To Fight for Freedom, or to Fight for Empire – That is the Question
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” –Frederick Douglass
So you’ve answered Shakespeare’s question: to be or not to be? What’s next? I hate to break it to you; it only gets harder. Now you must answer an even more daunting question: fight for freedom or fight for empire? It’s a theme that has haunted the human condition since time immemorial. Indeed, a most intimidating mytheme that has both undermined and propelled the evolution of our species at different times in the overall human leitmotif.
On the one side is Empire: chock-full of status quo junkies and conditioned masses (brainwashed citizens), sycophantic police and military members who blindly obey a corrupt chain of command (storm troopers), and a power-tripping leadership whose power has become so absolute that it can be nothing short of absolutely corrupt (Emperor Palpatine/Darth Vader). On the other side is Freedom: Free men and women questioning and resisting authority to the nth degree (the rebel alliance/Yoda).
