Dune

“The Imperium, the CHOAM Company, all the Great Houses, they are but bits of flotsam in the path of the flood.”

In the world of Dune, certain characters are important, but no individual can compare to the grander durability of institutions. Even Paul, a messianic figure with great power, is aware that he must adhere to the rules and expectations of institutions such as the CHOAM Company and the Imperial throne. These institutions have lasted hundreds of years and, in the greater scheme of history, are far more important than the actions of men like Baron Harkonnen or Duke Leto. Yet even these institutions pale in comparison to the “flood” (35) of history. The real movement of history is grander, slower, and more forceful than anything that could be influenced by a single person. Ultimately, every individual is a slave to the forces of history.

“The protective legends implanted in these people against the day of a Bene Gesserit’s need.”

Many cultures and people in the universe have prophecies about messianic figures who will arrive in the future to bring them success or salvation. As Jessica is aware, however, some+ of these so-called prophecies are deliberately implanted in the cultures by the Bene Gesserit. While the people may believe sincerely in the prophecy, the prophecy is manufactured for political gains by a secretive organization. Prophecy and fate are shown to be hollow institutions, manufactured creations that are designed to be acts of political opportunism rather than genuine glimpses into a definitive future.

“Water being wasted so conspicuously that it shocked her to inner stillness.”

On the desert world of Arrakis, the use of water is a demonstration of conspicuous consumption. By watering plants rather than giving the water to the people, those inside the palace are demonstrating their wealth and supposed superiority over others. Even someone as rich and as privileged as Jessica is shocked by the conspicuous use of water inside the palace in Arrakeen. As Jessica becomes acclimatized to life on Arrakis, she learns the true value of water and sees the distinction between the rich and the poor played out in the simplest, starkest terms possible.

“We make our own justice.”

Like fate or prophecy, both of which Leto rejects, justice is an abstract and seemingly unknowable idea. There is no objective idea of justice, just like there is no objective version of the future. Instead, events are the consequences of human actions and judgment. Leto reminds Paul that he should not surrender himself to abstract ideas, insisting that people still have the agency to shape their lives.

“The melancholy degeneration of the Great Houses has afflicted me at last, perhaps. And we were such strong people once.”

Duke Leto is imbued with a melancholic nostalgic. He accepts the Emperor’s offer to take control of Arrakis, knowing that he is being ushered into a trap. Leto—who lives in the shadow of his forebears, and whose relics line his walls and are transported to Arrakis—feels that he was born at the end of an era. He believes this limits his capacity to ever measure up to the reputations of his ancestors. The decline of the Great Houses constrains his power through no fault of his own. Leto was born too late to match the greatness of his ancestors and dies too soon to witness the greatness of his descendants.

“The unknowns here filled her with uneasiness.”

Jessica has been trained by the Bene Gesserit to be aware of every tiny detail. She reads the smallest muscle movements in people’s faces and listens to the most minute inflections in the tones of people’s voices. These skills allow her to discern the truth about any situation, so the possibility that she knows nothing is terrifying. Jessica faces many dangerous situations and suffers many tragedies in her life, but her worst moments of unease are when she must confront the limits of her understanding and accept that she is unsure what will happen.

“He fears the questioning of a Truthsayer.”

The Baron’s plans require a degree of plausible deniability. Given that the Emperor employs a truthsayer who can tell when a person is lying, the Baron works hard to ensure that he never needs to knowingly lie in front of the Emperor. For the Baron, the truth is a fearsome prospect. He works in shadows, devising complex plans that are filled with feints and deceptions. The truth is terrifying to him because he risks being exposed. The Baron’s only fear is that his shadowy plots and repulsive lies should be made visible to anyone other than himself.

“The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.”

The Baron justifies his actions by insisting that anyone could or would do the same if they were in his position. The fact that his plot could succeed is a credit to his intelligence, he believes, and also an indictment of the failures of others. He believes that anyone would act in the same way if they had the opportunity and he believes that not doing so would be a personal failing. Comparing the Baron’s actions and beliefs to those of Duke Leto shows the limits of the Baron’s reasoning. Leto has the opportunity to act like the Baron but refuses. Instead, the Baron’s belief is revealed as a desperate act of justification. He needs to believe that others would do the same to satisfy his paranoia and quell his massive ego.

“Why can’t I mourn?”

After the attack by the Harkonnens and the death of his father, Paul is struck by his inability to properly mourn. The lack of emotion bothers him because it reveals the extent to which he is different from other people. He is the product of genetic engineering by the Bene Gesserit and a lifetime’s worth of training by his father’s trusted lieutenants. The result of this is that Paul is removed from the fundamentals of human behavior. He is not like other people and this bothers him, as he was not given the choice or the opportunity to consent to his training. Paul begins to recognize the reality of his existence and the truth that he may not be quite as human as he once believed himself to be.

“The entire spice income of Arrakis for fifty years might just cover the cost of such a venture.”

Hawat’s capabilities as a Mentat can reduce every political decision to raw numbers. The actual cost of the Baron’s plan is revealed: After 80 years controlling Arrakis, the Baron is willing to spend 50 years’ worth of income to secure control of the planet in the future. He plans to spend a vast fortune to maintain control of Arrakis and eliminate House Atreides, which shows that the Baron is motivated more by politics than profits. To the Baron, money is a way to measure and secure power. Hawat measures the Baron’s willingness to exercise power by expressing this desire in financial terms. The influence and power that stems from controlling Arrakis is worth more to the Baron than decades’ worth of income from the spice.

“Fear is the mind-killer.”

Whenever Paul or any other Bene Gesserit-trained person finds themselves in a tricky situation, they repeat a familiar mantra. They remind themselves that “fear is the mind-killer” (313), thus allowing them to regain control over their emotions. This mantra is an example of emotional control and an entire ethos. The Bene Gesserit refuse to allow themselves to be controlled by something so weak and human as emotion. They raise themselves above others, whose minds have been killed by fear, allowing them to operate on a higher level of understanding. The Bene Gesserit mantra is an ethical position that shows the Bene Gesserit’s desire to remove themselves from the shackles of human emotion.

“It’ll keep the Sardaukar occupied.”

To the Baron, the Sardaukar’s proposed genocide of the Fremen is a convenient distraction. This callous approach to a brutal slaughter is illustrative of the Baron’s inherent weaknesses. He is willing to ignore or dismiss violence against people because he does not value human life. This same disregard for human life leads him to consistently underestimate the Fremen, which will eventually be his downfall. He is happy for the Sardaukar to kill the Fremen because he believes that the true value of Arrakis is the spice when, in fact, the real value is the Fremen people themselves.

“We must use man as a constructive ecological force—inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place—to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.”

Many people want to change Arrakis, but their visions for the future of the planet are markedly different. The Harkonnen plan for Arrakis is to turn the entire planet into a brutal, violent hell in which profit is extracted in the most efficient way possible, regardless of the human cost. For Kynes and the Fremen, however, Arrakis has the potential to be a paradise. They do not want to maximize spice production; instead, they want to ensure that the planet is a habitable world where people do not struggle to find water. The two futures reveal the differences between the Harkonnens and the Fremen. Where the Harkonnens see the Fremen as a nuisance standing in the way of their profits on Arrakis, the Fremen see the profits as a distraction from their own desire to live in a more habitable world.

“These Fremen are beautifully prepared to believe in us.”

Jessica realizes that the Fremen’s desire to view Paul as the messianic figure in their prophecies is a convenient product of Bene Gesserit interference. The prophecy is not the authentic product of an ancient religion. Rather, it was planted in the Fremen culture in the hope that a Bene Gesserit might need it in the future. The Fremen have been “beautifully prepared” (388) for Paul’s arrival, to the point where Jessica recognizes the inauthentic nature of the prophecy. But given the Fremen’s sincere belief in their religion, the Bene Gesserit’s role in the prophecy makes no real difference. Even if the prophecy is manufactured and implanted, the Fremen do not stop believing it. Jessica realizes that all prophecies, visions, and predictions are just methods of control, to be used as a person would use any tool.

“He sees that this is not like a child of his own people, but a fighting machine born and trained to it from infancy.”

During the duel, Jamis and Jessica come to the same realization: that Paul is less a person than a weapon. Paul is not a Fremen like Jamis or a Bene Gesserit like Jessica. His genealogy, birth, and training with Jessica, Halleck, and Hawat have turned him into something unique. The irony of Paul’s role as the messiah in the Fremen religion is that the person who is prophesied to lead them to glory has been trained, manufactured, and refined until he is something quite different from them. Paul may be the Fremen messiah and the Kwisatz Haderach, but whether he is still a human is increasingly debatable.

“She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were

perfectionists.”

Both the Harkonnens and the Atreides dismissed the Fremen as backwards people who scraped by in the desert. The reality of Fremen culture is very different: They are technologically advanced and have the capacity to engineer and build incredible machines and devices. The prejudice against the Fremen is a form of protection. In dismissing the Fremen as irrelevant or inadequate, the Harkonnens ignored the threat that will eventually bring down their house. Jessica realizes what Leto meant when he said he wanted to recruit desert power. Leto was one of the few people who recognized the ingenuity and the potential of the Fremen that Jessica now witnesses firsthand.

“It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values.”

Fremen culture is shaped and molded by the harsh conditions of Arrakis. As such, those who understand the planet’s ecology will be able to understand the people. Despite this tight connection between environment and culture, the Fremen are not afraid to change their home world. They plan a future in which Arrakis is a green paradise, eliminating their constant struggle to find water. The planet shapes the culture and the mindset of the Fremen but they are willing to change their planet, even if it will mean changing their culture. The Fremen look to the future rather than try to preserve the past.

“Feints within feints within feints.”

Feyd-Rautha expresses one of the key motifs in Dune. Like one of his duels, the behavior of almost every character depends on a complex set of nested maneuvers—in other words, “feints within feints.” The Baron, the Duke, the Emperor, and the Fremen are all caught in a complicated web of deception, betrayal, and fragile alliances. As such, the gladiatorial arena becomes a metaphor for the political world of the novel. Every character is feinting and dodging, trying to lure their opponent into a position where they can strike a killing blow.

“I must not die. Then it will be only legend and nothing to stop the jihad.”

Paul glimpses a future in which the Fremen conduct a brutal war in his name. Their religious devotion to Paul and their skill as warriors will make them unstoppable, whether he lives or dies. As such, Paul has no real interest in self-preservation. He does not feel a need to save his life because he wishes to stay alive. Instead, he only wants to save his own life so that he can save the lives of others. At this stage of the novel, Paul no longer thinks in terms of individuals, even those who are as powerful as himself. He has begun to think about events on a galactic scale. Death may not be an issue for Paul, but he understands that his own death could have ramifications for billions of others.

“Paul has only one major chance—to ally himself with a powerful Great House, perhaps even with the Imperial family.”

Jessica has changed drastically over the course of the novel, but she still struggles to leave behind certain biases. She still thinks about the galaxy in political terms, believing in the importance of alliances and marriages that were prevalent before the emergence of Paul Atreides. Paul has shown that he can transcend the old methods of control, suggesting that Jessica is still unaware of his true potential as the Kwisatz Haderach. More accurately, Jessica clings to her beliefs in the old ways because she is in denial. She does not want to acknowledge the raw, seemingly unlimited power she has unleashed on the galaxy through her son. She clings to the old methods of control because she does not want to accept that the galaxy has changed forever.

“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.”

Paul’s declaration of power reveals a nihilistic point of view. Only a person who can “destroy a thing” (609) has the power to control said thing. This is an interpretation of power from a destructive point of view, rather than a creative one. Kynes sought to control Arrakis by creating life, while Paul exerts his control over Arrakis by threatening to destroy the spice. In Paul’s world, power is inherently violent and destructive because it demands a willingness to destroy.

“It’s fear, not the injunction that keeps the Houses from hurling atomics against each other.”

Throughout the novel, fear has been described as the mind-killer that must be avoided. This conception of fear is turned into a political agenda and a battle plan, in which the other great houses fear one another. Their fear makes them weak, whereas Paul is not bound by their weaknesses. Paul turns his Bene Gesserit training into a worldview, expanding the teachings beyond the individual to become a political theory.

“Yet, the feeling was like hunger, and he poised himself several times in his suspensors on the point of ordering food brought to him. But there was no one here to obey his summons.”

The Baron’s weakness is revealed at the end of the novel, particularly through his sudden inability to indulge himself. Throughout the book, the Baron has gorged himself on food, violence, and sex slaves. In this moment, however, he has no one available to satisfy his desires. He cannot even order food because he is surrounded by the Emperor’s people. The Baron realizes the extent of his weakness when he can no longer indulge in the hedonistic behavior that elevates him above everyone else. At his weakest point, he is powerless to indulge himself.