197 - Who Failed Anakin Skywalker?

Right-wing X has been full of pro-Anakin posts, including one Elon Musk shared of an AI image of Emperor Anakin with Padme and their children in Imperial uniforms, captioned "This is what they took from us." Some of that is just meme energy. Underneath it sits a real claim: that the Jedi, read as a bloated liberal order, failed a gifted young man, and that Palpatine at least affirmed his passions and offered a path of belonging. On Mythic Mind Exploring the Psyche, Dr. Andrew Snyder asks who actually failed Anakin Skywalker. Was it the Jedi who raised him, the chancellor who empowered him, or Anakin himself?

He grants plenty of the grievance. Qui-Gon dies early. Obi-Wan clearly loves Anakin, yet treats as a brother the young man who needed a father. The Order treats love as a liability to manage more than as a fire to order toward the good, and the council wants Anakin's power while withholding the rank of master. Palpatine, though, loves him the way the witch loved Hansel. The candy is real sugar, and the house is still a trap. Anakin's fall rides disordered desires that each begin in something genuine: a love of Padme that becomes the glory of being her savior, a hunger for justice that becomes impatient revolutionary will, a longing for paternal affirmation that accepts a false name from a devourer, and underneath them an attempt to make fortune's wheel stand still under his hand. Drawing on Kierkegaard's call to be "in the truth," Boethius on the wheel of fortune, C. S. Lewis's men without chests, and Edmund Burke on inheritance across the living, the dead, and the yet unborn, Andrew argues that soft licentiousness and hard empire are two faces of the same refusal of ordered love. Luke does not save his father by matching power with power. He lays down the saber. The harder freedom is responsibility under what is true, good, and beautiful.

The Abolition of Man, Part 1: Men Without Chests (Mythic Mind, ep. 111): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voOEKAzHrk0

Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety: Anxiety Is Not an Ailment to Be Removed (Mythic Mind, ep. 196): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqA5coEKKnk

Oblivion's Sheogorath and Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death (Mythic Mind Games, ep. 34): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZUgEUzaBXU

📚 Books discussed

The Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard: https://bookshop.org/a/129785/9780691020280

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (Relihan translation): https://bookshop.org/a/129785/9780872205833

The Aboliti