Lecture Series "These Rules Are Written In Blood: A History of the Jedi Code" can be found here.
PROF. NIMDOK: Before I begin, I have a confession to make. When I was a child reading about the Jedi and the Sith, I thought that anyone who read these stories couldn’t possibly become a Sith. The reason I thought that, aside from it being the naïve idealism of a youngster, was because I found zero appeal in the Sith philosophy. In many ways, I still can’t. The Sith philosophy clashes with my personality, doesn’t fit anywhere in my worldview, fails to rouse any of my dark desires, and probably gives me indigestion too. I’m mentioning this only because I’m about to give a lecture on the Sith Code, and if some of my commentary seems a little, eh, lacking in depth, you can attribute it to my inability to understand why people become Sith except on a purely intellectual level. Also, this is not a philosophy course, so if you’re looking for deep thinking, I recommend you enroll in one of those.
STUDENT B: What about the Code do you disagree with?
NIMDOK: It’s not so much that I disagree, more that I don’t really get anything out of it. The big thing is that I am not driven. I’m the sort of person who prefers to go off and do their own thing rather than try to work my way up a social ladder, or maneuver through some other established hierarchy. As much as I enjoy making the lives of college students that much harder—I mean, more interesting—I am quite certain I could have found happiness and contentment teaching elementary schoolers about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader for the rest of my life. Being a professor doesn’t mean as much to me as being a teacher, if that makes sense.
STUDENT C: So are you afraid of challenges, or…?
NIMDOK: Here, let me put it another way: much of what it means to be Sith requires that you want something “worthy”—power, love, wealth, fame, and so on—meanwhile I just want to not have to deal with traffic. I don’t claim to be perfect, or even all that moral of a person, but the kind of evil I’m guilty of is much more… subtle compared to your average Dark Lord. By the very nature of their philosophy, the Sith make value judgements based on the grandiosity of their selfishness. If you aren’t able to prove how evil you are to your fellow Sith, you’re gonna get stamped out of the competition, and that’ll be that. Just seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through when you could be cursing at people on the freeway. I get the fascination with Sith, but I don’t get why anyone would want to be like them. Anyway, enough about me and how pathetic and boring I am. Here is the Sith Code, and here is the Je’daii Code. What similarities do you see?
STUDENT A: Power. For the Je’daii, the opposite of fear is power. The Sith equate it to strength, or require that you have strength to be powerful.
NIMDOK: And through power…?
STUDENT A: I gain victory.
NIMDOK: Anyone else?... As you can see, the Sith Code is much more removed from the Je’daii Code than the Jedi Code was. The only concept the two really have in common is this notion of power being, if not beneficial, then at least not a bad thing. We know that the Sith Code was written by the fallen Jedi Sorzus Syn after she observed the Sith purebloods’ culture, but it’s also quite clearly meant to contradict the Jedi Code. It begins with “peace is a lie, there is only passion”—a direct refutation of the opening line of the Jedi Code, “there is no emotion, there is peace”.
STUDENT B: So are the Sith defined by being the opposite of the Jedi?
NIMDOK: In a way, yes. But have the Jedi always been the same?
STUDENT C: Well, they used to be the Je’daii, and they believed power was okay to have.
NIMDOK: The Jedi still have power, even if they put a lot more restrictions on it.
STUDENT J: There are other versions of the Jedi Code, so the Jedi have changed over the thousands of years they’ve been around. Has the Sith Code changed?
NIMDOK: To my knowledge there has only ever been one version of the Code. On the other hand, there are various Sith doctrines—the Rule of Two and the Rule of One, for instance. These things did change, fluctuating according to the megalomania of the top Sith in each era.
STUDENT J: How come it never changed?
NIMDOK: It may be simply that the Code was made for the Sith’s followers. It’s something that can be taught to your students, or drilled in the heads of your underlings.
STUDENT X: Isn’t it kind of dumb that a philosophy about not following the rules has a Code to follow in the first place?
NIMDOK: [Student X], please refrain from dropping truth bombs in my classroom. You’ll kill [Student D] in his sleep, and that’s no way to die.
STUDENT D: Huh?
NIMDOK: Exactly. But like [Student X] put it, the reality of the Dark Side is that it’s more something that results if you fail to walk the line. I would interpret it as being more of a loss of control, despite all that stuff in the Code about breaking chains and gaining power. You give yourself over to your passions, you are choosing to forego restraint, yes, but then you are losing power.
STUDENT Q: Have you ever read the journals of Mace Windu?
NIMDOK: Yes.
STUDENT Q: There’s a part in them where, I don’t remember whether it was the Jedi or the Republic, but he basically equated them to civilization. He was in the jungle on Haruun Kal during the Summertime War, and people were killing each other there. He said the jungle was the Jedi’s true enemy, not the reborn Sith. The jungle is the opposite of civilization, and the Jedi aren’t fighting for peace, they’re fighting for civilization, which is the only way we can have peace.
NIMDOK: He also said that the Jedi are not moralistic, they are pragmatic. Jedi are altruistic not because it’s good, but because it’s safe. Using the Force for personal ends is dangerous, and even the power to do good eventually just becomes power, an end in itself.
STUDENT L: But having too much control can cause just as many problems as no control.
NIMDOK: You can cause problems even if you don’t have the Force.
STUDENT A: Don’t you have to have power in some form to affect people in a negative way?
NIMDOK: I would ask whether destroying yourself can be an evil act.
STUDENT H: The real takeaway I’m getting from all this is that there are lots of ways to do bad things and be evil.
NIMDOK: All of you are asking me philosophical questions. Does anybody still care about the history of the Sith?
STUDENT D: No.
NIMDOK: Ah, that means I can sit down finally.
PROF. NIMDOK: Before I begin, I have a confession to make. When I was a child reading about the Jedi and the Sith, I thought that anyone who read these stories couldn’t possibly become a Sith. The reason I thought that, aside from it being the naïve idealism of a youngster, was because I found zero appeal in the Sith philosophy. In many ways, I still can’t. The Sith philosophy clashes with my personality, doesn’t fit anywhere in my worldview, fails to rouse any of my dark desires, and probably gives me indigestion too. I’m mentioning this only because I’m about to give a lecture on the Sith Code, and if some of my commentary seems a little, eh, lacking in depth, you can attribute it to my inability to understand why people become Sith except on a purely intellectual level. Also, this is not a philosophy course, so if you’re looking for deep thinking, I recommend you enroll in one of those.
STUDENT B: What about the Code do you disagree with?
NIMDOK: It’s not so much that I disagree, more that I don’t really get anything out of it. The big thing is that I am not driven. I’m the sort of person who prefers to go off and do their own thing rather than try to work my way up a social ladder, or maneuver through some other established hierarchy. As much as I enjoy making the lives of college students that much harder—I mean, more interesting—I am quite certain I could have found happiness and contentment teaching elementary schoolers about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader for the rest of my life. Being a professor doesn’t mean as much to me as being a teacher, if that makes sense.
STUDENT C: So are you afraid of challenges, or…?
NIMDOK: Here, let me put it another way: much of what it means to be Sith requires that you want something “worthy”—power, love, wealth, fame, and so on—meanwhile I just want to not have to deal with traffic. I don’t claim to be perfect, or even all that moral of a person, but the kind of evil I’m guilty of is much more… subtle compared to your average Dark Lord. By the very nature of their philosophy, the Sith make value judgements based on the grandiosity of their selfishness. If you aren’t able to prove how evil you are to your fellow Sith, you’re gonna get stamped out of the competition, and that’ll be that. Just seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through when you could be cursing at people on the freeway. I get the fascination with Sith, but I don’t get why anyone would want to be like them. Anyway, enough about me and how pathetic and boring I am. Here is the Sith Code, and here is the Je’daii Code. What similarities do you see?
STUDENT A: Power. For the Je’daii, the opposite of fear is power. The Sith equate it to strength, or require that you have strength to be powerful.
NIMDOK: And through power…?
STUDENT A: I gain victory.
NIMDOK: Anyone else?... As you can see, the Sith Code is much more removed from the Je’daii Code than the Jedi Code was. The only concept the two really have in common is this notion of power being, if not beneficial, then at least not a bad thing. We know that the Sith Code was written by the fallen Jedi Sorzus Syn after she observed the Sith purebloods’ culture, but it’s also quite clearly meant to contradict the Jedi Code. It begins with “peace is a lie, there is only passion”—a direct refutation of the opening line of the Jedi Code, “there is no emotion, there is peace”.
STUDENT B: So are the Sith defined by being the opposite of the Jedi?
NIMDOK: In a way, yes. But have the Jedi always been the same?
STUDENT C: Well, they used to be the Je’daii, and they believed power was okay to have.
NIMDOK: The Jedi still have power, even if they put a lot more restrictions on it.
STUDENT J: There are other versions of the Jedi Code, so the Jedi have changed over the thousands of years they’ve been around. Has the Sith Code changed?
NIMDOK: To my knowledge there has only ever been one version of the Code. On the other hand, there are various Sith doctrines—the Rule of Two and the Rule of One, for instance. These things did change, fluctuating according to the megalomania of the top Sith in each era.
STUDENT J: How come it never changed?
NIMDOK: It may be simply that the Code was made for the Sith’s followers. It’s something that can be taught to your students, or drilled in the heads of your underlings.
STUDENT X: Isn’t it kind of dumb that a philosophy about not following the rules has a Code to follow in the first place?
NIMDOK: [Student X], please refrain from dropping truth bombs in my classroom. You’ll kill [Student D] in his sleep, and that’s no way to die.
STUDENT D: Huh?
NIMDOK: Exactly. But like [Student X] put it, the reality of the Dark Side is that it’s more something that results if you fail to walk the line. I would interpret it as being more of a loss of control, despite all that stuff in the Code about breaking chains and gaining power. You give yourself over to your passions, you are choosing to forego restraint, yes, but then you are losing power.
STUDENT Q: Have you ever read the journals of Mace Windu?
NIMDOK: Yes.
STUDENT Q: There’s a part in them where, I don’t remember whether it was the Jedi or the Republic, but he basically equated them to civilization. He was in the jungle on Haruun Kal during the Summertime War, and people were killing each other there. He said the jungle was the Jedi’s true enemy, not the reborn Sith. The jungle is the opposite of civilization, and the Jedi aren’t fighting for peace, they’re fighting for civilization, which is the only way we can have peace.
NIMDOK: He also said that the Jedi are not moralistic, they are pragmatic. Jedi are altruistic not because it’s good, but because it’s safe. Using the Force for personal ends is dangerous, and even the power to do good eventually just becomes power, an end in itself.
STUDENT L: But having too much control can cause just as many problems as no control.
NIMDOK: You can cause problems even if you don’t have the Force.
STUDENT A: Don’t you have to have power in some form to affect people in a negative way?
NIMDOK: I would ask whether destroying yourself can be an evil act.
STUDENT H: The real takeaway I’m getting from all this is that there are lots of ways to do bad things and be evil.
NIMDOK: All of you are asking me philosophical questions. Does anybody still care about the history of the Sith?
STUDENT D: No.
NIMDOK: Ah, that means I can sit down finally.
