words

This talk was delivered on Sunday, October 8th, at a Counter-Currents gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I want to thank everyone who helped organize the event and everyone who came out to attend. I love Texas, which deserves much more than its one-star rating.

It is just a coincidence that today’s gathering falls on the birthday of Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, which is the best-selling and most influential science fiction book of all time. Without Dune, there would be no Star Wars. Without Dune, there would be no Warhammer 40K. Dune combines tropes from science fiction and fantasy literature and explores deep issues in political philosophy and what has been called political theology. Thus I welcome an occasion to talk about Herbert, who is a true artist of the Right and a deep influence on my own political and metapolitical thinking. So take a deep breath, relax, and let your imagination play freely.

Mankind was born on Earth. But it would be a tragic failure if we were to die here. There is a deep truth to Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Western man as “Faustian”: ever desiring the infinite. And there is no better arena for the Faustian spirit than the exploration and colonization of the galaxy. Yet space exploration has been stalled for decades now. Mankind has not walked on the moon in more than 50 years, much less reached for Mars and beyond.

Frank Herbert can offer an explanation for why mankind has preferred to wallow in the mud for the last half-century rather than reach for the stars. Based on Dune, I think he would lay the blame at the feet of liberal democracy and capitalism, which are afflicted by increasingly short-term and mundane thinking. Indeed, the only reason we left the planet in the first place had less to do with Faustian striving than Cold War competition with the Soviet Union about which system, liberal democracy or communism, would have dominion over the Earth.

Cold War competition was an enormous engine of technological development, especially in the West. It forced liberal democracies into some semblance of long-term strategic thinking. It also forced capitalists to treat workers more decently. The result was a golden age for Western workers, whose wages were buoyed by dramatic technological innovations, many of them lavishly subsidized by the state.

But the West’s victory in the Cold War turned out to be our defeat, for two reasons. First, easing superpower competition removed one of the main spurs of technological development. Second, capitalism became global, and instead of increasing productivity through technological advancement, suddenly the craze became cost-cutting through offshoring production and importing cheap labor, the benefits of which accrued overwhelmingly to the oligarchs.

Increasing Leftist control of the culture led to the denigration of space exploration as white, male, and colonialist. Instead of taking humanity into the twenty-first century, the focus became uplifting blacks into the twentieth-century, truly an infinite task but hardly a heroic one.

So what kind of civilization could take us to the stars? Herbert gives the answer in the backstory of Dune. A galaxy-spanning civilization must cross vast distances, which takes an enormous amount of time. It must also spend enormous amounts of wealth today for the benefit of distant future generations. It would have to plan far into the future, and its form of government would have to be replicable on widely separated worlds between which travel and communication would be extremely slow and expensive. It would, in short, require great decentralization.

Liberal democracies and capitalist enterprises are incapable of such great ventures. They only think of the next election or the next quarter. Wealth and power flow to those who better serve the whims of empowered morons in the present, not distant future generations. After all: What have future generations done for me?

Herbert believed that feudalism, not liberal democracy, is the social form necessary to take mankind to the stars. Thus in Dune, planets are ruled by hereditary dukes and barons who owe allegiance to a distant emperor. Feudalism is hierarchical but decentralized, befitting a world in which travel and communication are slow and expensive. Feudal institutions also supported long-term planning, vast expenditures, and multigenerational labors on matters that were far from mundane, such building cathedrals and fighting for centuries against Islam.

Hereditary monarchies and aristocracies encourage long-term stewardship. Beyond that, initiatic spiritual institutions like the Catholic church and its various monastic and knightly orders — or, in the Muslim world, Sufi orders — provided the institutional continuity necessary to pursue plans unfolding over centuries.

In the Dune universe, three such spiritual orders emerged against the background of what Herbert called the “Blutlerian Jihad”: a holy war against artificial intelligence. Mankind in the pursuit of security and comfort had become enslaved by machines, and the only force that could overcome them was a religious revival. Only the sacred is powerful enough to trump the utilitarian and convenient In the wake of the jihad, mankind had to do without artificial intelligence, which forced us to develop our own intrinsic powers.

The Bene Tleilax created “mentats,” human beings who had expanded their memories and analytical powers to the point that they could function as human computers. The Tleilaxu also practiced cloning and genetic engineering. Through something called “prana-bindu yoga” they developed “face dancers,” human beings who could mimic the appearances and personalities of others. In the fifth Dune novel, Heretics of Dune, we learn that the Tleilaxu are Sufi Muslims, who take Islamic misogyny to revolting extremes.

The Spacing Guild focused on the development of prescient powers. To develop these powers, Guild Navigators used immense quantities of the most valuable substance in the universe: the highly addictive and consciousness-expanding drug known as “spice,” found only on the planet Arrakis, known to its natives as Dune. The spice had mutated the Guild Navigators into strange fish-like creatures who could see the future, or different possible futures. They used this power to make possible faster than light travel by charting wormholes in space.

The third spiritual order is the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, inspired by the formidable nuns and crones who knew Herbert’s Irish Catholic grandmother. The name Bene Gesserit is supposed to call the Jesuits to mind and roughly means “Well Born,” referring to its focus on eugenics. The Bene Gesserit also use the spice to prolong their lives and develop their mental powers. They use the “Water of Life,” which is related to the spice, to access the ancestral memories of their female forebearers. Through prana-bindu yoga, they have developed the ability to control the chemical processes and involuntary muscles of their own bodies by will alone. They have also developed other yogic superpowers, including a martial art known as the weirding way. The sisterhood’s principal occupation, however, is eugenics. By cultivating hyper-observation and abductive reasoning skills, the sisters have uncanny abilities to read people, which they call “Truthsense.” 

The sisterhood’s principal occupation is eugenics. Their proximate goal is the breeding of a superman, who can transmute the poisonous Water of Life and access male ancestral memories as well as peer into the future. They call him the “Kwisatz Haderach,” which means the “shortener of the way.” Their ultimate goal is murky, but it appears to be to ensure the survival and upward development of the human race from any peril. They are both the guardians and guiding intelligence of humanity.

The back story and world creation of Dune are not the only things of interest to political philosophy. The stories themselves also offer many lessons. The six Dune novels fall into three pairs.

The first two, Dune and Dune Messiah, tell the story of the rise and fall of Paul Atreides, the heir to a dukedom who becomes the Kwisatz Haderach and while pursuing the world-shaking but petty vendettas of his caste unleashes a holy war that devastates the galaxy and makes him God Emperor over the ruins. Herbert clearly meant Dune and Dune Messiah to be cautionary tales about the dangers of charismatic leadership and mixing religious fervor with politics. These are sobering lessons our movement should take to heart.

The next two Dune books, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, have become my favorites. (See my essay on them “The Golden Path.”) They tell the story of Paul’s son, Leto, who inherits his father’s ancestral memories, prescient powers, and throne but does not become an antihero whining about how oppressed he feels by his knowledge and supreme power. Instead, Leto peers into the future and sees the extinction of humanity by one of its own inventions (AI again), and sets out to stop it. But this required 3500 years of planning and execution. Instead of entrusting this task to an initiatic order like the Bene Gesserit, Leto found a way to fuse his mortal flesh with the larval sandworms of Arrakis, who produce the spice, becoming a monstrous colony organism that is virtually indestructible.

Humanity’s vulnerability is its political unity in Leto’s imperium. Humanity can be ruled because it can be seen, and not just by the all-seeing God Emperor, but by all the forms of communication that make us available to and manipulable by great powers. Thus Leto sets out to breed a strain of human beings who are invisible to the prescience grantd by the spice. He also develops a new technology, the no-sphere, which is invisible to prescience and any other form of monitoring. The no-sphere can be combined with a spaceship to create the no-ship, a stealth craft that can travel anywhere in the universe unobserved and untraceable.