Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspiruality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.

I'm Matthew Remski. We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiruality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes, ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon,

or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.

Patreon listeners, thank you, written by the way.

It's copyright-free and fan-made, and that makes it really appropriate for a lot of the themes that I'll be getting into.

So this is part two of watching Andor with the kids.

There are spoilers, just so you know.

On Saturday, I set things up by looking at some origin story material for this half-century-old cultural event,

mainly how the Lucasfilm political

timeline begins with this fork in the road for Lucas himself and his interests. He has a spiritual

revelation at the age of six, and as an adult in the 1970s, he wants every kid to sort of have the same

thing. But he also grows up in the anti-Vietnam era, and he starts

his film career with work on Apocalypse Now and his own dystopic sci-fi cautionary tale about

tech-driven authoritarianism. Now, out of a desire to inspire optimism in that demoralized

post-60s milieu, he focuses on the spiritual war of the Jedi

against the Sith, showing the sacrifices of psychological discipline and mental focus and emotional

non-attachment. But he also doesn't want to completely abandon the politics of anti-fascism and

anti-colonialism, and he can't.

He's set up an empire, after all, and he's set up a rebellion.

And that conflict can't just stay in the ether.

And my meta-comment here is that the worldview of conspirituality actually depends on not being able to differentiate between the need for spiritual relief and the desire for an end to oppression.

And the progression of Star Wars from the world of Lucas to the world of Gilroy is about learning what that distinction actually means.

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