There’s always been one question that’s bugged me about the Sith Empire. Why are there so many humans? It makes literally no sense, especially from what we know of the lore.
Yes, the Jen’jidai were mostly human, but there were only twelve of them. Yes, the Sith Empire before the Jen’jidai did have human slaves, but I somehow doubt there’d be enough for humans to become to majority in the entire Empire. Yes, the Republic committed genocide against the Sith, but I somehow doubt human Sith were spared the blade.
And then there’s the question of why there’s so many Latin and Greek sounding names and words floating around. Why is the Sith Emperor named Tenebrae and Vitiate, two very Latin words/names?
In the end, I thought of a simple explanation, one supported by canon.
Throughout the ancient history of Star Wars, humans have colonized solar system after solar system. Mostly, at first, they kept to the Core Region, but as technology evolved, they developed further and further out across the stars. Very easily, one of these colonies could’ve been born on a planet that would later be consumed by Sith Space.
These humans land on this planet, build their colony, and eventually develop a pseudo-Greco-latin culture (or at least, a very Greco-latin language). Time passes, and they grow exponentially, just in time for the Sith Empire to arrive.
Now, the Sith Empire that arrives is a post-Jen’jidai Empire and still very much pro-human. So, when the Empire arrives and sees this planet filled with humans, they feel like they’ve struck gold. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but the human colonies are consumed by the Empire, becoming what we would call the “Imperials,” the non-Force Sensitive civilian/military class of the Empire.
Over time, the Imperial culture and the Sith culture started intermixing and evolving until we get what we see in Star Wars: The Old Republic. The exact cultural rules surrounding names and whatnot could be expanded by someone more skilled than I am. Imperial names are usually given only to humans, and if a Sith Pureblood is named such it could be seen as a slight by their parents or master (or whoever named them).
Darth Thanaton can trace his lineage to the original human colonists. Tenebrae was named such because he was illegitimate and had black eyes. Aloysius, presuming you’re playing a human Inquisitor (or don’t have any issue with being a hybrid) is also of Imperial decent. It all fits together nicely.
"Let the hate flow through you" can actually be seen as good advice; it could be about letting your emotions pass through you and out of you naturally, instead of bottling/suppressing them like the Jedi. But Palpatine, ever the liar, actually meant "let the hate consume you" when he said those words.
Well, he’s a Sith after all and Sith are not just know liars they’re all about letting their passions rule them. And I wonder if the unhealthy parts of the Jedi’s philosophy wasn’t a result of fighting the Sith for so long?
If you look at the original Jedi code it is one that indicate balance in all things:
Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force.
There’s nothing in this that hints that suppressing or dismissing your emotions should be part of the deal of being a Jedi. In fact it looks like the opposite, that both emotions and peace can coexist.
But then the Sith came along:
Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.Through Passion I gain Strength.Through Strength I gain Power.Through Power I gain Victory.Through Victory my chains are Broken.The Force shall free me.
This isn’t balanced in any way.
I’ve seen it said that the Sith code isn’t evil and while I agree so far, I don’t find it particularly healthy as it is based on letting your passions rule you to the elimination of all else.
And with this in mind it makes kinda sense that the Jedi Code eventually became this instead:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force
See the difference between this one and the first? That the first one accepted, even embraced, the existence of emotions in the Jedi but this one demands that only peace exists?
This isn’t so much a Jedi Code as it’s an Anti-Sith Code.
The Jedi fought so long and hard against the Sith that they forgot what they were supposed to be and became only the antithesis of their enemies. But I doubt that the original Jedi subscribed to the bottling up and suppression of emotions that the PT era Jedi did, but by the time of Yoda, Mace and Anakin, the Jedi had lost their paths and become obsessed with eliminating the Dark, instead of promoting the Light.
I just had an epiphany. I was thinking about why exactly the Jedi and Sith are ideologically so different yet formally so similar. And, of course, I know the Canon and Legends explanations, but I wanted to understand the philosophical reasoning behind it. I also wanted to understand why I, on a personal level, find the Sith ideologically more compelling and I think I finally figured it out. [This is a repost of a very similar post I made on the subreddit r/StarWarsCantina.]
So, I looked at the very core of their ideologies - their respective codes:
The Jedi Code:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
The Sith Code:
Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through Passion I gain Strength.
Through Strength I gain Power.
Through Power I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken.
The Force shall free me.
Obviously, these codes are polar opposites of each other. But polar opposites of what? Of their stance towards "peace". It's in their respective first lines. Their ideas of how the subject of peace should be treated is the core message of their ideologies and codes. Every other line in their codes builds on that and every aspect of how they are supposed to act in the confines of their order can be traced back to this first important line.
Now, I wondered, how can it happen that two groups, that somewhat share the same origin, can come to such vastly different ideas on how to handel "peace". How can one group hold it above everything else, even their own emotions and personalities, and the other group outright deny its existence?
I thought about everything I know about peace beyond the common word as it's thrown around in conversations and then my 11th grade sociology class slapped me flat across the face. I remembered that we learned about the scientific definitions of positive and negative peace as they are commonly used within academics nowadays.
The negative and positive peace framework is the most widely used today. Negative peace refers to the absence of direct violence. Positive peace refers to the absence of indirect and structural violence, and is the concept that most peace and conflict researchers adopt. This is often credited to Galtung but these terms were previously used by Martin Luther King in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1953, in which he wrote about "negative peace which is the absence of tension" and "positive peace which is the presence of justice."
- Peace and conflict studies, Wikipedia
And this is the reason why the Sith and Jedi differ so much in how they handle peace. Because, while the terms positive and negative peace are used as co-existing concepts in the real world, the Jedi and Sith each only subscribe to one of these ideas of what peace is.
In a Star Wars context that means:
Jedi & Negative Peace:
Essentially the time before the TPM. Also the phase between ROTJ and TFA. The galactic republic was at peace, at least according to this idea. There was no open warfare and the Jedi were there to keep all other violent conflicts at bay. It is also the reason why the Jedi themselves claim to be keepers and protectors of peace despite using violence to achieve their goals.
The idea of negative peace is the one that the Jedi follow, because if peace is merely defined as the absence of violence, especially military violence, then yes, peace is something achievable. It's something that can be maintained, which the Jedi were able to do for a long time. (Side note: The Jedi, of course, also define peace as something very internal: inner peace. But inner peace is just that: inner peace. It doesn't extend to greater reaches.)
Therefore, the Jedi see peace as something very real and realistic. This is why they can afford to place peace above all else. Because they "know" they can achieve/maintain it in the form of absence of war. A cold war would be enough of a state of peace to suffice.
Even the Sith would agree that "the absence of war" can exist. However, the Sith do not define peace that way. Though, from a "negative peace" perspective the Sith are clearly the aggressors, as the concept in general is more superficial and narrow. The Sith attack and conduct active warfare and unprovoked, obvious acts of violence: They are a threat to the Jedi definition of peace.
Sith & Positive Peace:
If you only follow the ideas of what defines positive peace, then there was never any peace. Not even in that phase before TPM, because, while there might not have been broad, open warfare, there was still injustice, crime and corruption. There was discrimination and slavery (even if it might have been outlawed, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist). All of these factors cannot be part of this definition, since positive peace means absence of all of kinds of structural violence (e.g. social or cultural). It's in general a much broader definition of what peace is and it also necessitates a much different approach to how one can achieve peace. It is not enough to be diplomatic and to, if necessary, fight aggressors.
In order to achieve this kind of peace one would have to tremendously influence and/or control social and cultural aspects on a broad scale. This is also the definition of peace that the Sith subscribe to. While all the desired ideals sound like something the Jedi would also want, it is not a priority for them (see: Qui-Gon dismissing slavery in TPM) on the one hand.
On the other hand, I just now have to tell you that true, real positive peace down to the smallest micro-level of social structures is - in contrast to the ideal of negative peace - deeply unrealistic and actually considered a utopia. In a world with multitudes of cultures and backgrounds and histories and therefore endless sources of conflict (in a Star Wars universe those would be infinitely more complex than in real life) it is something that should always be strived towards achieving but is realistically unachievable. In other words: Peace is a lie.
I understand that a first reaction to the Sith and the idea of peace might be, that they don’t care about it. However, I think they might have just a very twisted way of dealing with the subject. But if they outright say it's a lie, that means they must have an understanding of what "peace" is supposed to be. It also means, that their understanding of peace - either because they abhor it or because they believe it to be unreachable - makes them passionate enough about it to make its denial the first line of their most central code.
So I'd say, they actually care very much peace. Yes, in a twisted way, but they do. They build their entire philosophy and identity on the denial of their understading of an abstract concept. Not caring = apathy. The Sith are everything but apathetic.
To take this fruther, in a sense of "positive peace" the Jedi are actually just part of the problem, contributing to the structural violence inherent in the system that they are sworn to protect and are willfully ignoring other suffering in the society. Even if it may bother them, they - in contrast to the Sith - do not take part in politics. And politics is what is influencing the social and cultural levels of society.
Now, that I think about it, every single flaw or "contradiction" within the Sith and Jedi as orders can be based on this.
The surprise about the rise of the Separatist alliance: The Jedi were convinced there was peace aka absence of war. Therefore, they see no need to get involved with anything. They ignore structural injustice, that the separatists are claiming to rebel against (TCW has a lot of good stuff on that). Structural justice is not a core element of what constitutes peace in a Jedi's mind. They begin to realize that something is off over the course of the prequels, but they can't figure out what it is, until it's too late.
Why Sith call for order and justice: While there's a fair share of Sith that are purely selfish, idealistically, there's also the other kind, that desires to implement "order" or "justice" or Palpatine calls it "peace". These aspects are all structural. In fact, they completely ignore the level of "negative peace". They are free to use open warfare and direct violence as long as it justifies the means of building an ideal utopian society where there is order aka achieving positive peace.
Why Anakin is drawn to a totalitarian ideology: He used to be a slave - a horrible position for a little kid to be in. He knows injustice well. He knows, deep down, the direct consequences of the Jedis' philosophy. What negative peace means, is something he learned first hand, when he had to leave behind his mother in slavery, despite a "good guy" - completely able to free her - being right there. An ideology, that instead of absence of war, calls for order and justice is naturally something that he would like, even before falling.
Yoda admitting the Jedi were “blind”: In AOTC he admits that the Jedi were "blind". They are realizing that they made big mistakes and that they didn't pay enough attention to glaring problems. I think that them giving more importance to negative peace compared to positive peace is that problem. I think the Jedi have a more narrow definiton of what peace is, but that doesn't mean that they are satisfied with it.They knew something was wrong, but they didn't understand what it was, because their defintion of peace aka the lense through which they look on conflicts/the world, didn't allow them to see anything but an inexplicably growing darkness. I think that their ideology restricts them from seeing the big picture. They think they do, but that arrogance was part of why they failed in the end.
I could go on, but the list would get too long, so... etc.
Personally, I also realized that this is why I seem to be more drawn to the Sith code. I find myself thinking, quite often, that when people talk about peace and fighting violence that they are often ignoring the social structures that are playing a part and how violence can not only be direct but also indirect. Fighting this is obviously much harder, than just achieving a world without warfare. So putting a focus on that, speaks to me. But I digress...
Ultimately, this is also the reason why Jedi and Sith will never be able to find a common ground. Because if one defines peace as a state of mind or just as the absence of war, of course that person or order will never be able to agree on how to handle the subject and achieve peace with someone who defines it as a social ideal without any sort of conflict at all.
I believe this is also how "balance" between the dark and light factions can be restored on an ideological level. By acknowledging that both parts - positive and negative peace - are necessary to be taken into account to achieve true, long-lasting peace and balance.
