Updated 3 years ago
Best post about The Last Jedi I’ve read, from Metacritic. It’s as long as a term paper, but well thought out. All the philosophy references check out. TL;DR: the Star War’s take on the Manichean Joseph Cambell Hero’s Journey became a Disneyfied postmodern relativistic morass where it’s all shades of grey.
“So… post-modernism anarchism has reached Star Wars. By the hand of Disney, of course. Most ancient myths, from the Genesis to the Iliad to the Arthurian mythos, are reflections on the ability that humans have to choose between good and evil (the light and dark sides of the force), and the transcendence from that dichotomy (the resurrection through compassion: Jon Snow, Christ, Neo, Anakin and Luke). Lucas specifically envisioned his Star Wars as a way of retelling the Hero’s Journey and tackling those concepts by creating a modern mythology. For that end, he realized that he needed to literally personify the philosophical battle between good and evil (the dualistic Ying-Yang of the Force) in Anakin’s and Luke’s Journey. Post-modernist philosophers, mainly Derrida, have challenged this traditionally dualistic Western philosophy of morality and their deconstruction of those ideas is the mainstream now. Post-modernism is relativistic, it defends that good and evil are inherently and completely relative concepts. That is, they are culturally created and perpetuated as such by structures of interest and power, and not objective at all. Please note this is not a buddhist-taoist approach to the duality of morality (it’s not a transcendence of those concepts via detachment of materialism/evil and compassion/good, but a negation of their objective reality). Light and dark are blurred until they become grey. Modern psychologists and philosophers, such as Jordan B. Peterson, are now opposing post-modernism by re-elaborating the work of western philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung and Campbell. They see the relativistic approach to morality as only partially true, as it ignores the evolutive and social consequences of disposing of the dualistic war between good and evil that lies at the root of western culture (and, explicitly, in Lucas’ original approach to the symbolic narrative of Star Wars), negating the inherent conceptual difference between acts of objective evil and objective good and thus removing the moral compass from society. This view of morality has led to the modern state of relativistic (or non-existing) moral values that is characteristic of the consumerist, individualistic individual, full of feelings of meaninglessness, which modern capitalist societies tend to produce. Disney is pushing this philosophical deformation of Lucas’ original vision, the Campbellian Hero’s Journey, precisely because they want to reinforce those kind of individuals in our society. A sign of our times. On the other hand, Peterson uses the phrase “Rescue your father” (the rescue and redemption of the father figure is a very important archetype in the Hero’s Journey) to mean that one must rescue moral values from the maelstrom of modern relativism in order to live a happy and fulfilling life: the same meaning ancient myths conveyed. It’s not coincidence that Lucas made Luke literally rescue his father from the Dark Side. Proposing that there’s no absolute good and evil, that both Jedi and Sith were equally wrong because of their dogmatism and that both of those factions used the Force and viewed themselves as good (as a mean to reinforce their power) is treason against the core morality that was deeply embedded in Lucas’ original philosophy, one that he tried to build in the tradition of ancient mythology: he carefully showed how this relativistic “grey view” of good and evil is just a trick used by the dark side. Remember Palpatine’s and Anakin’s conversation at the opera. It was meant to mirror the Temptation of Christ in the desert, the serpent at the Tree of Good and Evil or the conversation between Buddha and Mara. Evil tries to twist the morality of the hero, painting both moral opposites as the same, as relative. A pure Jungian archetype. That’s why Lucas sold his soul. He literally did. He sold a creation that conveyed these ideas beautifully to a company that wants to deconstruct them and negate their validity and use them to further advance the destructive globalist agenda which is aimed at breaking down everything into chaos gray zones, lack of meaning, addiction etc where everything is the opposite to what it was before.
I’m sure he’s sad with what Disney is doing with his carefully crafted mythology but this is the perfect depiction of why more and more are reporting being unhappy, depressed, unwanted, not loved…… Not having understood the meaning or ways of navigating in life because it all has been based on big lie. The truth has always been there right there right infront of them. “That evil & good is subjective, lightness darkness is not equal, we need to choose the tree of life”
By supporting this movie u are consenting to create “Order out of Chaos from wickedness & suffering”
