A long time ago, in a blog far, far away...
Since Star Wars is everywhere this weekend, I figured I might as well throw in with everybody else. I haven't actually gotten to see the new movie and I'm told I can't say anything about it if I did, so I'll go in a different direction. I'm going to talk about what I call the Sith Principle. Yoda said there are always two Sith, one master and one apprentice. I thought about this and wondered why and fnally realized, it's not just the Sith, it's evil in general.
First of all, you can not have more than one master, because if there were more than one, they would all vie for number one and kill each other until only the stongest remained. This then begs the question of why there is an apprentice. The apprentice is one humble enough to know he's not the strongest, yet ambitious enough to believe he could be if he were trained by the one who is the strongest. Much like the mastters fighting among themselves, the apprentices would fight each other until there would be only one. Such is the ambition of the Dark Side that there really isn't room for anyone else in the Sith, you're either driven to make the top two or you're too weak to be a part of the order. So now that we narrowed it down to the top two, why do they put up with each other? As I said, theapprntice wnts to learn from the master, why figure it all out for yourself when you can learn from someone who knows it all already? Because the master is going to use you to do his dirty work, that's why he let's the apprentice stick around. It's always good to have someone to be the fall guy, so you send out the apprentice to do all your dirty work and if anything goes wrong, he takes the blame and you're free to get a new apprentice and keep going. Just look at Palpatine, he skated by two out of three episodes in two trilogies with everybody looking at his apprentice and went through three apprentices with almost nobody even knowing he was the one taking over the galaxy. Of course, there is the downside that if the apprentice gets strong enough he will eventually betray the master and kill him, but the basic philosophy is, if you are the master of the Dark Side, and your apprentice gets powerful enough to pull off assasinating you, you didn't deserve to be master anymore anyways. It's one part confidence and pride that it just ain't gonna happen so don't worry about it, and one part that the final test of the apprentice is to prove yourself by overcoming your master. Ultimately, they are still mortal and they know the only way to preserve their ways is to continue to gamble with an apprentice who will keep you on your toes while being the perfect minion. Besides, if you're going to be a master of the Dark Side, you really want one person who can truly comprehend just what a badass you really are. I mean, consider that dude who dared to talk back to Darth Vader and got force choked. That was a guy who regularly worked with the most evil people in the galaxy, helped them build a weapon that could destroy planets, and still didn't get that being sarcastic could spell his own demise from two fingers across the room. If you are the master of the Dark Side, and you can't get your generals to get that you're more than just some old dude in a cloak, you realize your demi-god status just isn't being recognized, so it's nice to have your apprentice around to keep it real.
Having said all that, I totally support the light side of the force. Remember there were more Jedi because they were not homicidal. Do you want to try to rule the galaxy knowing that the attempt could kill you, or do you just want a light saber and telekinesis with a little amnesia power in case of emergencies?
No comments:
Post a Comment