Megan McArdle, comrades!
I just can't even believe how stupid this one is. It's not that I'm an AI booster (indeed, i'm rather pessimistic), but real shit, Dune is your model for a future humanity?
Brava Megan, Brava.
https://archive.is/FwQ5r no paywall, thanks @awoo
:posad
Economics in Dune works like this - The Navigators need Spice Melange to fold space. Folding space is the only way to travel interstellar distances. Dune is the only planet where the Spice Melange is found in the entire known galaxy, and no analogue exists. The Navigator's monopoly on interstellar travel relies on access to the Spice. The entire galaxy's economy relies on the Navigators.
Out of that come two unbreakable rules - Don't fuck with the Spice, and don't fuck with the Navigators.
If you fuck with the spice then everyone's access to interstellar travel is jeopardized. The entire galaxy will come down on you and you are not that bad ass.
If you fuck with the Navigators the guild will embargo your system. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out. You're not part of the galactic community anymore.
Everything is feudal because everyone in power likes it that way. Interstellar travel represents a single point of failure, and a perfect opportunity for monopoly - If the Navigators like doing business with you then you have an unbelievable advantage over everyone else on the planet. You now have all the wealth and all the power and everyone else can suck eggs. This benefits the Navigators because they never have to worry about local politics fucking up their vibe. Same deal for the LAANSRAD, the Noble Houses, and for the Emperor - Having one monopoly on control of each region of space makes everyone's lives easier. If all the great powers agree to help each other there's no possible uprising that could defend itself from armies of the best equipped soldiers in the galaxy descending on them from orbit.
In exchange for being part of the great protection racket in the sky the LAANSRAD noble houses are bound to arcane rules of conduct and behavior that would make the most bureaucratic states in Earth's history wince. Everything about how they do business, war, marriage, trade, and everything else is part of highly regimented formal strictures. War was long ago deemed too expensive and messy, so the LAANSRAD, the Emperor, and the Navigators enforce limited war. There are strict rules - No WMDs. If you use Nukes or other large scale weapons you'll be embargoed. Every Great House maintains a stockpile of incredibly powerful future-tech nukes, but those are a last ditch "If I'm going down I'm taking you with me" threat against the possibility of invasion, not an offensive weapon. Wars between the houses are formally conducted with carefully staged battles between assassins with strict rules on who can be targeted, when, and how. The conventions strictly limit the scope of destruction to ensure that whoever wins the system of trade and politics isn't disrupted. The system also quietly but not so quietly insures that no rising power is able to overthrow the system. Duke Leto of House Atreides was targetted in a conspiracy between the Padashah Emperor, the Navigator's Guild, and House Harkonen because the Emperor and the Navigator's believed that Leto's charisma and support in the LAANSRAD made him a threat to the established order of things.
The whole thing with the Sardukar super-soldiers was significant because the Sardukar were the best (second best, actually) soldiers in the galaxy, with Atreides troops probably a distant third. The power of the Emperor and the power of the LAANSRAD were usually kept carefully in check - The Emperor had more power than anyone in the LAANSRAD, but the LAANSRAD as a whole could take down the Emperor. As long as everyone played by the rules the two groups couldn't go too far in acting against one another's interests. The Emperor sending his personal Sardukar troops to ensure a Harkonnen victory on Arrakis was a huge breach of conduct - The Emperor was not supposed to take direct action against the LAANSRAD houses in that fashion, and if he was found out the political ramifications could lead to open war. But the Navigators were in on it, and since they control all travel and thus all movement of information the conspiracy thought they could get away with it - When the bloodshed was over anyone who knew of the deception and was in a position to talk could be easily disposed of and there was no way for them to ever get off Arrakis even if they somehow survived.
To enforce this galaxy wide cultural, economic, and military stagnation all the great powers made extensive use of extremely long-term eugenics programs to breed transhumans that could out-think and out-fight the competition. Mentats were humans carefully bred over millenia to perform super-human data processing, storage, and retrieval tasks. They could do everything a powerful computer could, including retaining, organizing, and crunching vast amounts of data very rapidly, but they could do it with a human mind making them far more useful than any dumb system could be. And since one individual could see all of the data at once they could reliably outthink a room full of expert analysts, each of whom could never have more than part of the puzzle.
There were a lot of these human augmentation eugenics programs. The Bene Gesserit could do some weird shit. The Voice is the one that's most obvious in the movies; They developed a means by which they could modulate their voice to make people do what they're told. A bit more subtly they had super-human control over their bodies - Their strength, agility, endurance, and fine-grained control over their physiology is completely super-human. The unique martial arts system that the Bene Gesserit developed and trained their membership in, the Weirding Way, was not only one of the best martial arts systems in the galaxy, it was so powerful that it turned out to be a strategic weapon in Paul's Jihad. Fremen soldiers conditioned to survive life on Arrakis, when their native martial arts abilities were elevated by the Weirding Way, proved to be a literally unstoppable army. Fear of the Sardukar was a key part of the Emperor's balance of power with the LAANSRAD and the Fremen overwhelmed and destroyed the Sardukar with relative ease. After that there was nothing in the galaxy that could slow them down.
A lot of these trans-humans, including Mentats and some Bene Gesserit, were reliant on the mind-expanding properties of the Spice Melange to use and maintain their abilities. Spice also had great benefits to human health and greatly increased human longevity, as long as you had a steady supply.
The point of all this being that Herbert did actually put a lot of thought in to his universe, including how the economy and politics worked. All travel, many lynch-pin transhuman clades, and the longevity and robust health of the nobility were all absolutely reliant on the Spice Melange. If anything disrupted the flow of Spice the entire human galaxy would face complete, horrific collapse. Thus the whole economic and political system was designed to protect that single point of failure at all costs. The immense deep history stagnation was by the conscious design and careful intervention of the ruling powers. The techno-feudal future with schizotech like anti-gravity carts pulled by literal oxen was by design - Strictly controlling access to high technology and enforcing a subsistence level of existence on most of humanity secure d the power of the great houses. No revolt was possible because he who controls the high ground wins, and there is no higher ground than orbit - As long as the noble houses controlled local space travel they could just drop rocks on any rebellion with impunity, assuming they didn't call on their allies to send near super-human soldiers to fight it out on the ground. And if the nobles lost and the rebellion gained control of the planet? The Navigator's Guild could simply starve them out, leaving them isolated until all their high technology broke down and the descendants of the rebels could be easily subdued.
From what I understand the whole story started out from Herbert's interest in desert ecology. You'll recall that Keynes, the Imperial Ecologist, was a critical character - He (she in the movie) was so important that he was chosen to be the Emperor's official witness to the change of fiefdom from Harkonnen hands to Atreides hands. Keynes is arguably one of the most important secondary characters in the story - A large part of the reason the Fremen decided to take Paul and Jessica in was that they saw Keynes treating the Atreides with respect. Keynes was secretly using his knowledge as an ecologist to aid the Fremen in their millenia long project of sequestering scarce water in hopes of one day terraforming Arrakis in to a green and vibrant world. He was probably the most-respected non-Fremen on the planet.
Herbert's decision to make an ecologist a key player in the story went further than that; The Emperor's and the Harkonnen's disinterest and dismissal of the indigenous peoples proved disastrous. The Emperor and most of the LAANSRAD vewed Arrakis as a hell world unsuitable for human habitation and useful only as the source of the Spice. Duke Leto, however, believed that people, not resources, were the key to power and treated his subjects accordingly. He did something unprecedented in history - He sent one of his most trusted men, the reknowned warrior and poet Gurney Halleck, to Arrakis to
seducebefriend the Fremen. And he proved the right man for the job - His peerless fighting skills impressed the Fremen, while his diplomatic skills and cultural abilities gained him trust, access, and a voice. The Harkonnen had treated them like animals and sought to exterminate them, while the Atreides approached them as potential recruits, or at least allies.Leto's charisma was a great part of the reason he was so feared by the Emperor and some of the LAANSRAD houses. Leto was honorable and just to a fault and bent a great deal of effort towards ensuring the relative comfort and prosperity of his serfs. They were serfs, but they were well fed serfs who
genuinely believed that their lord would not treat them unfairly or arbitrarily. Laws would be followed, rights would be upheld, deals would be upheld. No one would be asked to die for the Duke unless it was necessary and there was a justified reason. And that bought him the fanatical loyalty of his household, his troops, and his people. In a galaxy where most Great Houses ruled by fear this made the Atreides particularly hard to deal with by normal means. It was hard to find anyone to bribe in the Atreides household. The personal, sincere loyalty of the rank and file towards Leto and his family meant that putting together any kind of betrayal was far more difficult and perilous than it would be against most Great Houses. This gave the Atreides considerable advantages in the constant cold-war of espionage and counter-espionage that was a key part of LAANSRAD politics.
One of the things that keeps Dune relevant even now, however, is that Duke Leto's "Philosopher King" approach to rulership did not change the material conditions of the world in which he lived. His role on Arrakis was to ensure continuous, uninterrupted access to the Spice. The Fremen understood this. Thus while they might admire the loyalty and capability of his soldiers and consider him an ally against the hated Harkonnen, they still recognized him as a foreign oppressor come to exploit their land with little concern for their autonomy and rights.
An important theme of the story is that the Fremen were far, far more capable than anyone, even Duke Leto, suspected. Their population was much greater than anyone except Keynes knew. Their local manufacturing abilities were much more sophisticated. They had a cohesive religious and political culture under which they were able to set aside inter-community rivalries to act together against their foreign oppressors. And they were incredibly skilled fighters, maintaining ancient martial traditions of close-in knife fighting and martial arts that relied entirely on speed, agility, and reaction in a galaxy where most soldiers were accustomed to shield-fighting. There were no shields in the deserts of Arrakis - The worms could detect the vibrations created by the shields from great distances and would always come to an active shield, making their use suicidal. The Fremen, alone in the universe, fought without the protection of the shields and became commensurately more skilled as a result, exceeding all martial arts except the secret transhuman martial arts of the Bene Gesserit and a few others. The nature of combat in the Dune setting - Shields rendered artillery and most projectile weapons worthless, while lasers had a suicidally deadly interaction with shields, meant that hand-to-hand combat personal combat between relatively small, elite armies was the norm. And as the Fremen said "God created Arrakis to train the faithful".
As such the Fremen had far more agency than anyone suspected. The check on this ultimately turned out to be imperialist religion - Missionaries from the Bene Gesserit had long ago manipulated their religion to include the story of a prophesized savior in order that if a Bene Gesserit ever had to shelter among them, or any other similarly manipulated culture, she could rely on her training, education, and transhuman powers to assume an important role in the prophesies of their religion. Even then, as Paul and Jessica take advantage of this to position Paul as the prophesied Mahdi, the Fremen again show that the Galaxy has underestimated them. Rather than Paul taking control of the Fremen the culture and religion of the Fremen bind Paul's actions - In order to retain the political powers the Fremen give him he must fulfill the role the Fremen expect of him in the way that they expect it. His power and authority relies entirely on this indigenous culture, so to maintain that power he has to fulfill the role they expect him to fulfill. I don't think you could call it an anti-imperialist or anti-colonial narrative, but the germ of one is definitely there. Paul and Leto are both ultimately puppets on the strings of history, unable to change their fate as they become the focus of powerful material realities and cultural histories. Paul's burgeoning trans-human powers of pattern-recognition and prediction become literal precognition, allowing him to see and understand the future by extrapolating from current events, realizing at once all the choices he will ever make and their consequences, and also realizing that no other choices will be possible. He is essentially trapped in his knowledge of the future, the great white savior made powerless by the history happening around him. The real victors of the story are ultimately the Fremen, whose every prophecy is made true and who conquer the universe in a bloody religious campaign that results in nearly all of humanity adhering to their religion and culture. Paul is ultimately so horrified by what has transpired under his leadership that he blinds himself and, as is tradition for the blind in Fremen culture, wanders out in to the desert to live alone and presumably die.
Now, take this all with a grain of salt. It's been years and years since I've read Dune and I'm certainly reading a lot in to the narrative. It's still at it's heart a book written in the 60s by a white guy based on his perception of the politics of the Arabian Penninsula, with the Spice standing in for both access to potable water sources, and the vital importance of oil tot he world at large. I expect for a lot of young science fiction readers of that age it might have been Baby's First Imperialism is Bad, Actually, Even When It's Done By A Well-Meaning Paternalistic White Man. It had a massive historical impact on Science Fiction - Star Wars owes a great deal to it, while WH40k basically just ripped off the whole setting and shook it up in a bottle with 2000AD and some Tolkien. Every giant desert worm with no obvious ecological niche owes it's existence to Dune (Notably the entire life cycle of Shai'Hulud is explained in detail in the appendices and is quite interesting. No one since has seemed to care). A whole slew of mystical psychic psuedo-cults are just the Bene Gesserit with different outfits. It's hard to overstate it's effect on later science fiction, and that alone makes it of historical value to the science-fiction enjoyer if nothing else about it appeals.