Beware The Strongman & The Kangaroo Mouse | The Philosophy of Dune
Dune Read-Along Companion Essay 4
Welcome to the Parker’s Ponderings Dune in June (and some of July) Read-Along. This is the third of six companion essays that I’m writing for those reading through Dune with me.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you all as well, so make sure to leave your own thoughts and favorite quotes from the sections in view down in the comments.
Here’s the reading schedule:
June 5th – pages 1-105, read until this epigraph “Over the exit of the Arrakeen landing field, crudely carved as thought with a poor instrument, there was an inscription…” and the first line of the main text: “The whole theory of warfare is calculated risk…”
June 12th – pages 106-205, stop before epigraph “There should be a science of discontent…” and the first line: Jessica awoke in the dark, feeling premonition…”
Zoom Book Club – Sunday, June 22nd 4pm central
June 19th – pages 206-305, stop before the epigraph “At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence” and the first line: “As Paul fought the ‘thopter’s controls…”
June 26th – pages 306-407, stop before the epigraph “The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism…” and the first line: “On his seventeenth birthday, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen killed…”
Zoom Book Club – TBD
July 3rd 408-515, stop before the epigraph “When law and duty are one, united by religion…” and the first line: “The smuggler’s spice factory…”
July 10th – pages 516-616 (the end of the book, before appendices)
Zoom Book Club – TBD
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Terrible Disaster = Terrible Purpose?
No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.
Frank Herbert interwove lots of themes throughout our fourth section of reading. If I had to pick out the major theme of this section, I’d say it’s the dangers of a Great Man Theory backed by religious fervor.
We’ve already seen that Paul is the rightful ducal heir of Arrakis, as imperial planet, through his father’s death and of Caladan by the same right. He’s the rightful heir of the Harkonnen Barony through his maternal grandfather, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. He’s looking more and more like the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit messiah who is prophesied to be able to view the whole of the collective uncionsiouss of his ancestors, both feminine and masculine. He has Mentat capabilities and prescient faculties on top of all of this.
We’ve seen that, metaphorically and/or psychologically, Paul is a potential Platonic philosopher-king who is losing his cardinal virtues one by one due to his shadow self, which he’s failed to properly integrate into his identity—aka, the Harkonnens and the Emperor who have killed off Duke Leto (Justice), Duncan Idaho (temperance), and capturing Thufir Hawat to be twisted and bent (wisdom).
But now we get to see if Paul is the Fremen’s messiah, their Mahdi and/or Lisan al-Gaib.
We’ve learned that the imperial planetologist Kynes is actually Liet-Kynes, the unofficial king of ‘Dune’, which is the Fremen’s name for Arrakis. As planetologist, Liet-Kynes is a sort of personification of the planet’s ecology. Liet is the heart and soul of Dune. He has successfully unified the Fremen under a singular vision, which he inherited from his father. The vision is of a lush, green planet transformed for human flourishing; Arrakis as a paradise. And we see that Kynes’s father has worked hard to establish this vision of paradise as another unifying religion amongst the Fremen, fusing disobedience with sin and religion and law (350).
As unofficial king of the Fremen, and the one who speaks for the planet’s ecology, Kynes is the only one who rightfully speaks for all Fremen as well (359). But Kynes is left to die out in the desert without a stillsuit by the Harkonnens. He begins hallucinating his father’s voice instructing him about Dune’s planetology and smells the telltale pheromones of a pre-spice blow. We learn that there are ‘little makers’, which are half plant/half animal juvenile sand worms, deep under the sand that collect up all the water and somehow form giant subterranean bubbles of pre-spice liquid. After a while the bubble breaks and the pre-spice soup oxygenates and blows, leaving spice all over the surface of Arrakis.
Kynes was inadvertently left to die on just such a pre-spice mass and just before it blows. Kynes sees a desert hawk come down to peck at him. Dune desert hawks are specially adapted to smell liquid and feed on the blood of their prey. Kynes calls them carrion eaters—like a vulture… it’s a hawk that’s become a blood thirsty vulture which is trying to feed on him… the Atreides symbol on their crest is a hawk! Two more hawks join the one peering at Kynes and then together the three Atreides hawks, fly away before the pre-spice mass explodes.
Just as the mass is set to explode, Kynes has a realization and his hallucinatory father says proclaims “no more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero”. (351) But Kynes had already sent messages to the Fremen to protect Paul and Jessica—he single-handedly pushed his people into the hands of a hero.
Why is a hero so dangerous for the Fremen? So terrible? Because Kynes and his father had invoked deep religious tropes to justify their planetary vision, their vision of paradise, a dream to capture men’s souls (404). They had been priming the people with religious fervor for years. If a strong man comes along and redirects that fervor, then… well, an imperial-wide space jihad might ensue!
Here Herbert is invoking the Great Man Theory but instead of commending it as a good historiography, he’s warning us against it. Beware of the Great Man, the Strong Man; beware the hero who can lather the mob into a frenzy, especially a religiously motivated frenzy! They may appear as a noble hawk, but at heart they are blood thirsty vultures.
The “terrible disaster” of the Fremen falling into the hands of a hero, could be an allusion to the “terrible purpose” that’s been plaguing Paul through his premonitions. Later, on pg. 402, we see Paul’s vision’s of just such a jihad, “Somewhere ahead of him on this path, the fanatic hordes cut their gory path across the universe in his name. The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: “Muad’Dib!”’.
But with that last revelation of Kynes, the mass erupts, launching him up into the air and then the planet Dune swiftly devours him as it fills the hole made by the explosion.
Paul Muad’Dib
So the personification of the planet, Kynes, is gone—swallowed up by the planet itself. Paul and Jessica prove their worth to the Fremen by besting several in Stilgar’s Fremen troop, including Stilgar himself.
They are then welcomed in under Stilgar’s countenance and Jessica is taught about the Fremen philosophy of leadership,
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob… The law demands our form of choosing a leader is a just law… But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread our force over more land. (371)
I believe this is meant to be another warning for the reader. Rule without justice? Pragmatism over what’s right? What a terrifying proposition. And yet Paul is set to be just such a leader as his father, Duke Leto, the personification of justice, has been taken from Paul.
Paul is then challenged to a fight to the death by Jamis and Paul kills Jamis fairly easily, proving that his valor is still alive and well—which I’ve been arguing is personified in the character of Gurney Halleck, who himself has been given over to bloodlust:
Halleck opened his eyes. “I would prefer the blood of Rabban Harkonnen flowing about my feet… You think that day will come?” (327)
Paul is then welcomed into the troop as a full member and receives a new name, his troop name. And incase Herbert’s hints to Paul being the heroic Great/Strong Man of the Great Man Theory were too subtle, Stilgar names Paul “Usul” because he saw great strength in him, strength like the base of a pillar (388).
Remember back to the opening pages of the book when Paul recounted his dream of a blue-within-blue-eyed girl to his mother and the Reverend Mother. She said “Tell me about the waters of your homeworld, Usul” (31) and Paul initially thought “Usul” was a planet but then reconsidered that the girl may have been calling him Usul.
Paul does end up meeting that girl and her name is Chani. Chani is the daughter of Liet. Liet was the unofficial king of Dune. Chani is the unofficial princess of Dune. Chani is clearly falling for Paul-Usul. If they end up together, then there’s just one more avenue of power consolidated under Paul—one more claim to the rightful rule of the planet. Paul would be the heir to Arrakis as the direct heir of the Atreides and Harkonnen, and he could be seen as the heir to Dune through his relationship with the unofficial princess of the Fremen—not to mention all the other fulfilled prophetic roles he’s been accumulating.
In addition to being called Usul, Paul is then invited to choose his own name of manhood, which is different from his secret troop name. Paul chooses the name of the little hopping kangaroo mouse, which happens to be called ‘Muad’Dib’—the name Paul had prophesied to Jessica that the Fremen would call him. The Muad’Dib mouse is revered by the Fremen as being wise. It creates its own water, hides from the sun and travels at night like the Fremen, it’s fruitful and multiplies all over Arrakis, and called ‘instructor-of-boys’ which is ironic since Paul himself was a boy just a moment ago before his transformation in the stiltent.
Paul’s prescient faculty, his inner awareness, his trinocular vision of past/present/future, is fascinating. He sees futures, potentials, but the ‘future’ is not always fixed. He’s seen that sometimes moments are so delicate that a cough could change the course of future events. The isn’t just one available path for the future—or is there? Paul has seen some futures where he dies, and yet none of those come to fruition. There’s a terrifying jihad looming in Paul’s future and this disquieting terrible purpose that haunts him, are these one and the same? Are the avoidable? Or do all of these paths converge on one ill-fated future? Is Paul merely a pawn of fate? “How much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy?” (353)
Paul and Jessica continue to accidentally fulfill prophecies left and right. Jessica takes a cynical attitude toward the religion of the Fremen because she feels as though she sees behind the curtain—all of these prophecies are really just planted tools of manipulation put there by the Missionaria Protectiva, but yet she continually fulfills them. Are they really faux-prophecies if they continue to be fatefully fulfilled?
Here at the end of our reading, we see that Jessica is wise to the scheming of Liet-Kynes and senses that his dream could be appropriated for Paul’s benefit, that the Fremen “could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul’s place for him.” (405). Paul is not a crazed power hungry maniac, however. He doesn’t want to bring the jihad. He chose the name Paul Muad’Dib because he hadn’t seen it in any of his visions and wanted to pick something that would lead to a new future. But he begins to realize that fate is coming for him, boxing him in on all sides, and unless he were to murder his mother, unborn sister, and the whole of his Fremen troop, that terrible purpose will continue to march ever closer to him.
Paul starts to sense these machinations in his mother and we’re left with a single thought turning over in Paul’s mind: “My Mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me, she trained me. She is my enemy.” (407).
Alright, that was a lot! As always, I want to hear from you! Leave me your thoughts in the comments, leave me a like, and share this with your favorite Dune nerd—maybe even in a Dune Facebook group or sub-Reddit?
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Awesome essay, reading these has seriously enriched my reading of Dune!
If I recall correctly, Herbert was upset by how many people liked Paul and viewed him as a hero, and he felt compelled to write the sequels to undo that. Of course, that may actual point out the Great Man Theory has more merit than Herbert would like to admit when one consider that even in Herbert's fictional work designed to undermine the Great Man theory people accepted Paul as a Great Man.
Or maybe it is just ironic?