The problem is that prescience causes the future to become fixed - once he had forseen the jihad, there was no way to prevent it. Even if he had died in the duel with Feyd-Rautha, his martyrdom would have inspired the Fremen to the same end. That’s why the Golden Path was the only way to save humanity from extinction due to the inevitable extinction of the sandworms and/or the return of the thinking machines - it was necessary to create people and places that were immune to prescience.
It’s clear from the text of Dune that the jihad was going to happen, and that the Fremen hated everyone.
Paul knew the jihad was going to happen whether he lived or died, so the best he could do was become Emperor to control it (as well as revenge on the Emperor for wiping out the Atreides). From immediately before his duel with Feyd-Rautha:
And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he had already become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist.
A sense of failure pervaded him, and he saw through it that Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had slipped out of the torn uniform, stripped down to a fighting girdle with a mail core.
This is the climax, Paul thought. From here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib.
Regarding the Fremen, the scene where Jessica becomes a Reverend Mother and examines all the memories of the past RMs is nothing but the Fremen being invaded and enslaved and hounded from planet to planet. “Never to forgive! Never to forget!” is one voice she hears screaming. They especially hated the Harkonnens because they were the most recent to brutalize them, but their entire history is being victims of brutality.
it also begs the question whether Paul could, in fact, see the future or if it was just some sort of spice-induced madness. I know Paul was bred to be the Kwisatz Haderach, but does he REALY have actual magic powers of seeing all possible futures?
(This is exactly what I mean about the layers to the original Dune novel.)
If the reader believes the internal thoughts expressed by Paul are what he believed and are true, he tried to stop the Jihad. And failed. And then tried to reduce the Jihad, and didn’t do an especially good job of that either.
But of course, Paul claimed political power by intrigue from Fremen and by force from the Emperor. Whether or not he had those internal beliefs, or the truth of them, it was expedient to use the Jihad to solidify his personal power.
The guild navigators use the spice to be able to pilot their ships faster than light. Supposedly this also lets them see the future, and has made them extremely risk adverse, and caused the empire to stagnate. My problem, which I’m not sure the text supports, is that once they have avoided a supposed risk, how do they know it was ever real?
I do like the books, though as much as I try, I haven’t been able to make it past God Emperor since I was a teen, but I can’t help but think all the bits about prescience may just be a lie.
Seeing the future is no sillier than FTL travel, generational memories, or singing based instant mind control, and I’m fine with all those, so maybe there is something in the text that makes me skeptical?
Yes. After he’s blinded by the stone burner in Messiah, he’s still able to “see” by foreseeing the future as it will be a fraction of a second from now.
I kind of feel like that’s less interesting that Paul’s visions are essentially a large-scale “trolley problem” where he has to kill billions to save trillions. I’ve never read past the first book, but what’s so horrible that he has to do all that?
Imagine you eat a magic mushroom and hallucinate that if you were to go down 3rd street that you’d get in a horrible accident and die. So instead, you drive down 1st street, and you don’t get into an accident. I guess it worked!
It reminds me of an old story… A man is standing in a field, waving a stick in the air. A neighbor comes up to him and asks what that stick is, and why he’s waving it around like a maniac.
“It’s my elephant stick! It keeps elephants away!”
“But there has never been an elephant anywhere near here.”
“That just proves that the stick works!”
Remember, Paul was having accurate dreams about the Fremen and Chani, and that his name would be Usul, even before he left Caladan. So there were definitely real Kwisatz Haderach powers even before he took the spice.
Until Heretics of Dune, the only power the Guild Navigators had was to predict the future and thereby chart safe courses for their ships. After the 1984 Lynch movie came out with Navigators “folding space”, Herbert thought that was pretty cool and added it to the books moving forward.
Remember how there was a terraforming project in its early stages aimed at making Arrakis temperate?
And remember how water is fatal to sandworms?
By the time of Messiah, the project is too far advanced to stop it - Arrakis will become a moist Earthlike planet, and as a result the sandworms will go extinct, leading to resource wars and social collapse as the spice runs out, which will lead to the total extinction of the human race (possibly with the help of some omnicidal AIs that have been hiding in deep space since before the Butlerian Jihad).
The only way to avoid this is what Paul calls the Golden Path - find a way to keep the worms, or at least ONE worm, alive for long enough to put off social collapse until mankind can discover alternatives for spice and be induced to spread out far enough across the universe that a single catastrophe will never be able to wipe them all out.
Paul ultimately refuses to take that path, though - so his son has to try to fulfill it himself.
Sure. However, he also, maybe kind of sort of, has free will and perhaps does not have to fulfill his freaky visions; who knows?
Fascinating discussion. I wonder how the movie will tackle all that?
“They denied us the Haj!” The Harkonnens are not the “They” there. The Fremen have plenty of other targets, from their treatment during the Zensunni wandering.