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Thought for Sixth Month, 2008
In his essay "Dune Genesis," science fiction writer Frank Herbert says a key theme of his six-volume Dune series is "that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero..., eventually fallible mortals take over the
power structure that always comes into being around such a leader" (more of this essay below).
In the fourth volume, the God Emperor Leto II addresses this theme obliquely with his puzzled chief aide, Moneo:
Religion always leads to rhetorical despotism....
It leads to self-fulfilling prophecy and justifications for all manner of obscenities.... It shields evil behind walls of self-righteousness which are proof against all arguments against the evil.... It feeds on deliberately twisted meanings to discredit opposition....
The Jesuits called that "securing your power base." It leads directly to hypocrisy which is always betrayed by the gap between actions and explanations. They never agree.... Ultimately, it rules by guilt because hypocrisy brings on the witch hunt and the demand for scapegoats....
I'm describing a tool of the religious power base.... Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane, people who seek power only for the sake of power....
In the shadow of every religion lurks a Torquemada.
—Frank Herbert,
God Emperor of Dune
(New York: Ace Books, 1987, pp. 117-18)
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Thought for Six Month, 2008 (cont'd)
More from Frank Herbert's essay,"Dune Genesis":
Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.
My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.
This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane.
That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
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