Way of the Sith, Continued: Palp Facts

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe continue their Sith-related discussions from Star Wars Week...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And folks, if I sound a little bit groggy today,
I think I do have a bit of a cold.
But we're recording anyway. Since we're going to be talking
about the syth of Star Wars, I thought I'd just
embrace it. I would embrace all the negativity and lean
into the sithiness of this sickness.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
There you go, use it. It will make you stronger, exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
So, a couple of weeks ago, we did a pair
of episodes about the Star Wars universe. One of them
was about the ice planet Hath from the Empire Strikes Back,
where we talked about the fictional sort of theropod dinosaur
goat beast known as the ton Ton, and from that
we jumped into a discussion about actual dinosaurs that we

(00:58):
now know lived in a polar environments, which is pretty
cool and very surprising if you grew up like I did,
thinking that dinosaurs were ownt were exclusively inhabitants of steamy
jungles and you know, deserts, surrounded by molten lava. We
also talked about the wampa and its relation to real
life predators, as well as the infamous town Toon sleeping

(01:20):
bag scene, and from that we got into the history
and science of trying to crawl inside a dead animal's
body for warmth. People in reality have done it.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, listener, males keep piling in about this one.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
By the way, Yeah, it's generating some good stuff. Then
in a second Star Wars episode, we shifted gears and
talked about syth psychology, the Syth being the elite order
of practitioners of the dark side of the Force. So
characteristics of the Syth that we discussed from last time
obsession with power, a might makes right mentality, so a

(01:57):
belief in strength over principle. Not I do it because
I should, but I do it because I can. An
open embrace of negative emotions, seeing negative impotions as empowering
or fueling the acquisition.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Of more power in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
And then also the fact that they operate mostly in secret,
maneuvering through treachery, backstabbing.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Manipulation, and cruelty.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
And in the last episode we ended up talking largely
about the siths so called rule of two, Rob, can
you do a quick refresh on this? What's the organizational
structure here?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Always too? There are a master and an apprentice. That's
pretty much it, right. There is a master, there's an apprentice.
The master is promising power and withholding power and secrets.
The apprentice is lusting for power, is hungry for power
and dominance. And therefore this kind of like hateful relationship

(02:56):
between master and apprentice is able to They're able to
coexist for period of time until such time as the
apprentice is powerful enough and knows enough of the secrets
to slay their master and become the new master and
then take on new apprentice.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
So, from this we discussed the theory and practice of
conspiracies composed of only two people. Sometimes you run into
problems there. Religions composed of only two people problems there
as well. And we also talked about how succession often
works in the somewhat comparable world of elite business. Common
problems that arise during the succession of one CEO to

(03:36):
another in a big company. Now, of course, a lot
of these examples that came up in the episode from
Star Wars pertained to Darth Sidius, the main Sith Lord
in the main Star Wars series, also known as Emperor Palpatine,
and for that last Sith episode, it actually prepared a
whole other segment that we ended up not having time

(03:58):
to record in that session. So we're coming back today
and expanding on that. It is a perhaps recurring segment
that I would like to call Palp Facts, where we
review and discuss words of wisdom from the lips of
our beloved Emperor Palpatine. Because of course, you know, many
people admire the Emperor's way with words, but I think

(04:20):
it does not even insult him to say that the
words he speaks may not be entirely true, since the
Sith openly embrace lying and manipulation, and so I think
the Great Palp can do with a bit of a
fact check every now and then.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
You know, Joe I actually spoke with Emperor Palpatine earlier
today and he said that he's very much in favor
of this series and he thinks it should go a multi.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Part Oh, the Emperor will be listening. Yes, yes, then
I will do my absolute path. We will redouble our efforts. So, yeah,
we're going to look at some Palpatinian proverbs in this
episode and maybe in future installments of this as a
series and see to what extent they stack up with
observable reality and what the research literature has to say. So,

(05:05):
the first palp fact I want to look at is
about anger. The line in question comes in the movie
Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, episode three. The context
of the scene is that before becoming Emperor, at this point,
Senator Palpatine has been developing a relationship with the young
Jedi Anakin Skywalker. He is trying to cultivate Anakin's loyalty,

(05:31):
and he is subtly kind of twisting the knife in
turning Anakin against the Jedi order, dropping these little bits
of poisoning that other relationship.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
Would you say that's fair, Rob, Yes? Yes.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Above all else, Palpatine is a master manipulator and is
just always subtly tuning things in his favor.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Machiavelli into the core. So, Palpatine has for some time
been hinting that there is a looming danger to Anakin's wife, Padme.
In fact, I think Anakin has some premonitions of this himself, maybe,
or does Padme have them?

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Somebody has dreams, Anakin has dreams, Yeah, so he has
this growing feeling certainty that something terrible is coming and
he has to do whatever he can to stop it.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Right, and so Palpatine is hinting every now and then
that he himself has access to knowledge that could save
Padme from certain death. Now where does this knowledge of
power over life and death come from? Palpatine reveals in
a pivotal scene that it comes from the dark side
of the Force, with which he is secretly more than

(06:39):
a little bit familiar. And in the scene, Anakin is shaken.
His relationship with the Jedi has been rocky, but he
is still a Jedi. He's still fully allied to the
good side of the Force, and he knows to be
wary of the dark Side and his false promises. So
now this guy, this kindly white haired Paul Titian who

(07:01):
has slowly been becoming his mentor and patron, reveals that
all along he was an adept of the of the
dark Side, which is very disturbing. So Anakin draws his
lightsaber and he accuses Palpatine of being the secret Sith
Lord that has been commanding the Jedi's enemies over the
whole storyline so far, And then standing with his back

(07:22):
to Anakin, who has his lightsaber drawn. Palpatine asks, are
you going to kill me? Anakin says, I would certainly
like to, and Palpatine says, almost orgasmically, he's really feeling it.
He says, I know you would. I can feel your anger.
It gives you focus, makes you stronger. And I thought

(07:44):
that was interesting because that is a testable proposition. Does
anger give you focus? Does anger make you stronger? And
that's what I want to look at by examining some
of the psychology literature on this.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yes, an interesting question to get into, because, of course
anger is not exclusive to the dark side of the force.
You know that there is. We often hear talk of
righteous anger and a lot of discussion of like, in
what cases is it okay to feel anger, express anger
even and then of course process that anger in a

(08:18):
healthy manner. The sith of course, I think you can
say that their treatment of anger is let it go
ahead and fester, let it go ahead and mature into proper,
full blown hatred, let it rip. Yeah, exactly. They don't
just get angry, They stay angry, and they just let
it boil over into hatred.

Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
I think that's right. So human beings are not all
going to be prone to anger to exactly the same degree.
Sometimes we might be able to have conscious efforts to
limit our own anger in certain ways, and so we're
not all equally angry, But all humans have some susceptibility
to anger. Everybody's going to have some anger sometimes. I

(08:58):
think what separates the syth from just the common emotional
state of humanity is that they embrace it, go with it,
use it.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, Like, you might know that you might become angry
if you start scrolling the news first thing in the morning,
and therefore you might avoid doing so. Not so with
the Sith. They know that scrolling the news is going
to make them angry. They get up early to do
it so they can They can get angry, stay angry,
and let it become hatred.

Speaker 4 (09:28):
And get revenge. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
So addressing this question, does anger make you stronger? Does
anger give you focus? I was somewhat surprised by what
I found in my research here, because after digging into this,
I think I have to give this a ruling somewhere
between partially true and mostly true. It depends on what
exactly you're trying to do or optimize for and I'm

(09:51):
surprised by this because I personally almost always think of
anger as something that clouds judgment and impair focus. It
makes people make choices that they later regret, and I
know factually this is true in many people's lives. And
it turns out that this is not exactly wrong either.

(10:11):
This is also true. Anger does also cloud judgment and
impair focus. It does also make people act impulsively and
make choices they later regret, but in specific ways, anger
can in fact be a functional performance enhancer. So I'm
going to untangle this not as we proceed and try
to tease out this tension between seemingly opposed facts. All right,

(10:36):
so first, let's refer to one major recent paper on
how anger can be a functional performance enhancer. This paper
is by Heather Lynch, Noah Reid, Tiffany, George Caitlin Kaiser,
and Sophia North, and it's called Anger has Benefits for
Attaining Goals, published in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology in twenty twenty four. The research here was conducted

(10:59):
out of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at
Texas A and M University. In their background section, the
authors start by highlighting what they call the functional account
of emotions. This is the idea that emotions are adaptive traits.
They are traits selected by evolution, which we are not
just subject to. Emotions are not just something we must endure.

(11:23):
Emotions do things for us which in the ancestral environment
helped with survival and reproduction. And within this framework, the
authors compare our emotional capacities to a Swiss army knife,
which has different tools for different tasks. So you know
your Swiss army knife. You got the knife for a
lot of major You know your standard whittling and all

(11:46):
of the kinds of stuff, but you've also got the
sewing needle and the corkscrew and you need to open
a bottle. And they say our emotions are like this,
different emotions for different types of situations and challenges. If
you think about this, you can probably recognize in your
own life that if you are feeling a strong emotion,
there's a very good chance it stems from the relationship

(12:08):
between your current situation and a goal. How far are
you from a goal or a desired outcome? Are you
getting closer to that desired outcome or farther away if
you are not getting closer to it. What is preventing
you is something bringing an undesirable outcome closer to you.

(12:29):
That most of the emotions you can think about feeling
have some kind of interaction between my current situation and
what I want, And studies show indeed that in a
lot of situations, the emotions we feel can be traced
back to these kinds of situational inputs. Also, the emotions

(12:49):
that we feel change how we react to these situations.
Emotions are internal behavior modulators that should, at least in theory,
help us react in ways that make us more likely
to achieve our goals, and this study looks specifically at
anger through that lens. Now, there are several major accounts

(13:09):
of the functional value of anger. These are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. I'll mention just a couple of the ideas
that they review. One is what you might call the
challenge account of anger. Quoting from the paper here. Quote
Anger results when a goal is obstructed and requires attention

(13:29):
if it is to be attained, or a frustration eliminated.
So essentially, anger is what you feel when an obstacle
or obstruction appears that prevents you from getting what you
want and under this account, anger is the emotional state
that promotes readiness for action. It promotes a type of

(13:52):
reaction in your brain and in your body that gets
you ready to meet that challenge. It motivates you to
overcome the obstacle and beat it or overcome it, and
also motivates you to keep fighting and persisting against that
challenge until it becomes clear that the goal has been
attained or is impossible to achieve. Another interesting account they

(14:24):
bring up is known as the recalibration theory. This is
more a human to human social framing which says that
anger arises from perceived injustice or mistreatment. So under this model,
a person becomes angry when they feel that others are
in some way not placing enough consideration on.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
Their needs or desires.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
To quote from an author named cell in twenty eleven
in an important paper on recalibration theory, quote, the function
of anger is to recalibrate individuals who place insuf wait
on the welfare of the anger individual when making decisions.

Speaker 4 (15:05):
So under this.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
View, anger is sort of a relational bargaining chip. It's like,
you are not treating me as well as I think
I deserve. Therefore I will use anger associated behaviors like
threats and social retaliation, potentially even violence until you appropriately
increase the psychological wages you pay me in consideration for

(15:28):
my welfare and my desires. And note that a couple
of important things under this kind of framing recalibration idea,
anger could be abstracted onto concern for the welfare of
others as well. And in fact, many studies show that
one pretty reliable way to trigger anger reactions in people
is to show them like images of somebody just being

(15:51):
bullied or mistreated.

Speaker 4 (15:53):
That is like a reliable way.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
To induce anger in people. So it doesn't necessarily have
to be centered on the though obviously a lot of
our you know, the majority of our emotions in our
lives are going to be centered on the self, so
a lot of it is going to be about mistreatment
or perceived mistreatment of the self. It also, on this account,
I would say, doesn't need to arise from objective injustice.

(16:15):
It's just about the perceived mismatch between treatment and expectations,
whether that perception is objectively fair or not. And I
think you could probably see plenty of examples with this,
with the SITH getting very angry about not being treated right,
when in reality they're just getting angry because they're not
getting some special exceptional treatment they believe they're entitled to.

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
Now, these two models, challenge and recalibration sound pretty different,
but I think they're, at least in my reading, they're
not necessarily at odds with one another, because you could
frame the recalibration theory as a particular social human to
human instantiation of the challenge account. So a person not
respecting your welfare or your desires enough is functionally an

(17:02):
obstacle to your goals, and studies show actually that displays
of anger can remove these social obstacles. So getting angry might,
in social situations, cause someone to give in to the
angry person's desires. It might cause people to take their
side in a situation, or it might cause a person

(17:23):
who is interfering with them getting their desires to remove
themselves as an obstacle to the angry person's plans. You
can probably think of situations like these that you've seen
in your life. Anger can sometimes prompt joining and alliance
from onlookers and third parties, whether that anger is justified
righteous anger. It can bring people to your side, or

(17:44):
if it's you know, very unjustified anger, it can get
people into the bullying mob.

Speaker 4 (17:49):
It does.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
It works both ways. Anger can also make people give
up resistance and disengage. I think we've all had this
experience too. You are inter fearing with what somebody wants
because you think you're supposed to or whatever, but the
person just gets so angry. You're just like, I'm out,
I don't want to deal with this, and you just

(18:09):
let them have their way anyway. Operating primarily from the
challenge account of functional anger the author's right quote, the
problem that causes anger is the perception of challenge to
goals that are still attainable, and therefore functional accounts predict
that anger will result in greater goal attainment in situations
that involve challenge. So that is what they set out

(18:33):
to study in this paper, not just whether anger can
lead to behaviors that theoretically could help with beating obstacles
and attaining goals that had already been shown in some
other studies. In this case, they were looking at whether
feeling anger actually does lead to accomplishing goals in reality.
In their summary the author's right quote, in seven studies

(18:55):
goal attainment was assessed in situations that involved varying levels
of challenges to goal attainment. Across studies, anger compared to
a neutral condition resulted in behavior that facilitated greater goal
attainment on tasks that involved challenges. So that's the top line.
The authors found that anger does, actually, at least in

(19:17):
the types of tasks they tried, help people achieve goals,
with the caveat that the kinds of goals studied are
fairly simple. They are self contained laboratory tasks, and it's
possible that the same patterns would not manifest for real
world goals, though I suspect they would for certain types
of goals. We can talk about that more at the

(19:38):
end if you want, but a few specifics from the
paper that I'd like to get into. One was the
question I was wondering, how is anger manipulated? Like, how
do you make people angry for the purposes of a study.
It's a hard thing to calibrate. So it was a
mix of different methods across the studies. In the first
few studies, the participants were undergraduate university students, and the

(20:02):
authors used slide shows of images in part from a
database of images designed to provoke specific emotions. This is
called the International Affective Picture System, supplemented with some additional
pictures made specifically for this study. And with these slide shows,
they had multiple emotional groupings, so you'd have amusement images.

(20:24):
This was stuff like cute animals, babies, ducklings, laughter, that
sort of thing. Desire images here, it's a lot of
pictures of chocolate, cake, desserts and fudge and stuff. Sadness images,
images of people at funerals, pit upful animals and things
like that. And then the anger category consisted mostly of

(20:44):
for one thing, you had images of anger like showing
people displaying overt anger, angry faces, pointing accusingly. And then
you have this is a reliable, pretty reliable trigger of
anger in studies like this, pictures of bullying and in justice,
like a bigger person picking on a weaker person. Or

(21:05):
They also used direct group insults like graffiti or cartoons
insulting people who go to the school that the subjects
went to. They also used harsh insults to the school
sports team and its fans.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Not my sports team.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Yeah, well, so you know, I was like, how people
get upset about that? But then I remembered some people
actually do people do, yes, but I just can't. But
you could imagine other things that you care about.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Whatever kind of thing you're heavily invested in, like a
movie you're excited about, an album, whatever it happens today,
you know, someone starts yucking you'r yum. You can feel
a bit defensive about it, you know.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Only yeah, only the dumbest, like whatever you like.

Speaker 4 (21:48):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
So there were also emotionally neutral images, and it doesn't
describe these essentially, so I was wondering what they were,
like square triangle.

Speaker 4 (21:57):
Maybe I don't know.

Speaker 3 (21:58):
So the subjects were told that this slide show to
try to throw them off. They were told that the
slideshow was for a memory task later in the experiment.
This was misdirection. And then a self report found that
the images did indeed provoke the intended emotions in each
case oblique to the study, but I thought it was
interesting that sadness was the most easily provoked emotion by

(22:20):
the slide show, and the anger provoking images did make subjects,
as far as they self reported, significantly more angry. And
then after these manipulations, experiments found, first of all, in
an experiment presented to subjects as a test of verbal intelligence,
kind of subtly implying that in order to prove their intelligence,

(22:41):
they should do well. Subjects tried to unscramble these different
sets of anagrams at different levels of difficulty. Interestingly, the
experiment found that angry subjects solved significantly more anagram puzzles
at the higher levels of difficulty than subjects in other
emotional conditions, and it's worth noting that anger only seemed

(23:05):
to make a difference with the hard puzzles. Angry people
did no better than non angry people on the easy anagrams,
and the authors interpreted this as a result of angry
people displaying greater persistence on hard puzzles. Indeed, angry subjects
spent longer on the hard puzzles before giving up on

(23:25):
them and moving on, which resulted in them solving a
greater number of the difficult anagrams.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Wow, so I don't scroll the news first thing in
the morning, but I do attempt to solve the wordle
first thing in the morning. But it's sounding like maybe
I should get angry by reading the news first so
that I'll have everything more revved up for puzzle. Solving.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
I think it's possible that could work, but I think
getting angry might overall have more negative consequences on your life.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, the juice is probably not worth the squeeze on this.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yes, it's true. I think it might possibly give you
a greater mindset of persistence in the face of challenges
for this immediately following task. So in the second study,
researchers used a similar emotional provocation, and then they used
a puzzle test where you could win prizes for logic

(24:19):
puzzles that you solved. Unfortunately, the puzzles used in this
test were designed to be extremely difficult, so students did
not have much hope of doing very well on their
own merits. However, in this test, researchers presented participants the
opportunity to cheat. The researcher left the room while the
puzzles were being solved, and then allowed the participants to

(24:42):
self report the number they had successfully solved and then
discard the problem worksheet, destroying the evidence, or so they thought.
And this study found that students were significantly more likely
to cheat when they were angry. Now, of course, this
is in no way a moral and horsemen of cheating,
not by the authors here, But in a very practical sense,

(25:03):
cheating absolutely is a strategy for attaining goals. In reality,
it's just a way of, you know, I'm going to
go around what I think is people are supposed to do,
and I'm just going to get what I want. Cheating
in this sense does help us win, and anger seems
to possibly make us more likely to cheat, to break
rules in pursuit of desires, and maybe would make us

(25:26):
even more likely to dabble in the dark side. I
don't know to say, I'm not supposed to do this,
but all these things are standing in my way and
I can't do it, and I need to get it,
and so I'm just gonna I'm going to use the
dark side.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, I mean we see this all the time in
Star Wars, right, like get the noble Jedi angry. Not
only will they will they fight you, but they are
they're going to maybe fight a little dirtier, They're going
to fight more like a Seth. And so you almost
get a two fer on that one, right because now
they're angry, then maybe they're cheating a little bit, like

(25:58):
they're playing more and more into your hands.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
That's true, you know, you even see that in earlier
before the Syth was really expanded on in a lower
sense in the prequels. In Return of the Jedi, I
get a large sense that that is what the Emperor
is trying to get Luke to do in the final
fight in the second.

Speaker 4 (26:15):
Death Star with Darth Vader.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
You know, he's asking him, given to anger, given to hate,
let the hate flow through you. But he's also trying
to encourage him to, in a literal and practical sense,
fight dirtier in the fight against Vader, which will dirty
his soul in doing so.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, So another study tested for the effect of anger
on performance in a skill based video game. It was
like a skiing game of some kind. Interestingly, anger improved
performance relative to other emotional states only when the game
was hard. Anger did not help when the game was easy. Again,
it seems that anger's effect on performance is probably related

(26:56):
to persistence, to making you keep trying to overcome challenges,
to focusing on goals and trying to force yourself over
obstacles and toward challenges, perhaps at the expense of other considerations,
I mean, even considerations like honesty and honor.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
You know this is this even talking about playing games,
video games, or otherwise. This would this is like a
whole separate area we could come back to at sometimes
point in the future. You know, there's a lot of
talk about like getting tilted when you're playing a game,
you know, where it's like you've lost your confidence, you've
lost your mojo. Take a break from it because you're
just going to keep losing. And you know to what
extent that is true, You know, you hear that all

(27:37):
the time, like the game's making you angry, maybe you
should stop playing it because it's not fun anymore. But
we can all think to times, especially with frustrating video games,
where we got angry at that game and we did
not stop. We were in that mode where it's like
I am not enjoying this game. I kind of hate
this game, but I'll be darned if I'm gonna kind
to let this level beat me. And if you keep

(27:57):
grinding at it until it's just excrudeciating and then you
finally beat that level and then you get like an
easy part of the next level and you keep playing
for some god awful reason.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
Yeah, but no, I think this is actually a personal,
not a perfect common illustration of exactly what's being studied
here at work, that.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Feeling of.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Anger driving you to a higher level of persistence in
the face of obstacles than you would normally entertain.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, it's just sometimes they are like fake obstacles, like
a video game. Yeah, this is not the sort of
thing that our evolution has really been preparing us for.

Speaker 4 (28:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
So, in short that there were three more studies in
this paper. They found that anger sped up reaction times
in a time to task and cause players to persist
more in trying to improve reaction times. They also found
that anger predicted efforts to vote in upcoming elections, so
the level of anger about upcoming elections correlated to actual

(28:55):
voter turnout. And then also they found when compared to
no on emotional physiological arousal, anger was more likely to
make people I think it was sign a petition to
protect their financial interests. So this was testing. It's not
just about like arousal and elevated heart rate, blood pressure
and that sort of thing. It's the specific emotional motivational

(29:18):
state of anger.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Politicians should take note of this. You can you can
make people angry and exploit it.

Speaker 3 (29:24):
Okay, that's that's very novel. Very interesting. Yeah, you brought
up the idea of being on tilt in a game,
you know, so that might make you very angry and
persistent in this video game and eventually beat the level.

(29:47):
But I know of another use of the phrase on
tilt in games, and that is in gambling games where
it's player versus player games like poker, where to my understanding,
the idea of being on on tilt means you have
become so angry that you are behaving irrationally, and a
common maybe not that common. But the way I understand

(30:09):
tilt as a strategy in poker is sometimes poker players
will intentionally try to make other players angry in order
to make them behave less rationally with their betting behavior.
And that brings us back to my original instinct that
anger cloud's judgment and interferes with goal attainment? Was that

(30:30):
just totally wrong? Now that we've seen the study that
anger does help people break through obstacles and get to
their goals, No, that is not wrong. Some studies do
show also that anger cloud's judgment and interferes with goal attainment.
I think the difference comes down to it's complicated, but
I think the big difference is in what type of

(30:50):
problem you're trying to solve and what is needed in
order to solve it. So a few examples of this
kind of research. One thing I found is a twenty
nineteen study in the journal Motivation and Emotion where Schmidt, Gielnick,
and Sebel tested the effects of anger on problem solving
in goal pursuit, and they actually found something interesting.

Speaker 4 (31:12):
They found if you don't.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Already have a clear and effective plan in place to
accomplish a goal, anger actually makes you show less persistence
in your efforts, which makes you less likely to accomplish
the goal. Quote. Across both studies, self reported anger during
goal pursuit is negatively related to later goal achievement through

(31:35):
a decrease in persistence when participants action planning is low.
So these authors also found that when action planning was high,
anger was unrelated to goal attainment. It neither helped nor hurt,
and so anger in this case they find that anger
doesn't necessarily help you achieve goals if what you need

(31:57):
to do is unclear. So what about in figuring out
what you need to do in the first place. I
think this is another area where it seems pretty clear
to me that the Sith wisdom is totally wrong. If
you are trying to strategize and figure out what you
should do, the embracing anger path is very misguided. Multiple

(32:19):
studies over the years have found that anger can impair
higher order logic, planning and decision making. Just one example,
I came across a twenty twenty one study in the
European Management Journal by Meisner, Peinskin, and Wolf called how
hot cognition can lead Us astray The Effect of Anger
on Strategic decision making. This study made a distinction between

(32:42):
what they call simple decisions and strategic decision making, and
they say that strategic decision making is quote characterized by complexity, ambiguity,
and a high information load. And in a field experiment
they conducted with the participation of fifty two business executives,
they found that anger was negatively correlated with the quality

(33:05):
of strategic decisions made when later assessed retrospectively. Decisions which
required complex thinking, dealing with ambiguity and synthesizing a lot
of information led to worse outcomes when they were when
those decisions were made while the person was angry. Now,
another interesting thing here is that the authors say that

(33:28):
while there was some conventional wisdom that while anger might
be bad for this kind of high level thinking where
you need to deal with lots of information and ambiguity,
anger might at least have the benefit of speeding up
simple decision tasks, making you more decisive when the path
forward is pretty simple and clear. And the authors say, actually, no,

(33:49):
they didn't even find this. Angry participants showed no benefit
in simple decision speed in this study, and this is
mirrored in other research in the field. I was just
reading an article in The Atlantic from twenty sixteen by
Olga Kazan called the Best Headspace for Making Decisions, And
this article was going into more a general overview of

(34:10):
the relationship between emotions and decision making, and so it
quotes a researcher named Jennifer Lerner, a professor of public
policy and management at Harvard who's done a bunch of
research on the effects of different emotions and decision making.
And according to Learner and colleagues, anger is what they
call an activating emotion. It creates a bias for approach

(34:33):
behaviors at the expense of caution. So anger tends to
make you more confident and eager to act. Anger makes
you more impulsive, so when you're angry, you are more
likely to take big risks and to ignore or discount
the severity of risks. Anger also makes you more likely

(34:54):
to assign blame to individuals rather than to impersonal forces
or circumstance factors. You know, it's like, you know this
is Ted's fault. It's not, you know, just the situation.
Anger makes you crave rewards more intensely, and it tends
to make you more biased toward simple explanations rather than

(35:16):
complex ones. So putting together this whole picture we've been
painting of how anger relates to behavior and decision making,
you can see how anger could be very helpful or
very harmful, depending on what you're trying to do. Like,
anger might well help if your problem is Doug keeps
bullying me and stealing my food, and I need to

(35:37):
hit him hard enough to make him stop, but he's
bigger than me and I'm scared of him. In that case,
the anger might help you, like, we'll get over that
fear and get the confidence and face the challenge to
just fight him and try to make him stop. But
anger probably hurts you overall if the problem is something
that requires ambiguity synthesis of information. You know, if the

(35:57):
problem is I need to understand why my business is
performing poorly and come up with the plan to fix it,
or I need to understand you know, politics or business
or anything that's like a complex system. So my view
after reading all of this is that planning and deciding
while angry is usually not a good idea. So this

(36:19):
is this is going to be my overall assessment. I
think when the task required to accomplish goals is fairly
simple or concrete, that task is something like subdue the
Sith Lord, and when you already have a strong action
plan to follow, like beat him in a lightsaber duel.
Anger quite possibly does give you focus and make you stronger,

(36:43):
in particular by enhancing persistence and motivation. It might also
make you a dirtier fighter. But as we've been talking
about in the Star Wars examples, that might help Luke
Skywalker beat Darth Vader in the fight, but it also
might dirty his soul in ways that follow him for
the rest of his life.

Speaker 4 (37:01):
Now.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
But the other side is when the task required to
accomplish goals is complex and requires higher order rationality and
decision making. If the task is like navigate this political
situation involving the Jedi in the Senate, and if you
don't already have a clear action plan figured out, I
think anger is almost always going to hurt you there.

(37:22):
It's going to lead to impulsivity, dumb decisions. It's going
to make you think complex things are simple. It's going
to give you over confidence. It's going to make you
take unnecessary risks and lead to bad strategic moves.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
This is fascinating because it makes you think more and
more about the character of Palpatine slash Darth Sidius. Certainly
we see a lot from him when he is being
his more or less true self to what to whatever extent,
there is a you know, a true self on display here.
Since he is always manipulating people, there is often a

(37:58):
seething hatred to that persona. But at the same time,
you know, there is a sense of someone who is
also cold and calculating, and it would it would make
sense that he would need to be able to modulate
his own anger and hatred pretty regularly in order to
carry out these long term complex plots, manage underlings, and

(38:21):
also engage in such manipulation of those around him. So
you know, I can see where it would make sense
to actively encourage anger on the part of his apprentice
and his apprentices and those that he's attempting to bring
into the fold. But I would imagine there would be
a certain amount of modulation required in the part of
a true Sith master.

Speaker 4 (38:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
I think that's exactly right. I was thinking about this
in the last episode actually, when we were talking about
sith the other time, about how the Emperor, even though
he encourages anger and says it gives it gives strength,
you don't really see him acting out of anger very much.
He feels more like a more purely Machiavelian, cold calculating

(39:07):
manipulator rather than somebody who acts more impulsively like we
see Anakin do when he's during his descent into the
dark side. Right right, Yeah, So wait, No, where does
this leave us on the Palpal meter? At the beginning,
I said somewhere between partly, partially true and mostly true.
I guess I'll lean more toward partially true because it
is this mixed thing. It really just depends on what

(39:30):
it is you need to do, sort of at what
stage of the problem solving process that anger is arising
and how it's interacting with the problem itself. So yeah,
in some cases can make you stronger, give you focus,
comes with a lot of downsides, and in some cases
definitely makes you dumber and hurts you. And that's just

(39:50):
if you're a Sith, by the way, and the only
thing you care about is optimizing for your own goals.
I mean, it's quite obvious. And I'm sure we talk
all the time about the the negative externalities of anger,
just in real human life.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, for the part I'm going
to cover here, I don't have so much a testable
statement from Palpatine, but I think there's a there's a
lot to draw from another key moment in Revenge of
the Scyth. So I think everyone is familiar with this
moment if you if you've seen the film at all,

(40:26):
and maybe even if you've never seen the film, you
just have seen clips of it and you've picked up
on sort of the lore of it. But there is
a moment laid in the film where Jedi Master Mace
Windhu and two Jedi associates attempt to arrest the Supreme
Chancellor Palpatine, accusing him of being a Scyth, and he
reveals himself and promptly slays two of the Jedi with

(40:49):
a lightsaber before Windu is able to disarm him of
his lightsaber and deflect his syth force lightning back onto Palpatine,
soverely disfiguring him. Yeah, Windu himself has always is always
depicted as a rather grim, humorless Jedi.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
He's all business. He doesn't crack a lot of jokes
or anything.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
No, no, but he's a cool cucumber and seems to
he seems to walk that line. He seems to walk
this line of you know, of of the Jedi's honorable
path and almost a kind of of coldness that that
maybe gets close to the borders of dark side. But

(41:32):
you know, he's he's a master, and he knows exactly
where the line is.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
One assums, seems to be very devoted to the rationality
aspect of the Jedi approach.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Right right, So when Anakin Skywalker arrives and witnesses this scene,
he ends up pleading for mercy on behalf of the
injured Palpatine who's there, you know, also clearly milking the
moment master manipulator that he is, you know, calling out
for help like he's just a wounded old man that
is being like basically creating a bully tableau much like

(42:05):
the ones that you were discussing in the studies. You
know that's going to instantly make one angry to see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's this younger, towering Jedi threatening this old man who's
crumpled up on the floor and has now already been
horribly disfigured.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Right, if you didn't see the scene before, makes Palpatine
look like the victim. It makes Mace Windu look really mean.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Right right. And then when Windu pronounces that Palpatine is
too dangerous to live, he of course raises his saber
to finish him off right there on the floor. But
then Palpatine reminds Anakin that you know, he's pleads for
his aid and reminds him that the only way he
can save his family is of course, through the secrets
of the Scyth that he has promised and leveraged by

(42:48):
this by the pleadings of an injured old man who's
always been good to him, he intervenes, slicing off Window's
saber hand, allowing Palpatine to then force lightning the Jedi
Master out of the shattered window to his death, and
he exclaims, with a lot of passion power, unlimited power.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
Yeah, that's always what you want to hear right after
you have intervened on somebody's behalf.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Well, it's done now, that's the thing. So it's a
great scene. It's very dynamic, it's emotionally complex. Palpatine is
on one hand, just merely expressing his enthusiasm for the
thing he values and desires most in life. That's what
it's all about for him. Unlimited power.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Some people love skateboarding, some people love nature, some people
love unlimited power.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah. But he's also expressing something. This is where I
really got to thinking about it. He's also expressing something
key to the Sith order, and that is that negative
emotional states, especially anger and hatred, but also other related
negative emotional states. They're the key that they use to
unlock the Force and harness its powers. So this got

(44:08):
me looking at a topic that I'm researching for an
upcoming interview that I'll come back to here in a minute,
the topic of rumination. Now, coming back to the Revenge
of the Sith, there's a great line in the novelization
of the film by Matthew Stover about how towards the
end of his time under the name Anakin Skywalker, so

(44:29):
this is before his actual fall, before this pivotal scene
I just mentioned, he's meditating, or he's supposed to be
engaging in some sort of Jedi meditation, and Stover writes
that these meditation sessions have become quote indistinguishable from brooding.
So ideally he's supposed to be engaging in something much
like meditative practices in our own world, where you're freeing

(44:50):
the mind, you're living in the moment, he's trying to
sort of shut off the default mode network and be
free of those inner voices. But instead Anakin is giving
end them and he's just brooding, and he is ruminating over,
you know, the things that he is afraid of in
the future that he and course within the context of

(45:12):
the film and the story that he has perhaps some
level of insight into, and also constantly thinking about things
in the past and things that are being deprived of him.
You know, we're talking about what's standing in the way
of your goal. There's a lot of that with Anakin's character,
Like he believes that he has been slighted. He should
be on the on the council, and he is not.

Speaker 4 (45:32):
I'm being treated unfairly. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
And then later on in the timeline, but earlier in
the Star Wars movies, at various points, we see Darth
Vader doing something that at least externally resembles meditation. Remember
an Empire strikes back. He has a dedicated meditation chamber,
like this is what it's called within the lore. It's
also a place where he can take his helmet off

(45:57):
and have like a contained environmental and environment that allows that,
but it also serves as him. It serves as a
place for him to quote unquote meditate.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Yeah, and it looks like Richard Keel's teeth in the
James Bond movies.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
Oh yeah, I guess it's like Jaws Jaws teeth. It's
a great, great set. It's one of the great designs
of Empire. So why would Darth Vader, of all people,
need to meditate and see this seek escape from his
ruminations and negative emotional states, when, as we've been discussing,
these are the source of his power. These are the

(46:30):
keys that allow him to tap into the potent dark
side force energy that lets him you know, it gives
him heightened senses that makes him helps make him such
an amazing combatant, and also gives him these supernatural powers
over his surroundings. And so it would make more sense
that these sessions, which outwardly resemble meditative meditative practices, are

(46:53):
actually quite the opposite. They are highly focused exercises in rumination.
And I believe this is all reflected elsewhere in Star
Wars media, where especially novelizations and all where we were
not just dealing with the visuals of the scenario, but
also discussing what is actually going on inside the character's mind.
But yet, we might well imagine a Sith practitioner mentally

(47:14):
walking a memory palace of the worst moments in their lives,
visions of their enemies and things that they feel or
denied them, the things that they fear most in the future.
All of this is a way to continually nurture their
negative emotional states, creating a sort of black hole of
emotional darkness inside them that serves as the fulcrum of

(47:35):
their force powers, kind of like a self renewing battery
of dark side energy.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Okay, yeah, so if the anger for the Scyth, you
know more so than in the real world. If it
for them in this fantasy scenario really does just make
them stronger, give them focus. It's like a magnifying glass
for the dark side of the force. Then they can
sit there and channel all of these negative emotions. It's
like charging their powers.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah. Yeah, And so as we discuss this, we'll have
to sort of like step in and out of the
fictional world where again in Star Wars there is this
kind of magic and these negative emotional states again allow
them to manipulate these powers, and then in our own
world that's not the case. So I wanted to talk

(48:22):
about a couple of angles here. First of all, the
idea of unlimited power through negative emotional states, the wave
we've been describing sith Anger and hatred, it really does
make it sound like a kind of engine, a perpetual
motion machine that the Dark Force users draw on to
sharpen their senses and invoke unnatural powers. And I think
that's an ideal comparison, because in many ways, hatred is

(48:44):
a perpetual motion machine. It's cyclical, it is self sustaining
in a way that we only wish all of our
positive emotional states were, you know, like what if you
got in like a really good mood and you're like, man,
I just can't shake this good. This thing's just gone.
It's just looping on itself. Somebody, somebody showed me a

(49:05):
sad puppy because I got to stop feeling this good
and move on to other things in my day.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Well if only, I mean that certainly doesn't happen, I
think for most people. But I think you can at
least identify some limited ways that positive emotional states can
give rise to things in your life which can in
the future bring on more positive emotional states. Like if
your positive emotional state makes other people around you happy

(49:32):
and then they're going to give it back to you
and make you happy again sometime in the future. Yeah,
you can kind of see how good things happen like that.
You can really see how this works with negative emotional states. Yeah,
like that you just being say, like spiraling down, getting
angry and hateful about people around you. It's probably gonna
kind of cut you off from them and make it

(49:53):
impossible for you to have good relationships, which is just
going to make you more angry and hateful. So yeah,
it really is a very self.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Staining emotional condition.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah, there is a kind of dark gravity to spiraling
down in these scenarios. But one thing I'm going to
come back to, if not in this episode, then I
think in the interview that I'm going to be conducting.
This is discussed by Donna Jackson Nakazawa in the upcoming
book Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to

(50:23):
Outwit your Inner Defeatist. She talks about spiraling up as
kind of like a catch all for some of the
different tools that all of us can use when we're
dealing with our own rumination and trying to get out
of these states. So this idea that hate is cyclical
and self sustaining, this is often observed to be true

(50:47):
in the world of outward hate. Certainly. There's a quote.
This quote circulates around, and it's from nineteen fifty four's
Human Society and Ethics and Politics by philosopher Bertrand Russell,
and he's the quote, when you hate, you generate a
reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite,

(51:07):
But when great groups or of nations hate each other,
the harm may be infinite and absolute. Do not fall
back upon the thought that those whom you hate deserve
to be hated. I do not know whether anybody deserves
to be hated, but I do know that hatred of
those whom we believe to be evil is not what
will redeem mankind. It's a great quote. I think there's

(51:29):
a lot of truth in it. But in discussing the
finite and the infinite here, I believe Russell is referencing
the finite scope of human lives. So two people may
hate each other, and they may hate each other a lot,
but on the whole, when on the whole that hate
is going to die, when one or both of them dies,
like it has a limited lifespan.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
Okay, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Meanwhile, if the hatred spreads, if it becomes a societal infection,
it can last for a very long time. Obviously, maybe
not truly infinite in the great and sense of the word,
but certainly lasting longer than the scale of a human lifetime.

Speaker 4 (52:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
I think I'm sure bertrand Russell meant it in the
metaphorical infinite, not in the mathematical en right, right, exactly.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yeah, But even between two people, we can see how
the cycle of hatred can be very self sustaining, and
this may even be part of the Sith Lord's a
rule of two master and apprentice our accomplices. Yes, but
there's probably hatred there as well. Like we can imagine
this with Vader and Palpatine. Vader hates Palpatine for the

(52:33):
things he's lost in service to him, including the life
of his wife. He hates him for you know, not
being able to deliver on his promises. And at the
same time, Palpatine may well hate Vader on various levels
because of his growing power, for the threat that he represents,
either in the culmination of the Sith Way or in

(52:54):
the culmination of Jedi prophecy, you know, the one that
will bring balance to the forest and so forth. Yeah,
and then we have just the case within the human mind,
within the depths of rumination. Here experts agree that these
negative thoughts are highly self sustaining and cyclical, and in
many different ways. So, for instance, I was reading political

(53:15):
paranoia in Organizations, Antecedents and Consequences. This is by R. M.
Kramer and came out in two thousand and It points
out the theories that we hold about others' basic hostility
and incivility. These are highly self sustaining. Just think how
easy it is to cherry pick data to strengthen these theories,

(53:37):
or to know or to have it served to you
via your favorite influencer or partisan news site. They point
out that quote freeway drive driving provides unfortunately all too
much time for isolated, dysphoric rumination about such people.

Speaker 3 (53:54):
Yeah, we've talked about this a good bit on the
show in the past. This sort of came up in
our episodes about cynicism, which I think back on fairly often. Actually,
that's something it's on my mind a lot. But it's
true that it's just so easy to maintain thoughts of
negative generalizations about people, whether that is just a sort

(54:17):
of universal cynical outlook that people are nasty and in
it for themselves, or kind of negative group characterizations if
there's some group of people you don't like, it's so
easy to maintain that because just you know, the smallest
little bits of evidence that you know couldn't possibly actually
reflect on any broader realities, will just feed the furnace,

(54:40):
almost like a kind of the magic coal in the story,
you know, the one magic coal that blooms up into.

Speaker 4 (54:45):
A great fire.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Sorry, I was just picking up what you were saying
about the cherry picking one little thing that like feeds
that ruminations like yeah, yeah, it is like that, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, because you can pick the most potent coals, the
worst examples, true or not to continue to feed these
feelings and just keep that fire raging, and again generally speaking,
without being completely aware of it or not aware of
it at all. And that's that's something that is essential
to all of this because to be clear, we all ruminate.

(55:17):
I think we all engage in some level of this,
and it's more of a problem for some of us
than others. A lot of the data shows though that
it is. It is a big problem for a lot
of people, and it's perhaps worse now than it ever
has been, in part due to just, you know, certain
details of our modern life. But the other thing that though,

(55:38):
is that like a lot of things with negative emotional states,
a certain awareness of them is necessary to do anything
about it. You know, you have to be aware of
your thoughts and then being able to you know, be
able to step back from it, label it and then
deal with it. But it's Donna Jackson, because Alla points
out in their book as many as according I think

(55:58):
this was an Australian study found like a third of
the people out there don't even have the concept of rumination,
like to say, like they don't know the word or
they don't know the definition, Like it's not something that
they would be able to give a name to, which,
of course, is going to be vital vital first step
in being able to combat it at all.

Speaker 4 (56:21):
Well, okay, can we describe it here?

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah? Yeah, So rumination is one of those things that
it's going to vary depending on how you're tackling it.
And sometimes a distinction is made between worrying and rumination,
saying that like one deals with the past, one deals
with the future. You know, I'm ruminating about the past,
I'm worrying about the future. But on the whole, you

(56:45):
see a lot of rumination literature just using rumination to
determine both directions. So it can be thinking about past failures,
past social slights perceived or real, you know, ebarrassing moments
at parties, traumatic memories, even like, it really runs the gamut.

(57:06):
There's a huge variety of the sorts of things that
could be sucked up in rumination and then go looking
into the future. You know, it can deal with all
sorts of spiraling worst case scenarios. You know, what's the
worst thing that could happen, and then that becomes the
thing that I feel like will happen. And this can
become the the the you know, the the engine of

(57:27):
rumination in one's mind.

Speaker 4 (57:29):
Yeah, okay, So.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
And like let's just laying in bed and I let's
revisit all of the times I've let people down.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Right right, So thinking about Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader.
So when he is Anakin before the full fall to
the dark Side, a lot of his rumination is going
to be over you know, perceived slights on the part
of the Jedis and also this worry about what is
going to happen to Patme in the future. And then
once he is Darth Vader, there's I'm assuming a lot

(57:58):
of rumination about everything that he lost, about you know,
the fall of the Republic, the loss of Padme, his
his also the shame of his own role in her
death because remember part of the whole you know, as
he continues to become Darth Vader. Like that's one of
the things that Palpatine is really kind of quick to
let him know, like she is dead, and it is

(58:20):
because of you, like the the it's not like obi
Wan killed her, it is like it's your fault. Sorry, pal,
this one's on you, a like piling on that dark
side weight.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
That's interesting from a storytelling perspective, you would think that
the Palpatine would want to use that against the Jedi.
Wouldn't he want to play up that somehow it was
obi Wan's fault, somehow the Jedi did this.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
Yeah, but then like that in a way that kind
of like sends him out in a direction he doesn't
want him to go, because, on one level, like obi
Wan someone who could conceivably bring him back, you know,
his his great friend from the past who has no
longer his friend, but there's still that connection to the past.
But if he can like drown him in his loneliness

(59:04):
and isolate him from any other influence, you know, then
he has even more control.

Speaker 4 (59:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
Blaming obi Wan poisons one relationship, Blaming Anakin himself poisons
all of Anakin's life, is all of his relationships?

Speaker 4 (59:19):
Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
So coming back to rumination specifically, in psychological literature, there
are multiple models and subtypes of rumination. There's no overarching
layout for just how it works.

Speaker 4 (59:42):
In the mind.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
Obviously, our minds are all different, but a common theme
is repetitive thoughts about a sadness, trauma, social interaction, or
something else. And we keep replaying the triggering event or thoughts,
which increases our distress, which enhances our focus on these
things via negative altering, and so forth. We become trapped
in a cycle in which no solutions or actionable items

(01:00:06):
are generated. We're just pummeling ourselves with enhance bad memories
and traumas of the past, as well as spiraling worst
case scenarios of the future. And you mentioned it already
that like emotional states are there for a reason, we
evolve them for a reason. And so the trap of
rumination is that this is in theory, like this is

(01:00:28):
about finding an answer to a problem, and that's why
we end up tackling It's like, I'm going to replay
this in my mind until I find a way out,
until I find a solution. But that's the horrible thing
about rumination is generally we're not finding a way out.
We're just replaying it and making ourselves miserable and also
exhausting ourselves emotionally in the process.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Yeah, well, I mean much in the same way that
fear is a biologically useful emotion because it helps you
avoid things that are dangerous. We can also recognize in
our lives that the body is quite often over eager
to deploy fears in ways that are not adaptive in

(01:01:12):
you know, a non dangerous scenarios. So you know, our
bodies are constantly using that fear emotion that is really
only useful when like there's you know, a large animal
or other human trying to kill you or something, and
is instead deploying it about an email or something where
it's just like this is not helping anything. It's something

(01:01:32):
is being repurposed to a kind of environment where it
doesn't really make any sense.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
Yeah, yeah, So a note, there are models for rumination
that are not entirely negative or view it as one
of many coping strategies, but most of the model that
was looking at in a Roadmap to Rumination by Smith
and Alo twenty ten Clinical psychological review, most of these
models viewed it as something that actively interferes with our
self regulation, and they view it as something that can

(01:01:59):
easily viral into enhanced states of anxiety and depression. So
these thoughts feed on themselves without generating a way out
unless we take action ourselves, and there are various tools
for doing so. The putting thoughts on trial exercise is
a great example of this that I've brought up before
that I think a number of you may be familiar with.

(01:02:21):
You might use this in your own life where you
know you're spiraling, you're thinking about worst case scenarios. This
is the thing that could happen, this is the thing
that will happen. And then you take that thought, you
step away from it, and you say, is this what
is going to happen? Is this what is likely to happen?
And then separate it and say what is likely to happen?
And then you put that thought on trial and you

(01:02:42):
decide whether this is a reasonable thought or an unreasonable thought.
And you know there's no silver bullet for any of
these things, and there's a lot of gradual work to
be done in any of these scenarios, but it's something
that can help that can help you sort of work
your way out of out of ruminated states. Another source

(01:03:05):
I was looking at on this is Marine Solomon's Break
the Cycle from twenty twenty four published on Harvard Health.
She points out again that It's like the idea is
that your brain is tricking you into believing that you're
figuring out something useful by replaying all of this like
your captain on a star on a on a like
a you know, on star trek or something, and you're like, okay, enhance,

(01:03:26):
all right, enhance again. Let's just keep enhancing on this
this traumatic moment until we find the answer. But the
answer doesn't occur. You just keep enhancing something negative that
is making you feel worse.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
Much like in reality, zoom and enhanced doesn't exist. Yeah,
it's an illusion.

Speaker 4 (01:03:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Yeah. And at the same time, the thing Salomon drives
home here is that all you're doing is exhausting yourself.
You're emotionally exhausting yourself, and you're stealing your focus away
from things you'd rather be doing or need to be doing.
So I think that's all interesting to think about in
terms of the Sith, and it leads me to the
next area I want to discuss. So, yeah, the Sith

(01:04:03):
or space wizards and their negative thinking is the way
they harness their power. We're to assume there are different
sorts of mental states that one can use to harness
the force, you know, the Jedi's equanimity is one way,
the Cyth's darkness is another. But conceivably there are other
emotional states that you can use as your force interface.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
Am I correct in remembering that? In the prequels at least,
the Jedi are not even very big on positive emotional states,
things like love and so forth. They're sort of against
all of the emotions. They're more just reason oriented. They're like,
use your reason, discipline your mind, those sort of things.
So I don't know which force users are out there,

(01:04:42):
you know, cracking up the lightsaber for love.

Speaker 4 (01:04:45):
I just see the Sith.

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
Are going in for hate and anger, and the Jedi
are like, no emotions at all.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
I want those love Jedi.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
They might not be Saber users at all. Yeah, but
there might might be some faction. Maybe I'm forgetting one.
Surely this has been discussed in the expanded Universe. But
there's got to be some force users out there that
are motivated by love, like love is their key, And
maybe they're not particularly useful. Maybe they're even a little
unpredictable because of this.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
To be fair to the Jedi, you know, I don't
want to slander them. I think they're thinking, is that
all of the positive emotions are gateways to negative emotions,
right that, like within love there is the potential for hate.
And so if you foster love, much like we see
with Anakin, it's like because he falls in love with somebody,
he is therefore tempted by a desire to protect her,

(01:05:34):
to embrace all of the darker paths.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So so, momentarily putting the Swith magic aside,
is there anything innate to rumination that benefits us? Well,
we've discussed some potential answers to this already, but here
are two really important things to consider. So, by and large,
rumination again is a mental trap in which no solutions
are generated. And beyond that, it can interfere with us

(01:05:56):
getting things done outside of the ruminated upon problem, you know,
interfering with work, hobbies, interpersonal relationships. And if we step
back into the fantasy world of the Sith for a second,
we might conclude that all this rumination might just interfere
with such important ongoing projects as the training of apprentices,
the seeking of revenge, overall plotting, and of course the

(01:06:17):
keeping of secrets and golf and golf, Yeah, might interfere
with the golf game. So again it does make you think,
I get, like we were saying earlier, like a true
Sith master like Palpatine might need to be able to
modulate things. Might be important to not just meditate in

(01:06:37):
a way that is just ruminating and wallowing and darkness,
but also step apart a step away from all of
that and engage in more logical reasoning as well. Yeah, now,
again we're dealing with space magic. But there is this
recurring idea that hatred also keeps various Sith practitioners alive.

(01:07:00):
This is something that is implied with Vader, I believe
at times. I don't know if it's ever expressly stated.
You know, he has this his suit, he has he
benefits from executive health care, and he has all these
cybernetics that do the heavy lifting and keeping him alive.
But there's also this strong sense that he is fueled
by hatred, that he is like too too angry to die,

(01:07:23):
you know. Yeah, And in the Nights of the Old
Republic games, I believe there's there's actually a dark Sith
Jedi by the name of what is a Darth Psion
who is more of an explicit example of this like
he has like a shattered body that is held together
by his hatred and by dark force energy, Like he's
just he is too angry, too mean, and too evil

(01:07:45):
to die. It just holds him together in one piece.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
So for the sith, hatred itself is the geriatric spice.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
Yeah. Yeah. At times it is either yeah, it is
either implied or expressly stated as such. And I think
this idea is is very alive and well in our
own perceptions of reality. I think we can all think,
on one hand, we all have examples of people that
we hold in a positive light whose lives were cut
short by illness or tragedy or some of the recurrence.

(01:08:14):
While meanwhile we can point to other examples in the
world where some of the worst stop is people who
are full of passionate enthusiasm just live on and on
and what could possibly sustain them but their own inner darkness. Right,
And we have all these examples of people we can say,
like that person is just too mean to die. There,

(01:08:36):
they're just going to live forever because they're just so evil.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
You know, it can seem that way, but I think
that's just our the salience of things that seem really
horrible and unfair to us. I mean, you're just not
thinking of all the examples of really awful people who
died young and good people who live to be old.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
And to be clear, like, engaging in this kind of
thought can also be rumination. You know, we can get
into the cycle of thinking, yeah, life's not fair, the
good people die, the bad people live forever. Don't fact
check it, but just keep running it through your head,
you know. And Yates is the second coming, which I
just referenced there. With the passionate enthusiasm, it can be iny,

(01:09:17):
isn't it. Yes, that's right. Yeah, the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity. You can
see that poem is kind of one big rumination. Sometimes
great art can come out of rumination, and you can
find examples of people saying that their art comes out
of rumination. But I think it's like a lot of
things when we're talking about artistic inspiration, there are plenty

(01:09:38):
of examples we're not aware of in which rumination has
prevented great art from taking place. Yeah, so absolutely this
kind of observation can very much be the stuff of rumination.
But also the statistics don't just don't support this, like
if you start, if you set aside the cherry picking

(01:10:00):
you look at like rumination tends to do to people
what the larger trends are is just not true. So
Nakazawa writes that quote, the degree to which we ruminate,
perhaps more than any other mental act, determines our lifelong
well being. Studies have shown that rumination heightens our vulnerability
to anxiety, depression, insomnia, and impulsive behaviors, all things that

(01:10:24):
we know also lead into potential, you know, you know,
either health problems or negative life choices, that sort of thing.
And also rumination can interfere with psychotherapy. It can worsen
and sustains the body and sustain the body stress responses
such as inflammation. And this this was pointed out as

(01:10:44):
well in that Salomon twenty twenty four article. So again,
the idea that you could just be so full of
hatred that would somehow sustain you, just holds you together
and unlimited power, unlimited power out of your hatred not true.
It's it's like it's as true, I guess as that

(01:11:05):
as on the Simpsons where we hear that mister Burns
can't die because there's too much competition for the things
in his body that are trying to kill him. That
that also is not.

Speaker 3 (01:11:15):
True three Stooges syndrome. There you go where all the
germs are stuck in the doors.

Speaker 4 (01:11:20):
And they go.

Speaker 2 (01:11:23):
So that's the case of regarding rumination in our own world.
But again, to step back into the fantasy world of
Star Wars, in the sith I guess you could, you
could make a strong case that self sustaining negative emotional states. Again,
these are what allows you to access the force and
whatever degree you can keep it always on as you can,

(01:11:44):
you know, you have like an always on high voltage
battery within you. But within the actual context of real
world rumination, the process mostly consumes energy, and it consumes
your energy. So so yeah, you can. Again you point
to examples where artists say rumination is their creative font

(01:12:04):
but for the most part it again, it results in
no answers to a given woe, and it serves only
to emotionally exhaust the ruminator.

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):
Well, actually, now that you're saying this, another way of
looking at it occurs to me, what if the sith lord,
if the syth is actually not the same as the person.
So you know, you have Anakin Skywalker, who is a
body and a brain, and then you've got the syth
Darth Vader, which is some kind of parasitic person that

(01:12:37):
sort of inhabits that body, and maybe the rumination powers
the powers the parasitic person while sapping and draining the
body the whole time. Like it's you know, it's actually
like it's never actually good for Anakin Skywalker's brain and body,
but it is continually juicing that syth energy which runs

(01:12:58):
at the expense of its hope.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Yeah, yeah, and you know that actually might have some
some legs and cannon right when you start getting into
some of the stuff in the sequel trilogy, you know
some or at least the last film of the sequel trilogy.
They were all a bit disjointed, weren't they. But in the.

Speaker 4 (01:13:14):
Last what you're talking about, but oh, you do know
what you don't know? I said, I don't remember, Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
I only vaguely remember it. I've only seen the third
film in the sequel trilogy a couple of times. But
they get into some sort of idea about like there's
some deeper meaning to what's happening when uh, you know,
the when one sith Lord passes on to the apprentice,
and there's some sort of like continued energy. So I
don't know, there might be more out there in the

(01:13:41):
extended universe about about this as well, But yeah, I
like this read, and certainly without even getting into the
idea of there being some sort of like dark force
entity residing within one, I mean you could imagine that,
you know, given the complexity of the human psyche, you
could you could have that duality in place where like
it's making you know, it's easy to compare to to

(01:14:03):
real world states as well, Like this is destroying, this
is making you physically ill, mentally exhausted, But this version
of yourself that you hold up, maybe this persona, this
is what you're sustaining.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
I think of this often, actually that not in a
literal biological parasite sense, but I think often a person's
social media persona is a parasite that sustains itself by
draining the host body of the actual individual. So the
person is destroyed in the process, but the persona feeds

(01:14:37):
off of that, off of that weakening of the host body.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
Yeah. Yeah, so it's like I'm exhausted, but I need
more content for the Darth Vader feed.

Speaker 3 (01:14:47):
Or you know, or my sort of personal integrity in
the real world is kind of shattered and drained, but
I have continually built up this facade.

Speaker 4 (01:14:55):
For people to see. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Yeah, he would be a pretty epic poster. Actually, I
think he would have He would have good Internet game.
I mean not like not good like I would like it,
but you know, he would be good at it.

Speaker 4 (01:15:09):
He would be good at the algo.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
Do you think he would be a long tweeter or
a short tweeter? Which would which would.

Speaker 3 (01:15:16):
What if he's a meme guy, it's just image memes.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
Yeah, I don't like to think. I like, I have
too much respect for Palpatine to think that he would
just post memes. But but who knows?

Speaker 4 (01:15:27):
Who knows?

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
I guess it would be like hollow memes in the
future they're always doing it's hallow this, hollow that.

Speaker 4 (01:15:34):
Oh that's right, yeah, and project up out of your phone.

Speaker 3 (01:15:36):
Yeah, okay, does that do it for pulp facts?

Speaker 4 (01:15:40):
Today?

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
We have some other pulp facts we were thinking about
talking about. Obviously, no time to do that in this episode.

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
But hey, you know, we already got to go ahead
from the Emperor himself, so we may do some more
in the future, right in if you would like to
like to hear that, And in fact, if you have
particular nuggets of knowledge from Palpatine, either from the films
or from extend universe content, comics, novelizations, novels and so forth,
send them to us and we will consider them for

(01:16:07):
the future. All right, all right, just a reminder to
everyone out there, The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
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(01:16:29):
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Speaker 4 (01:16:40):
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Speaker 3 (01:16:48):
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