"Not a specific one, really."

"Do you want an overview of what philosophical movements I'm well versed in? Or... It is about when most people go to sleep. I can return tomorrow evening, when you've had a chance to go through the library and think."

"Tomorrow. I should sleep."

"Alright; sleep well." She begins to fade out. 

Elesse spends much of the next day (when her time isn't already scheduled for) in the library, brushing up. She doesn't want Vader to be able to catch her off-guard easily.

(She does her own bruising up - her eons of experience works best for teaching when combined with primary sources, after all, and she didn't pay much attention to some things previously. (She is only somewhat cheating on how she's engaging with said primary sources; there's a lot of advantages to briefly unanchoring herself from this one manifestation in this one fragment of spacetime, after all.))

Vader appears as soon as Elesse's fully settled in her quarters that evening, leaning slightly against a wall near Elesse.

"Okay, just so we're both on the same page, you're not allowed to talk me into falling to the dark side tonight."

"You said your determination is to not let anyone else choose your path, earlier; I won't do anything to contradict that." Also she doesn't want to make Elesse fall, doesn't want to corrupt her. Well she does but she shouldn't. "Tonight or in the future."

"I won't lie about the dark side, nor the Sith, either to make them look worse or better - but I won't discuss them directly unless you ask, how about? And I could change the topic if I sense you feeling conflicted about a line of inquiry?"

"That sounds fair. I do want to, um, understand how you think."

"Including wider Sith philosophy, or just my personal opinions?"

"Both, I think."

"I'd like to start with a historical overview, then, to give a... Scaffold, let's say."

"Scaffolds are good. Context is important."

"Alright."

"The basics, first: the Sith Code was originally penned sixty nine hundred years ago by Sorzus Syn, a Jedi who was exiled after the Hundred Year Darkness following the Second Great Schism. She was an influential philosopher in her day, and she saw a need for a new mantra to unify the Jedi exiles in their opposition to the Jedi Order. She therefore wrote it in conversation with the Jedi Code, and it should be read as such - failing to acknowledge that has been a major blind spot of Jedi leadership through the years. The fact that it directly responds to the Jedi Code is part of why it's appealing to Jedi at risk of falling."

"In my opinion, it shouldn't be treated as a rule, but as a tool for meditation and reflection. That is true of Sith philosophy in general; while Sith organizations have been usually coercive, the philosophy taken at its face encourages individualism and independence of thought. The Code also should be treated as the nearly seven thousand year old poem that it is - it's been translated many times, and even minor literal translations can greatly change the meaning, just by different connotations of the words involved. 'Peace' has been one of the most contentious single words through its history, in terms of both translation and interpretation - the original word generally meant, when used in poetical or philosophical contexts, a state of perfect quiet and stillness, as driven by an absence of conflict - it was actually the same word from the Jedi code that currently gets translated as 'serenity,' as indicated by its contrast with 'passion.' Its current primary translation as 'peace' reflects the increasing emphasis on the sense of 'absence of conflict' by the Sith over the years, which began even in Syn's day and was fully realized by the time of the Old Sith Wars, when much of the Sith philosophical 'canon' crystallized. There have, however, been several schisms even since then centered on disagreements over translation and interpretation of the Code as a whole, as well as over which works should be considered canonical versus apocryphal versus fully heretical, or in a few particularly spicy heresies over whether there even is a canon proper - I suppose you could say I'm a member of one of those heresies."

"The code, in its current most common translation into Basic, is as follows:"

Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.

"I can see how it rhymes- and why it might sound appealing."

"It isn't for everyone, and it's incredibly easy to turn to ill ends."

"It's easy to blame others for their chains, to decide they deserve whatever they get. It's easy to reject any bounds on your worst impulses, even your own conflicting desires; it's easy to decide that the desires 'society' approves of least are in turn the least likely to have been imposed upon you, and therefore the most authentic. It's easy to value the short term pursuit of passion over the long term pursuit of freedom. It's easy to gain power by taking it from others. It's easy to see negotiation as deception."

("But even as it's easy to see the pursuit of peace as the pursuit of a quiet oppression - it's very easy, in turn, for the pursuit of quiet oppression to disguise itself as the pursuit of peace. The peace of the Republic has rather often been won by the silence of the marginalized.")

"But... The easy path is also rarely the correct path."

"In my personal life..."

"Selfishness is toxic to both an individual and their society, except for when it is necessary - I was never allowed to be truely selfish, whether I trained under the Jedi or the Sith. Always the desires of those greater than me constrained me. Selflessness proved just as toxic as selfishness. I did not know how to stand on my own, how to even acknowledge my passions, let alone pursue them. I needed to learn to live for myself - and it wasn't until I embraced true selfishness that I found reasons to be kind, beyond a childish desire for my Jedi Master's approval, or an equally childish rebellion against the Master of my childhood. I care about freedom; I care that all sapients attain their freedom, their self actualization, whatever that might look like. However, this, too, has its trap, in the assumption that one might know another's path - perhaps even the assumption that one can know one's own path is a trap in itself."

"It seems like a general hard problem to have an- organizational level philosophy or ethos that works for everyone or even most people. Because people are different, with different values and different ways of responding to the same proposal. Some need strict structure, others need to be left on their own entirely. So I can see where- if you're designing that philosophy from the ground up, you decide which direction you want more of your, um, failures for lack of a better word, to fall. The old Sith obviously didn't want to fall back into being Jedi, which informed their Code and how they started to interpret it, and the Jedi have been doing sort of the same thing in reverse, they don't want their members to become Sith. This doesn't work all the time but like I said, I don't know if there's anything that could even work all the time."

"It's... Difficult. And from what I've seen of history, many attempts to fix it just make it worse."

"And yes, the Sith and Jedi's philosophies have been in conversation since the inception of the Sith Order. They aren't quite mirrors of each other, but... The failings of one are usually the strength of the other, in ways that truly distinct systems wouldn't experience."

"In my opinion... It's impossible overall to have one philosophy that'll fit every Force user. It's... Never actually been tried yet to have multiple truly separate, fully legitimate organizations of Force users within one wider political or geographical system larger than the scale of a single solar system."

(It'll be tried in the future, of course, even a million years will utterly dwarf the entire complicated arc of Jedi and Sith history - and a trillion will make a tiny speck out of the full history of galactic civilization. She can't exactly explain political theory rooted in examples that haven't happened yet, though.)

"Huh. That's... a weird thing to think about."

"What part?"

"The multiple organizations part. The Jedi are a little, uh, all-encompassing in terms of things we do."

She nods. "It leaves few options for those who don't fit in." 

"But at the same time, there are many ways to be a Jedi, and you don't have to leave everyone behind to do something else."

"There are limits to that 'something else,' though, including using the dark side."

"Or like, indiscriminate murder. Not that I'm saying those are the same thing, just, there always have to be some limits."