Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
the 4000 years of necessary tragedy and sacrifice, aka the golden path, is also remarkably similar to the rationalistsā teleology! specifically the longtermist stuff! i.e. itās okay to sacrifice lives today to ensure humanityās survival.
i think herbertās feelings about breeding programs are ā¦ complicated. he never presents it as ethical but he does seem fascinated by the concept and heās very very into the idea of forging supermen from extreme environmental pressure. like ācomes up several times per bookā levels of fascinated.
Only in the broadest sense where humanity survives into the far future by spreading so far and wide that no matter the scale of a catastrophe a significant part will always continue to thrive.
However, where longtermism is about papercliping the entire universe into compute to fulfil some vague utilitarian notion of virtual happiness quota, the GP seems to be more about crippling the substructure that ostensibly causes humanity again and again be reduced to the whims of some supreme authority, be it the automated thinking machines from their past or their current much harder to escape succession of psychic tyrants let loose by selectively breeding for something humanity had absolutely no natural defence against.
The GP isnāt even a utopia, itās a response to an immediate incredibly out of the box problem, the inevitability of an eventual dynasty of space wizard genghis khans.
I think they come second to his concerns about ecology and humanityās relation to the environment. Post-desert fremen are basically water-fat cosplayers, and in general, other than the deliberately paradigm shattering kwisatz haderach, the end product of genetic adjustment are never presented as an apex for humanity, more like a good fit for their niche, like how post-emperor fish-speakers either peter-out or get subsumed by other factions.
No, the golden path isnāt a utopia! Itās the necessary breaking of eggs to make the survival of humanity omelet. Itās sort of a more twisted version of Asimovās Foundation carried entirely in the mind of a being with perfect knowledge of causality. The details of the plot donāt necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about. (Another wrinkle is that in Dune I believe [havenāt read beyond godemperor] ultimately the solution is to create a being that escapes prophecy, a neat little transcendent conjuration. Solving alignment doesnāt quite have the same oomph but it is also essentially a magic trick you can do if your freethinking and selfreliance stats are high enough. Also remember Rat!Harryās patronus is a Human! Benevolent AI should be seen as the liberated, transcendent form of the human mind.)
Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? Itās a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbertās obsessions from a new perspective.
To be clear I love Dune, and I find Herbert fascinating because his ideas always find themselves in tension and are often baffling and muddled enough to provoke entertaining discussion. But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.
Nerding out about Dune is tremendously cool and i love it, you can pick any thread to pull and it always goes somewhere.
Isnāt aspiring for the aesthetics while ignoring the (admittedly heavily lore driven and not especially applicable to irl) substance exactly what the torment nexus meme is about though? Except I donāt think there is a dust-speckness aspect to the GP, you arenāt future-human-population-maxxing1, the point seems to be to ensure there is a future where humanityās collective free will isnāt utterly tethered to a prescient autocrat2, and the prescriptive aspect is that we should be part of an open system instead of say locked in with the great man of history du jour, which is also in keeping with the ecological framing.
Itās been a while but I donāt think the Golden Path is even that front and center in the text, Dune 4: GEOD is basically a character study on the God emperor, who is one of the most unique and fascinating characters in sci-fi3.
I think this is why the GP is a TINA situation by authorial decree, itās Frank Herbert going listen, Iām doing my best to write a suicidal rebirth god archetype as a layered and relatable-yet-utterly-othered character, you are not supposed to be worrying that much if there could be a GP-but-liberal with more individual thriving and less oppressive totalitarianism, I assure you heās thought about it extensively and he thinks there sure canāt and thatās it.
The Bureau of Saboteurs books along with Godmakers were my favourite non-Dune Herbert books! I also found the Dragon in the Sea fascinating 20 years ago and think I should revisit, and also finally read the follow up collaborations that only seem to be available unofficially. Also The White Plague gave late-teens me nightmares.
I remember Dosadi as being more about FH going all out on the intrigue and deep lore to the point where the latter parts of the book are basically written in innuendo, you are literally expected to read between the lines to understand what the hell is going on, I wish my parents had as much faith in me as Frank Herbert had in his readers.
The worst aspects of FH Iām aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.
I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long itās starting to need an editor.
Ah yeah they absolutely are two branches off the same tree! Iāve heard the tree is called Alfred Korzybski but Iām not super familiar myself. But yeah I was thinking the other day about how Dune is replete with ātechā in the Scientologist sense. I feel like ānot becoming a cult leaderā is a pretty low bar, but their parallel evolution is a pretty fascinating case study.
Also as far as Dune discourse is concerned, there is one thing no one talks about that is very important to me, and it is that in Children of Dune Frank Herbert implicitly acknowledges that Irulan is an acronym of āurinalā.
IRULAN FLUSHED!!! I love it. I wish Herbert had allowed himself to be this silly more often. Imagine a world where Dune had been more like Whipping Star!
Also a speech writer for various Republicans, a Reagan fan obviously and a big boring libertarian muh freedom from
taxesgovernment tyranny. His main edge over Ayn Rand is the weird evopsych ecofascist stuff.I would read that essay.