After I was in my teenagers (a lifetime in the past), I learn a whole lot of fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien. G.R.R. Martin. C.S. Lewis. Terry Brooks.
After which there was Frank Herbert, greatest identified for his novel Dune (1965) and its many sequels. Although I didn’t learn the complete Dune sequence, I beloved the primary two books, which observe Paul Atreides, the inheritor of Home Atreides, as his household is assigned management over the desert planet Arrakis, house to the spice melange, essentially the most invaluable useful resource within the galaxy.
Herbert set a brand new customary for sci-fi, constructing whole worlds and cultures that built-in advanced concepts and occasions from our personal world, relating quite a lot of themes — politics, faith, ecology, and energy.
For years, I had not thought of Dune. However through the pandemic I recalled how Paul Atreides warned concerning the hazard of concern.
Worry is the mind-killer. Worry is the little-death that brings complete obliteration. I’ll face my concern. I’ll allow it to go over me and thru me.
It was a passage that all the time caught with me, and I wasn’t alone.
The quote — a part of the Bene Gesserit Litany In opposition to Worry and a mantra recited by Atreides throughout a vital check early within the first novel — might be the most well-liked quote from the Dune books, and one routinely shared through the pandemic.
Not too long ago, I got here throughout a Frank Herbert quote I hadn’t heard earlier than, one far much less identified.
All governments undergo a recurring downside: Energy attracts pathological personalities. It isn’t that energy corrupts however that it’s magnetic to the corruptible.
It’s a penetrating thought, and once I first learn the phrases, I puzzled in the event that they had been too good to be true. Most of us at one time or one other have seen a quote on-line attributed to Morgan Freeman, George Washington, Robin Williams, or another well-known or influential individual solely to search out after a two-minute investigation the quote is pure fiction or falsely attributed.
This isn’t the case with Herbert’s quote on energy. Although I had by no means heard it earlier than, it seems in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the ultimate guide within the sequence, and one broadly thought of the weakest of the Dune novels. (This would possibly clarify why I didn’t learn the guide and was unfamiliar with the quote.)
Herbert’s phrases on energy stood out to me for 2 causes. First, it considerably activates its head Lord Acton’s well-known line that “energy tends to deprave and absolute energy corrupts completely.” In contrast to Acton, Herbert was not saying people are corrupted by energy, however that energy attracts corrupt individuals.
Second, Herbert’s line is deeply Hayekian. In his magnum opus The Street to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek devoted a whole chapter to the thought of the worst males in society rising to the highest (it’s actually referred to as “Why the Worst Get on Prime”).
In that chapter, Hayek describes at size how centralized programs elevate people to steer them, and concludes that these possessing the strongest need to arrange financial and social life to their plan are likely to have the fewest scruples about exercising energy over others.
“To undertake the route of the financial life of individuals with broadly divergent beliefs and values,” Hayek wrote, “the very best intentions can not stop one from being compelled to behave in a approach which to a few of these affected should seem extremely immoral.”
The Street to Serfdom was printed in 1944, when Stalin and Hitler had been ascendant and the world was immersed in totalitarianism. But Hayek didn’t see the brutality of those programs as “unintended by-products,” however the pure development of nation-states by which checks on energy are destroyed or deserted.
“Simply because the democratic statesman who units out to plan financial life will quickly be confronted with the choice of both assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans,” he wrote, “so the totalitarian dictator would quickly have to decide on between disregard of atypical morals and failure.”
This is the reason “the unscrupulous and uninhibited” are most definitely to rise in such programs, Hayek concluded.
I don’t know if Herbert ever learn Hayek, however his remark that governments have a robust tendency to draw “pathological personalities” sounds remarkably near Hayek’s concept that “the worst” get on high.
As to the character of energy and whether or not it corrupts man or attracts the worst, I believe it does each. Both approach, historical past exhibits the result’s a lot the identical. For each George Washington, there are 100 Robespierres.
