Dune (2020)

Denamian said:

Other than making fun of the font, I don't get this at all. I must be really out of touch

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Campbell1oo4 said:

Feast your eyes on this abortion.

Fun fact - that Dunkin Donuts in the first shot is in my hometown. Used to stop there before work in the summers.

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Feanor said:

Frank Herbert:
I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact.

It's clearly obvious @Mudcrush Durtfeet can be dumb as shit.

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Lithose said:

One reason I always loved dune is because it was a great narrative about how revolutions often become corrupt. He focused on Messiahs, but the subtext, whether he realized it or not, was much larger in terms of how humans use heuristics to shortcut important decision making and how that directly translates into the fact that pretty much all non-local (Larger than Dunbar's limit) human organizations will eventually become corrupt, and dangerous. Often it is not a case of "if" but "when". Because humans die, and are replaced and every replacement is a chance to bring someone into the system who is corrupt--that's not even getting into divergent behavior due to imperfect information

IE its entirely possible for two people who believe in the same thing, and genuinely want the same thing, to have two wildly different views on how to accomplish that goal. If your revolution is so important the fate of millions rests on it, it quickly becomes rational to purge/kill even good people within your organization if you believe that despite them having the best interests of the group at heart, they are wrong and you can't convince them otherwise. Herbert didn't explore this as much as why messiah's are bad--but he did dance around it with how Paul realized the Jihad would continue even if he died. It was a really great illustration of how our assumption that "monstrous men" corrupt otherwise good systems is not always right. In many cases its the system itself that turns good men into monsters. You can be a good person and with too much power, you will be evil because the size and complexity of the system demands it.

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Mist said:

I mean, it's pretty obvious. Even the most benevolent, utopian government will eventually become corrupt by necessity, because they will have to constantly defend their ability to continue to do good things, and the only way to do that is to increasingly expand their power to eliminate political opposition.

This is all pretty well covered by The Lord of the Rings... you don't give power to people who are good at wielding power, because while they might solve some immediate problem, they will concentrate that power and become corrupt very qickly, because they understand how to exploit power. You give power to well-meaning but naive idiots, hope they do a little good for a little while and then lose or disperse their power before they become corrupt. The point is that it's ultimately, it's better to give power to people who will squander it instead of people who will concentrate it, even though the instinct is to do the latter.

Leto II does what no one in history really has done, he concentrates literally all the power in the galaxy and then disperses it.

I think Tolkien and Hebert were exploring fairly similar themes, but Hebert was more focused on these bigger-picture, civilizational and intergenerational manifestations of power in the 2-4th books, while Tolkien was more interested in the specific arc of the individual's relationship to power.

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Feanor said:

If a society removed war, hunger and all ills there is no assurance later generations won't bring them back. A good society would try to improve, prevent and minimize war, world hunger, corruption while accepting human nature. Destroying, dismantling isn't good.

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Lithose said:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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