So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed "to bring balance to The Force," but I never understood what it meant.
Star Wars is extremely dualistic--there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.
The "good side", the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide "balance" while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren't. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.
I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that's about as far as it goes.
I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke's vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.
Can anyone square this circle?
Edit: It's funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.
Yes but also no. Due to all the good Star Wars video games and the emphasis on dualism, we think of force powers as separate abilities unlocked on a skill tree, and you have to choose to use or not use them, or it'll make your dark side points go up. That's not really the case though. Everyone uses the Force for telekinesis. Force Choke is just telekinesis, except increasing the pressure specifically around the throat. Sure, you can kill someone and be "good" or Light Side, even specifically that way theoretically. But let's be honest here: it was a way for Vader to torture or kill underlings that questioned him to assert his authority to aura farm. Not out of love, not out of any sense of "I need to do this to make the world better". So it is a "dark side power" in practice, because of your intention.
There is some debate about how Palpatine's master (have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise?) was able to extend life. But at least one popular books says that it was by literally sucking the life energy out of someone else to extend your own life, increasingly having to kill more to extend your life by increasingly shorter periods. The same book states that this is how Vader survived and why Padme mysteriously died "of a broken heart". Palpatine killed her to save Vader, as well as a bonus for him to have full control over him by severing his last connection to his old life. So yes, defying the laws of the universe of life and death, and using life itself (the Force that is a part of us all and we are all part of it) to inflict suffering, pain, and death, just to extend your own life ("you" really just being the Force too that exists for a small period of time, think Buddhism) is definitely a corruption of the Force for evil purposes. But if you were able to do this to sacrifice your own life to save multiple others, or even to save one person who can serve a greater purpose, perhaps that wouldn't be seen as the Dark Side.