> Once a character becomes culturally iconic, he becomes a mirror. Paul Atreides now stands in the same uncanny pantheon as Rorschach, Walter White, and Homelander. These are figures conceived as indictments but construed as aspirations. People don’t just admire them; they emulate them. Because it doesn’t matter what the author intended when the audience sees a conqueror with glowing eyes and thinks Cool!
The patient zero for this type of character was Milton's Satan.
As someone who has gone through Dune on audiobook while on a cross-state commute (Maryland to Virginia), I will admit that the philosophical and ecological stuff simply went over my head. What really told me that something was up with Muad'dib was the ending when he got into a sham "marriage" with Princess Irulan but Chani remained the "real wife".
Even though I was rooting for Paul I always felt the arrangement was screwed up, especially since Irulan's voice was peppered throughout the book through the intro quotes. Jessica had this monologue that sounds neat on the surface but all I see is a man who can't make a decision. Either marry the Princess and put away the concubine or refuse the Princess' hand in marriage to marry the concubine. But Muad'dib did neither because all that power made him think he was "the exception to the rule" (as you alluded to).
Herbert wrote an essay about the book titled "Dune Genesis". This passage always hit me:
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This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane.
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As does this one:
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I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
===
Herbert is skeptical about the attractions of power, the fallenness of the men who are attracted to it and wield it, and the hypocrisies lying beneath the pretty and flattering surfaces.
Couple that with his remarks that "the flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist" and you end up with something at once quite ancient and cutting-edge modern.
The paradox is baked into the cake, and that's by design.
Now backtrack and explain the correlation between Spice and Psilocybin. Herbert imagineered the sand worms from maggots that he watched as they ate his magic mushrooms.
> Once a character becomes culturally iconic, he becomes a mirror. Paul Atreides now stands in the same uncanny pantheon as Rorschach, Walter White, and Homelander. These are figures conceived as indictments but construed as aspirations. People don’t just admire them; they emulate them. Because it doesn’t matter what the author intended when the audience sees a conqueror with glowing eyes and thinks Cool!
The patient zero for this type of character was Milton's Satan.
As someone who has gone through Dune on audiobook while on a cross-state commute (Maryland to Virginia), I will admit that the philosophical and ecological stuff simply went over my head. What really told me that something was up with Muad'dib was the ending when he got into a sham "marriage" with Princess Irulan but Chani remained the "real wife".
Even though I was rooting for Paul I always felt the arrangement was screwed up, especially since Irulan's voice was peppered throughout the book through the intro quotes. Jessica had this monologue that sounds neat on the surface but all I see is a man who can't make a decision. Either marry the Princess and put away the concubine or refuse the Princess' hand in marriage to marry the concubine. But Muad'dib did neither because all that power made him think he was "the exception to the rule" (as you alluded to).
Herbert wrote an essay about the book titled "Dune Genesis". This passage always hit me:
===
This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane.
===
As does this one:
===
I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.
===
Herbert is skeptical about the attractions of power, the fallenness of the men who are attracted to it and wield it, and the hypocrisies lying beneath the pretty and flattering surfaces.
Couple that with his remarks that "the flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions-all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist" and you end up with something at once quite ancient and cutting-edge modern.
The paradox is baked into the cake, and that's by design.
(Thanks for the opportunity to nerd out on Dune.)
incisive 👏
https://www.bartkasperolaw.com/dunes-magic-mushroom-origin-story/
Now backtrack and explain the correlation between Spice and Psilocybin. Herbert imagineered the sand worms from maggots that he watched as they ate his magic mushrooms.