Space Taoism
Given the fact that the Dark Side of the Force (as the Sith, the Empire, or the First Order) always build a planet-destroying weapon that has a single point of failure and the Light Side of the Force (as the Jedi Council, the Rebel Alliance, or the Resistance) always manages to destroy it, I’ve started to see “Star Wars” as a version of the myth of Sisyphus.
Instead of rolling a stone up a hill only to watch it fall down again, it involves piloting a starship down a trench, blowing up the planet-destroying weapon, then watching the Dark Side take another shape and grow again.
(This was inspired by a post comparing the mythology of Middle Earth to the Star Wars Expanded Universe)
It is kind of sad. They have faster-than-light starships, genuine AI, and the ability to build fully-functional hand prosthetics, but they don’t have antibiotics that are effective against a certain intracellular parasite….
(If midichlorians were incorporated into eukaryotic cells like mitochondria were, then at one point they were free single celled organisms.
Fun fact: there are certain antibiotics that can actually damage and kill your mitochondria in addition to damaging and killing pathogenic bacteria, but since they don’t readily cross eukaryotic cell membranes, they usually don’t accumulate enough intracellularly to cause significant problems….)
I think Space Mysticism of any flavor is harmless. The real problem is Space Mysticism that actually works and can easily gaslight people, choke them to death from afar, or instantaneously kill millions of people by guiding a high energy explosive with your mind.
