Lies, Damned Lies, and Dune
At the end of last year, I was fortunate enough to participate in a panel discussion on Dune hosted by the wonderful Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA. I first read Dune in high school and was blown away. That year, I wrote my AP Lang essay on Dune and, if I recall, did pretty well. I was excited to reread it.
What surprised me most was how the trappings of Dune and its various science fiction technologies were so memorable, how they felt familiar and vivid as I was reading. There's the sandworms, of course. The "mentats" doing the work of computers with their minds. The stillsuits and all the ways the Fremen conserve water out in the desert. The spice, which allows humans to "fold spacetime" and travel the galaxy.
But I think any understanding of technology that acknowledges how it is more than physical stuff invites us to focus on a more important part of Dune, and one that strikes me as more prescient and telling than all of the others, even those that operate in a context of ecological fiction. And that is the technological function of manufactured myth.
In Dune, the Bene Gesserit (space witches) have "seeded" a "Panoplia Propheticus"—basically a broad array of prophesy, religious doctrine, superstitious rumor—intentionally spread throughout the galaxy in a way that allows local populations to be exploited. In Dune, Lady Jessica realizes that these myths have spread to Arrakis. This allows her son, Paul, to become the savior of the planet; the people of Arrakis are primed, more or less, to embrace a rebel leader and prophet.
In the world of Dune, the Panoplia Propheticus seems to draw from Christian and Muslim religious tradition. But really Herbert is drawing from Campbellian ideas of the "mono-myth," which he sees as central to organized monotheistic religion as a whole.
This is, too, a kind of technology. Rhetoric is a kind of technology. The idea in Dune is that rhetoric and story can be treated exactly like technology to become a means of cultural programming. This seems particularly prescient in 2021, when the United States is wrestling with myths and legends that have outgrown their creators but not their original functions.
I won't spent time here writing too much about the events of January 6th. Suffice it to say that I was terrified and disheartened as anyone to see armed terrorists, some of whom were emboldened by white supremacists and explicitly fascist forces, attack the Capitol Building. I remember my deep-down fear for my legislatures, especially the progressive women of color who have taken on important leadership roles within the Democratic Party—and, for their courage, have been targeted by the worst fascistic elements of American right-wing extremists.
A week later, I read "The American Abyss," historian Timothy Snyder's essay in The New York Times on the event. I found his writing honest and direct. In the end, he admits he doesn't know which way the conservative movement will go, at this juncture in which it is up in the air to what extent they will continue to promote terrorism in America. He says there is a fight between the "gamers" and the "breakers," and January 6th was a clear instance of the "breakers" taking the helm.
His final observation, however, was the most important: the "Big Lie" of election fraud—the false claim that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election—cannot be undone. Snyder writes: "The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish 'stab in the back' was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?"
Others have written elsewhere that Trump's many lies, intentionally or instinctively, drew from a lot of our country's racist myths, and some that pre-date America. Most obviously, many have pointed out that the main scaffolding of the "QAnon" conspiracy, which relies on an idea that there is a global cabal of "elites" (sometimes lizard people?) that drinks the blood of children, reeks of anti-Semitic "blood libel." If there was any doubt that such conspiracy groups are trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic themes, their advocate in Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, blamed California's recent spat of wildfires on—no joke—space lasers operated by the Jewish Rothschilds family.
There is a reading of Dune that I think could be said to be, say, anti-religious, possibly even Islamophobic. But for all that Herbert does see present day religious texts being warped into far-future propaganda, I find these connections mostly incidental. For me, the message in Dune is not that religion is intrinsically state-manufactured propaganda, but that it can be utilized as such. That stories can be intentionally planted early on and exploited later. It is easy for people with power to lay down stories that they know to be motivating in the long-run, with little thought to where that motivation will lead.
After all, the Bene Gesserit had planned to "use" the Panoplia Propheticus for themselves. They did not anticipate that Paul Atreides would utilize it to take control of Arrakis.
And even then, the ending of Dune makes it clear that the movement Paul begins outgrows him, against his own will. As he takes control not only of Arrakis but of the entire human-controlled galaxy itself, Paul reflects that he failed to prevent a religious war he knows will cost billions of lives. He knows that in order to avenge his father's death and assume control of Arrakis, he has already passed into legend, a legend that will outlive him and cause untold suffering.
Paul is, in many ways, a tragic hero. The difference between him and those real-life politicians who exploit people by utilizing long-running myths to cast themselves as heroic saviors is that Paul tries to offset the worst possible outcomes of these dangerous cultural touchstones…whereas the political "breakers" like Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk are doing everything they can to have them come to pass.
Little about the Panoplia Propheticus is explained explicitly in Dune. It is part of the backdrop of the book, something that is vital to the world and the plot, without which the story could not move forward, but that is felt more than seen. But it is worth reflecting on the way the Bene Gesserit plant the seeds of their own destruction by spreading their myths and superstitions. They think they are hiding away a kind of rhetoric weapons cache for later use. They could not anticipate that, like any weapon, it could easily fall into others' hands…and be turned back against them.
Anyway, Dune holds up very well as both a riff on a critique of the kind of "hero's journey," and the way it is woven into the very fabric of our societies—a decade before Star Wars: A New Hope hit the theatres.
