Slave Philosophy Continued - Through Passion, I gain Strength - The Sith Code at its Most Complex
This is a part of the code of the Sith that seems the least understood apparently by Reddit. Surprise surprise that they don’t get it, and don’t think it applies to any Sith Lord from the movies even though it is easily applied to all of them.
Every Dark Lord in the films is a creature of passion, with each of them pretty much undone by their passion.
Maul let it overrule his reason so that he gloated before he had won, Dooku let his passions lead him astray and blind him to the reality of what he had become and then to the fact that he was being obviously duped, and Anakin allowed it to cripple him physically. As to Palpatine it seems to have led him to damage his face and blind him to the fact that Anakin wasn’t the sort of person to throw his kids away, and the seed of morality Obi-Wan had planted in Anakin during his raising of the boy, and Jerec if we include the Jedi Knight series allowed it to blind him to the reality that Kyle a ‘daddy’s boy’ would not let his father rest unavenged.
The fact is that one must either in life master one’s passions or become ruled by them. If one wishes to become a beast one will let it rule them, but if one wishes to succeed one will learn to channel and master one’s passions.
Because Passion can be a strength but one must first perfect and master it. The current system though tends to try to neuter it so that most don’t have any passion and may as well be robots, for all the reading, thinking some people do. Others do too much and let passion control them so that they are in a way gluttons.
In Star Wars as in real life, the Sith’s folly is very obvious, and their peculiar lusts and hungry nature, very obviously is their undoing. Passion without ‘Peace’ without focus is uncontrolled obsession and could lead one to become a shadow of oneself, just as strength without conviction and without some measure of love and humility is little more than might.
Strength, Passion these are but words to those without them, but to those who possess at least one of them you have so much more than most. Luke for example has plenty of passion and strength, but he must learn to master his passion and let go of it to an extent, while learning to hone his strength.
This so that he might save his father and grandfather, this is what learning to control himself and submit himself as Campbell might put it is what it means.
The Sith though could never understand this, because why would they need to humble themselves? Why would they need to think in any other terms than power? They need only stomp on those who might oppose them harder.
Take for example before Anakin gives way fully to his passion, when he is still himself and how horrified he is by his own actions when he butchers the Sand-People, and the difference in response he has to after he butchers the children in the Temple. The difference is a man who has not yet let Passion rule him, with the latter he is a very disturbed individual who has let power utterly corrupt him.
Now there is a great deal of complexity of course to the actions of some Sith such as Yuthura Ban from KOTOR who had the same passion as Anakin that is to say to liberate the slaves of her homeland. Thing is though that in her case she just needed a little kindness and friendship, and she soon realized she had become a slave, the only way she could truly liberate herself was to finally just go and liberate them, to let go of her obsessions, to learn to master passion and use what strength she has for others.
In her case it is obvious that she dies at the hands of the likes of Sion or Nihilus or Atris, but at least her soul was rescued.
Passion may not sound dangerous but if one looks at real history, one can see how it can pave the way to obsession and then madness. Commodus was passionate, and he wrecked completely and utterly the Roman Empire, the systems and structures and balances the likes of Augustus and Nerva put in place. It was ruined also by the likes of Tiberius and Caligula, who abused their power rather than listening to reason.
There is also the likes of Dong Zhuo from Chinese history and even the likes of Zhuge Liang and the rulers of Jin, with Zhuge Liang effecting the same stratagem over and over again repeatedly, until the enemy put up but a token resistance because they knew his strategies inside and out. As to the rulers of Jin, they let their hunger for power get the better of them, as they looked south that they failed to consider the long term effect of their removing the border guards to the north and using Xiongnu barbarians as vanguard and armies.
Basically they let barbarians in, in the thousands if not the millions and what happened next was a massive population replacement and the Han Chinese fleeing south-east to what was once the Sun Wu kingdom.
Passion without rules, without mastery led to these black incidences in history. Strength without purpose one might call it. Policy without wisdom.
As to Dong Zhuo he butchered whomever he didn’t like, ate as he liked and whored himself off as he liked. The man had little in the way of self-restraint, and so brought about his own downfall, just as Commodus did.
My point is not to preach against Passion, but to look at it from a certain perspective that it needs wisdom and intelligence, even as it is crucial to humanity. Strangely to some, the Jedi do understand this and try to approach it with some measure of understanding. At least some do.
Some such as Qui-Gon & Yoda fear it, others such as Mace and Obi-Wan seek mastery of it, as did Odan-Urr, the Jedi Exile and his pupils and Luke Skywalker and even Kyle Katarn. Each of them could thus harness the strength that Passion gives them without ever losing themselves all while having all the strength in the world. This is not to say that they used the Dark Side, to the contrary none of them ever did.
So remember folks; don’t do what Anakin did and let passion rule you, but at the same time don’t repress it until it explodes and breaks you like Yoda did. Rather make peace with it, as you do have passion deep within you. Learn to harness and wield it and the strength that lies within, otherwise you will be its slave or the slave of whomever learns what your passion is and will desire mastery over it and you through it.
Mastery of oneself is not wrong, rather it is crucial in life.
Terran Morale Officers radiate an aura of pure passion. One might say that it is their core, and what drives them to sacrifice and die for others. However, theirs is a passion clad in reforged into armor fear, armed to the teeth with their uttermost fright brought to heel by much training and emboldened will.
In the academy on Sirius Prime, the grizzled old veterans advise:
“Your anger must be colder than the depths of space.”
There is a youtube audiodrama "Star Wars vs 40K" by A Fan with Too Much Time that dives into this, especially in the theorycrafting between episodes. The psykers of the 40K Imperium are seen as indistinguishable from Sith in the Jedi's eyes, forcefully taking the warp/force into themselves until the breaking point.
The difference is that the Imperial psykers had to contend with temptation from their earliest moments. While passion is their dynamo, it is their eternal peril as even a moment's laxity will doom them. When they felt big, they also felt eyes of judgement upon their actions.
As such, they leash their passion by being as selfless as possible, to their own detriment. Granted it is a case study of one man, but an implied broadstroke in background.
What Sith are missing is something like a higher purpose, a noblesse oblige. Their normal creed seeks power without purpose, for the most part. A self referential authority against morality. Jedi are at their worst with only restriction, Sith with only freedom. The best Jedi are selfish in their do-gooding, rules be damned, and the best Sith seek power only as a means to a decisive end they couldn't otherwise accomplish. Ying Yang, a speck of the opposite motivating the bulk.
Also something about the rule of 2 Sith being an ancient Sith that possesses the successor in a snowballing of powers? It checks out. Rule of 2 Sith are incapable of changing course, it's one extremely careful narcissist.