Existing, as I do, as part of the living force, I have access to all of your planet’s so called “entertainments.” This is how I, Darth Vader, dark Lord of the Sith, came to read your Erik Larson’s historical account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City.

The book traces the paths of Daniel Burnham, the lead Architect and Director of Works overseeing the construction and operations of the World’s Columbian Exposition (as the fair was called,) and H. H. Holmes, a notorious murderer preying on travelers flocking to the event.

Though one wonders what trick of necessity would lead to Homes’ particular predispositions, in reflecting on the book title, I’m led to ponder: which one the devil?

The exuberant spectacle of the fair, which has been said to mark the genesis of your modern commercial society, was created for and by the hubris of Chicago’s elite, with little regard for the common man.  Burnham in his ambition, saw this massive construction project not only as an opportunity to bring glory to and raise the reputation of the city, but to elevate his own social status and political power, to join the ranks of the elite himself.

Burnham was charged with the massive task of conducting the design, coordination, and construction of the fairgrounds and structures. The fair’s enormous size and the short construction schedule would prove powerful obstacles to overcome, but buffeted by ambition, Burnham was up to the task. He wasn’t beyond pushing craftsmen to work day and night enduring unsafe conditions. By the time construction was completed, “scores of workers” would give their lives in the realization of Burnham’s vision. When budgetary concerns arose, he sought to cut costs by laying off workers, many of whom had come great distances to work on the fair, and would be left stranded, facing poverty and homelessness.

Burnham and Chicago’s finest envisioned the exhibition displaying the aspirations of what the city could be, perfected.  They wanted to break with the city’s reputation as a backwater cattle slaughtering town. Many aspects of Burnham’s “White City” went beyond architectural forms, the built environment.  Burnham sought to impose a more perfect social order within the exhibition’s walls.  He empowered the Columbian Guard, the fair’s police force, with a “mandate [that] explicitly emphasized the novel idea of preventing crime rather than merely arresting wrongdoers after the fact.”  He exercised authoritarian control over every aspect of the management of the fair, right down to who would be sanctioned to sell official photographs of the event, disallowing visitors bringing in their own cameras and charging a prohibitive fee for camera rentals to fair visitors. In this way, he could control how the outside world would perceive his fair.

The World Fair’s grotesque display of opulence and discipline took place against a backdrop of failing banks and skyrocketing unemployment across the country.  Amid this growing unrest, Chicago’s well-to-do came to fear workers riots after a confrontation between some workmen and police at City Hall.  Days later, at a demonstration of unemployed workers on the Chicago lakefront, Samuel Gompers said:

“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”

Perhaps Burnham wondered what else these workers could want from him having employed so many at such expense.  But for what?  Burnham wasn’t exactly meeting the social needs of the working class, he built something of little utility beyond temporarily serving the glory of the city’s elite.

Burnham would concede this lack of utility when, as he discussed plans for shutting down the fair, he mused about burning it all to the ground.  When the fairgrounds indeed came to a fiery end at the hands of arsonists, the Chicago Tribune would report, “There was no regret.”

So on the one hand we have Holmes, the murderer.  Killing for the chance to exercise ultimate control over his victims, intimately.  On the other hand we have Burnham and his unbridled ambition for power and status and an authoritarian drive for ultimate control over an entire city made in his image.

In reading of Burnham, I am reminded of Moff Tarkin, the Imperial officer who oversaw the construction of the first Death Star.  Both were driven by ambition and an amoral quest for power.  Both undertook construction projects unprecedented in size.  Both placed the requirements of their project and their own ambitions above the well being of their workers.  Tarkin served the glory of the Empire for his own purposes, just as Burnham served the city of Chicago for his.  Both would triumph, and both triumphs would end spectacularly in flames.

If there is a lesson in these two narratives, it’s that hubris, unbridled ambition and an insatiable drive for power are paths to evil, even for the best, most gifted of men. That, and if you are careless, the people you exploit in your ambition might just come back in the end to burn your shit down.

Let me show you the nature of your prison, of your mortal husk.  That crude matter you call ‘body’ and the series of animal impulses and reckless decisions you call ‘life.’  One is tempted, often, when trying to assign some meaning to life, to explain these impulses and decisions, to fall back on a general notion of fate, some kind of cosmic will from beyond one’s self, both inaccessible and inexplicable.  It is often deemed suitably explained by its very unexplainableness.  This state of belief is unacceptable, immoral and, well, insane.

Take me: my entire physical existence seemed governed, or at least conducted by the belief of the people surrounding me in fate, in destiny, in the prophecy of the Chosen One.*  Not even I, whose every formal mentor willed it to be true, accepted that I walked a predetermined path of destiny decided by a universal, etherial Force with a will and motives of its own.

The Force doesn’t have motives any more than light has a will of its own.

I traveled with this doubt, treasuring it like a keepsake, an heirloom.  It was the product of something Fatriar Didax said to me shortly before the Jedi got their meathooks into me.  Didax didn’t believe in destiny.  He talked instead of “living in the moment, informed by necessity.”

Though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, the peculiar choice of word, “necessity,” sparked a curiosity in me that would glimmer at the back of my mind perpetually until I came to understand what Didax meant.  He used the word in the same way philosopher William Godwin of your Solar System did.  He was giving voice to the concept your modern day philosophers call “determinism.”  Godwin struck a particularly apt metaphor, which especially resonates with someone of my experience, when he wrote:

Consider, that man is but a machine!  He is just what his nature and circumstances have made him:  he obeys the necessities which he cannot resist.  If he is corrupt, it is because he has been corrupted.  If he is unamiable, it is because he has been ‘mocked. and spitefully entreated, and spit upon.’  Give him a different education, place him under other circumstances, treat him with as much gentleness and generosity, as he has experienced of harshness, and he would be an altogether different creature.

You see, our predispositions and circumstances inform our “choices.”  Even more than that.  At any moment, all of history, (both our personal history and history history,) determines for us, in a way we can little control, what we are compelled to do next.   The path we walk, the choices we make are as inexorable as any destiny prescribed by a higher will, or imposed on us by a consensus of equal or lesser wills (like Jedi monks with a hope complex.)

To choose to leave the path necessity blazes, requires a substantial dispositional break.  A type of break which seems only possible at the proverbial ‘rock bottom,’ or ‘when there is nothing left to lose,’ but then, these conditions themselves are only predispositions and circumstances that follow from whatever preceded them.

The best we can hope for as moral creatures under such a system, is to understand this, and to cultivate the ability to recognize and cope with our reasons.

* “Fully defeated by just anyone, the dark side cannot be, but only by the Chosen One. And who might be this Jedi? Know I do not, but not yet born is he or she. This much, sense I can. A vessel of pure Force the Chosen One will be, more powerful than any Jedi in history.” [Yoda]

“What ho, Ani?”

“Hiya, Professor Didax.”

Visits from Fatriar Didax (fay-tree-are) (die-dax) were among the few things powerful enough to lighten the black mood of a desert planet child slave.  I had been toiling all morning at Watto’s junk shop tearing down and parting out a wrecked speeder some Jawas had brought in the previous afternoon, and had resigned myself to several hours of sweeping the omnipresent sand that blanketed the floor.  The Professor’s presence in the shop was a welcome diversion.

“What are you working on today, Professor?”

“I’ve got a challenge for you,” he insinuated.  “This, as you surely recognize, is a power supply for a moisture vaporator,”  he said dropping a metal box heavily onto the workbench.  “And this,” he began, producing a tangled mess of wires, sensors and relays from a bag he carried slung over his shoulder, “is a compressor controller.  The compressor’s outside.”

Didax was a scholar from the core who wasn’t content confining his pursuits to the theoretical.  He preferred to spend his days out on Tatooine helping moisture farmers increase drinking water production.  A fellow gearhead, he did a lot of work ‘hands-on,’ hacking moisture vaporators.  He was a regular around Watto’s shop, and unlike the smugglers, pirates and bounty hunters who made up Watto’s usual clientele, Didax acknowledged the worth of a slave boy from the Outer Rim.  Rather than ‘slave’ or ‘boy’ or ‘kid,’ he referred to me as a ‘young person.’  A term before he came along, it hadn’t occured to me to claim for myself.

“This stuff,” he said, gesturing with the clump of wires, “is dumb.  It’s primitive.  It’s inefficient.  I need something smarter.”

“I understand.”

“Oh, really?  Alright then.”  With this he leaned back, arms folded and looked at me with a glint in his eye.

I already had a solution, but made a show of looking thoughtful for a moment before retreating out into the junk yard and immediately to a defunct R5 series mechanic droid that I must have passed a hundred times a week in the course of my duties around the shop.  Didax caught up to me just as I was lifting the dome off, so I handed it to him, and pulled out the droids sensors and processing computer.

“You need better sensors and a way to program the compressor to cycle on and off when you want it to, right?”

“Yeah,” he said laughing, “want to wire it up for me?”

“Sure.  If you tell me about the trouble you ran into on Geonosis that one time.”

I finished rewiring the Professor’s smart compressor controller.  It took some doing to cram everything into the tiny space available for it.  The man couldn’t stop smiling.  He seemed genuinely impressed to see my work.

“So how much do I owe Watto for all of this?”

I turned and looked up at the high windows overlooking the shop from an office on the mezzanine.  Framed in the window was the scowling face of Watto, who had been in there all morning sleeping off the aftereffects of a bad night at the Jhabacc tables.  He didn’t look particularly interested in customer service.  He nodded at me and his face vanished from the window.

“I don’t know.  Let’s say twenty druggat for the parts.”

“And the labor?”

I didn’t feel like helping Watto recoup his gambling losses on my back this day, so in response to the Professor’s query, I just shrugged.

“Are you sure?”  he asked again.

I gave a short nod to signal that he should stop asking before Watto realized what was happening.  “Want some help carrying this stuff back outside?”

As we loaded the unit into the speeder I said, “That thing’s the cleanest compressor I’ve ever seen, but it’s obviously not new.  How do you keep the sand out of it?”

“Let me show you,”  Didax said, and removed cowling from around the condensing mechanism to so I could the inside.  All of the seams where the metal had been pieced together had been sealed with what looked like black sludge, but proved to be rock hard to the touch.

“That stuff works, huh?  I could use that stuff for the pod racer I’m building.  I can’t run it reliably with all the sand that goes through it and builds up in the works.”

“I’ve got some right here,” Didax said, and started rummaging through a compartment in the speeder cockpit.  He produced a jar coated with toxic looking drips of the black substance.  “You just brush this anywhere sand might work its way through.  Then you heat it with a flaming torch to get it to seal and set up.”

“So don’t tell your mother where you got it, alright?”  He added as an afterthought.

“Ok.  This is great.  Thanks, Professor Didax.”

“Thank you, Ani.  You’re brilliant.  Whatever Watto is paying you, it isn’t enough.”

As soon as the words had been uttered, a look of horror spread across the scholar mechanic’s face.  He seemed to recoil from his own words.  Slavery, and my own status, was not a topic we had ever discussed, and I had sensed that he had always been uncomfortable with the obvious truth.  “”I’m so sorry,” was all he managed to add.

“It’s ok, Professor.  I enjoy working with you,” I tried to reassure him, and it was true.  For he was the only grown person, aside from my mother, who had ever treated me as a person.

There was a period of silence where I sensed that Didax wanted to continue the conversation but didn’t know what to say, so I told him, “My mother is always telling me,” and in my best motherly voice, I said, “We must have hope, Ani. One day things will be different. I can feel it.  We are not destined to be slaves forever.”

He chuckled at my impression, but asked in a more serious tone, “Does that make you feel better?”

“Not always.  Sometimes I can feel pretty hopeless.  Like this morning before you arrived.”

“Yeah, I don’t put too much stock in destiny, Anakin.  Only in living in the moment, informed by necessity.”

“My mom says we should rely on hope.”

“Hope is not necessary for perseverance, Anakin.”

Those words!  How they echoed inside me.  I felt reinvigorated.  I felt a sense, for the first time, of having a purpose of my own, not reliant on hope, or faith in an as yet unresolved future.  Perseverance.

A week later Fatriar Didax was dead on the ground near a vandalized moisture vaporator, head laid open.  It was the work of Tusken Raiders.