The latest post at The Darth Side contains an intriguing explanation of the Dark Side of the Force. I was trying to find a good excerpt to encapsulate what struck me, but unfortunately the theme is drawn out over a matter of several paragraphs that really work best when read all together. Hopefully the Dark Lord won’t mind such a large citation.
It must be understood that the Force is, above all, singular. The so-called “sides” arise from differing matters of perspective. (If you study the way of the Sith you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.)
The opposite of the singular Force is the all-encompassing void of death. Time began with the Force, and will end in desolation. This is the way of things, and an inevitable consequence of the flow of events from the past into the future.
Without the inertia of the fall toward the abyss, the Force would have nowhere to go.
For in the chaotic tumble toward doom the stuff of the worlds enact loops of complexity that change the grade from life to death, introducing valleys, peaks and cycles. Between creation and destruction comes a flutter of improbability, a brief sonnet of meaning against the noise of time. Life!
It is the causal contagion that ties every ounce of us together through the network of the Force, our actions resonating against our almost-actions and our non-actions in a web of fleeting possibility that spans this galaxy and beyond. The beat of a child’s heart detonates supernovae, the beat of a bug’s wing tilts the orbit of worlds.
We are all connected.
Anyone who awakens to the Force knows this. The divisive issue is what to do with this knowledge.
When you can run the mechanism of the universe forward or backward, scrubbing through possible histories with a thought, a theme develops. You cannot escape it. Death, death, death. It is the final destiny of all things, great or small, matter or idea. But there is astounding beauty in the arts of the not-death, the filigree dances of life’s loops as it spins from light to void. If you are human, it moves you.
It should move you. But this is what the Jedi Order denies. They preach that the heart of a beast cannot judge the destiny of a galaxy. They preach dispassion and detachment, a condescending compassion for the damned. They stand by the sidelines and watch history happen, intervening only in trivia that offends their effete sensibilities.
Every Jedi knew the cycles of civilization, and every Jedi knew an age of barbarism was nigh. And yet they did nothing.
In contrast, the way of the Sith is predicated on a love for man. We have inherited the godhead of the galaxy by colonizing its every world. Though lesser species might have flourished given infinite time, it was our kind who got there first. We have won this galaxy with thousands of generations of our blood and our dreams. We call the others “primitives” because we are their kings.
And we will not sit idly by as it all careens toward a morbid interregnum. Inspired by our passions we will act to bridge the gulf between civilizations, shortening the period of disorder by decisively maintaining connections between societies from one side of the galaxy to the other. We will weather the storm.
Hate! Love! Misery! Joy! These are paths to the dark side, for to invest in the emotional life of civilization is to care about its fate. To care is to suffer, and suffering is real.
The Jedi were mere spectators.
I’m intrigued by the thought that goes into the writing of this blog. For example, there’s a purposeful logical contradiction there (did you see it?) that helps explain Vader’s anathema toward the Jedi. It arises from what he was taught, not what he can sense. And yet he is not completely duped…he has begun to question his master. It will be interesting to see if this contradiction will reemerge and be reconciled in the latter posts.
I’m not sure how CheeseburgerBrown will handle the day of Vader’s death. It seems unlikely that Vader would think to blog as he’s dying, or that he would even have a way to, but his thoughts at that moment are too intriguing to pass up, in my opinion.