Truth Bomb Tuesday: Yoda was a product of his time.
I rewatched The Empire Strikes Back the other day, and I think I know what’s wrong with the world.
(It’s amazing how well that film holds up. Classic.)
Anyway, there’s a point where Luke is deciding to rush off and help Hans and Leia, while Yoda and Obi Wan are trying to talk him out of it.
(If you think that having a 900-year-old Jedi master and a Jedi ghost from the spirit realm telling you that your current course is going to end in complete disaster – if you think that would be enough to make you stop and consider what you’re doing, you’ve never met a teenage boy.)
Anyway, at some point in the discussion Yoda says to him:
“Anger… fear… aggression. The dark side are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.”
I actually had to stop and rewind it to see that I’d heard it right.
Because it is just epicly bad advice. Like close to the worst advice I’ve ever heard.
When I first heard it – probably in the cinemas – it seemed to make sense. It fits the playbook.
Getting angry is bad. Being scared is bad. Being aggressive is bad. They are literally evil.
And so we must do everything in our power to avoid going over to the dark side. We must exile those feelings from the body, and only flow towards love and kindness and helping old Jedi masters across the street.
We have raised generations of children on exactly this advice.
But I’ve had a few more orbits round the death star now. And I’ve had to work with hundreds of young property Jedi’s.
And so now when I hear these words it just smacks me in the face – like it is the worst possible thing to tell someone.
Anger isn’t bad or ‘dark’. (Hurting someone isn’t cool, but let’s not conflate the two.) Anger is the feeling that comes when something isn’t right in your star system. A line has been crossed. And injustice has been done.
And the energy of anger, when properly channelled, can be an immense source of power.
Same story with fear. Fear is an essential and necessary emotion. It goes hand in hand with being human. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel it, we disconnect ourselves from our felt body and an important source of knowing and intuition.
And then aggression? Well, one person’s aggression is another person’s assertive, and as someone who’s grown up in a world where I was constantly told that women shouldn’t be too ‘bossy’, I want to say that sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in.
Anyway, I think Lucas was tapping into an idea that was in the Zeitgeist of his age. Being calm and gentle is always good. Being angry and fearful is always bad.
And for generations we tied ourselves up in knots trying to uphold that ideal, smothering and bottling up the fear and anger we actually felt.
It’s not what we feel, but how we work with what we feel.
Seriously. You’d think a 900 year old Jedi master would know better.
DB.