Podcast: Redemption & feeding your shadow
A preview of "How The Force Can Fix The World" approaches Redemption
Happy Saturday one and all! I’m on the home stretch of writing this book, How The Force Can Fix The World. T-minus 35 days till the manuscript is due to the publisher. I teased last week a bit of what the chapter on Redemption would be about and decided to do a podcast about it. Talking things out is a great way to overcome writer’s block.
Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on the concept of “The Shadow.” For a section of the book focused on Redemption, I decided to hone in on two incredibly simple topics in the cultural zeitgeist: Cancel Culture & America’s original sin of slavery.
Just kidding, obviously not simple topics. And what I’m trying to do with this book is not apply my own opinions or beliefs to how we should live, but look to Star Wars as it exists — for wisdom. So when I approached “Cancel Culture” and felt in my gut that we have a “forgiveness problem” in America, I had to step back a bit from this feeling. Because while Star War contains subtle elements of forgiveness, its characters in the greatest need of personal redemption do so without receiving forgiveness for their transgressions. This required me to step back and consider a different nugget of Star Wars wisdom to diagnose our huge problems.
Excerpt ————————————
The Shadow and hubris
When you acknowledge and accept your darkness, your brokenness or capacity for wickedness — only then do you truly know yourself. The famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called this thing within us “The Shadow,” but he thought of it less like a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde situation and more like a simple affirmation of your blind spots. His studies concluded that denying the existence of those blind spots is what gave them power, fed them, and caused them to grow in strength. In essence, he might argue that you have to engage the Shadow in order to have dominion over it.
Religion is one way in which people have long sought to deny the Shadow. The Christian faith, for example, has elements of abstention to it, or rules. Don’t covet what belongs to your neighbor, don’t steal, save sex for marriage, marriage is reserved for one man and one woman, don’t labor on the Sabbath, so on and so forth. There have been and will always be denominations and sects of Christianity that have incredibly punitive streaks when it comes to sin, or breaking the rules. But at its core, it’s a faith founded on human error being the way of the universe.
Yoda did indeed conquer his hubris, or what you might call reckless ego. He laid down his pride and his Jedi-like sense of purity. By the end of his journey, he’d discovered the secret that would one day allow him to live on after death and advise the next generation of Jedi. We see him appear several decades after his passing in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, when Luke is in desperate need of guidance to help Rey.
Fans of Star Wars tend to talk about Force ghosts like they might the idea of Heaven. It’s life after death, it’s a cosmic reward for good behavior, it’s a thing reserved for the “good people” and not the bad. This just isn’t so.
In the case of Anakin Skywalker, his redemption was a deeply personal thing. The Force didn’t deem him pure. No, Anakin joined a very small group of characters in galactic history in living on after death because he had conquered his Shadow and put to rest an alter ego that had seized the steering wheel of his life all those years ago. Anakin, Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, these Jedi had achieved peace, balance, and harmony within. That plus training in the technique is why they ascended. Kylo Ren, or Ben Solo, notably did not reappear on screen after his death. It’s not because Ben was any less redeemed than his grandfather Anakin, we just have to assume he didn’t do his homework on unlocking this power during his short life.
You can’t “cancel” the beast
Look around you. We don’t have peace, we don’t have atonement, we don’t have empathy and we don’t have healing. Everytime you turn on the news, some cartoon character, author, book, actress or private citizen is being cancelled, discontinued, fired or destroyed. All in the name of “accountability” or “justice” for an amorphous group or to quiet a small but rowdy online mob.
It’s easy to say, we just need to rediscover the virtue of forgiveness. But there’s a blockage in our veins that makes even approaching the task of forgiveness a huge hurdle. It’s exactly what Yoda had to conquer in The Clone Wars: Hubris, ego and self-righteousness.
One of things I’ve been most surprised by with young people today is that for a generation who came of age online and have massive digital footprints documenting their formative and possibly most stupid years growing up, they seem incredibly eager to litigate each others sins in the public square. “Cancel culture” went from being a social media punchline to an issue of immense national concern in just a matter of years. There’s a real sense that we’re all being watched by one another, and that any day now someone is going to dig deep enough into your social media history to dredge up a skeleton. Your life will be put on hold. Your character will be called into question. You may apologize. Either way, you’ll be “cancelled.”
How did we become so simultaneously so self-loathing and arrogant? I think it has something to do with how the social media era has allowed people to curate the ideal versions of themselves to present to their peers. We can pick and choose what is seen. We apply sepia filters to our lives just like our Instagram photos. At a certain point, it becomes easy to forget the not so great posts we might have made ten years back, and we begin to believe our own distortions about who we are and our own need for room to grow.
We’re in the midst of a hubris pandemic. A widespread mentality where enough public self flagellation paired with the clever hiding of your own sins positions you to be the judge and jury of others on social media or in the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post.
It needs to stop.
Will you tell a friend who cares about Star Wars and politics to subscribe to this newsletter? Pre-sales for the book start this summer, and this medium is absolutely vital to making that successful. I’d really appreciate it.
In other news, this week on my new YouTube show “Right Now with Stephen Kent” I was joined by Matt Yglesias, co-founder of Vox, founder of the "Slow Boring" Substack, and author of "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger."
Loved this book and so I was naturally very nervous to do this interview. Leave a comment and Like on the video, let me know whatcha think! It’s an interesting premise.