#anti grey jedi
I have recently been informed that the term “gray jedi” actually has several different meanings that noone seems to actually agree on. So, for the sake of clarification, in my Anti-Gray jedi posts, I am referring to the definition of a force-user that uses both the “Light” and the Dark Side in “equal” amounts. That is the concept I am referring to as bullshit.
The thing people in this fandom don’t seem to get is, Yin and Yang aren’t Order and Chaos; Yin and Yang reaching equilibrium is what creates Order, and harmony, and stability, and all that good stuff. The two complementary opposing forces being thrown out of that equilibrium, too much or not enough of either, is what causes Chaos, in the form of things like famines and wars, and that chaos continues to get worse as the forces try desperately to get back into harmony with each other.
For an analogy, let’s look at the elk and wolves of Yellowstone National Park. When the wolves were taken out of the park, what happened was that the elk now didn’t have to worry about predation, so they stopped moving around as much and that led to them overgrazing a lot of areas of the park, which had knock-on effects like reducing the beaver population since they were eating the beavers’ preferred food, and a lot of other animals were reliant on the beavers’ dams and didn’t thrive as much. When the wolves were reintroduced, things started getting better, as the elk went back to moving more often and spreading out their eating. Wolves aren’t good or bad; they’re necessary for the health of the environment.
The Sith and the Dark Side aren’tthat. They’re not the wolves. Wolves are just doing what they need to in order to survive, just like the elk are; Sith do awful shit for kicks or for their own selfish ends. You’ll note the Jedi (at least in the movies) don’t bang on about the “Light Side” the way Sith do about the “Dark Side,” and that’s because the Jedi don’t believe that the Force is split into a Manichean Light/Dark divide of opposed equals, and they’re probably right not to.
Because there is no “equilibrium” to be reached with people whose philosophy is that their own desires are more important than anything else in the galaxy and that any limitation or check on their behavior is something to be destroyed. Daoism is about how nature exists in a harmonious but precarious balance of seemingly opposed but actually complementary forces, but the Sith are only “natural” in the sense that it’s inevitable that some people would choose to abuse the incredible power of being able to see and sense the energy that connects everything in the universe for their own gain and then that some of them would come up with a bullshit pseudo-philosophy to justify it to themselves. The Sith might use the terminology of the “Dark Side” to try to posit themselves as, if not “superior” to the Jedi by seeing a part of it they apparently ignore, then at least their equal-and-opposite, a natural and perhaps even necessary part of the whole, but that’s self-aggrandizing bullshit.
In conclusion, the very concept of “Gray Jedi” is based utterly on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Force and the Dark Side.
