Discussion Are the Jedi Really the Good Guys?

[Darth Carnifex]

I think one of the things that people commonly and frequently misunderstand about things like the Acolyte is that it's some scathing polemic against the Jedi to cast them as a bad or evil institution, when in reality its just another example of the Jedi of that era being misguided, flawed, but ultimately still objectively good. We see often not only in shows like The Clone Wars or Tales of the Jedi, but in the Prequels themselves how the Jedi Order of the late Republic era are a flawed organization that has strayed from their path to become jaded, cynical, and way too enmeshed in the politicking of the Republic they serve.

Yet even as flawed as the Jedi became, and how far they lost their way, there's no real debate about whether or not the Jedi are the good guys. The Sith are ontologically evil, the Dark Side itself is the epitome of imbalance in the Force, with the Light Side being the natural balanced state of the Force overall. Sith can have empathizing moments for sure, sometimes they're just as much victims of the Dark Side themselves. Vader is sympathetic in many regards, but his actions are still his own at the end of the day.

As others have stated, the Jedi are allowed and encouraged to feel the depths of emotions but never to allow themselves to be controlled by them. Emotions like fear and anger are natural responses to things, but a Jedi's strength is recognizing their own fear and anger and overcoming them all the same. Jedi can and should love others, even Anakin in Attack of the Clones says that the Jedi should love unconditionally. His downfall was jealousy and greed, the inability to let go of what he loved, the manic attachment to Padme whose endpoint resulted in him willingly killing children.

Short story long, the Jedi are very much the good guys.

 

[Elpsis Kerrigan]

Within the context of SW canon - which is a good vs evil setting at its heart - yes, they are.

The prequels portray them as flawed and ossified, which is to be expected from an ancient institution that has become stagnant and enmeshed with politics, but that's not the same as evil. It would be a dull narrative if they were perfect.

 

[Gren Blidh]

As others have correctly pointed out, from the perspective of the films and the morality they impose, the Jedi are clearly "the good guys" and this was obviously the intention of George Lucas. It's pretty futile to debate this. Star Wars only became cynical about its own mythology later.

You seem to be asking for people's takes though, so I will give mine. In my own personal interpretation of Star Wars I do not believe the Jedi are "the good guys" or even good. The Jedi were fine in the OT when they were simply a nondescript order of warrior-monks, but the prequels turned them into hyper-stoics that mixed all the worst parts of Buddhism and slave morality/Christianity. Stoicism never really resonated with me; I have way too much rage and passion to just remove that part of myself. I need to integrate that part of myself into my life in a positive and productive way rather than try to suppress it. The closest I'll get to stoicism is some sort of amor fati as professed by Nietzsche, but that's different than the stoicism prescribed by Marcus Aurelius and quite different than what is practiced by the Jedi.

Imagine being a Jedi. Imagine a life without possessions, without passion, without ambition or personal aspirations, without romance, without the ability to marry or have children or have a family at all for that matter. It's completely anti-life. The natural state of humanity and any organism is the attainment of personal power over one's surroundings and environment. The Jedi philosophy dictates against this and says that you can't be YOU, instead you have to subsume into their collective, for the "will of the Force". Oh, and you're kidnapped as a child so you have zero choice in the matter. You're doomed to an existence without the experiences, heartaches and triumphs that make life worth living in the first place. A life without the chaos of frenzy from which inspiration and creation flow. That is not a society that creates great works of art or gives rise to great heroes.

And that is what the Jedi are. They are slaves to the will of the Force, which punishes anyone who acts outside of its constraints and demands you lose yourself into its collective. According to the philosophy of the Jedi, ALL life is sacred, but it feels like it's fighting against nature the whole time. Life is both order and chaos. Humans naturally impose order and structure into our surroundings, but life also necessitates the destruction of other living things in order to sustain it. From the void of chaos -- the ginnungagap -- springs life. Every time you chop down a tree to build a home or devour food between your teeth, you are destroying and breaking down the order of life to sustain your own. But according to the will of the Force, these natural tendencies are bad and need to be punished. The term "Balance" comes up a lot, but balance is not a fitting word for it. "Bringing Balance to the Force" does not mean some sort of paganistic balance between order and chaos. "Balance" means the eradication of the Dark Side, aka the individual. The will of the Force wants to imprison you in a completely insane moral paradigm where humanity itself feels like a mistake. It doesn't make any sense.

Ask yourself, what is the ideal state of the Jedi? It would be some kind of state of complete stasis, and to be honest I can't fathom what that would look or feel like. More intelligent minds say that the universe is expanding until eventually entropy wins and everything becomes so spread apart that the universe will fade into eternal darkness. Maybe it's something like that -- Balance is a universe of perfectly arrayed hydrogen atoms so spread apart that no power exchange can ever happen. Let's go even further. True stasis can only be a state of complete nothingness and absence of everything; Nirvana if you will. After all, even free-flowing energy is potentially dangerous as it might lead to a Big Bang-type scenario and a repetition of the power struggle. What about becoming "One with the Force"? Well, look what happens with that. When Obi-Wan dies he becomes "One with the Force" and is able to manifest himself as a Force ghost. But as time goes on, he eventually LOSES the ability to do this, as his spirit becomes more and more diluted and subsumed into the collective matrix of the Force. So becoming "One with the Force" is a trend towards nothingness. That's what you get if you follow the philosophy of the Jedi to its ultimate conclusion. Nothing.

 

[Junpei Kenobi]

All I can say is the Obi-wan Kenobi was the goodest of good that ever done gooded, and nobody can tell me otherwise. Sure, he had his faults, but who doesn't? As far as examples of how Jedi should be, I think he ranks as the best. But that's just my humble (correct) opinion lol.