn't Daala even wear her Imperial uniform around as Chief of State? My guess is the average joe has so lost faith in Galactic government that they just don't give a flying fish about what goes on in Galactic politics. This is one thing I found interesting in Legacy that we actually got some semi reasonable average joes, in that they don't want anything to do with galactic government. To use a real life example if the US had been involved in 4 major total wars in the past century 3 of which were Civil Wars and one where the government was totally incompetent i.e. the Youzhan Vong war I would not want my state to be a part of the Union. It just would seem like a federal government or galactic govenment in Star Wars leads to disaster! So no it doesn't really surprise me that the citizens of the Republic/GA don't have access to the knowledge that their tax money funded.

 

The old republic Jedi (and to lesser extent the NJO) was bigoted and elitist. That's the nature of militant religious monastic orders, and the fact that the Jedi actually do possess a one in a million gift that provides them super-powers doesn't help.

On the other hand being 'elitist' is not entirely bad (there's a bad strain in modern America that listening to people who are experts on something is somehow a bad idea). The Jedi did know more about the Force than just about everyone else and they made a command decision not to let other people in on the puzzle so they could keep control of that knowledge. Ostensibly this was to keep the bad stuff out of hand, but it probably was also designed to prevent average joe Force shaman, who by the way significantly outnumbers the Jedi in all eras and in the post-Ruusan republic does so by orders of magnitude, from getting their hands on all the cool stuff the Jedi know how to do. This is rather like how sword schools keep a whole bunch of secret techniques in the back.

Actually, the reality is that the galactic government simply happens on a level that is several steps removed from control by the people themselves, when it is even democratic in the first place. Citizens might elect a planetary governor, though more likely they elect regional leaders who elect a planetary governor. Then that planetary governor gets together with all the other governors in his or her sector and they decide (probably proportionally based on things like population and economic output), who gets to be a Senator (though a few big worlds, mostly in the Core, get their own private senators). Then the Senate gets together and elects a Chief of State.

This is a system of highly layered representation that will, obviously, obscure the will of the people immensely. However, it's about all that can be done given how unimaginably huge the Star Wars galaxy truly is. The Galactic Empire had 1.75 million full member worlds and 79 million worlds with some level of representation. That's disgustingly big. The United States, by way of comparison, has something like 90,000 incorporated municipalities, so the galactic government has to try and represent almost 900 times as many planets as the US has towns.

This is further complicated by the 5 million known species in the galaxy, a diversity that overwhelms every other potential block except humans (who are some as yet undetermined but rather high percentage of the active galactic populace, I usually think somewhere from 40-60%), many of whom have extraordinarily different ideas about the nature of government itself.

 

The prequel Jedi Order had one goal and one goal only: Preserving peace through the continuance of civilization in the form of the Republic. They were not a) a library b)wikipedia or c)a book store. They were an admittedly strange combination of national police force, intelligence agency, disaster relief group, and paramilitary operations force; most government agencies of those natures don't make their information public knowledge, either.

Furthermore, at least as much raw galactic data was available here: Obroa-Skai, on a politically neutral world without the whole preservation-of-civilization mission.

 

Presumably all the information they wanted public was already out there in other forms, and as for the rest, there was good reason to keep it secret.

 

This. I don't recall anything that indicates that they're holding back anything meaningful from the public that's unrelated to their own business. And given their history of being on the frontline of pretty much every conflict, I can imagine there's a lot of stuff in there that one would not want to be accessible to the average citizen.

 

Furthermore the archives contained technical specifications on all "known" weapons and technology. As well as floorplans and blueprints for governmentbuildings, sequrity installations and starships.

Somehow the Jedi have gained legitimate access to all this information. That doesn't mean that their sources would like it if they shared it with average joe. Or even between different sources such as one planetary government and another.

 

Wouldn't citizens be directed to utilize the Library of the Republic first, and only then to submit a request to the Jedi Temple after going through proper channels?

 

The most logical answer is this:

The Jedi archives contained information the Jedi considered need-to-know Jedi-only. It also contained very good & complete information that was also readily available in numerous other libraries.

It might have made more sense for the Jedi to have a separate 'Jedi confidential' library and their own library to be open to the public library or for the Jedi to use an existing public library except that this would have raised suspicion. Having a Jedi library and not really stating why it is Jedi only was probably the most secure way to deal with this information.

People want what they can't have, 'tis true but they don't want it if they think they already have it, how does the average SW citizen know that the Jedi library is really any different from their local library?

 

Why isn't the Vatican achives open to the public? I'm sure they have many historical documents besides religious ones in there. There are also many libraries here in the US that aren't open to the general public. I don't see the big deal. Besides, if everyone had the info the Jedi had then no one would need them anymore. Why make yourself irrelevant?

 

Like people before have said, general information not related to the Force was out there, the Jedi just had the largest collection of knowledge, not all private secret knowledge. It was just all in one place. The only real information that was not available to the public was anything pertinent to the Sith. After the Ruusan Reformation, the Council of First Knowledge sent out agents to find and located any Sith related material, almost completely eradicating all memory of the Sith and any mention of them in public documents. By the time of the Clone Wars, very few people knew what they were if they had ever heard the word. This isn't very farfetched, especially as the Sith weren't a threat for a millennia. So, I don't think the Jedi horded much at all; they just didn't release Jedi journals, Sith-related information, weapons-designs, gov't blueprints, or information on Force-technique and study.

 

Sign posted at the door:

Private club.

Must be narrow-minded and love dogmatic, self-serving point of views...
then, access can be yours.

 

Vatican archives are to some extent open to accredited scholars.

Closed archives and libraries are a big deal, because it's limiting knowledge for some reason, and you have to ask what that reason could be?

 

Jedi business.

Why do they need to disclose anything? Who are they responsible to that they would need to disclose their deepest closest secrets? the Jedi do have enemies other than Sith. Their secrets could be used against them if they came out or they may have sensitive info on others that may cause enormous problems. Or they were or had been engaged in covert ops that they drfinately didn't want to be exposed.

For instance, we pay for what the CIA does. Their funding comes from the Gov, which basically gets their money from US. Do they tell us everything? NO.

And where do the Jedi get their funding to begin with?

 

The Jedi Archive isn't the only source of information out there. I mean, I think there is an entire library planet or two in the galaxy. Despite the Jedi's boasting, it probably has a lot more information than the archives.

The galaxy also has a fully functional internet equivalent. I can't see any need for an average person to use the archives, and if something in the archives was important, I am sure there are ways to request it.

Plus, I remember them saying only a jedi could edit the information, not access it. If anything, I imagine the biggest obstacle to public access of the jedi order would be access to the temple itself...it just couldn't operate if anyone could come or go as they wish.

Edit: Though I can't help but feel that keeping information on the Sith secret might be a counter productive policy. Sure, it might help stop bored force users from accidentally stumbling on terrible powers (like the Krath in the Great Sith War), but the galaxy might be more willing to listen to the jedi when the Sith come knocking if they knew everything that the Sith were capable of.

 

Like one of the other posters said, try walking into the Vaticans library, or Yales Archive for that matter. No one says you can't, but there is a difference between organizational libraries and PUBLIC libraries. There is nothing saying that the Jedi didnt share information with the rest of the galaxy. Remember the Order had an agricultural corp, an exploration corp, a medical corp. Certainly general knowledge, discoveries were shared with the populace, but the source material, original writings, etc were probably kept at the Jedi Temple.
Things pertaining to the Force, questionable powers/abilities or dark side related things probably were restricted but that makes sense. Logic would have it (and I think I recall some mentions to it in books) that there was a percentage of the galaxy's population that had force sensitivity or ability but were not selected for the order. I can see where they wouldn't want someone "untrained" to gain knowledge of certain things.


Granted we dont see a kids day at the Jedi Archive but there is nothing saying that is was absolutely off limits to scholars or researchers.

 

Remember the Order had an agricultural corp, an exploration corp, a medical corp.
And an education corps.