“How The Force Can Save The World” author Stephen Kent joined The Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech on Fox News’s “The Ben Domenech Podcast” Monday to make the case that “Star Wars” is a timeless myth that can help people interpret the world and discipline their own interactions with it.
“I think essentially the primary message of ‘Star Wars’ all goes back to when Anakin Skywalker was leaving home for the first time … and he says to his mother ‘I don’t want things to change,’ and Shmi Skywalker says back to him, ‘You can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the sun from setting,’” Kent said. “And even just as soon as yesterday [a friend] literally had in their Twitter byline, ‘I am angry at the sun for setting.’ … There are people out there who really do not like change.”
The message of “Star Wars” runs counter to our political climate, Kent added. “That war between the Jedi and the Sith, the call towards balance is a call towards not being all of one or all of the other. That’s really, really hard when you think about the way that our political culture is today — that it sort of demands dualism and sort of a segregation of two sides of yourself in all senses, and that gets even worse when you talk about our secularizing society where people don’t believe in anything but themselves and anoint themselves as their own gods and saviors,” he said. “That’s one of the things that’s plaguing young people today, especially on the left.”
“There’s numerous lessons you can take from [‘Star Wars’], but one of them really is responsibility, denial of self, and the kind of stoicism that comes with that purpose,” Domenech noted. “The idea of Obi-Wan living out in the desert forever, in terms of just waiting for what’s going to come to him, is very biblical in a sense.”
Kent agreed that “Star Wars” teaches important lessons about stoicism, adding, “This right here is a call for people to recognize that only they are accountable for their actions in a world where they cannot control the actions of others. You are responsible for your feelings. If someone has micro-aggressed against you, as some snowflake college student might say, it is your responsibility, not theirs, to be the master of what sort of feelings you feel. … That is what ‘Star Wars’ is all about.”
“There’s a line in ‘Empire’ where Yoda tries to stop Luke from going and confronting Vader too early, essentially, and he says, ‘If you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil. The quick and the easy is the type of thing that appeals to Americans today across the board,” Domenech said.
“Expediency does not build any sort of grit or sense of how to deal with adversity,” Kent agreed. “Our strength and our moral courage comes from accomplishing great things.”
Kent proposed that some of the lessons of “Star Wars” mirror elements of the Christian faith. “There’s a huge benefit to just sort of letting go of control in life and accepting that maybe there is a higher power out there who is going to help you and who is going to lead you along the way to conquering the things that you need to conquer,” he said.
