Everything You *Really* Need to Know About Dune

dune is one of only a few movies that i think definitely deserves a remake so ever since i heard that denny villeneuve who i certainly hope you'll remember as the director of arrival and blade runner 2049 was attached to a new film bringing frank herbert's award-winning fantasy epic to life i've been pretty excited to see what he would do with it obviously given the release date of this video i haven't seen that film yet but most of the trailers for dune have impressed me and i'm pretty confiden

t that the casting and filmmaking are going to be dramatically better than david lynch's bizarre version from 1984 which i have seen several times the sleeper has awakened fortunately i have also read or at least listened to dune so i'm pretty familiar with the source material the story features a ton of fascinating ideas about economics political philosophy messianic religion and the future of humanity that are going to be really fun to explore on this series plus let's be honest dune's plot is

a little complicated and i figured it might actually be helpful to walk you through the basics of the setting the characters and the story so get ready to be transported 20 000 years into the future into a world that is a little too much like humanity's past on this episode of out of frame dune is a deeply complex story that involves an array of interesting characters and unique settings its politics and plot are driven by people's personal motivations and realistic economic limitations there's

monsters and magic mystery and large-scale action beats so it's easy to see why this best-selling novel won the first ever nebula award in 1965 and a hugo in 1966 and although i have faith in villanuev's ability to tell a good story it certainly won't hurt for everybody to get a crash course in the world of doom but don't worry i'm not going to spoil the entire plot or everything that happens obviously i can't spoil much of the new movie even if i wanted to my goal is just to get you up to spee

d enough to understand some of the core ideas and i think the simplest way to do that is to break my synopsis into three parts setting characters and plot so let's start with the setting roughly 20 millennia from now humanity has spread out across the universe largely thanks to the essentially magical properties of a substance known as melange or the spice which is described as having a cinnamon-like smell and a euphoric experience that varies from person to person and with each instance of cons

umption spice is as important as it is rare found and mined on just one planet the desert wasteland of arrakis dune the fact that the spice is so rare makes it extremely valuable and yet curiously most of the people who live on arrakis are incredibly poor you better believe we'll be talking about that a little later but first let's talk about the characters over the centuries some humans who have been affected by the spice have developed various primarily mental superpowers such as clairvoyance

some have evolved into an entirely new species like the mysterious navigators of the spacing guild which use melange to fold space-time and traverse the stars there are also mentats who have used spice to become ultralogical human computers and there's the all-female religious sect known as the bennet jesuit who in addition to having powers of suggestion and manipulation have also learned to control their physiology so they can choose the sex of their babies during pregnancy meanwhile the creati

on of artificially intelligent machines has been outlawed in order to keep people from growing lazy and weak so some of the people in this universe are trained to the peak of what's physically and mentally possible even without relying on spice it's all pretty interesting the specific characters we follow are mostly comprised of the elite our heroes are from house atreides we have duke lado atreides and his bene jesuit consort jessica along with their mentat and assassin duffy howitt dr wellingt

on ua swordmaster duncan idaho minstrel warrior gurney halleck and most importantly of all their 15 year old son paul our villains are from the competing house harkonnen including the grotesquely fat baron vladimir his nephews fade ralpha and glosso or the beast and his disturbingly pro-torture mentat piper de vries there's also of course the patasha emperor sadam korino iv and his advisor the benedezura reverend mother gaius helen mohaim princess ireland and liet kinds who is the imperial ecolo

gist on arrakis lastly we have the two major peoples of arrakis including the city-dwelling hurricane and the mysterious desert people known as the fremen oh and also there's 450 meter long sand worms got all that cool let's talk plot up to a point what you need to know is that the story begins with emperor carino giving house atreides the privilege of taking over planetary government on arrakis this is a big deal and it seems like a great honor except it's actually a trap for reasons that i won

't explain here the emperor is working with house harkonnen which had been the previous and much more callous overseers of arrakis thanks to a long-standing feud baron harkonnen's goal is to put duke lado in a position where his entire family will be destroyed i don't want to spoil the details of the plan or the various twists that must inevitably emerge in order for it to come together but one thing you should know is that lato knows it's a trap and accepts the position anyway hoping to outwit

baron harkonnen and capture the immense wealth generated by the spice trade for his own house this new fiefdom compels house atreides to leave their lush home world of caledon and move to the dangerously inhospitable world known to some as dune when we first meet paul he is basically the best at everything he's an incredible weapons master and fighter he's been trained by his mother to think like a been a jesuit he's curious and intelligent he's been unwittingly trained to become a mentat and he

's even a competent young diplomat on top of that he has prophetic dreams about arrakis water and of a young woman with deep blue on blue eyes i'll be honest he's a bit of a gary stew that said we also learn why he is the way he is paul's mother lady jessica was originally told by the benedezura order to conceive a daughter with the duke but she chose to have a boy for two reasons first she actually does love lado atradies and that's what he wanted but secondly she had a premonition that if she

bore a son instead of a daughter that boy just might become the first ever male to fully attain the powers of the bene jesuit it would involve a dangerous ritual but if paul survived he would be forever known as the quisats hatarak which is something the bene jesuit had been trying to create for centuries through a genetic breeding program but choosing to have a boy instead of a girl brought jessica shame and resentment even so when the reverend mother mulheim comes to caledon to test paul's hum

anity she ultimately concedes that it might indeed be possible for him to become the quisats hararak and in the end dune is largely a story about paula tradies achieving his full potential anyway once everybody from house atreides lands on arrakis and starts exploring their new residence the harkonnen's nefarious intentions are almost immediately revealed paul gets attacked by a slithery drone known as a seeker hunter and he only survives because of his world-class training and quick reflexes me

anwhile lady jessica discovers an opulent garden in their new palace which seems to have had the sole purpose of flaunting the harkonnen's wealth and finds within it a note that suggests there is a traitor close to leto as the political intrigue heats up we learn more about the people of arakas mostly from duka tradies advancement duncan idaho and from the planetary ecologist and judge of the change liet kinds the fremen are thought to be a small and mysterious group of strange desert dwellers w

ho believe in a messianic prophecy turns out there are a lot more of them than they generally let on and partly because they've been so deeply infused with spice melange they've learned to inhabit some of the most dangerous landscapes imaginable what's more when fremen liked the shout out mapes meet lady jessica and paul they start wondering if their messiah has finally arrived obviously there's a ton more story to talk about but at this point you should know enough to understand the world and n

ow that you do let's talk about some of the most interesting ideas in dune in my opinion one of the best things about frank herbert's writing is that in spite of its wild setting and characters it's actually extremely realistic i really think it's a model of internal logic in storytelling take for example the way it depicts the value of water on the atreides home planet of caledon water is everywhere there are vast oceans rivers and rainstorms relatively speaking water is not particularly limite

d or scarce so the people living on caledon are able to consume a lot of it at virtually no cost it's easy to get anyone can use just about as much of it as they could ever want or need without that becoming a problem for anyone else it's just not an issue as a result water does not play a significant role in the politics or economy of caledon but on arrakis totally different situation there water is extremely scarce as a result it affects everything about human society on the planet it's expens

ive it's a sign of wealth and status people who have water use it sparingly and its value is so great that the housekeepers under house harkonnen's rule developed a grift where they would take wet towels from the palace and sell whatever moisture could be wrung out of them to people on the street the freemen treat it with religious reverence and wear what they call still suits a technology that helps them reclaim all but a thimble of water lost from their own bodies while living in the desert th

ey even draw water from the dead all of this is not only great writing in that the logic of the world that's being created actually makes sense but it's also a fantastic lesson about subjective value in economics there's this idea called the diamond water paradox which talks about the seeming contradiction between the fact that water is objectively more valuable to human survival and yet diamonds are much more expensive this has been a subject of discussion among great thinkers going back to pla

to but scottish economist adam smith is probably most famous for observing the phenomenon in his book and inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations as he put it nothing is more useful than water but it will purchase scarcely anything a diamond on the contrary has scarcely any use value but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it the thing is it's not really a paradox or a contradiction at all in the late 19th century the austrian economist

eugene von bombaverk started what economists now refer to as the marginalist revolution by observing that economic value is subjective and that prices are determined by the marginal utility of a given good or service marginal utility is the idea that as a good becomes more or less scarce and as an individual satisfies his or her wants and needs the value of whatever that good happens to be will change if you are extremely thirsty and have only one bottle of water you probably wouldn't sell it to

me at all or if you did it would take a very high price for you to be willing to give it up on the other hand if you are not extremely thirsty and you have 100 bottles of water you may be willing to part with one or more of them for free economic value isn't a fixed universal or objective thing the average price of a good or service is not based on the amount of labor or the cost of the resources required to produce it it's a function of supply and demand value changes depending on individuals

desires and preferences and it's based on the availability of whatever it is that they want relative to how many other people happen to want the same thing at the same time that's why on caledon water is so cheap people swim in it and take it for granted but on arrakis it's one of the foundations of their entire social structure the same thing is true for the spice on an intergalactic scale remember melange comes from just one planet and yet it is utterly essential throughout the universe the sp

ice extends life the spice expands consciousness the spice is vital to space travel as baron harkonnen put it he who controls the spice controls the universe now if you've been paying attention you may have noticed something that doesn't seem to add up arrakis is the only place you can get spice spice is worth more than any other substance in the universe it's tens of thousands of years in the future and yet much of the arakin population is materially poorer than a lot of people alive on earth t

oday how can this be fans of the show are going to be shocked to find out that the answer is government if you check out other people's analysis of the story you'll find a lot that don't really understand economics or history and get this all wrong and i won't be surprised if some major conceptual errors worm their way into denny villeneuve's version of dune as well but we need to get this right dune is not an example of capitalism gone awry the political system in frank herbert's universe is im

perial feudalism and its economic system is explicitly mercantilist what does this mean well it means that the entirety of interstellar society is controlled by a centralized political authority in this case an emperor and because its territory is so incredibly vast this authority has delegated some of its power to lords such as dukes and barons who are empowered to rule over various planetary fiefdoms and as has often happened throughout human history this empire maintains its power through a c

ombination of threats and acts of violence carried out by its superior military force economic incentives and religion in spite of being the original settlers on arrakis and initially discovering the incredible properties of spice the arakin and fremen are not legally allowed to own productive land or keep the proceeds of their work furthermore the empire has chosen to adopt a mercantilist economic policy what's that you ask it's the idea that the state should play a dominant role in the economy

in particular by controlling commercial activity everything the law-abiding citizens of iraq is produce like spice belongs to the empire and the emperor decides what to do with it and who profits from it you might not be surprised to learn that it's not the air king or the fremen in a mercantilist system the government directly supports favored companies or corporations and inhibits competition they typically do this through tariffs subsidies and regulations that restrict who is allowed to part

icipate in commerce in dune virtually every important industry that gets mentioned at all is associated with a massive corporate guild or union and these guilds enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly over whatever it is that they do for example the spacing guild has the exclusive authority to control space travel and banking throughout the universe spice mining is similarly controlled by a monopolistic union and of course we have the chome company which actually owns distributes and directly profits

from melange one of the key benefits of being granted authority over arrakis is that it includes a directorship in the chome company which means getting a share of the profits and tremendous political power to really drive the point home chome is in fact an acronym it stands for kombin onet ober advancer mercantile this is a bit of a mishmash of languages but as best i can tell it means the honorable union for the advancement of mercantilism so again this should go without saying but the politic

al economy of the universe in dune is not built around free market capitalism to the contrary it is representative of the very system that adam smith was critiquing in the wealth of nations in fact you will find no advocate of free markets who believes that the state should have this kind of power over individuals property and economic decisions mercantilism is not capitalism gone wrong it's what people all over the world did before capitalism and they're inherently conflicting ideas even if you

have what sort of looks like a market economy if you squint real hard when the land and resources are controlled by feudal lords the only jobs available have you working for state subsidized monopolies and the distribution sale and profit from all the goods and services you produce exist to serve the empire you don't have anything that even remotely looks like economic freedom and unfortunately the less free economies are the poor people living under those conditions tend to be for example let'

s look at the arakin and fremen living on arrakis with no legally upheld property rights and strict limits on commerce that prevent them from setting up competing spice mining operations of their own individual entrepreneurs from the native population of arrakis have no functional way of using the one massively valuable resource their planet has to offer to enrich themselves so instead of being the wealthiest people in the entire universe as would probably make sense they are relegated to being

one of three things government lackeys serving whichever lord happens to be in power at the moment impoverished serfs eking out a living in the cities knowing that whatever income they produce will be taken by the state or fremen living dangerous lives in the desert outside the law as a result the people of arakas have no purchasing power with which to flood their entire planet with water food and other resources they could have easily acquired in exchange for their magical spice as you can see

there are serious material disparities between the rich and poor in dune but just like the truly problematic wealth inequalities we see in the real world this disparity is so severe because some people are explicitly granted special privileges by the state that no one else is allowed to have individual rights are only applicable to those who have managed to find favor with the empire and those are the people who become wealthy at the expense of everyone else in a world where individual rights we

re universally respected we would see a multitude of property owners who become entrepreneurs we would see the proliferation of innovative businesses and commercial enterprises that can only exist when markets are actually free and people are allowed to offer the products of their vision and labor to consumers who have a choice whether or not to pay for them and in that world those people who genuinely create value for others would find that their endeavors are profitable thus allowing them to e

xpand their businesses hiring even more people to help produce even more goods and services which ultimately enrich the lives of even more consumers and equally importantly everyone would be allowed to keep the income they have legitimately earned using it to improve their own lives as they see fit the disheartening thing is that no one in the universe frank herbert created seems to recognize the underlying problem including the fremen instead of rallying their people for political and economic

independence and overthrowing the state in the name of building a new constitution that guarantees clearly defined individual rights they wait thousands of years for a messiah to come and save them by overthrowing the existing order and taking the throne for himself as not just an emperor but a god sadly that's also pretty realistic but all the fremen ever really needed was the right as individuals to make their own economic choices if they had that the spice would flow everybody in the universe

would benefit and the fremen would have become insanely rich none of their people would have had to worry about much of anything ever again dune is an incredible book and i'm absolutely hoping the new movie is good because well the first one wasn't and i think this is a story that deserves to be told to way more people than just those of us who actually like reading lengthy science fiction novels as much as i complain sometimes about inconceivable societies in fiction the world frank herbert cr

eated is surprisingly astute its political and economic systems create virtually all of the problems its world's inhabitants experience and the solutions most of those people come up with are often very similar to those that people living under the same kinds of institutions have developed in the real world and yet we also get incredible set pieces mutants that can see pathways through space spice induced magical powers and giant sand worms pretty cool what's less cool is how often people misund

erstand the ocean of difference between economies driven by private property rights entrepreneurship and freedom of choice for producers and consumers and economies that are dominated by a powerful government in the words of the late great george mason university economist walter williams capitalism is relatively new in human history before the rise of capitalism the way people amassed great wealth was by looting plundering and enslaving their fellow man capitalism made it possible to become wea

lthy by serving one's fellow man we don't need emperors and lords or even presidents and congressmen commanding our land labor and resources we don't need the government to choose winners and losers and grant giant well-connected corporations monopolies over the production and sale of our most important goods and services if we want a prosperous society that actually creates wealth and raises standards of living for the vast majority of people what we need is economic freedom and that is the fut

ure i want to see hey everybody thanks for watching this episode of out of frame let me know what you think about dune the book or the movies in the comments and if you want to participate in even more conversation join us on discord also check out our weekly behind the scenes podcast we discuss movies tv books and other content we usually don't get into on this series and for those of you who support the show on patreon or subscribe star we do special bonus content where we answer q a supporter

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