Way of the Sith, Continued: Palp Facts

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lam. 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 Sith of Star Wars, I thought I'd just embrace it. I would embrace all the negativity and lean into the sithiness of this sickness. There you go. Use it. It will make you stronger. Exactly. 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 Hoth from the Empire Strikes Back, where we talked about the fictional sort of theropod dinosaur goat beast known as the Tauntaun. And from that, we jumped into a discussion about actual dinosaurs that we now know lived in icy polar environments, which is pretty cool and very surprising if you grew up like I did thinking that dinosaurs were exclusively inhabitants of steamy jungles and deserts surrounded by molten lava. We also talked about the Wampa and its relation to real life predators, as well as the infamous Tauntaun sleeping 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. Yeah. Lister males keep piling in about this one, by the way. That's generating some good stuff. And then in a second Star Wars episode, we shifted gears and talked about Sith psychology, the Sith being the elite order of practitioners of the dark side of the force. So characteristics of the Sith that we discussed from last time, obsession with power, a might makes right mentality. So a 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 of more power in the world. And then also the fact that they operate mostly in secret, maneuvering through treachery, backstabbing, manipulation and cruelty. And in the last episode, we ended up talking largely about the Sith's so-called rule of two. Rob, can you do a quick refresh on this? What's the organizational structure here? Always two there, 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, is lusting for power, is hungry for power and dominance. And therefore this kind of like hateful relationship between master and apprentice is able to, they're able to coexist for a 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. Right. 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 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 Sidious, the main Sith Lord in the main Star Wars series, also known as Emperor Palpatine. And for that last Sith episode, I, it actually prepared a whole other segment that we ended up not having time 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 it does not even insult him to say that the words he speaks may not be entirely true since the Sith openly embraced lying and manipulation. And so I think the Great Palp can do with a bit of a fact check every now and then. 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 multi part. Oh, the Emperor will be listening. Yes. Yes. Then I will do my absolute best. We will redouble our efforts. So yeah, we're going to look at some Palpatinean 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 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 and he is subtly kind of twisting the knife in turning turning Anakin against the Jedi Order, dropping these little bits of poisoning that other relationship. Would you say that's fair, Rob? Yes. Yes. Above all else, Palpatine is a master manipulator and is just always subtly tuning things in his favor. Machiavellian to 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? Somebody has dreams. Anakin has dreams, yes. So he has this growing feeling certainty that something terrible is coming and he has to do whatever he can to stop it. 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 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 its false promises. So now this guy, this kindly white-haired politician who has slowly been becoming his mentor and patron, reveals that all along he was an adept 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 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 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. Yes, an interesting question to get into, because of course, anger is not exclusive to the dark side of the Force. You know, 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 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. Yeah, I think that's right. 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 think what separates the sith from just the common emotional state of humanity is that they embrace it, go with it, use it. 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 get angry, stay angry, and let it become hatred. And get revenge. Yeah. 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 was surprised by this because I personally almost always think of anger as something that clouds judgment and impairs 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. 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 knot as we proceed and try to tease out this tension between seemingly opposed facts. 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 Reed, Tiffany George, Caitlyn Kaiser, and Sophia North. And it's called Anger Has Benefits for Attaining Goals, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2024. The research here was conducted out of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&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. 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 Swiss army knife, you got the knife for a lot of major, your standard whittling and all other 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. You've suffered too long. Your days of sluggish broadband are over. We're connecting rural homes to full fiber with thousands more joining every month. The gigaverse is expanding before my very eyes. GigaClear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds per month. TZC's apply, 18 month contract. Prices may rise during contract. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Another interesting account they 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 their needs or desires. To quote from an author named Cell in 2011 in an important paper on recalibration theory, quote, the function of anger is to recalibrate individuals who place insufficient weight on the welfare of the angry individual when making decisions. So under this 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 my welfare and my desires. And note that a couple of important things under this kind of framing, a 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 images of somebody just being bullied or mistreated. That is like a reliable way to induce anger in people. So it doesn't necessarily have to be centered on the self, though obviously a lot of our, 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. 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, they're 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. Yeah. 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 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 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 if it's very unjustified anger, it can get people into the bullying mob. It works both ways. Anger can also make people give up resistance and disengage. I think we've all had this experience too. You're interfering 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 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 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, 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 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 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 seems like 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 authors used slideshows 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 slideshows, they had multiple emotional groupings. So you'd have amusement images. 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, pitiful animals and things like that. And then the anger category consisted mostly of, 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, a pretty reliable trigger of anger in studies like this, pictures of bullying and injustice, like a bigger person picking on a weaker person. Or 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. Not my sports team. Yeah. Well, so, you know, I was like, how would people get upset about that? But then I remembered, oh, some people actually do. People do, yes. But I just can't, but you could imagine other things that you care about. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever kind of thing you're heavily invested in, like a movie you're excited about, an album, whatever it happens to be, you know, someone starts yucking your yum, you can feel a bit defensive about it, you know? Yeah, only, only, yeah, only the dumbest, like whatever you like. Yeah, yeah. So there were also emotionally neutral images, and it doesn't describe the, it's actually, so I was wondering what they were, like square triangle, maybe, I don't know. So the subjects were told that this slideshow, to try to throw them off, they were told that this 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 the slideshow. 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, 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 to make a difference with the hard puzzles. Angry people did know 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 them and moving on, which resulted in them solving a greater number of the difficult anagrams. 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. I think it's possible that could work. But I think getting angry might overall have more negative consequences on your life. Yeah. The juice is probably not worth the squeeze on that. Yes. But 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 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 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 endorsement of cheating, not by the authors here, but in a very practical sense. 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 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 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 going to use the dark side. Yeah, I mean, we see this all the time in Star Wars, right? Like, get the noble Jedi angry. Not only will they fight you, but they're going to maybe fight a little dirtier. They're going to fight more like a Sith, and so you almost get a twofer on that one, right? Because now they're angry, and maybe they're cheating a little bit, like they're playing more and more into your hands. That's true. You know, you even see that in earlier, before the Sith 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 Death Star with Darth Vader. He's asking him, give in to anger, give in 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. 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 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. 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 some 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, oh, 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 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 going to let this level beat me. And you just keep grinding at it until it's just excruciating. 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. 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 feeling of anger driving you to a higher level of persistence in the face of obstacles than you would normally entertain. Yeah, it's just sometimes they are like fake obstacles like a video game. This is not the sort of thing that our evolution has really been preparing us for. Yeah. So in short, there were three more studies in this paper. They found that anger sped up reaction times in a timed task and caused 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 voter turnout. And then also they found when compared to non-emotional physiological arousal, anger was more likely to make people, I think it was sign of 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 state of anger. Politicians should take note of this. You can make people angry and exploit it. Okay. That's very novel, very interesting. Yeah. You brought up the idea of being on tilt in a game. So that might make you very angry and persistent in this video game and eventually beat the level. 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 tilt means you have become so angry that you are behaving irrationally. And a common, maybe not that common, but the way I understand 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 clouds judgment and interferes with goal attainment. Was that 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 clouds judgment and interferes with goal attainment. I think the difference comes down it's complicated, but I think the big difference is in what type of 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 2019 study in the journal Motivation and Emotion, where Schmidt, Guilnick and Siebel tested the effects of anger on problem solving and goal pursuit. And they actually found something interesting. They found if you don't 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 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 so anger in this case, they find that anger doesn't necessarily help you achieve goals if what you need 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 studies over the years have found that anger can impair higher order logic planning and decision making. Just one example I came across a 2021 study in the European management journal by Meisner, Peanskin and Wolff called How Hot Cognition Can Lead Us Astray, the Effective Anger on Strategic Decision Making. This study made a distinction between 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 52 business executives, they found that anger was negatively correlated with the quality of strategic decisions made when later, you know, assessed retrospectively. Decisions which required complex thinking, dealing with ambiguity, and synthesizing a lot of information led to worse outcomes when those decisions were made while the person was angry. Now, another interesting thing here is that the authors say that 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, 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 2016 by Olga Kazan called The Best Headspace for Making Decisions. And this article was going into more a general overview of 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 Lerner and colleagues, anger is what they call an activating emotion. It creates a bias for approach 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 to assign blame to individuals rather than to impersonal forces or circumstantial 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 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 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, well, 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 problem is I need to understand why my business is performing poorly and come up with a 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 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 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. Now, 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. 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 overconfidence. It's going to make you take unnecessary risks and lead to bad strategic moves. This is fascinating because it makes you think more and more about the character of Palpatine slash Darth Sidious. Certainly, we see a lot from him when he is being his more or less true self to whatever extent there is a true self on display here since he is always manipulating people. There is often a seething hatred to that persona, but at the same time, there is a sense of someone who is also cold and calculating and 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 also engage in such manipulation of those around him. 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 is 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. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I was thinking about this in the last episode when we were talking about Sith the other time about how the Emperor, even though he encourages anger and says it gives strength, you don't really see him acting out of anger very much. He feels more like a more purely Machiavellian, cold, calculating manipulator rather than somebody who acts more impulsively like we see Anakin do when he is during his descent into the dark side. Right. Yeah. So, wait, no, where does this leave us on the palpimeter? At the beginning, I said somewhere between 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 it is you need to do sort of at what stage of the problem-solving process the 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 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 negative externalities of anger just in real human life. 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 lot to draw from another key moment in Revenge of the Sith. So, I think everyone is familiar with this moment if you've seen the film at all and maybe even if you've never seen the film, you just have seen clips of it and you've picked up on the sort of the lore of it. But there is a moment late in the film where Jedi Master Mace Windu and two Jedi associates attempt to arrest the Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, accusing him of being a Sith, and he reveals himself and promptly slays two of the Jedi with a lightsaber before Windu is able to disarm him of his lightsaber and deflect his Sith force lightning back onto Palpatine, severely disfiguring him. Yeah. Windu himself is always depicted as a rather grim, humorless Jedi. He's all business. He doesn't crack a lot of jokes or anything. No, no. But he's a cool cucumber and seems to walk that line. He seems to walk this line of the Jedi's honorable path and almost a kind of coldness that maybe gets close to the borders of Dark Side. But he's a master and he knows exactly where the line is when it seems. Seems to be very devoted to the rationality aspect of the Jedi approach. 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 also clearly milking the moment, master manipulator that he is, calling out for help like he's just a wounded old man, that is basically creating a bully tableau, much like the ones that you were discussing in the studies, 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. Right. If you didn't see the scene before, makes Palpatine look like the victim. It makes Mace Windu look really mean. 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 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 Sith that he has promised. And leveraged by this, by the pleadings of an injured old man who's always been good to him, he intervenes, slicing off Windu'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. Yeah. That's always what you want to hear right after you have intervened on somebody's behalf. Well, it's done now. That's the thing. Yeah. 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. Yeah, some people love skateboarding. Some people love nature. Some people love unlimited power. 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 me looking at a topic that I'm researching for an upcoming interview that I'll come back to 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 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 the mind, you're living in the moment, you're trying to sort of shut off the default mode network and be free of those inner voices. But instead Anakin is giving into them and he's just brooding and he is ruminating over things that he is afraid of in the future that he and of course within the context of 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 council and he is not. I'm being treated unfairly. Yeah. Yeah. 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 in 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 and have like a contained environmental environment that allows that, but it also serves as a place for him to quote unquote meditate. Yeah. And it looks like Richard Keele's teeth in the James Bond movies. Oh yeah, I guess it does. Jaws teeth. It's a great set. It's one of the great designs of Empire. So why would Darth Vader of all people need to meditate and 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 keys that allow him to tap in to the potent dark side force energy that lets him, you know, 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 actually quite the opposite. They are highly focused exercises in rumination. And I believe this is also 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 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 their force powers, kind of like a self renewing battery of dark side energy. Okay, yeah. So if the anger for the Sith, 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 up their powers. 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 these these powers. And then in our own world, that's not the case. So I wanted to talk about a couple of angles here. First of all, the idea of unlimited power through negative emotional states. The way we've been describing Sith anger and hatred, that 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 a perpetual motion machine. It's 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 mood. This thing's just going, it's just looping on itself. Somebody show me a sad puppy because I got to stop feeling this good and move on to other things in my day. 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, 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 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 going to kind of cut you off from them and make it 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 sustaining emotional condition. Yeah, there is 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 a discussed by Donna Jackson Nakazawa in the upcoming book Mind Drama, The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatess. She talks about spiraling up as kind of like a catchall for some of the different tools that all of us can use when we're dealing with our own rumination, trying to get out of these states. So this idea that that hate is cyclical and self sustaining, this is often observed to be true in the world of outward hate, certainly. There's a quote, this quote circulates around and it's from 1954's Human Society in Ethics and Politics by philosopher Bertrand Russell. And he states that quote, when you hate, you generate a reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite. But when great groups 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 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, on the whole, that hate is going to die when one or both of them dies. Like it has a limited life span. Okay, yeah. 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 grand sense of the word, but certainly lasting longer than the scale of a human lifetime. Yeah, I think I'm sure Bertrand Russell meant it in the metaphorical infinite, not in the mathematical infinite. Right, exactly. 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 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 things he's lost in service to him, including the life of his wife. He hates him for 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 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 paranoia in organizations, antecedents and consequences. This is by Ariane Cramer and came out in 2000. 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 or to, you know, or to have it serve to you via your favorite influencer or partisan news site. They point out that, quote, freeway driving provides, unfortunately, all too much time for isolated, dysphoric rumination about such people. 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. 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 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 almost like a kind of the magic coal in the story, you know, the one magic coal that blooms up into a great fire. Sorry, I was just picking up what you were saying about the cherry picking one little thing that like feeds that rumination. It's like, yeah, yeah, it is like that, isn't it? 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 something that is essential to all of this because to be clear, we all ruminate. 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 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, though, 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 step back from it, label it, and then deal with it. But as Donna Jackson, Nakazawa points out in her book, as many as, according, I think it was an Australian study, found that like a third of the people out there don't even have the concept of rumination. Like either, you know, just 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, a vital first step in being able to combat it at all. Well, okay, can we describe it here? 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 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, embarrassing moments at parties, traumatic memories even, like it really runs the gamut. 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, you know, the engine of rumination in one's mind. Yeah, okay. So in like, let's just laying in bed at night, let's revisit all of the times I've let people down. 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 Jedi's, and also this worry about what is going to happen to Padme in the future. And then once he is Darth Vader, there's, I'm assuming, a lot of rumination about everything that he has 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 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, like piling on that dark side weight. 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? Yeah. But, 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 and isolate him from any other influence, you know, then he has even more control. Yeah. Blaming Obi-Wan poisons one relationship, blaming Anakin himself poisons all of Anakin's life, all of his relationships. Yeah, there you go. So we need a social media wrap up for the work Bake Off. Any takers? I can design posts on Canva. I can also design posts on Canva. Aha. Well, I can design posts with the Jamtart theme on Canva. That's great. I can design posts with the Jamtart theme and generate a moving image of a Jamrolly Polly ruling on Canva. Well, I can design posts and create a 3D headline that says bake your tarts out on Canva. I can design posts and create a 3D headline and turn your face into a Bakewell tart on Canva. Alright, calm down. With a huge range of easy to use design AI tools, anyone can with Canva. I can slice a video of a crock and bush. The people of Britain love their fancy blenders. They've bought loads of them. And luckily, if they bought them with Barclaycard, they earned rewards. In fact, they'll earn rewards on all their eligible purchases. It's a more convenient way to consume your proven bench. What you buy is your business. Giving you rewards on purchases is ours. Barclaycard, back in your future. 28.9% APR representative variable subject to application financial circumstances and boring history. T's and C's apply. 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 in the mind. 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 filtering, and so forth. We become trapped in a cycle in which no solutions or actionable items are generated. We're just pummeling ourselves with enhanced bad memories and traumas of the past, as well as spiraling worst case scenarios of the future. And you mentioned already that like emotional states are there for a reason. We evolved them for a reason. And so the trap of rumination is that this is in theory, like this is 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 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. 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, you know, 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 is being repurposed to a kind of environment where it doesn't really make any sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, of 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 I was looking at in a roadmap to rumination by Smith and Aloe 2010 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 easily spiral 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 brought up before that I think a number of you may be familiar with. 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 decide whether this is a reasonable thought or an unreasonable thought. And, you know, there's no, you know, 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 ruminative states. Another source I was looking at on this is Marine Salamon's Break the Cycle from 2024, 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 you're a captain on a star, on a, you know, like a, you know, on Star Trek or something, and you're like, okay, enhance. 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. Much like in reality, zoom and enhance doesn't exist. It's an illusion. Yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, the thing Salamon 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 SIF and it leads me to the next area I want to discuss. So yeah, the SIF are 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 Sith's darkness is another, but conceivably, there are other emotional states that you can use as your force interface. 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, you know, cracking up the lightsaber for love. I just see the Sith are going in for hate and anger and the Jedi are like no emotions at all. I want those love Jedi. They might not be saber users at all yet, but there might be some faction. Maybe I'm forgetting one. Surely this has been discussed in the expanded universe lore, 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. I don't know. To be fair to the Jedi, you know, I don't want to slander them. I think their 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 to embrace all of the darker paths. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So momentarily putting the Sith magic aside, is there anything you can make 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 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 keeping of secrets. And golf and golf. Yeah. Might interfere with the golf game. So again, it does make you think, again, 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 a way that is just ruminating and wallowing in darkness, but also 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. 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 the strong sense that he is fueled by hatred, that he is like too, too angry to die, you know. Yeah. And in the Knights of the Old Republic games, I believe there's a there's actually a dark Sith Jedi by the name of what is it, Darth Sion, 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 to die. It just holds him together in one piece. So for the Sith, hatred itself is the geriatric spice. Yeah. Yeah, at times it is either, yeah, it is either implied or expressly stated as such. And I think this idea 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 other recurrence. Meanwhile, we can point to other examples in the world where some of the worst of this people who are full of passionate enthusiasm, just live on and on. And what could possibly sustain them, but their own inner darkness, right? You know, we have all these examples of people we can say like that person was just too mean to die. They're just they're just going to live forever because they're just so evil, 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. And to be clear, like engaging in this kind of thought can also be rumination, you know, we can get into this 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 the second coming, which I just referenced there, the passion and enthusiasm. It can be passionate intensity, 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 I 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 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 just don't support this. Like if you start, if you set aside the cherry picking, and you look at like like rumination, sin tends to do to people, what the larger trends are, it's just not 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 we know also lead into potential, you know, either health problems or negative life choices, that sort of thing. And also rumination can interfere with psychotherapy. It can worsen and sustain the body's stress responses such as inflammation. And this was pointed out as well in that Salomon 2024 article. So again, the idea that you could just be so full of hatred that it would somehow sustain you, just holds you together. And unlimited power. Unlimited power, just out of your hatred, not true. It's like it's as true, I guess, is that as on the Simpsons where we hear that Mr. Burns can't die because there's too much competition for the things in his body that are trying to kill him. And that also is not true. Three Stooges syndrome. There you go. Where all the germs are stuck in the door. And they go whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop. So that's the case of regarding rumination in our own world. But again, to step back into the fantasy world of Star Wars and the Sith, I guess you could make a strong case that self-sustaining negative emotional states, again, these are what allows you to access the force and to whatever degree you can keep it always on as you can, 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 can point to examples where artists say rumination is their creative font. 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. Well, actually, now that you're saying this, another way of looking at it occurs to me. What if the Sith Lord, if the Sith 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 Sith, the Darth Vader, which is some kind of parasitic person that sort of inhabits that body. And maybe the rumination powers the power, 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 Sith energy, which runs at the expense of its host. 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, or at least the last film of the sequel trilogy, they were all a bit disjointed, weren't they? But, but in the last one, what you're talking about, but you do know what, or you don't know, I said, I don't remember. Oh, okay. Yeah, 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, 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 extended universe about, about this as well. But, 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, and you know, it's easy to compare to, to real world states as well. Like, this is, this is destroying you. 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. 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 off of that, off of that weakening of the host body. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, I'm exhausted, but I need more content for the Darth Vader feed. Or, you know, or my, my sort of personal integrity in the real world is kind of shattered and drained, but I have continually built up this facade for people to see. Yeah, yeah. Palp 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. He would be good at the algo. Do you think he would be a long Twitter or short Twitter? You know, which would, which would he lean towards? Oh, and that's a good one. What if he's a meme guy? It's just image memes. Yeah. Oh, I don't like the thing. I like, I have too much respect for Palp to think that he would just post memes, but, but who knows? Who knows? I guess it would be like hollow memes in the future. They're always doing it's hollow this, hollow that. Oh, that's right. Yeah. They project up out of your phone. Yeah. Okay. Does that do it for Palp Facts today? We have some other Palp Facts we were thinking about talking about. Obviously, no time to do that in this episode. 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 extended universe content, comics, novelizations, novels and so forth, send them to us and we will consider them for the future. All right. All right. Just a reminder to everyone out there. 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