[Star Wars] Why did Jedi care about the prophecy of the one that will bring balance to the Force in the first place? Their order already had enormous power and authority, second only to the Galactic Senate
[Star Wars] Why did Jedi care about the prophecy of the one that will bring balance to the Force in the first place? Their order already had enormous power and authority, second only to the Galactic Senate
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Because the Jedi aren’t the good guys. They’re the balanced guys. They saw the current state of the force as balanced. Only a small few believed the prophecy. Most thought it was just a myth.
They don’t care though. Only Qui Gon cares and when he brings it up he’s mostly met with skepticism as I recall.
The prophecy was from a long time ago, it was a vague vision from a past Jedi that really hadn’t gotten much attention in years since.
It was qui gon who was the most interested in it at first. Qui gon brought this special child who happened to match some of the description of the prophecy, and at the same time told the Council “hey — you know how we thought the Sith were extinct for 1000 years? I think one just attacked me on Tatooine while I was picking up this kid”
THAT’S the interesting part that made the prophecy suddenly relevant again. The Sith had returned seemingly from complete extinction.
They didn’t. The galaxy was at peace and they believed the Sith had been extinct for a thousand years. Apart from that, the Jedi tend to approach prophecy and premonition with a healthy degree of skepticism, because “always in motion, the future is” and visions tend to be vague and open to (mis)interpretation.
It wasn’t until Qui-Gon brought Anakin in, claimed to have fought a Sith Lord, and invoked the prophecy that the Council started to take it more seriously, and even then they didn’t agree to train Anakin at first because the prophecy wasn’t detailed enough and Anakin was too old. It took Qui-Gon being killed by said Sith and having his dying request be that Anakin be trained in order for the Council to take the prophecy seriously enough to bend the rules. And that still didn’t stop several members of the order from distrusting the prophecy and, by extension, Anakin.
They didn’t care about it. It had spent 1000 years sitting in an archive collecting dust. Barely anyone put faith in prophecy by the time of the Prequels and the ones that did tended to focus on more recent prophecies. It was only really being faced with conclusive evidence that the darkside was making a resurgence that made people sit up and consider it, and even then they still were doubtful of it all the way up through to the end of the Clone Wars.
> Their order already had enormous power and authority, second only to the Galactic Senate
I think you misunderstand what it means to be a Jedi. None of that stuff matters to them, the accumulation of power is never their goal. That’s what separate them from the Sith. They only want to make things better for people. Im pretty sure that if you convinced a Jedi that you could make the entire galaxy a utopia but only if the Jedi stopped existing then they would willingly fall on their sword themselves.
So, even though they had all this power within government, it all pales in comparison to the wellbeing of the force and the galaxy itself. The Chosen One prophecy promised to right the imbalance that exists due to the Darkside, and that’s what they ultimately want.
They didn’t. But we were meant to think they did.
My best guess, self denial.
Anakin indeed brought balance to the force, by breaking the power of the Jedis.
After the Battle of Yavin, Light and Dark side users roughly where on equal footing again.
The majority didn’t only Qui-gon. That said, for the rest of the Jedi Order, Qui-gon discovering the chosen the same day a Sith pops up for the 1st time in a 1000 years makes the prophecy a little hard to ignore.
They were tools of the Senate. They were so lost that they thought Balance ment the destruction of the Sith. But neither religion is mentioned in the Prophecy. I think the Prophecy was to get the Jedi back on the Path of Light, instead of tools that sent their children, who they taught from birth to use violence as a last resort, into military commanders.
Because they’re a religious order, and power or authority aren’t their goals, balance and listening to the Force are. The one thing has nothing to do with the other.