Something that I’ve found bedevils Reylo fans both long term and new is the seemingly inscrutable paradox of motivations that drive Kylo Ren/Ben Solo over the course of the first two films of the Sequel Trilogy. I’ve covered Ben’s motivations regarding his desire to destroy his emotional attachments as a way to eliminate what he perceives as weakness within himself, but I haven’t delved into why it’s so hard for him to accept that concept as fundamentally wrong— something that seems to have been demonstrated to him as abundantly clear by the strength he was able to find in his emotional attachment to Rey.



What we’re dealing with here is a complicated tangle of psychological complexes that tie in with conditioning, grooming, abuse, and programming. Essentially, Ben Solo is trapped in a highly destructive feedback loop that cycles between two psychological barriers to his growth: the sunk cost fallacy, and the backfire effect.

Let’s take a look at both of these in some elementary detail, and then apply them to Ben’s character arc.

Sunk Cost

We’re all familiar with the sunk cost fallacy, even if we don’t know it by that name. For example:

You arrive at the lobby of a building in which you have a meeting on the tenth floor. You have two choices: the elevator, or the staircase. Like most people, you don’t want to climb ten flights of stairs. So, you punch the button with the up arrow and wait for the elevator to arrive. One minute passes. Then two. Then three. And the elevator still isn’t there. You check to see if there’s a different button you’re supposed to press. You grumble and curse under your breath. But, even though you would have made it to your destination via the stairs by now, you continue to wait for the elevator.

Now five minutes have passed. It’s hard to tell if the elevator is malfunctioning or if there really is that much traffic on the higher floors. After all, you could start up the stairs now, only to have the elevator doors slide open just as you make it up the first half-flight. While it shouldn’t matter, it really, really does— at least in your mind. You’ve already waited this long. You’re not going to declare all that time wasted and do what you could have done to begin with as an alternative. And, though it seems like the easy and rational choice to take the stairs, the longer you spend waiting for the elevator, the harder it becomes to justify abandoning your vigil. The elevator will come. It has to. You were right to wait. You were right all along. You’re no fool. You would have been a fool had you taken the stairs. It’ll be worth it in the end. Surely it must be worth it in the end.

This is the sunk cost fallacy. The false premise that the more time/money/effort expended on any given enterprise, the greater the value in seeing it through to its successful completion (or nurturing it along into perpetuity). This is commonly seen in situations involving repair projects that encounter unforeseen costs or delays, or in waiting in line for something that’s taking far longer than expected. But where it happens most devastatingly is in romantic relationships that have gone sour, but in which one (or both) of the partners considers too much time or investment (financial, emotional, or otherwise) to have been devoted to the relationship to simply walk away.

Implicit in all sunk cost fallacies is the recognition that, at some definable point, all enterprises cost more than their intrinsic values deserve. The problem is that most people who undertake an enterprise are invested to a sufficient degree to render themselves unable to reasonably judge when the cost outweighs the value. The greater the cost expended, the more incentive one has to erroneously inflate the value of the underlying enterprise.

Which brings us to Ben Solo. Kneeling before Snoke in The Last Jedi, Ben says to his master, “I’ve given everything I have to you. To the Dark Side.”

Snoke responds to this with derision and scorn. But Ben has a point. He’s given Snoke, and, by extension, the Dark Side, everything of his former life. He’s even killed his own father. When Han confronts him in The Force Awakens, Ben says, “It’s too late,” before coming to the conclusion that he’s already given so much to the Dark Side that to turn away from it now would be to admit a failure so profound and damning that it would be impossible to bear. And so, he takes that next step into darkness, committing an act so vile it breaks him.

By the beginning of The Last Jedi, Ben is nearing the point of recognizing the value of the power and approval offered by Snoke to be far less than the cost of securing those things. Once he’s rebuked by Snoke, he decides to double down; if killing his father wasn’t enough, surely killing his mother would be. And this is the moment where Ben draws the line (initially). This is a cost too high to pay. This is where the sunk cost of fealty to Snoke is revealed to Ben as a waste, and that truth roils inside him just as Rey arrives on the scene (involuntarily) to offer him the possibility of something better than continued servitude.

However, this is where we have to differentiate the sunk cost of being Snoke’s apprentice from the sunk cost of the Dark Side itself. Again, Ben says he’s given everything to Snoke, and to the Dark Side. These are concurrent obligations, but they are not one and the same. There’s a subtle divergence once Ben finds he cannot accept sacrificing his mother to his master and the darkness in the same way he surrendered his father to both. But let’s discuss the other element of our analysis before returning to the sunk cost divergence.

The Backfire Effect

One of the important things to understand about conditioning and programming is that the person being programmed typically walks into the situation willingly, but without an accurate understanding of the terms of the arrangement. What I’m discussing here is cult membership, religious zealotry, and even pyramid schemes. These programs all rely on duplicitous promises to reel in recruits, and leverage the recruits’ increasingly onerous sunk cost into continued devotion to the cause, even in the face of evidence refuting the fundamentals of that cause.

Sunk cost is not always time or money. Often, sunk cost is tied up in emotional investment, anchored in a firm conviction of the rightness of one’s beliefs or actions. No matter how sophisticated our reasoning becomes, human psychology is still founded in survival instinct. One of the best examples of this is the presence of irrational fears. Our ancestors survived because they were conditioned to believe that the rustling in the bushes wasn’t just the wind, but a dangerous predator (even though it was just the wind 99 percent of the time). Our rational minds understand that it’s almost certainly just the wind in these circumstances. However, because survival was for so long tied to a reflexive override of rationality to guard against catastrophic misjudgment, our brains are hardwired to look for patterns where there are none, and to reject rationality when survival is at stake.

A programmed or conditioned individual has been trained to assimilate tenets of the programming into her worldview in such a way as to make removal of those tenets irreconcilable with continued survival. Programming like this uses a number of durable techniques to maintain its targets’ devotion: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, epistemic closure, etc. But what happens when the subject of programming, particularly when serious abuse is involved, is confronted with irrefutable evidence of the empirical vacancy of her worldview? What happens when the subject realizes that there is a man behind the yellow curtain?

This is where we encounter the Backfire Effect. It’s a curious and maddening aspect of human psychology directly linked to our survival instincts. An example:

You are a firm believer in the Flat Earth theory. You have written long pieces passionately arguing that the Earth is disc shaped. You have detailed documents and videos that support your beliefs, including various media outlining the broad conspiracy to maintain the illusion of a spherical Earth. Your internet presence is almost entirely rooted in Flat Earth culture. You recently spearheaded a campaign against Hollow Earth proponents, and feel as though you won the arguments easily.

Then, one day, you’re offered the opportunity to accompany a space flight into orbit. You accept. You see the curvature of the Earth. You complete several full orbits. It’s one of the most edifying experiences of your life. And when you come back home, you post on your blog: I WENT TO SPACE AND CAN PROVE THE EARTH IS FLAT.

What?

Review the scenario above. The person I described has tied their entire worldview and identity to a very specific concept. Her reality is dependent upon certain fundamental things being true. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that those fundamentals are wrong, thus threatening her reality, and thereby, her survival, the psychological reflex is to deflect, deny, and double down.

It’s important to note that the person in the scenario above is not lying. Instead, she is utilizing a defense mechanism that reframes the unwanted refutation into a reinforcement of existing beliefs. The greater the sunk cost of the programming, the more extreme the reframing can become.

So, when Ben Solo kills Snoke, he is doing so as a rejection of Snoke himself. He is killing his abuser— the source of the lies upon which his programming has been founded— and does so out of genuine affection and attachment to Rey. However— and this is a giant however— his rejection of Snoke is not a rejection of the Dark Side. And this gets to the heart of what’s happening in Ben’s mind in the moments after the last Praetorian Guard falls dead.

He has accepted that the sunk cost of being Snoke’s apprentice far exceeded the value of maintaining that arrangement. But the overall cost exacted in his journey to the Dark Side has been staggering, and that’s not something easily abandoned.

Ben Solo’s viewpoint as he stares at Snoke’s dead body and the empty throne is colored by the reflection of what wages he’s paid to find himself in this place at this moment. From his standpoint, he must be considering that he’s killed and tortured, terrorized and brutalized, tormented himself and others, subjected himself to untold humiliation and acts of debasement and self-harm, and murdered his own father. And for what? From this vantage, even as Rey stands with him, the panic flashes through him as it occurs to him that all of it might have been for nothing. And that concept is too devastating to consider.

So, he deflects. Snoke was the problem. He’s gone now. He denies. The Dark Side demanded these things, and it’s still the correct ideology, the correct way to access and apply the Force. His father didn’t die for nothing. The cost is acceptable because the cause is just and right. He doubles down. And not only that, he asks Rey— begs her, really— to validate his decisions, to join him on the Dark Path. This is less about seducing her to his worldview than it is a desperate plea for her to ratify his sacrifices as having value.

When Rey (thankfully) rejects his entreaty, this is not the wake-up call a lot of people expected it should be. He doubles down again. To him, her rejection is a betrayal. It proves the basic tenets of the Dark Side are indeed correct. He was weak to desire belonging. She will fall alongside his enemies just like anyone else. Only the self matters. All else is intended to serve the one who can wield the greatest power. This is the Dark Side in its purest distillation. It’s also exactly what Ben has held up as the ideal to which he should aspire.

So, when Ben seethes, and growls, “I’ll destroy her, and you, and all of it,” he does in fact mean it. Or, perhaps more importantly, he thinks he does. Luke’s sacrifice, and the subsequent revelation that the Force Bond between him and Rey was real, are further direct refutations of his worldview. But this time, having been given the opportunity to apply the tenets of the Dark Side to their natural conclusions, and having had his expectations turned upside down through experience absent Snoke’s manipulations, he is left in a state of bereft self-reflection.

To wit: if he had decided to double down yet again, he would have looked at Rey as an enemy, full of anger and hatred. Instead, he is a defeated man, and one who is only now beginning to understand how great a cost he’s paid in service of an unworthy cause.

Luckily, his father showed him enough love to help him, even though that meant dying. And Luke showed him enough love to allow him to take out his anger and try to realize his complete fall to the Dark Side, and did so without risking Ben losing his soul.

In Episode IX, I think it’s pretty clear that Ben’s going to have the catharsis that his sacrifices were in fact wasted, but that it doesn’t matter. He has to embrace the hope for the future that is represented by Rey, and by her continued hope and affection for him. And I think he will. He’s already made the hardest decision (from the worldview he occupies) once:

He saw the cost of the Dark Side. It demanded he kill Rey, and, by extension, the remaining Light within him. And it was too high a price. He’s already placed her as more valuable than the foundations that hold his reality together. But he couldn’t complete the break without seeing for himself the emptiness of that reality without her. He’ll be faced with a similar choice in Episode IX, and this time he’ll meet the challenge, and overcome his demons. And, as she promised, Rey will be there to help him.