How The Force Can Fix The World

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0:00:07.8 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.1 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.8 Aaron Powell: Joining us today is Stephen Kent, he’s the host of Beltway Banthas podcast and author of the new book, ‘How the Force Can Fix the World.’ Welcome to the show, Stephen.

0:00:20.0 Stephen Kent: Nice to be here, thank you.

0:00:22.7 Aaron Powell: What is it about Star Wars that resonates so strongly with so many people?

0:00:27.3 Stephen Kent: Well, I would have to say, first of all, that it’s because it’s intergenerational, it’s a story which there is just a shared understanding across multiple generations what this thing is, what the references mean, that when somebody says, that person’s gone off to the dark side, or someone says, do or do not, there is no try. There’s just this increasing shared consciousness of what the story is. It has reached the level just because of the cultural zeitgeist, that I think it really is, just the modern myth. You hear this a lot when people are talking about modern comic books and stuff like that, as a comparison to the way people used to think about Greek myth, the Iliad and the Odyssey, all that kind of stuff. I think that is it. It’s the fact that they can talk about a movie with their grandparent or their parent or a grandchild, vice versa, about a story and everybody understands.

0:01:25.9 Trevor Burrus: How do you we feel… We know that George Lucas was thinking about consciously doing that, that he was going to create a mythos that was gonna be shared by humanity, but I’ve also heard that it’s not wildly popular in China, for example, so it’s not perfectly translatable to any culture but generally though, it seems that he succeeded in at least bringing those themes and consciously creating a myth.

0:01:54.4 Stephen Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the popularity issue in China has really sort of reared… It’s like we had in recent years, is China’s market has become more increasingly competitive for western companies. China did for the longest time actually ban the original Star Wars trilogy. It didn’t become possible to watch Star Wars, I believe not until the end of the ’90s, if not a little bit later. So it already has sort of a handicap there, and then after that, around the time of The Last Jedi, news reporters would go and talk to Chinese audiences about whether or not they liked Star Wars, whether or not they liked Spider­Man, like Marvel movies and stuff, and Chinese movie goers in these interviews repeatedly said the same thing, which is that they just didn’t know what was going on. [chuckle] And they didn’t know who this old guy on the island being Luke Skywalker was, why he mattered, so they just weren’t able to connect, and Star Wars is very convoluted after nine movies and lots of side trails and different… Prequel this and prequel that, but it’s really easy to dive right into a Marvel movie and enjoy the story that’s being told in that moment without the baggage of the past. So that’s one of the ways in which Star Wars sort of struggles. But by and large, this is the most popular franchise in the world, from its collectables and merchandise to actual raw ticket sales.

0:03:23.8 Aaron Powell: I wanna get into the meat of your book in a second, but I wanna just raise this issue that I thought of yesterday as I was reading the book, that you frame it as exactly this, that Star Wars is this myth that we all… Or not, maybe most of us, many of us share, and it’s especially in the US, in the Western world, it’s this, we can raise references and people know what it mean. In a way, it’s a role that’s similar to what the Homeric Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey played in ancient Athens, that everyone could draw moral lessons from, pull metaphors out of, trace things back to. Or that in the later Western world, that the story of Jesus played, that even if you weren’t a Christian, you… That story was a parable that you could draw on or compare to things and so on, and then I think you’re right, like Star Wars does frequently play that role for us, but it struck me as really interesting that what distinguishes… One of the things that distinguishes, say the Homeric Epics and the Jesus narrative is that they are… They’re fixed now, like the Gospels exist, and there aren’t…

0:04:35.8 Aaron Powell: We’re past the period of new gospels coming out, right? And Homer, I mean, he didn’t really write them, but they were fixed at some point, and then you could draw on them, and if you built your identity around them, you could build your identity on this, on moving foundation of the text. But Star Wars isn’t fixed, and it’s not just that there are people interpreting it today, but that there are like people who are officially adding to revising building out this mythology. And I wondered how much that plays into the way that we use it, and then particularly like the toxicity that fans can have around it, because you’ve built your identity with this version of Star Wars, but then Disney comes along and changes things or ret­cons things and that’s a real…

0:05:23.0 Stephen Kent: Gosh, we don’t even need Disney, just George, right?

0:05:27.9 Aaron Powell: George, yeah.

0:05:28.0 Stephen Kent: George in 1996 just filling…

0:05:28.4 Aaron Powell: And we get like all mad, and it seems like it would be in the same way as if a new gospel came out that was official, like people would get…

0:05:33.6 Trevor Burrus: Hey, don’t tell the Mormons, the Mormons did ret­con Christianity. So, I mean…

0:05:37.4 Aaron Powell: Yes.

0:05:38.3 Trevor Burrus: There is some extra gospels being written.

0:05:38.9 Stephen Kent: No, Aaron, I’m really glad you’ve mentioned all this because it sort of clarifies two things, one, why Star Wars is different from classic myths that are set stories that are not currently in the middle of evolution, and the second thing, which is that they are sacred and divisive at the same time, Star Wars is incredibly divisive. Even among the faithful, one of my favorite episodes that we did of my show, Beltway Banthas, was we really broke down all of the ways in which George Lucas handing off the franchise IP to Disney, mirrored in many ways some of the hostilities and ranker of the Protestant reformation, and it all basically comes down to the central critique of Catholicism versus Protestantism, which is, how do you speak to God, and who gets to help you speak to God, do you get to do it yourself, or does a priest mediate that relationship. And right there, it exactly puts them on why it’s just so gosh darn divisive when people wrap up their identities and their sense of truth and fiction in Star Wars, because the IP is handed over to a new priest, a new god, a new church, and you didn’t get to participate in that decision at all.

0:06:58.1 Stephen Kent: It used to be in the early 2000s, people hated George Lucas, because they thought he was making the prequels as a cash grab, making Jar Jar to sell more toys and all this stuff, and fiddling with their childhoods. How many times did you hear people say, George Lucas raped my childhood, and that comes from a really deep and raw place, but at the end of the day, people believed he had the right to do it. [chuckle] At the end of the day, he kind of worn out that divisiveness, it was like people shaking their fist at God for burning down their home and stealing their family away from them, it’s like, “I hate you, God,” but God bless you. I think of it as being very much like that, whereas the Disney purchase is viewed very much as inauthentic, forced… And nobody agreed to this, nobody agreed to have a new mediator between them and their faith, but I do think that Star Wars matters even as an evolving tale, and it kinda goes to one of the quotes that I put in the beginning of the book, about why fairy tales matter, and CS Lewis and GK Chesterton would both talk about this, but GK Chesterton wrote that fairy tales do not give the child their first idea of the bogey, meaning like the bogeyman.

0:08:11.5 Stephen Kent: What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of the bogey, and Star Wars is that for me, that was my story growing up about how you can actually overcome a problem, take out the Death Star, it’s no different than being trapped in the maze with a minotaur, it’s the same kind of value that you get as a story when you’re a child, and then you grow into that and you find new parallels, which is kind of what the book is all about.

0:08:43.8 Trevor Burrus: We can start on Naboo, I think is… Would get in to some of the actual lessons you pull out, and I thought it was interesting ’cause I remember… I guess it’s what? Six years ago now, we did the episode on Star Wars where the Force Awakens came out with Leia Soman. And I hadn’t watched the prequels in a while, and while there are still many problems with them, they’re probably better than a Disney Trilogy, and there’s more interesting politics, that’s definitely true. There’s more things to talk about political intrigue in the prequels. So on Naboo, so we get into Padme and Naboo, and your defensive child monarchs.

[laughter]

0:09:23.8 Trevor Burrus: I am maybe simplifying a bit, but…

0:09:26.2 Stephen Kent: Yeah, sure.

0:09:26.2 Trevor Burrus: What makes Padme, I guess, estimate­ly humble?

0:09:31.3 Stephen Kent: Yeah, well, basically, for all of your audience who’s not really familiar with the premise of this book is that how the force can fix the world is my prescription of Star Wars, seven key virtues that make it a story worth internalizing more than the explosions and the fun lightsaber fights that all of Star Wars has different key stories that we should grow up on, I grew up on a cartoon called The Book of Virtues, and it was like Greek, Roman and Christian stories rolled into a cartoon, which just basically gave you lessons on how to live, it was how I learned as a kid about Icarus flying too close to the sun. I had never heard that story till I watched this cartoon, and that’s where I learned about hubris. And so this book picks out what I think are star wars main lessons, the first one of which is humility, so I dig in on a couple of things, and one that I diagnose is the problem, which is that most of our culture today is very dead­set on what they believe. You see it in news headline after news headline that people are not persuadable as they used to be, that families are bickering online and divided on social media, and you go into your echo chambers and everybody will tell you that you’re always right all the time.

0:10:49.5 Stephen Kent: And we sort of have a, I don’t know, a little bit of a market­created incentive now for this to be the case in the way that our world works, and so I was looking at Star Wars as a question… A way to answer that question. And I actually ended up coming down to Episode one is where that lesson’s answer is offered, and it does come in how Padme dealt with the droid invasion of Naboo, and what she thought of as how to solve it. So did she solve it on Coruscant, when she went to the senate to get help? No, she tried politics, politics didn’t work for getting the trade Federation out, because corruption runs rampant. She only was able to defeat the trade Federation and drive invaders from her planet by taking a knee before her enemy, taking a knee before a group of people being the Gungans who dislike and distrust her, and saying, “I need your help, and we have both equally great societies and can help each other with a shared problem,” that’s the moment that I zero in on and look at our culture today, and I see a total disconnect from the ability for people to humble themselves before people they dislike or distrust and say like, “Hey, I have something that you need, you have something that I need. How can we work together?” So the essence of, I think being a child ruler is curiosity, and that is just the essence of being a child in general, curiosity and openness.

0:12:16.0 Aaron Powell: What do we make then of the fact that Padme doing this and then winning this skirmish against the trade Federation, was exactly what the bad guys wanted to have happen, and was the precipitating event arguably to the ultimate fall of the Republic? It didn’t… If she hadn’t done that, maybe it would have still gone the same way, but she was playing into their plans.

0:12:42.5 Stephen Kent: I don’t know if that’s entirely true. And this is a really complicated question, just because Sidious is the thing that disrupts a lot of Star Wars analysis, particularly when you get into the weeds of maybe the separatist movement was good. I personally believe the separatist movement in episodes two and three was good, and that they, in many ways had the moral high ground in the galactic civil war that we see playing out there, the Clone Wars. However, there’s that factor, which is that Sidious is playing both sides, Sith Lord, so both sides are sort of getting screwed here. So kinda going back to episode one, I don’t believe that it was the plan of Sidious for the Droid invasion of Naboo to ultimately be repelled. It seems to me he was quite intent on when he said, “Wipe them out, all of them,” that he wanted the droid armies and the trade Federation to kill the Gungans and kill the rebellion. But the thing about Palpatine is that he’s just an incredibly nimble guy, he rolls with the punches and finds new ways to make his plan work, but it is the case that the Droid invasion and then the failed intervention, that was the plan. He was not going to allow the Republic to intervene, but I don’t think that he expected the trade Federation to be repelled.

0:14:04.0 Trevor Burrus: On the point about the Separatists, is this… One of the things that struck me when I was politically analyzing, especially the prequels, is the nature of the galactic senate, and which is very strange, because there’s one line where they say thousands of systems are being represented by like… I don’t know, like 60 people in a floating chair in the galactic Senate. So you have kind of this… The exact opposite of the New Hampshire legislator, which is one representative per two square blocks or something, and so, of course, there’d be people who would be pretty against the strange, I would say pseudo­Democratic representative system that holds immense power over these planets, and they would wanna separate out, is that one reason why you are kind of in favor of the separatists?

0:14:56.1 Stephen Kent: Yeah, absolutely. I can’t remember the exact final digit number, but the number of seats in the galactic Republic are roughly 3,200 give or take people coming in and out, and yeah, it’s a lot, a lot of people and a lot of competing interests. One of my favorite books, which all of you out there listening to this podcast should go get, it’s called Star Wars propaganda, and it’s by Pablo Hidalgo, one of the kind of head art directors, and creative directors at Lucas Film, and it is an in­universe Canon Guide to persuasive Art Throughout Star Wars history, so like literal propaganda posters, and then every propaganda poster has an explanation of why this was made, so there are posters showing people depicting the trade federation, kind of as like a shadowy corporatist hand, stealing people’s dreams on the frontier, and then trying to explain why people are distrustful of the trade Federation.

0:15:56.4 Stephen Kent: And honestly, they really frame it as being akin to anti­semitism, and they paint the picture… The people of the galaxy as looking at the trade Federation a lot like the Nazis would have wanted you to think of banker Jews in Germany, it’s really, really interesting, similar parallel there, but with the separatist movement, you couldn’t get representation if you weren’t in the core worlds around Coruscant, everybody was basically roped into the Republic by being grandfathered into the Republic by previous decisions made by their planets or economic necessity, if you’re not in the Republic, your planet probably gets pillaged by pirates, and you aren’t able to trade freely with the rest of the galaxy. So it’s sold as an opportunity to get wealthy, and we’re very familiar with that, there’s Libertarians and neo­liberals and the values of free trade and all that stuff, and if you’re not in on that, you end up poor.

0:16:52.8 Stephen Kent: But it tends to be the case that the further you get away from Coruscant, the less your representative spends time on Coruscant glad handing and back slapping, the poorer your planet becomes. So most of the separatists, most of the people on the other side of the clone wars, are what you call outer rim worlds, or maybe you call them like fly over country. So it’s a really interesting parallel, and I think it just stands to be true, the closer you are to the capital of political power, the more interconnected, wealthy and corrupt you might be.

0:17:27.8 Aaron Powell: It’s interesting that you talk about this propaganda, because one of the other themes in Star Wars, and you discuss this under the heading of empathy in your book, is kind of masking and unmasking and through that like humanizing and dehumanizing, and you hit on the moment and the force awakens when Kylo Ren is fighting Rey for the first time, and he removes his mask and she is startled that he’s this guy…

0:17:57.2 Stephen Kent: A cute boy. [chuckle]

0:17:57.6 Aaron Powell: Yeah, he’s not… I mean, when Vader removes his mask in Return of the Jedi, he is this disfigured… He kind of… To the extent, it’s properly unfortunate that we use disfigurement as a stand­in for internal moral problems, but he looks the way that those tropes go. Kylo does not. And so that is this humanizing moment, but at the same time, it’s coupled with storm troopers who through that movie, and we get Finn taking off his mask, but by and large, storm troopers are disposable faceless goons who the rebels are happy to just mow down. And so what are we to make of that? Like on the one hand, trying to humanize, but on the other hand, if they’re wearing a white helmet that covers their face, just kill him.

0:18:47.1 Stephen Kent: Yeah, yeah. So the moment you’re describing is when Ray is being held hostage by Kyra and she’s like, she’s strapped to the table and all that stuff, and he’s gonna read her mind. Yeah, and he takes off his mask and she’s horrified. And one of the main things that I thought when I saw that, she calls him a creature in a mask. And he doesn’t say anything, he just pops the mask off, puts it down. And she looks horrified, and also she’s also like, “Oh, this boy is cute.” But the main take away that I had there was just that she didn’t have the moment that Luke had, oa recognition that this man is my father, that Darth Vader is my father, and I have to grapple with the humanity beneath the mask. Before Luke even went to duel Vader in the Empire Strikes Back, he had that vision in the cave where he saw a vision of himself being under the armor of Darth Vader. An acute reminder that you too can become the monster, you too can become the bad guy, or just a reminder that the guy that Obi­Wan described to being underneath the armor of Darth Vader was a person, and he might still be.

0:19:57.5 Stephen Kent: And I just loved that Ray, in this sort of hyper­polarized moment in our culture, in this moment where half of us live behind avatars online rather than dealing in our real selves, that she had this moment assuming this guy was a monster, seeing a face and then going, “Huh, what do I do now?” And we know what she does now, from there, she set out to save him. And a lot of us are dealing with the same thing every day. I don’t know about you, but have you ever had a Twitter relationship with someone? And then turned it into a coffee meeting before? Even an enemy? I did this once where I… There was this person who just antagonized the crap out of me on Twitter, who worked in North Carolina politics, and I ended up asking them to go to breakfast with me, [chuckle] ’cause I was like, “I can’t do this anymore. Would you like to grab a bagel?” And they said, yes.

0:20:49.5 Stephen Kent: And it was a lovely, lovely time. And I really think about it as being the exact same kind of thing. You’re a creature in a mask until you’re not. But then there is Storm­ troopers. I think that from a narrative standpoint, I think in that sequel trilogy, the Disney movies, really big missed opportunity to follow through on this promise, ’cause you have Finn, The unmasked Storm­trooper who we finally learn is a person. And then by the end of that trilogy, my big wish­list item was that they liberate the Storm­troopers. You need to un­brainwash them, ’cause all these first order Storm­troopers were forcibly recruited. They didn’t even wanna be there. And then by the end, I guess they just forgot, like all of the other things that got forgotten [chuckle] in that trilogy and they just killed them all. But it’s a little bit of a disconnect, but it’s something I think a lot about is that, that masking part and the humanization of the Star Wars villains.

0:21:47.1 Aaron Powell: And this does seem to be something that Disney has maybe this half­ measure with Finn, but they have been better about this. And I’m thinking that… The most recent example is what the Book of Boba Fett show is doing with the Tuscan Raiders.

0:22:02.4 Stephen Kent: Oh, yes.

0:22:03.0 Aaron Powell: And attempting to humanize them. But also have you read… There is the novel… It was a young adult novel called Lost Stars by Claudia Gray.

0:22:12.7 Stephen Kent: I did read that. I did. Yeah.

0:22:12.9 Aaron Powell: Which I think is the best of the Disney New Canon. Not… Or the most interesting. And for our listeners, it tells the story of basically from Before A New Hope through till basically after The Force Awakens, and so it’s the…

0:22:32.4 Stephen Kent: The Battle of Jakku.

0:22:33.4 Aaron Powell: The Battle of Jakku and it starts with the building of the Death Star, but it’s told from the perspective of a couple of Imperial pilots, young people who in YA standards, have a complicated relationship and so on. There’s lots of teen romance, but the main thing is like they are seeing this entire conflict from the other side, and it’s really striking because it doesn’t make the Imperials look like good guys, but it shows how they knew hundreds of thousands of people, like their friends were killed on the Death Star when it blew up, and it was just people that they knew, and it was like…

0:23:07.5 Stephen Kent: Did he catch that in The Mandalorian In Season two, Cara Dune… The Cara Dune character, I forgot her… Gina Carano. She encounters an officer in the finale of season two, and she’s holding him at gunpoint and he sees the tear­drop on her face and all the rain and tearing, and he just grins. He’s like, “Was your friends and family there? All of mine died on the Death Star too.

0:23:33.5 Aaron Powell: Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:34.5 Stephen Kent: And fans used to always talk about this, we used to joke, and I think it was because of Silent Bob, like Jay and Silent Bob and their conversation in Clerks about that. The contractors all died on this thing, and rightfully so, tons of Imperials, their friends and families died.

0:23:53.7 Aaron Powell: There’s even a moment in that book where they’re talking about building the second Death Star, and there’s this discussion of like, “If we don’t rebuild it, the terrorists will have won”.

[chuckle]

0:24:02.4 Aaron Powell: And it’s just… But I think Disney has been interesting in that, of trying to take these sides and make it more complex than the hero’s… Standard hero’s narrative at Lucas gave us.

0:24:12.0 Stephen Kent: Yeah. And this is what’s interesting for me is someone who marinates way too much in Star Wars Twitter, the far left and far right of Star Wars fandom are never happy. They’re both miserable all the time, and if you talk to far right Star Wars fans or reactionary conservative friends, they think that Star Wars has been overrun by SJW nonsense and Femi­Nazis and all of this crazy stuff, and in some respects, you can see where some of that, that gets worked into a lot of Star Wars properties these days. But then, go talk to the so­called Femi­Nazis and SJWs in Star Wars fandom. They still think Disney is run by White supremacist corporate shells, because they will not commit to telling stories where the rebels are purely the good guys. And that’s where I always love that Star Wars has not lost its essential soul, which is that they are rigorously committed to making you see the Empire, The First Order, the bad guys, as potentially conflicted and interesting dynamic people, and telling you that Storm­troopers, in book after book after book, one of the more recent Claudia Gray books, they’re usually kids who come from poor neighborhoods, whose towns are ravaged by crime and crime lords and the empire was the first glimpse of Law and Order they’d ever seen in their life.

0:25:35.9 Stephen Kent: And so they were proud, not just reluctant, but proud to put on the White armor and to be heroes for their community. It was bringing civilization to nowhere, because the Republic failed the Outer Rim miserably and the empire at least promised that. They promised that you would be part of the glorious empire, and you’d have wealth and security, and they failed on that promise, and that’s why they no longer exist 30 years later. But that’s what Disney is still, I think, handling really well, and when you think about the moral fiber of Star Wars, I think the, “From a certain point of view” thing that Star Wars has always done since Obi­Wan was caught in his lie about Darth Vader’s origins, that’s what this story is all about and what it means the most to maintain. They’ve done that.

0:26:26.1 Trevor Burrus: The guy who in also second… The Lost Stars, which Aaron told me to read, and I thought that was very good, and that goes into what Steven Hugh said that the guy who joins… They’re Outer Rim people, and the guy who ends up joining the empire is doing this thing. It’s an opportunity for him, kinda like the American military and it’s under­representation of anyone with means or money, or an over­representation comparing the people of color. It’s interesting too, and you point this out, which I think one of the more… I don’t know if George Lucas wanted it to be a profound thought about the clones being the Storm­troopers in at least the prequel era, which is saying something about the way that we view… We have to view the people that were killing is disposable in war time, so we call them Gooks in Vietnam and something like that. But then if you go to shows like The Clone Wars and in Bad Batch, they had to take that mask off of those Storm­ troopers who were all identical twins, right? They were all clones. And then they all get different haircuts and different tattoos and different ways of differentiating themselves and adopt names and things like this, so suddenly you take the mask off and you have to humanize someone.

0:27:35.3 Stephen Kent: Yeah, it just… It makes you think about the power of being part of groups versus being individuals. And I think everybody here on this call, we all believe vociferously, in the power of the individual that when you give yourself a custom haircut, when you get that face tattoo as a clone trooper and all that stuff, and when you walk around with your helmet underneath your arm, you’re saying, “I am a person, not part of your platoon. I’m part… I am me first, I am a member of your platoon second.” And when they are standing in the crowd of people, all listening to Emperor Palpatin in the Bad Batch show, give his birth of the empire speech, they all salute. It was like the Nazi salute moment for all of the storm troopers. But not the Bad Batch, who all can see with their own eyes and look at each other and be like, “I don’t know about this.” And that’s really powerful. And one of the ways that I took this a little bit deeper in the chapter on empathy was not just the power of hiding behind avatars on the internet, but quite literally, looking at Antifa and the power of Black Block and what it means for kids in Antifa to mask up, cover their identities, wear all black and walk around with billy clubs as part of a group.

0:28:50.2 Stephen Kent: It’s one thing to say like, “Yeah, these are all like a bunch of out­of­work baristas and Art kids, and they’re all actually pretty darn scrawny”. But the point of Black Block is not just to avoid detection by law enforcement to be able to get tracked, it’s also just to be intimidating. [chuckle] It makes you scary when you’re having a whole group of people with black masks and billy clubs come at you, they’re not baristas anymore, they are Antifa and they’re gonna kick your ass. [chuckle] So that is one of the main points of just making a Storm­trooper wear their helmet all the time. Finn in The Force Awakens takes his helmet off, and Captain Phasma comes up and says, “Who gave you permission to take your mask off?” Those things really, really matter, especially when you’re talking about collectivism versus individualism.

0:29:39.5 Trevor Burrus: Definitely. Well, let’s move on to the next chapter if we’re kinda going through it orderly, but with maybe the emotion most associated with Star Wars, fear. That the fear is… It’s discussed, of course, in terms of the dark side. And it’s of course a very powerful emotion, and it seems to have one characteristic in the Star Wars universe, which is negative. That fear is uniquely negative. Although, I’m not sure that it is true.

0:30:09.4 Stephen Kent: I think fear is rational.

0:30:10.6 Trevor Burrus: It’s rational. Yeah.

0:30:11.2 Stephen Kent: Yeah. Fear is rational. Fear is what makes us human. And I mean animals. Animals experience fear too, but they experience it more as like programmed caution. But fear keeps us alive, it’s why we’re still here, because we know not to touch the fire again, it’s because we know that we need shelter to keep attackers out and to keep the weather away. That’s understandable. But we also know, again, if you just turn on the news and you look at the culture of anxiety, paranoia and fear that we’ve built around us, particularly in the post­911 era and made even worse by a pandemic, fear can also, of course be incredibly counterproductive to you living a happy and fruitful and fulfilling life. Cato is where I learned that. Cato is where I learned and got all of my views about the way in which the war on tear has gone completely awry and shipped away at all of the things in which we sought to protect by going down that adventurism route. So I don’t wanna poo poo fear too much, I wanna be very clear throughout the chapter that fear is what makes us human and what keeps us alive, but it can take over our lives before we know it.

0:31:26.7 Aaron Powell: Can you talk about that then, in the context of Anakin? Who is the most… Because we have… We have on the one hand, Luke and his story is about… Fear is a central theme of Luke’s story. And then the sequel trilogies even get us to basically like the sad end of that before his final moments of, he’s become kind of so afraid that he’s just left. But early on with Yoda’s cave and facing Darth Vader, it’s about not running away from the fear, but accepting it and being empowered to face it. But then we have Anakin who has a similar sort of starting journey of an entry into dealing with his fear, but lets it take him in this different direction.

0:32:19.3 Stephen Kent: Yeah. So I think the thing that unites both of the Skywalkers and the sequel trilogy is a little unique, so I’ll segment that off, but the Skywalker journey between Anakin and Luke is the story of dealing with the tendency to be a control freak, wanting to have your hands around everything at all times. Anakin’s story begins… Like his descent begins, I mean, in episode one, when he is being taken from home or he has opted to go with Qui Gon, Jinn and Obi Wan to Coruscant to train as a Jedi. And he says to his mother, “I don’t want things to change.” And she puts a hand on his shoulder and she says, “But you can’t stop the change anymore than you can stop the sun from setting.” And then she says, “Go! Don’t look back!” And he goes and he looks back. He looks right back over his shoulder, sorrowfully at his mother, and then he leaves. But what we know from being Star Wars fans and seeing his movies, is he spends the rest of his life looking back, having dreams about his mother, having anxiety fueled nightmares about what might have become of her, feeling angry at the Jedi that she had to stay there, that she was still there, he was never able to let go and just let things be.

0:33:38.4 Stephen Kent: And you see that play out with his control freak tendencies as a Padawan, he doesn’t listen, he always wants to kinda be in charge of the game plan, and then when it comes down to his wife and him having a vision of her dying in childbirth, he deals with the same thing he dealt with, with his mother, which was, “I couldn’t fix that, but I will fix this and I will smash a couple of eggs or Younglings in order to do it.” This destroys his life, of course, and it puts him in a prison, a physical prison, for the rest of his time. Luke, I think it’s like a little bit of more of a weird journey about just fearing, becoming who you’re always meant to be, fearing destiny in a way. But his lesson in particularly, Empire Strikes Back is the same lesson. A vision of fear. He has a vision that Han and Leia are suffering at the hands of Darth Vader in a city in the clouds, and he’s gonna go save them. And Obi­Wan and Yoda both tell him, set… Their future is not like… We don’t know what’s gonna happen, distrust your visions of the future, ’cause it’s always emotion, is what Yoda says. And he says, “But I must help them.” And he says, “Even if that means destroying everything that they have fought for.”

0:34:50.7 Stephen Kent: And Luke goes and he fights Darth Vader, and it turns out it was already too late. Han was always gonna be shipped off with Boba Fett, and the suffering was only going to happen as a result of him making a rash decision to go up there and fight when it actually wasn’t time. So generally, the same lesson that both of these guys learn is that you have to let go. And for George Lucas, the storyteller, this goes right back, straight line back to Greek stoicism and the workings of Marcus Aurelius, whose thoughts on living a fruitful life and being a stoic was separating the things which you cannot control from the things that you can, and focusing your energy and your anxieties on the things that you can control in your own life, instead of focusing on what you can’t. [chuckle] What happens on a plane, sometimes when you’re traveling? The fear of terrorism. Am I gonna get shot when I go to a movie? Like these things, this is just fear of things that you just purely have no control over, and COVID, obviously takes that to a whole another level.

0:36:02.2 Aaron Powell: So Yoda says that gives us fear leads ultimately to the dark side, and we get that as like a standard kind of Jedi line of like fear itself is just a stepping stone to catastrophe. Is that then the wrong message that it’s less about fear itself and so the solution is to not feel that feeling because then it leads to anger and so on, or is the underlying message then that the Jedis were kind of wrong in that? That fear itself has value. Feeling it can be the right thing, but it’s more of like how you relate to it, how you use it and what you allow to create it in you.

0:36:46.6 Stephen Kent: Yeah, I think the last bit there is more spot­on. Fear is toxic. Fear is the path towards anger, frustration, anxiety and resentment, and that takes you towards hatred and then ultimately suffering and sort of the fear leads to anger, it leads to hate, suffering path that the Jedi always prescribe. And their general way that they handle that is sort of the way that the Dalai Lama might prescribe for you to handle that, which is to let go and sort of disavow yourself of worldly possessions and attachment. That’s what Yoda tries to tell Anakin when he tells him that he is having fear of loss of someone that means something to him. And Yoda’s advice is impossible to implement once you have already experienced attachment and love. He says, “Train yourself to let go of all that you fear to lose, except it’s too late.” It’s too late for him on that point, he’s not just going to be able to let go of what might happen to a loved one.

0:37:46.1 Stephen Kent: And I think this point always takes me back to my upbringing in the Christian church, and just the saying that Christians will always say to one another and myself is, “Let go and let God. Let Jesus take the wheel.” [chuckle] It’s kind of like a joke to some people, but like we believe that, we believe very strongly, and sometimes the tighter you try to hold on to things, plan things really rigorously, that’s why people will say like, “Look at God laughing while you make your plans.” [chuckle] Because you just can’t control what’s gonna happen sometimes in life, and your ability to roll with it, to be adaptable and not attached to a certain way of doing things is gonna allow you to be free to handle things, that’s why with populist politics, they’re always angry to the left and the right, ’cause they’re just always trying to chase down this boogie man that they’re afraid of.

0:38:43.3 Stephen Kent: And it’s usually the future in some way, shape or form, and they just wanna drag us back to the past. And that’s why I kind of found my way towards Libertarianism because of its general posture towards organised chaos, spontaneous order, letting things unfold naturally as they’re going to unfold and then making sense of it once it’s already happened. A lot of people equate that to being reactionary and only being on your back foot every time something goes wrong, but when you just let things happen and move with the flow, I think you would say just kinda like moving with the flow of the river and letting it shape you rather than trying to stand in its way, you’re gonna be generally calmer, generally happier and less angry, ’cause you don’t have any plans that are gonna be disrupted. It’s very counter­intuitive, and that’s why not many people walk around in orange robes following the Dalai Lama, because that’s not human nature, but I tend to think that the path of liberty is actually the path that cuts against human nature in many ways, it’s hard, and so is rejecting fear.

0:40:00.3 Trevor Burrus: In discussing hope. I always thought that there needed to be a sort of counter balance to the fear narrative in Star Wars. ‘Cause hope is super important, but I also feel like hope can lead to… An over sense of hope can also be something that could lead you to the dark side if…

0:40:17.5 Stephen Kent: Yeah a lot of pain, broken dreams. [chuckle]

0:40:21.3 Trevor Burrus: A lot of pain. And maybe that’s… Or it leads you to a place like where Luke is in the sequel trilogy, which I think is probably the most interesting thing, part about that entire trilogy is where they put Luke at that time. Seemingly lacking hope or he’s afraid, he’s almost afraid of being afraid so he just kinda moves himself away and has no hope anymore. So hope, I mean it’s definitely a two sided coin, but you can’t fight a rebellion without hope too at the same time.

0:40:51.1 Stephen Kent: Yeah, and I think hope is tied straight line to agency and the feeling of having choices. We usually lose our sense of hope and dreaming big and planning for the future when we don’t feel like there’s anything to plan for, so either you think the world is gonna end in 10 years, so why should you even go out and go on some dates to try to find someone to marry and have kids. Everything is gonna be over because of climate change. Or you live in a really poor neighbourhood that’s a dead­end road. And your teachers and the president and vice president are telling you that if you come from a really poor ZIP code, America is an awful country, and you’re not gonna make it in the country like this because of the kind of history that we have. Like these are things that compartmentalise pain, that close your sense of what’s possible and diminishes hope. And I think that hope does come from just feeling like you have options in life, and I think a lot about Darth Vader and his choices that came after he started having to wear the armor. He made a mistake. He knew that Palpatine lied to him.

0:42:00.9 Stephen Kent: If you guys have read, you now, many of the comics that precede Episode three, or any of the books, Vader knew immediately he’d been lied to, that the whole thing about Padmé was a manipulation. But he had already betrayed the Jedi, he’d killed a bunch of children, he was responsible for his wifes death and he had helped destroy the Jedi order and he lived in a metal suit where his tormentor, his boss emperor Palpatine could just kind of turn the lights off on him whenever he wanted to, he wasn’t powerful enough to take on the emperor. And he resigned himself to anger and he resigned himself to just hating, not only the world, but himself for the decisions that he had made. And he never thought there was a way out until Luke. And Luke gave him the first hand that he had ever seen, that came at just the right time and he saw another option. That’s why he said like, when Luke started trying to convince him to come back and be Anakin Skywalker, he said, “It’s too late for me son.” He didn’t say, “I don’t want to be back on the light side and be Anakin Skywalker,” he just didn’t see a way, but then he did.

0:43:07.3 Stephen Kent: So I do think that with hope, it can create pain and resentment, and we open ourselves up to a lot of disappointment in life when we’re hopeful, but it is still the only thing that pushes us forward, and even when you’re in the dark and you’ve been spurned by hope before, as long as you can keep walking down that tunnel, you will find the way out eventually.

0:43:29.8 Aaron Powell: What do we make of the post Return of the Jedi stuff then in that context? Because we get as Gina Rodriguez says in Rogue One, like rebellions are built on hope. That’s the, hope is this theme through that movie and then the original trilogy, but the hope that sparked the rebellion succeeds at the end of Return of the Jedi, but then has basically failed the next time we get a movie. Like we don’t get a lot of story about what happened to the New Republic, and it gets filled in some of the novels, but we do get the take away that it hasn’t worked out in practice. It hasn’t been great, it might have been better than the empire, but lots of people are dissatisfied with it, it seems to be fairly corrupt. It’s not fulfilling its obligations. We even get, there’s the moment in, I think it’s the first season of The Mandalorian, where a group of new republic, like a patrol, X wing patrol, comes to the station, that’s kind of a fringe station and just like without hesitation on the word of essentially a tracker that they’ve planted, they just blow it up, killing everyone on board.

0:44:39.9 Aaron Powell: And it’s this kind of horrifying moment of like they have turned into, at least in this one regard, like that which they sought to replace.

0:44:48.9 Stephen Kent: Yeah, if I could segment a little bit kinda the two tracks of that question, which is like one like hope and overthrowing the empire and sparking the rebellion, and then hope sort of with central planners and people who wanna build governments fulfilling false promises. I think those are two different things. So with the new republic, generally, they made some of the same mistakes that the Old Republic had made, which is that they believed wholeheartedly that they could unite this galaxy again underneath a large government banner. And one book I would recommend you read, it’s also by Claudia Gray called Bloodline, and it tracks Leia’s political career after Return of the Jedi, her running for chancellor and Mon Mothma handling her role as Chancellor of the New Republic.

0:45:39.5 Stephen Kent: A couple of things go wrong, Mon Mothma is committed to winding the military down, she thinks that military engagements have ended, and therefore the new republic needed no military. Leia vociferously disagreed with this, she wanted a fully militarized New Republic, because she believed that there would always be future threats. So what ends up happening is that an enemy does present itself, and they do have to have a military and they’re not ready for it. The other thing that goes wrong is that the new republic breaks down into two political parties, the centrists and the populists, and the centrists believe that they need a fully united central government to do what the Empire tried to do, but do it without totalitarianism and to do it without doing evil. All of us, of course, believe that this is not possible when you try to create some sort of like large unitarian government.

0:46:33.2 Stephen Kent: And then, there’s Leia, who leads the Populist Party, and the Populist Party is essentially a states rights party in space. They believe that all planets should have their own government system, and that there should be free trade between worlds, but nothing in the way of a large centralized militarized government. The centrists largely win this [chuckle] debate by the end, and it does bear rotten fruit for the galaxy. But going back to the rebellion question, I think that that is just a strong example of when you have an evil enemy who you believe should be defeated, there are different ways to fight, and you can either organise people around negative polarization, and we need to take this enemy down, ’cause they are wrong, or we can tell them, we have this thing that we want to build in its place. And that is another layer further than just saying, “Hey, we can recognize evil,” we have to actually also know what good is, and the rebellion had a general sense of what good was, where Saw Gerrera on the other side of the rebellion in Rogue One, he did not. He was just sort of a burn it down kind of guy.

0:47:43.3 Trevor Burrus: So is there a core lesson of Star Wars? I mean you have the virtues you point out, but in these difficult times, polarised times, a lot of hatred going around, is there a core lesson that we can look to and learn from?

0:48:01.2 Stephen Kent: Well, I think we can learn from the failures of the Summer of Love, the summer of 2021, and going back into the… I’m sorry, 2020, going back into the heat of the George Floyd protests and subsequent riots. The idea of reforming policing across this country and tackling some of the things that we care dearly about, like getting rid of qualified immunity for starters, for cops. These were actually like low­hanging fruit that could be sought after around the country with a mass movement of people demanding change and doing so with locked arms. But we also know what happened is that anger took the day and really changed the entire direction of the movement around the country. And the rioting, the looting, the burning cities and the downtowns which were completely lawless and allowed to be lawless by many city mayors, it changed the mood in the room. I don’t know about you, but I saw criminal justice reform has been marching on for several years in a positive direction, until we got some of the chaos of the past year and a half, it set us back so darn far.

0:49:13.3 Stephen Kent: And so, I don’t like to over reach in some of my analogies, but the whole point of that Saw Gerrera, we’re just going to kill Imperials and storm troopers versus we’re going to build a new republic under Leia, it’s a reminder that we have choices in the way that we fight, and the way that we choose is gonna define whether or not people want to join us in that, and whether or not we’re going to expand the Coalition for our cause. You guys might have a different perspective on it, but I think 2020 and 2021 have been disastrous for criminal justice reform on a national level, and it’s because the fighting ended up going down the wrong way and happening in the streets instead of in legislatures and in court houses, that’s what I think about.

0:50:00.2 Trevor Burrus: So does that mean… Does that parallel Star Wars, because that ends up with a lot of fighting and a lot of killing of people, as we discussed.

0:50:07.9 Stephen Kent: No there’s legitimate ways to organise against an enemy, and there’s illegitimate ways to organise against an enemy. There’s not a perfect example, like a corollary for Star Wars. Like the way in which the empire is taken down and the rebellion forms and it fractures in a couple of different ways, that can’t quite be tied yet to American politics in any way, but the lesson is there, there’s a right and a wrong way to fight, and if you really want your cause to succeed, you need to build something worth people believing in.

0:50:41.6 Stephen Kent: I think there is this political scientist, Cass Sunstein, he worked in the Obama Administration, he spoke at Cato once for his book, which was also on Star Wars and he talked a little bit about the Arab Spring as sort of an example of ways that rebellions can form and fracture and go off in different directions. But at the end of the day, the book that I wrote is more of a virtues book, and less of an attempt to paint exact parallels, ’cause I think that those things tend to fall short in some way, but just to say that it’s not enough to be able to say like Nazis are bad. It’s like you have to paint an alternative of what is good, otherwise, your movement is gonna fracture. And totalitarians are really good at fracturing movements. What do they do when they’ve got rebellions in the street? They find ways to turn the rebels against each other. And they also do that by goading rebels and dissidents into violence.

0:51:40.1 Stephen Kent: If a rebellion is forming in Egypt and the regime can get the rebellion to start acting violently against property, homes and police, then people on the sidelines go, “I don’t want this, I don’t want bullets flying in downtown, I don’t like the regime either, but I don’t want a revolution, I just want change.” These are the choices that we have to make, because if you want a meaningful movement, you’ve gotta have people buy in on you, and so that you can get out of being the minority.

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0:52:26.2 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favourite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayers. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.