Star Wars theory about the balance of the Force (Patreon)

Okay, this is my masterpiece, a crank Star Wars theory that no one asked for, but here it is.

(If you don't play Star Wars games or watch the cartoons, I'll fill in the context when needed. This is basically building on my theory that the prequels are about the Jedi completely failing to handle a really obvious and easily-solved human problem.)

So in the game Knights of the Old Republic 2, the central villain is a Jedi-turned-Sith named Kreia. She's a fan-favorite for a lot of reasons, but what makes her unique is that she's not ambitious in the normal sense. She's basically Space Ayn Rand. She gives the player advice throughout the game, but it's weird advice: suppress any attachment, only concern yourself with the Big Picture, and just treat the Force as dispassionate tool. 

If you're thinking that sounds like the prequel-era Jedi, you'd be right. Kreia  takes the idea to its logical extreme. She's the Dark Side version of that dispassion: the Force is a means to an end, it's just for her that end is total independence instead of serving the Republic. And that got me thinking that George Lucas's intention may have been that the "imbalance" of the Force wasn't between "light and dark," it was the imbalance between the Living Force and the Cosmic Force.

So the Living Force is a Lucas concept that was sort of downplayed after Phantom Menace but fleshed out significantly in Clone Wars. Basically it's about how the Force comes from living things, the moment-to-moment energy you feel through emotions/empathy. Yoda talks about it a lot when teaching Luke in Empire, but notably nobody besides Qui-Gon Jinn ever mentions it in the prequels.  The Cosmic Force, by contrast, is the more big-picture, fate-oriented thing most people think of when they think of the Force.  It's how Jedi and can see into the future, how they normally tap into the Force at all, and how they center themselves emotionally.

It's confirmed in Clone Wars that the reason prequel Jedi can't turn into ghosts is because of lost understanding of the Living Force, and that Qui-Gon Jinn, by way of wandering and learning about cultures, rekindled  its study and passed it on to Yoda.  

We also see a radical shift in how Jedi train after the prequels, with Canaan (and especially Ezra) in the TV show Rebels, in lieu of traditional teachers, end up connecting with living things via empathy  and normal, healthy attachments. And as previously mentioned, even Yoda teaches Luke things he never taught before about the Force: Yoda even goes from a cold mini-mall setting in the prequels to a swamp surrounded  with living things, where he teaches Luke to feel his emotions and also actually self-assess. That's a great contrast.

Okay, that's all all canon, here's my crank theory: at some point in the past the Jedi discouraged study of the Living Force because they saw it as leading to emotional instability. "Getting too involved" was the path to the Dark Side, but they didn't realize that by only connecting with one aspect of the Force, they were throwing it out of balance.

Anakin's conflict is a microcosm of this contradiction. He's a traumatized kid who desperately needs empathy and connection, and despite their good intentions Obi-Wan and other Jedi can only offer dispassionate platitudes about how it's bad to be angry or have a girlfriend. Clone Wars explores this a lot, where Anakin and Ahsoka are frequently criticized for being "too emotional" when half the time  they're just saying things like "clones are people" and "don't let  everyone die for no reason." Prequel Jedi train to cut themselves off  from the Living Force, and it shows.

There's a scene in Rebels where Yoda tells Ezra about the Clone  Wars- that despite their numbers the Jedi fell to the Dark Side. At the  time I thought this was confusing because it was basically just Anakin, right? But also in Revenge of the Sith, Yoda mentions how strong the  Dark Side has gotten, but how exactly? It's not like Palpatine as an individual was So Strong that he could overshadow all these Jedi. 

But then it hit me, it was always right there: the Dark Side is actually when  the Force is out of balance in any way. Emotional imbalance, sure, but also when there's a disconnect with the world around you. This finally explains to me why in Phantom Menace the Jedi would be so concerned  about a "chosen one" bringing balance to the Force when the Sith have been dead for 1,000 years. The Jedi sensed that the Force was growing out of balance, but didn't know why. Ironically by closing themselves off in a tower and cutting themselves off to the Living Force, the prequel Jedi strengthened the Dark Side and didn't even realize they were the cause.

Qui-Gon was a flawed character and had a lot of mercenary qualities of his era (space racism, stealing a child's blood), but he was the last hope for that era's Jedi. He was the only one who was beginning to piece together a lost art, the lost art of "not being a shit." George Lucas even lays it out right at the beginning:

Obi-Wan: "But Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future."

Qui-Gon: "But not at the expense of the moment. Be mindful of the Living Force"

Then he dies and then the Jedi enable war crimes. WHOOPS