Try or Try Not, There Is No Do

I heard a neat theory the other day.  Why does Yoda use such backwards syntax?  Because he's old.  Well, duh, everybody who gets that old is going to have a hard time speaking correctly.  But Yoda speaks that way because he's older than the current version of language.  In other words, he's speaking correctly, but the language has evolved around him.

William Shakespeare lived about 450 years ago.  That's only half of Yoda's age in the original trilogy, and yet look how much language has changed since Shakespeare's time.  If Shakespeare showed up today and started talking to a redneck farmboy from Tatooine, they'd probably understand each other eventually, but not without some difficulty.

But that's not what I came here to talk about.  You know what grinds my gears today?  One of Yoda's most repeated aphorisms:  "Do or do not, there is no try."

Look, I get it.  Don't allow for failure.  If you visualize success strongly enough, you will succeed.  Put failure out of your mind, those thoughts can poison your chances of success.

But that's a pile of bullsith.  There is no appreciable definition of "do" that doesn't include trying first.  Trying is the act of doing.  Until the doing is done, you are trying.  If you don't try, you just sit there.  "There is no try" leads to "there is no do."  When Yoda said his famous line, Luke should have answered, "Fine, guess I'll go home now."

Plus, that line of thinking leads to people not having backup plans.  If you're so sure you can't fail, why bother taking safety precautions?  Why wear a seatbelt?  Why buy car insurance?  You're not going to wreck, Yoda said so.  All you have to do is do, not try, and you'll never wreck.

Plus, I'm not sure it's good psychologically to rule out the possibility of failure.  I mean, sure it's good for people to give everything their all, to not take no for an answer, to push ahead until they succeed.  It's good, that is, until they actually do fail.  Some people aren't mentally prepared for that.  If they spent a little time deciding how they'll handle failure, then they might not be as devastated when it happens.

And should we really be taking this advice from a guy who fled the senate to go brood in a swamp for twenty years?  He's had two decades to mount a counter offensive.  We've seen how powerful Jedi can be, and we've been told that Yoda is one of the most powerful.  If Galen Marek can pull a Star Destroyer out of the sky, why can't Yoda toss them at the Death Star like paper airplanes?

But no, he failed once, couldn't accept it, and went into seclusion.  Not exactly the role model for chasing your dreams.  

Geez, what a muppet.