Before we get started, I’d like to ask everyone to be sure and remind Jacob to hold the push-to-talk button down until after he’s done talking. He’ll appreciate it!
The Sith teachers here apparently didn’t get Revan’s memo advocating pragmatism and strength and just assumed that Sith = LOL MURDUR.
Never spare an enemy! They’re weak and deserve to die.
Right. Unless you think they might be useful later. Or it would be troublesome to kill and dispose of them. Or killing them might provoke someone else to come looking for revenge later. Even if you’re a bad enough dude to handle them, do you really want stuff like that popping up at an inopportune moment when you might have more important stuff to do?
Heck, if a foe is truly so weak they can’t be a threat to you, then it’s in your own best interests to spare them. If word gets around that you can be merciful, then your foes will be more likely to surrender when you’ve got them on the ropes. If everyone knows that surrendering just means you’ll torture them to death, then they will fight to the death and you’ll face greater losses. The most dangerous foe is one with a deep grudge and nothing to lose.
If your goal is to be the strongest, then why bother training anyone at all? Because you need an army, right? But then why do you let the upperclassmen openly murder the freshmen? Slaughtering easy prey won’t make the upperclassmen stronger, and it will probably kill lots of people who have more talent but less overall training than the bullies. Even if you’re totally amoral and care nothing for the life of anyone else, letting murder bullies run rampant in your school is no different than letting vandals run rampant in your palace. This shit belongs to you, and you shouldn’t put up with people destroying your stuff for their own amusement.
Also, is murder the only thing you need to accomplish? Someone needs to sweep the floors, change the light bulbs, and polish the overly ornate techno-throne on your personal star destroyer. Heck, if you kill all the wussy nerds, then who will build you a star destroyer?
And finally, all that internal murder and backstabbing will be a drain on your numbers. Sure, “only the strong survive”, but if you follow this particular Sith code to its logical conclusion, eventually you’ll end up with a solitary, battle-weary Sith remaining. Or maybe you end up with an army of people who are geniuses at poisoning their superiors but are actually rubbish in a stand-up fight. If nothing else, take the losers from your ranks and fling them into battle ahead of you. Rather than killing them yourself, why not make your enemy exert the effort to kill them?
Revan was supposed to be an answer to the short-sighted Jedi. But here we are with an army of treacherous, backstabbing, short-sighted, plotting dipshits. These people threw off the stupidity of the Jedi order. But instead of embracing a kind of hedonistic attitude of reveling in your power, they’ve simply replaced one idiotic dogma with another.
It’s been years, so maybe I’m romanticizing the portrayal of Revan, but in my mind the brilliant strategist does not mesh well with the murderclown circus we see here on Korriban.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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