The Hidden Message of the Dune Books

It actually has nothing to do with Zendaya’s interview behaviour

[No particular spoilers for Dune: Part 2 - instead focusing on broader ideas and moments of the series]

The buzz around the new Dune film is surreal for me; I grew up reading these strange, complex novels about water scarcity and desert mice. I knew about shield/lasgun interactions and the reason for Thufir Hawat’s blue lips long before I understood many  basic facts of our own world. I can only hope that the films help convert a few new fans of the incredible novels I’ve known and loved forever.

Not quite as transcendent a depiction of The Golden Path as I hoped, AI

The Golden Path

Paul Atreides begins to receive impressions of a singularly horrifying yet hopeful future from the moment he first experiences prescient visions, immersed in the spice of Arrakis. He sees himself becoming a reviled and hated dictator of the trillions of people who inhabit his known universe, until the moment of his death heralds a great change.

Paul can’t bring himself to enact those visions, and instead lives with the guilt of having doomed a far future humanity. But his son has been having the same visions, from a younger age and able to discuss them with an insightful twin sister. Together, Leto II and Ghanima Atreides decide to forge the future that Paul shied away from.

They choose to walk the Golden Path.

In brief: Leto II becomes part-sandworm in order to withstand the effects of time and gain an even more intimate control of the spice, then proceeds to rule his father’s empire with an iron fist for 3,500 years. Imagine if the strictest Covid-19 lockdown measures had been in place since people began writing in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Then multiply it across the thousands of worlds which Leto oversees.

Why? To psychically scar the human race so deeply that they will never again allow themselves to be contained and controlled in such fashion. Indeed, Leto II’s death prompts the Scattering: humanity expanding far and wide into the universe with very little looking back. 

[They are aided by Leto II’s continuation of the Bene Gesserit breeding program, which produced Atreides descendants invisible to the prescience he and Paul possessed. Otherwise, some other prophet could eventually see the path to reuniting all humanity].

The God-Emperor Leto II by Devon Cady-Lee

A Flawed Philosophy

The Golden Path, Scattering, and resulting conflicts are hard science fiction at its very best - though you have to wade through a lot of odd sexual themes in the latter three Dune novels to enjoy them. The fact that the Golden Path requires a long period of frustration before an urgent and passionate release… I’m sure that’s nothing.

Author Frank Herbert explores the same philosophy throughout the series: 

• Humanity already bears deep scars from the (presumably long and horrible) rule of ‘thinking machines’ over ten thousand years ago, and have never again created so much as a calculator.

• The Bene Gesserit’s breeding program has taken millennia of work for nothing, right up until they accidentally create Paul as the Kwisatz Haderach.

• The Bene Gesserit’s test of humanity and gom jabbar require a period of brutal pain before a subject can pass, alive and unscathed.

• Narratively, Arrakis is seen as a harsh desert planet with too little water - right up until there is finally enough, and we see the planet terraformed between books.

• A certain character lives a thousand lives, and eventually develops unprecedented abilities (might partially be reaching into Brian Herbert’s books).

The idea is that abject and extended trauma will cause a population to avoid repeating the same situation at all costs. And, as sensible as that might sound, it’s bullshit. At least as far as our species and world are concerned.

Do I even need to explain this one? The Second World War and all of its horrors are not even eighty years past and fascism is once again rearing its disgusting head. Every right that has been gained since then is apparently in jeopardy as well, despite the thousands of years many groups had previously suffered.

But I also think of cults and brainwashing: it is devastatingly easy for a person or population to forget the life they previously had when presented with a visceral and demanding new reality, and exponentially so over the course of generations. It’s true that the people released from Leto II’s 3,500-year subjugation will not be the same as those who began it, but I don’t believe for a second they will be any better for it.

Leto II used female-only ‘Fish Speakers’ to enforce his iron rule - art by Alex Boca

Maybe if the Fish Speakers are constantly reminding people of their ancestors’ freedom, the space travel they took for granted and the spice that prolonged their lives. Letting the people repeat stories of how things once were, and subtly encouraging more and more cunning forms of rebellion in the population. Then I can believe the Scattering.

Stories are Identity

What Frank Herbert is taking for granted, and what so much of our own world has completely forgotten, is that our stories define us. Dune is about memory and learning from our mistakes, just as much as it is about seizing an opportunity in the moment.

We must remember the mistakes and hurts of the past if we are to avoid repeating them in the future. The evil of thinking machines is enshrined everywhere in the world of Dune, while essential rights like abortion access and gay marriage have already lost so much of their context in our own world.

The Fremen’s hope for a better world, the Bene Gesserit’s search for an omnipotent puppet and Leto II’s vision of unshackled humanity are projects which require not just individual lifetimes, but thousands of individual lifetimes to achieve. Every incredible act that is possible in Dune is only possible because of the passing on of stories and dreams from generation to generation.

Meanwhile our education systems are under attack, our world and history constantly fractured by people trying to make a buck without a thought for anyone, anything, or any time. 

Shai-Hulud help us.