Star Wars’ Message Can Heal Political Divides. Will Fans Listen?

An excerpt from How The Force Can Fix The World: Lessons on Life, Liberty and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away, a book by Stephen Kent about the political virtues of Star Wars in divided times.

STAR WARS, POLITICS & EMPATHY

“Keep your concentration here and now where it belongs.” - Qui-Gon Jinn

Rey had nowhere to go. She’d been captured by Kylo Ren, the ghoulish villain we first meet in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens during a battle on the forest planet of Takodana. The First Order had laid siege to the region in hopes of snatching up her orange and white rolling droid, BB-8, who was carrying some valuable information. Rey didn’t know much about Kylo Ren, his motivations or his history. She had seen him only once before in a vision when she found the decades old lightsaber of Luke Skywalker on Takodana. When she touched it, Rey was catapulted through time and saw glimpses of the past and future. She was confronted by Kylo Ren first in the rain, surrounded in all directions by the fallen bodies of his victims. Then suddenly she stood deep in the snow covered woods when Ren, masked and cloaked, bearing his fearsome red lightsaber with a hum more like a growl, sprung out of the darkness toward her. Kylo Ren was damn near terrifying, and here he was now looming over Rey as she was bound to an interrogation table. Trapped.

“You still want to kill me,” Kylo says to her in his garbled robotic voice, filtered by the mask he wears. “That happens when you're being hunted by a creature in a mask,” Rey snaps back at him.

What happens next has always struck me when I watch The Force Awakens. Ren says nothing. He simply steps back from Rey, reaches for his helmet and pulls it off. Slamming it down on the table next to them with a crashing thud. Rey looks….bewildered and suddenly uncomfortable in a way her being held captive doesn’t quite explain. Ren is human. He’s a young man (handsome too). This frightful character was not some “ghoul,” and he wasn’t that different from Rey. Her eyes flittered, she squinted. Was this really what was beneath the mask of Kylo Ren?

Have you had that kind of experience before? A moment where your perception of a person or group was shattered in an instant by some act of vulnerability or humility and suddenly who stood before you was not a monster, but a person. I hope you have. But if I’m being honest, those moments are harder and harder to come by in a world increasingly ordered by “user preference.” Empathy is basically one person's ability to understand or relate to the feelings of another. It’s a value that goes beyond teaching your kids how to make friends on the playground. Empathy is more important to society at large than just providing married couples a tool to navigate conflict.

Empathy is a fundamental ingredient of a democracy. It’s how we relate to people that are unlike us on the surface but still find common cause. The only kind of society where you don’t have to worry about how other people may feel about things is a dictatorship, because only one person’s feelings matter in that scenario. More importantly, empathy lends to humanizing our opponents and resisting the gravitational pull of tribal politics, which demands that we reduce political opposites to something other than complex individuals. Star Wars has numerous stories of empathy that intertwine with the goal of creating a more free and open galaxy, of respecting the individual. Whether it’s encounters with alien species or confronting villains shielded by menacing masks, the journey of any hero in the Star Wars universe tends to involve a personal quest for empathy. Sometimes it comes easy, like Princess Leia and her immediate connection with the fuzzy Ewoks on the planet Endor in Return of the Jedi. Other times it’s a monumental challenge, like with Rey’s struggle against Kylo Ren. In a world where the powerful want to limit your cognitive ability to relate to others and build unlikely friendships or bonds of affection, empathy is a rebellious quality. More empathy could help fix the world.

Rebel Scum

Cockroaches. Rats. Parasites. Meat bags. Clones. Rebel scum. You’ve probably heard at least one of these slurs thrown around on the big screen to describe human beings, in iconic movies that leave a mark you can’t soon forget. Hotel Rwanda (2004), a well known drama depicting the 1994 Rwandan ethnic genocide against the Tutsis by an ethnic majority called the Hutus, was where I remember hearing “cockroaches” uttered over a radio broadcast calling Hutus to take up arms and slaughter any and every Tutsi they could find. I was just about 15 years old when my church youth group hosted a viewing of that movie for the express purpose of discussing what it means to be human. Rats, or untermenschen, may be what you picked up from Schindler's List (1993) or your high school studies of World War II and the Nazi led Holocaust of Jews, Gypsies and other minority populations deemed less than human by Hitler’s regime. Soviet propagandists in Stalin’s Russia penned pamphlets describing their German foes as “two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war."

Whether it’s criminal violence or within the confines of war, empathy is a liability. Seeing yourself in others or feeling what they feel, is a barrier that must be “overcome.”

Well meaning people learn about high profile instances of mass atrocity and evil and categorize them as something inhuman, a deed that otherwise normal people stumbled into or were tricked into accepting. The tougher truth to grapple with is that humankind is perfectly capable and even wired to do unbelievably wicked things. What makes us unique in the natural world is that humanity is able to build mental and emotional constructs in which doing those things becomes easier to digest. The words we choose have both meaning and great power. They affect the extent to which we need to tap into our reserves of empathy.

Do you ever wonder how in Star Wars, the people of the Republic were able to stomach the brutality of the Clone Wars? It was a conflict that resulted in millions upon millions of deaths in the war against the Separatist’s droid armies. What did the Republic do to face down the threat in Episode II: Attack of the Clones? The Galactic Senate sanctioned the creation of a Clone army. Those clones, created on an assembly line in a cutting edge factory from the DNA of one Jango Fett, were born in test tubes and raised to fight — and die for the Republic. It’s really quite horrific. The supposed “good guys” of the Star Wars prequel trilogy bred human life for the purpose of throwing those bodies into the gears of war. These weren’t “people” to Republic bureaucrats or even some in the Jedi Order, they were just “clones.” There are few instances on-screen where the inherent individuality of these soldiers is recognized.

It’s no wonder a society this decadent morphed so seamlessly into being the Galactic Empire.

Despite all of it’s imperfection and fraught history, the United States stands as a beacon of democracy and pluralism to the rest of the world. It’s a position that America has earned through trial, through failure and by right of just how radical the American experiment is. A multi-racial democracy, a constitution predicated on individual rights in opposition to the whims of the collective, rights that are endowed by a creator and not the government....these are uniquely American values. Heck, America is one of only a few countries in the world with no official language. It’s a beautiful and incredibly challenging thing we’re doing here.

What ties it all together is a somewhat tedious and unspoken truth, which is that because America is built on the value of debate, difference and deference...we aren’t always going to like one another. But we’re stuck with each other. The alternatives have been tried and are vicious, ugly and dehumanizing. We’re all here in this American republic hoping to be heard, to be seen, to be recognized and have our basic needs such as security, love and belonging met by our fellow citizens.

Empathy helps us to connect with those unlike us, to walk in their shoes, and hopefully in so doing — reach consensus. That’s politics after all, consensus and compromise. When there’s a conflict and politics is no longer on the table, we call that war.

The dark side clouds everything

Something is happening in American politics. The lines are getting blurred between acceptable and unacceptable discourse, between political affiliations that are within the bounds of the great debate and those which are existentially dangerous.

During the January 6th, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol building, in which Trump supporters mobbed the building and ransacked the halls of Congress, one Ashli Babbitt was shot dead by Hill police while trying to get into a secure area. She bled out from the neck as people around her screamed. Babbitt was a well documented supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory that alleges the Democratic Party and State Department are in cahoots to exploit and traffic children around the world, in addition to engaging in Satanic blood-rituals. She died in the company of some deeply unsavory characters, white nationalists and right-wing militants among them. Conspiracy theories make for strange bedfellows. Whether it be evangelical pastors or committed neo-Nazis, the belief has the power to unite them around a shared cause: defeating an evil and subhuman cabal of enemies. It’s a deadly scary movement and one predicated on abandoning empathy for your political opponents in favor of the mantle of quasi-spiritual heroism.

Did Ashli Babbitt deserve to die? My view is that if you storm the U.S. Capitol you certainly shouldn’t be surprised by the use of deadly force. But deserving it is something else entirely. If you were unfortunate to have been on Twitter the following day, you could find a wealth of conviction from people who’d never met Babbitt that were quite certain she did deserve it. Arthur Chu, an eleven-time winner of the TV game show Jeopardy, now a political columnist, took to Twitter to say the following in regards to Babbitt’s death:

“When a bullet goes through the fatty tumor a Nazi has in the space where a human being would have a brain, nothing is lost.”

“A pile of meat that moved and spoke and acted like a person was made to stop moving, and thus could no longer fool people into thinking it was one of them.”

“A Nazi is the opposite of a person, and therefore our morality to them be reverse. To hate them is to love, to harm them is to heal, to kill them is to bring life.”

“You should feel less bad than you do about putting down a rabid animal. In that case the rabies virus and the host are separate entities, one was the victim of the other. A Nazi is the disease.”

Naturally, these Tweets have since been deleted but can be easily found elsewhere. To keep this simple and not get mired in the unknown, Babbitt was not known to have any neo-Nazi or white supremacist affiliations. She was in a mob that included some of those people. From what we know, she was a Trump Republican and a conspiracy theorist. What worries me about Chu’s statements here, beyond the graphic dehumanization of a stranger and the supposed righteousness in doing so, is that there was zero burden of proof required to apply the label of “Nazi” to Babbitt and by extension mark her for death.

I’ll just say it — I have been a called “Nazi” and “fascist” more times by strangers than I can count. Why? Because as soon as I was old enough to knock on doors for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, that’s just a slur a young Republican learns to endure from their most thoughtless opponents on the left. My own brother (whom I adore) has playfully chided my more conservative stances as fascistic in years past, because he’s pretty far left. I used to joke back that he and his anarcho-punk friends saw a Nazi around every corner, and even under their own beds at night. I know (many) self-identified Republicans, even Libertarians, get pegged with that moniker indiscriminately and are angrily accustomed to it, despite it being unfounded and untrue 99.9% of the time.

That being the case, does Arthur Chu and the thousands of people who retweeted and liked his murderous rant feel authorized to kill me? Or certain members of my family who’d call themselves conservative? Or some of my friends who have unfortunately fallen victim to this QAnon madness and voted for Trump?

“To a dark place this line of thought will carry us,” Yoda said to his Jedi colleagues in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, as they gathered round a briefing room table to discuss the possibility of removing Chancellor Palpatine from office — by force. I bring that up not because the Jedi needed to pause and empathize with their treacherous Chancellor, but because they decided the gravity of the situation superseded the necessity to respond with democratic methods and process.

In this galaxy we live in, empathy and a shared sense of both humanity and common purpose is what stands between democracy and — well, everything else.

What’s zapping our empathy?

The immediate problem we face as a society is that numerous studies in recent years have shown that empathy is on the decline. In 2010, Sara H Konrath released a study through the University of Michigan that found college students’ sense of empathy for others had declined nearly 40% between the 1970s and the 2000s. Empathy here was measured by a scale involving both “empathic concern” and “perspective taking,” so taking the emotional component of sympathy while also capturing a person's ability to see things from another point of view. It’s remarkable that as we’ve all become more “connected” than ever, this research shows us drifting apart in a dramatic way.

A popular scapegoat for this decline is often technology. If you’d asked me before researching this issue, I too probably would have also pointed to phones and social media for this unfortunate trend. You see it everyday if you’re online. Friends and family acting toward one another in ways you couldn’t imagine them doing in person. Complete strangers making frightening or even threatening remarks in the comments section. Politics is almost always the inciting factor. We tend to think that the barrier social media puts between us and another person brings out this behavior, but the truth is more complicated. In fact, a 2016 study out of Denmark was able to show slight increases in empathy among adolescents who used social media. What Konrath at the University of Michigan points to as driving the decline in empathy more than anything, is simply the distraction factor, both as it relates to technology and cultural attitudes around things like work-life balance. To make this more concrete, what it means is that we have finite emotional bandwidth, we can only focus on so much. Being bombarded throughout the day by news alerts, comment notifications and texts from Mom about her arthritis...really take it out of you. Then when you’re faced with something simple like making eye contact with a homeless person on the street, or something difficult, like withholding judgment on a family friend posting nasty QAnon theories online, you’re just plum wiped out.

There are a handful of useful studies on distraction and empathy that have shown that when two people sit down to have a cup of coffee, just the presence of a cell phone on the table suppresses the substance of the conversation. “Out of sight, out of mind” applies nicely here. Shalini Misra of Virginia Tech looked at this in a 2014 study, and was able to show that participants got to more personal and weighty topics if their cell phones were not visible. Connection was made that goes beyond talking about the weather and simple pleasantries. The phone isn’t really the problem, it’s everything on the phone that takes you out of the moment, directing your mind to the future instead.

“Keep your concentration here and now where it belongs,” says Master Qui-Gon Jinn to a young Obi-Wan Kenobi at the start of Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

“But Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future,” Obi-Wan responds.

“Not at the expense of the moment” says Jinn.

Well put.

The other element I mentioned was work-life balance. Survival can be a significant depressant on a person's capacity for empathy toward others. I told you about gang members and the struggle to survive and provide in poor neighborhoods. The less dramatic version of this is just whether your culture is geared more toward leisure or work, and boundaries between the two. Americans love to work, and while that’s a noble trait as far as I’m concerned, there’s no doubt that work and the constant pursuit of financial gain dampens empathy overtime. The reason isn’t that complex. Humans most basic instinct is to seek security, and money in the bank equals security. While the average American lives a comfortable life in comparison to other parts of the world thanks to cheap consumer goods and a market that thrives on competition, 70 percent of Americans also don’t have more than $1,000 in savings. Living like that makes every cough your child or spouse gets feel more like an existential crisis than perhaps just a common cold. What if? Could be something else, something awful. Your mind wanders to the bank account and you realize just how vulnerable your situation really is. It takes a particularly empathetic person to then wake up the next day and head to the soup kitchen in service of others, instead of heading straight to work to put in extra hours for a few more dollars.

Han Solo always comes to mind when I think about someone with a work complex but a naturally empathic personality warring for more influence over his actions. You see it in the ending of the original Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope when Han breaks it off with Luke and Leia right before the final battle against the Death Star. He has debts to pay and a bounty on his head, he needs to sort that out, immediately. Luke is crushed, and tells him the Rebellion needs him. Han walks away, he has his own problems. But of course, right in the knick of time in Luke’s moment of need, Han shows up out of nowhere in his ship, the Millennium Falcon, and gives Luke the cover he needs to blow the Death Star to smithereens. We see this same conflict within Han in the 2018 standalone film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, when a younger Han Solo lands himself a haul of a lucrative chemical called coaxium, but the rebellion also could use it in the fight against the Empire. Han, this kid who has always had nothing but the clothes on his back, won’t join the rebellion...but he gives them the coaxium, keeping just enough for himself to place a bet on the Millennium Falcon and win the ship of his dreams in a card game.

Han has struggled his whole life, and while there’s a voice inside him inclined toward selfishness and pride in his own sense of self-reliance, he’s never been able to quiet that louder voice which relates strongly to the suffering of others. Walking in another person’s shoes is not an alien concept to Solo.

Borrowing those shoes

As I am writing this, Joe Biden has just stepped down from the podium after giving his Inaugural Address on January 20th, 2021. He just became the 46th President of the United States. In his speech, something stood out to me about the message he attempted to convey to the nation that gets to the heart of this very chapter. It’s an expression you’ve likely heard.

“-the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don't look like you or worship the way you do, or don't get their news from the same sources you do. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes”

It’s a nice idea. In simpler times this feels like the kind of message almost anyone would agree with. The problem of course is that actions speak louder than words, and when Biden says this, folks on the other side have come prepared with a laundry list of instances when Biden or his liberal allies openly disrespected them or their way of life — or looked down on them. The level of distrust is high.

There’s this moment in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, when Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn tells his padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi, that he’s going back into the city of Mos Espa to wrap up some unfinished business on the planet. Having just liberated Anakin Skywalker from slavery in a bet with his now former owner, Watto, Qui-Gon was intent on bringing the boy along with them on their journey to Coruscant, to train him as a Jedi.

Obi-Wan’s reaction? “Why do I sense that we've picked up another pathetic life form?”

Wow. If Obi-Wan were running for president that may have been his “basket of deplorables” moment. Revealing to the galaxy his general scorn for the unenlightened and unwashed masses beyond the glittering towers of Coruscant. He’s of course referencing Jar Jar Binks, who they had also picked up along their travels and was likely annoying him (and certain older members of the Star Wars audience). It’s a line delivered in some sort of jest, one shouldn’t take Obi-Wan too seriously here, but it reveals a certain aloofness in the young Jedi to the value and struggles of others. Tone deaf at best, callous and contemptful at worst.

I don’t recall a time I’ve spoken with a committed Democrat or Republican and they told me, “I absolutely feel respected by the other side.” We live a polarized age where our partisan news bubbles and echo chambers created by social media feed us stories of open contempt on-demand and all the time. The coverage by MSNBC and CNN of states that voted for Trump casts the people in a negative light, as bitter racists and unworthy. After all, they’re just “flyover states,” so the expression goes, which is a nicer way of saying, “who would want to land there.” After the incident of January 6th, 2021 where the U.S. Capitol was stormed and ransacked by a mob of Trump supporters, Anderson Cooper of CNN took to the air and said of them, “-they’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn that they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and they’re going to talk about the great day they had in Washington.” Come on. Olive Garden, America’s home of unlimited breadsticks, didn’t deserve to be brought into this mess.

The message from Cooper here was clear. This New York City liberal broadcaster thought the rioters were trashy (and they were), so obviously they would be having dinner at the most popular Italian-themed chain restaurant in the country where a family of almost any means can enjoy a white tablecloth meal, anytime. Even I took moderate offense. When I was just starting my family and money was at its tightest, Olive Garden was a destination, not because the food was particularly great but because going there, being served in a nice environment, having the white tablecloth, made us (mostly me) feel like we were doing okay as parents and providers. Going there is literally about a feeling. In a country where wealth inequality is an increasingly hot button subject and supposedly sits high among liberal concerns, this sentiment from Cooper about where average people dine or get a decent hotel room is like with Obi-Wan, tone deaf at best and contemptful at worst. Either way, an unfortunate example of empathy being nowhere to be found in our national discourse.

Fox News and Newsmax churn out the opposite, making every instance of absurdity in Portland or on a college campus into a national story about “snowflakes,” overly-sensitive liberals who can’t survive adversity and whose concerns about injustice are therefore moot. The hosts and panelists will convene, discuss the story, laugh, mock and ridicule city dwelling millennials or minority activists to the delight of their audience. It's a ritual.

The call by President Biden for Republicans and Democrats to walk in one another's shoes is a worthy one, but not easy. Empathy is a powerful virtue to practice and it can move the largest of logjams in a relationship, but what if we struggle to see the person before us as just that...a person? And even worse, what if they don’t want you to see them that way? So they hide behind a mask.

Wearing a mask

Star Wars has a handful of traditions and themes that you can trace throughout its entire cinematic history. Whether it’s the hero who wears white or the villain dressed in black, or the use of music to signal the virtue or evil of any given character, visual symbolism is essential to storytelling in a galaxy far far away. One of those symbols is masks.

The original trilogy, starting in 1977 with Episode IV: A New Hope and continuing with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was mostly made iconic not by its heroes, but by the masked malefactor Darth Vader. Fans were made to wonder for many years what was beneath the mask, what was the full story of this man who Obi-Wan derided as being “more machine now than man?”

Beginning in The Empire Strikes Back, we start to understand. Vader was once a man named Anakin Skywalker, he turned to the dark side and in so doing lost pieces of his humanity along the way. Still, we don’t know what literally lies beneath. While Luke Skywalker is training to be a Jedi on the swampy world of Dagobah with the pint-sized Master Yoda, he experiences a vision of sorts where he battles Vader and wins. When Vader falls headless to the ground, his mask bursts open and a face is revealed. It’s Luke’s face.

Symbolic, of course. We know from this vision Luke experienced that the truth of Vader’s identity isn’t really the point, it’s that Luke too could become like Vader if he’s not careful with the Force. The mask allows anyone watching Star Wars to put themselves inside the black suit of robotic armor and consider, “This could be me.”

Episode VII: The Force Awakens does something similar. The movie's three main characters are all introduced with their faces covered by masks. For the introduction of Rey, she is masked on the desert planet of Jakku, rummaging through a downed Star Destroyer for scrap parts. We quickly learn she’s all alone, abandoned there by a family who she barely remembers. Finn is first introduced as a Stormtrooper. He serves in the ranks of the neo-Imperial First Order, a fighting force composed of kidnapped children from all around the galaxy, brainwashed and raised to fight. Finn is snapped out of his brainwashing by a violent trauma. One of his comrades is struck down in battle, then reaches out with a blood soaked hand, defacing Finn’s mask.

Once he is alone, the Stormtrooper known first by his dehumanizing call sign FN-2187, rips his mask off. What we see is a frightened and upset young man. It’s the first time Star Wars audiences have ever had a real look at the human being inside that famous armor.

Then of course there’s Kylo Ren.

Masks by their nature are hiding something. In some cases it’s something the wearer doesn’t want you to see — ugliness, shame or maybe truth. Sometimes it’s a thing the wearer themselves don’t want to see, or maybe want to forget. In other instances, the mask can itself be a new identity to fill the void created by losing your sense of self and becoming something new. One or all of these things can be true at once. We all wear masks, don’t we? Probably not in the literal sense, but we’re masters of covering up how we feel or who we really are by creating alternate personas to navigate different situations. My wife likes to joke about her “customer service voice” as someone who has worked in the service industry for over a decade. There’s a certain elevation of the voice and the use of a manufactured smile that comes along with certain types of jobs. You probably know of a few.

Sometimes we take on harsh masks as well, to avoid vulnerability and opening ourselves up to feeling hurt. A child acting out at school and being cruel to others can be a mask. Sit them down and ask a few questions, and you may uncover a great deal of pain and unhappiness that they’re covering up with hostility and faux shows of strength.

Mask Up

So what does this have to do with empathy? A lot actually. Our challenge as modern people is to be able to recognize masks both literal and figurative that people around us are wearing, and do the hard work of seeing past them to a person underneath. It won’t always be as easy as Kylo Ren literally removing his mask and humanizing himself before Rey. Let’s look at two examples.

ANTIFA! Have I got your attention? I’m not a fan of this violent leftist gang. The idea that young progressives would dress in all black, cover their faces, march with red anarcho flags and carry an assortment of melee weapons around the downtowns of major U.S. cities is incredibly disturbing to me. They attack journalists, beat innocent bystanders, vandalize businesses and in some cases have torched government buildings. They do this, of course, all in the name of “anti-fascism,” thus their namesake. What’s with the masks?

On the surface it’s totally tactical. Antifa activists mask their identities because it seems that anytime they get together or mingle, a ton of property damage and violent crime just happens to occur in the process. It’s hard to know who is involved with Antifa, and it’s hard for federal and local law enforcement to arrest and prosecute them after the fact when they can’t be clearly identified. Simple enough. But I can’t help but feel like there’s something more going on with these mostly white urbanites who based on some of their other physical characteristics, look like they just left an art gallery opening before showing up to smash cop cars and punch reporters. I’ll just say it — take away the black garb and masks and what’s left is mostly kinda wimpy.

With all of their participants dressed in black, makeshift armor and face coverings, Antifa employs a strategy called “black bloc.” Think about what that means, more so than what it is. You get a whole host of people together, dress the same, strip away individual identity and become one single force. Immediately, you’re not just a mob of Portland baristas and record collectors, you’re a movement — you’re intimidating. Black bloc gives its users anonymity, thus less accountability, while infusing them within a collective. Otherwise weak people are made more powerful by the group. It’s not a stretch to take that idea across the political spectrum and apply it to the life of the average Stormtrooper. In Star Wars, the Empire’s recruiting efforts targeted young people in rough & tumble corners of the galaxy who saw Stormtroopers as warriors and vanguards of order. Sign up for the Imperial military, wear the armor, donn the mask, fight back against crime and lawlessness in your community.

Don’t be a victim — be a Stormtrooper. I want to be clear, Antifa and the Empire don’t have much in common in terms of ideology. Antifa is more communist where the Empire draws more on elements of facisism, but the through line is collectivism and the shedding of individual identity in favor of being part of a group. The mask is step one for truly joining that kind of collective, and it’s also what your opposition will leverage to demonize your cause and dehumanize you in the process.

Masks behind bars

Bishop Omar Jahwar is a spiritual activist and community leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He’s the Presiding Bishop of the Kingdom Covenant of Churches and helped found an organization called Urban Specialists that works to stop violence on the streets of American cities. Gang violence is the primary focus of Omar, who takes a hands-on approach to knowing competing gang leaders in a city and then meets with them to try and understand them better. Part of Omar’s belief and the logic of Urban Specialists is that while urban gangs tend to stumble into cycles of perpetual violence, the vast majority of members within these gangs would like to not die violent deaths. They want to live, and in many cases they’d like to have new lives that don’t involve gangs at all. So his approach is kind of radical. There are plenty of nonprofits dedicated to getting people, mostly young men, out of gangs but there were none focused on simply making the enterprise less violent.

Omar got his start counseling men behind bars who were serving time for all sorts of crime and then aligning themselves with prison gangs. It was there he had this kind of revelation, that while gangs and their foot soldiers are indeed scary to the general public, these are mostly desperate young men trying to survive. In America’s most violent neighborhoods, gangs fill a void for destitute families where they offer both income for young men of the house, and protection by way of affiliation with the gang. For young men lacking stable families to support, the embrace of gangs stands in for the safety that family would normally provide. The cost however, is high. Bloodshed is almost always involved.

I spoke to Omar in April 2020, and he told me that what he realized when meeting with these men was that they were one person with their gang and another person with him. They had bifurcated their own identities, adopting a sense of self tied to the gang and another that was their private, more authentic self. The trouble is that identities war inside of us for control of the entire being, and after enough compromise, enough unforgettable evil, enough killing...the mask that a young man wears to receive security from a gang can consume him entirely.

The culture of Star Wars’ dark side practitioners, the Sith, is eerily similar. When a person commits to the life of a Sith, they take on a new name that begins with “Darth” and in most cases the next part is assigned to them by a master. Their old self is to die with their old name, they cease to be “Anakin Skywalker” for example, and become Darth Vader. When Vader is confronted by his son Luke in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, and addressed by the name Anakin Skywalker, it elicits quite the physical reaction. Vader whiles around, pointing a lightsaber to Luke’s chest, “That name no longer has any meaning for me.”

This is exactly the kind of mentality Omar has seen all too frequently with young men serving time. A combination of disassociation and hostility to an outstretched hand. The mask they’ve chosen is protection, from perceived threats both physical and spiritual. Omar’s job is to try and see past it, help them remove it and if he can — and show them the way back to the light.

Empathy is a dangerous necessity

The thing about Kylo Ren is that he really is a broken individual. Beneath the mask, the boy he used to be...Ben Solo...the estranged son of a rogue smuggler Han Solo and the esteemed Princess Leia, is crying out for an escape hatch of the darkness he’s in. Midway through Episode VII: The Force Awakens we see Kylo huddled in his personal chambers, kneeling over the burnt up mask of his long deceased grandfather, Darth Vader, admitting he feels ‘“the pull to the light.” He wants out. Soon after we get the scene where he reveals his face for the first time to Rey and the audience, and a connection is made. What comes next immediately tears that brief empathetic moment to shreds.

First there was Kylo invading the sanctity of Rey’s mind while she was being held captive. He used the Force to reach inside and see her thoughts and fragmented memories, saying “I can take whatever I want.” A deeply ugly and entitled attitude that for anyone who has ever been victim of an abusive partner, might have felt all too familiar. Any empathy you felt upon the masks removal was diminished.

Then, there was the murder of his own father, Han Solo. In a sense, Kylo killed not only his father, but a father-figure to millions of fans. He did it because his love for his parents still lived inside of him, and he’d decided it was his greatest weakness. The path to redemption was alluring to him, but already convinced of his own monstrous nature and convinced that no sane person could ever forgive him of his crimes, Ben Solo went deeper into the darkness, deeper into the persona of Kylo Ren.

Empathy opens us all up to pain and disappointment. I’m under no illusions that seeking to see the best in people who frighten us is without risk. But what I’m calling on you to do is live riskily and with boldness. If we all chose the bubble wrapped existence of stripping our enemies of their humanity, the world we’d live in would be a horror show of violence and upheaval. Like democracy, empathy is hard. The rewards however, are worth it. Empathy can make you new friends, turn sworn enemies into faithful allies, and break cycles of endless conflict and contempt. For those least inclined to seek it, the outstretched hand of empathy can light the pathway to redemption. The Star Wars saga is a redemption story, only made possible by characters brave enough to practice empathy.

Tips: How to cultivate Empathy

1.) “Keep your concentration here and now where it belongs.” While it’s tempting to blame social media for dampening our collective empathy with echo chambers and fake news, the research has shown it’s more so distraction and exhaustion that is so problematic.

2.) Curb your multitasking. Being present and focused on one thing at a time allows you more bandwidth to feel for & connect with others you might encounter during your day.

3.) Facetime matters. Is your uncle driving you insane on Facebook with his political posts and mean comments? Call him. Go visit. See if the person who angered you online is the same person on the phone with you.

4.) Evaluate your own mask. It can be hard to understand at times, but some people don’t want you to see the real them. They hide, cover up and compensate. Be patient, practice grace and put yourself in their shoes. Take some time to look in the mirror and review the ways you hide parts of yourself from others. It might help you to be more empathetic when the actions of others confound you.