The Jihads and uprisings depicted in the books are not “collectivist” anythings. It’s Paul’s Jihad, and the Butlerian Jihad, not “The peon Jihad” or “the human Uprising”. The closest thing is the Scattering, but even that was Leto’s plan all along.
The Dune stories are a (seemingly conscious) counter to the Great Man crap that permeated a lot of Sci-Fi at the time. It was Herbert going “Behold the Übermensch . Isn’t he a privileged piece of shit? Turns out you have to BE a privileged piece of shit, to become the Übermensch in the first place. True story.”
This is what Leto II the God Emperor understood. He directed 3500 years of human ire towards himself. He made the choice Paul could not. Leto gave up his humanity and made brutal, tough decisions and those decisions allowed all humanity, after his death, to truly be free.
I think it’s a bit more complex than “good guys vs bad guys”. Dune isn’t Star Wars.
My understanding is that Leto II’s atrocities (which includes the deaths of hundreds of billions of people and the obliteration of dozens of planets) is all part of a long term plan for the “greater good” - namely preventing all of humanity from destroying itself. Now it’s my understanding that precognition is real in the Dune universe (a side effect of ingesting the spice and being the Kwisatz Haderach and all that). So, assuming his visions aren’t bullshit, there is some moral justification for Leto II and Pauls actions throughout history.
OTOH, plenty of real world atrocities have been committed in the name of “the greater good” or based on the predictions of some form of oracle.
Agreed, that’s why I said it’s a dystopia. It’s not just Star Wars with good guys and bad guys. Yes, the real world has shades of gray, but that means some people end up at the ends, as mostly white and mostly black. In the real world there are good guys*. The may not always win, and there’s been times in our history that they mostly lose, but there are good guys and bad guys. IMHO a world in which humanity has the flaws of the Dune universe, i.e. one in which it is useless to even try to be a good guy because of destiny / precognition / whatever, is a dystopia.
I’m not saying the good guys are perfect. None of us are. I’m sure not even the historical Jesus was. None the less, I feel comfortable saying that someone like MLK Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela, number among the good guys. The only character in all the Duneverse that I’m aware of that came close was Leto I.
But that didn’t happen until Leto II took over. So in God Emperor of Dune, the known universe under Leto II was a dystopian society where most of humanity was locked in the feudal age. But by the end of the book humanity was freed from Leto II’s control. But before that? I guess the Freman had it pretty rough but I’m not sure the entire setting was dystopian.
Paul wasn’t a bad guy. He generally did his best to take care of people and was horrified to learn that not only was there to be a jihad in his name but even with all his abilities he was powerless to prevent it.
How so? He could have just told the Fremen to knock that shit off. To paraphrase a character from Seinfeld, it would have been as simple as telling them “no spaceships for you.” He didn’t do that because of the aforementioned destiny / precognition / future set in stone / whatever you want to call it.
Geidi Prime and Salusa Secundus didn’t sound like beach resort planets either
The way things are presented, most people were literally peasants and social mobility was impossible (“A place for every man and every man in his place”). The best you could hope for was to become a lackey of the privileged few, and likely die in their interminable internecine wars.
By the time Paul got to the point where he realized he couldn’t control the jihad or limit the harm it would do it was too late to stop. In the eyes of the Freman, he had ceased being Paul the man and was Muad’Dib, the prophesized messiah who would free them. There’s a scene in in Dune where Paul realizes this and notes that he’s lost Stilgar as a friend because he’s now a messiah in his eyes. At one point, Paul believed he could control the jihad and limit the harm it would do but later realized he was wrong. The mythic of Muad’Dib was far more powerful than the man.
I guess it kind of depends on where you draw the line at dystopian. By some definitions, we’ve been living in dystopian societies through most civilizations throughout history. I tend to think of dystopian societies as those where it’s pretty much all bad all the time. While that seems true on places like Geidi Prime and Salusa Secundus, it didn’t seem to be the case on Caladan or even Arrakis itself.
We have no idea what life was like for Caladan’s peasants. We do know they were cheerily handed over to Fenring for a time. And then back to Jessica, who views ordinary people as easily-manipulated tools. And all that pundi rice wasn’t going to grow itself. Especially in a society without complex machinery.
The non-Fremen peasants live a water-poor existence, we see them scrabbling for the leavings of the tables of the wealthy, and subject to the brutality of their overlords. Sure, they had a few month’s respite, that one time…you know, before the Beast came back and then the Jihad (do you think the Fremen Jihadists, who despised the people of the cities, were going to be much better to them than the Harkonnen?)
My take on the Paul vs jihad: Once the Fremen learned that they had the power to conquer the Imperium, the jihad was inevitable. If Paul had tried to stop it, Stilgar and Gurney would have remained loyal, but someone would have assassinated him, and the jihad would have continued on. An army following his memory would have been even bloodier than the army following his person.
We see Leto exhibiting more concern over the lives of miners than he was over the loss of a great deal of spice, we see Paul risk his life to save the life of a maid when an assassin’s weapon meant for him targeted her, and Jessica makes it a point of treating those non-Freman servants with respect. I’d say that gives us a pretty good insight into how the Atreides treat their their subjects which is markedly different from their enemies the Harkonnens.
You’re always going to have people farming and you’ll always have the poor. Does that a dystopia make?
Before he duels Feyd, Paul is unsure if he’ll win or even survive. He does know for certain that by then the Jihad is unstoppable. ‘If Feyd kills me, they will say I let myself die so that my spirit could lead them.’
Coming back to this, there’s more than a small overlap between cryptobros and the sort of people who latch onto their own misguided interpretation of various works of fiction. A lot of them see “Fight Club” (the movie, of course) very differently than David Fincher or Chuck Palahniuk would, for example. Or thought Rorschach in “Watchmen” was actually one of the good guys (actually, Zak Snyder probably missed this point as well, but anyhoo…).
Rather than working out what the author obviously meant (I mean, it’s not even all that subtle), they instead project their own interpretation onto the latest creative work to strike their fancy, ignoring all the inconvenient bits that totally contradict their beliefs.
So, somehow, we get Dune as an example of decentralized cryptobros taking back the system rather than a thesis on the dangers of cults/messiahs (with some environmentalism and trippy 60s drug culture to boot). It’s totally on brand that they’d miss the point of a work that warns against placing cult-like faith in the flavor du jour.
Scarcity is something we could eliminate for the goods that matter (food, water, shelter), and finite resources can be distributed equitably. The world portrayed in Dune is not one that has to be kept in a feudal state. It is purposefully kept that way by the people in power.
And because ending poverty is something no-one, not even the most talented and well-intentioned leaders, has ever been able to do, and barring technological miracles, it’s doubtful they’ll ever be able to do it in the future.
Maybe you believe that a system can exist in which nobody is poor. In that case, you should write your own science-fiction series.
Spice is the single most important resource in the Imperium and it’s extremely finite. How do you distribute it equitably when the vast majority of it is consumed by a very small proportion of people without whom galactic civilization would rapidly collapse and nobody would have access to it?