Fear leads to Anger. Anger leads to Hate. Hate leads to Suffering.
Why does anyone assume, given all that we know about Yoda who is very obviously speaking in a second language, that his most famous statements are grammatically correct? This is the same person whose regular subject order clauses generally messed up are. Occupational health and safety officer should he be not.
What would happen if you pass Yoda's statements through some kind of algorithm which could generate the order in which they would become more Yoda-y? If you ran Yoda's statements through the algorithm multiple times, would you end up in a weird kind of nonsense gobbledegook which is then unparseable? Moreover, is it possible to run Yoda's statements through the algorithm backwards and arrive at the proper original meaning of what he meant to say?
If the statement is exactly backwards then you get:
Suffering leads to Hate. Hate leads to Anger. Anger leads to Fear.
All of this seems equally valid and as an aphorism, equally vapid.
I note that the end point of Yoda's arc, ends up with him talking to Luke Skywalker on a planet with weird mountain outcrops and he decides to burn all of the Jedis' writings to the ground. It isn't actually said but maybe Yoda realises that the Jedi religion is rubbish.
If only he'd stopped at the beginning and decided that if suffering leads to hate, then maybe they should have eliminated suffering in the galaxy. I don't know, maybe the Galactic Senate could have done something about enacting Universal Universal Healthcare, finding a cure for cancer, doing something about pollution and recycling instead of razing planets and moving on; instead of flying about the place and waving colourful laser swords like a bunch of ten year old children.
You can test the utter rubbishyness of the Jedi religion by looking at the amount of hope and joy and care for others that it inspired in its devotees. Mr Lord Darth Vader of Cheem who can kill catering with a thought, started out as a promising pod racer and ended up killing children. Ben Kenobi ends up becoming a hermit; as does Yoda and Luke. If someone were to come to me and say "Try this new religion," then all they'd get from me would be "No."
The reverse Yoda statement though, holds things which on the face of it sound perfectly reasonable and profound. The first profundity reads:
Suffering leads to Hate.
It's pretty difficult to argue that this isn't true. If someone is suffering, then it make sense that they should hate the circumstances of their suffering. Likewise, anyone with even a degree of empathy who sees someone else suffering should at very least hate the circumstances of someone else's suffering. If in the former case, the person who suffers doesn't hate the reasons why they are currently suffering then that might indicate a serious loss of hope in their world and that's tragic. In the latter case, if someone doesn't hate the circumstances of someone else's suffering, then that looks a lot like psychopathy.
Hate leads to Anger.
I have heard it said that anger is not an emotion but a reaction. I do not believe this to be true because people's emotions are a thing that an individual has absolute agency in and is therefore a choice. People can choose to be angry or not be angry about a situation, though the difficulty of making that choice varies wildly.
I would argue that hatred itself is a choice and that how one feels about the object of that hatred is actually a secondary action.
Anger leads to Fear.
I do not see this as necessarily being true. Mind you, I also do not see the original order of this sentence "Fear leads to Anger." as being true either. This appears to be a complete non sequitur.
Herein lies the central problem of Yoda and presumably his religion. Yoda himself speaks in aphorisms which simply don't stand up to scrutiny. If upon testing a document (which presumably Yoda is quoting) it fails, then you might want to think about giving it up.
Then again, maybe the whole point of the Jedi religion is to wrap profundities in a cloak of unparseable nonsense gobbledegook as an excuse for its adherents to bounce around with space laser swords. In that respect, Vader, Ben Kenobi, Yoda, and Luke, are all identical.
For those people in the universe who don't happen to posses a space laser sword, then the weak as dishwater religion of Jedi offers an excuse to sound profound and wear fancy cloaks.
"I am the son and the heir,
of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.
I am the son and the heir,
of nothing in particular."
- ancient Jedi hymn.
In universe there are massive Jedi temples; which leads me to think that people really really like wearing fancy cloaks and vapid aphorisms. It also makes me wonder if in universe, there are quaint crime dramas with old biddies going around solving murders... which other Jedi comitted with space laser swords.
Fear leads to Anger? Anger leads to Hate? Hate leads to Suffering? Probably not but based upon the presented evidence:
Jedi leads to murder. Murder leads to crime drama. Drama leads to movies.
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