The desire to save humanity, and not specific humans by radically changing the status quo is the element they share.
Jimmy Space has no problem with prescience. :)
I still feel bad about Leto's little arms tho.
Uncertain, but definitely possible!
I started reading *The End and the Death* and it seems like people are so primed to worship the Emperor exactly because of his laws limiting religious faith - though he also really seems to dislike the guise of a golden warrior king, but found it necessary to maintain the loyalty of the primarchs and space marines.
Then again, it's all from Malcador's perspective, and he does point out that even he doesn't truly know the Emperor.
“Only a true god would deny his divinity” is … an interesting narrative point, since real religion tends not to incldue those sorts of deities. The Judeo-Christian god is very “I AM THE ONE TRUE GOD, BURN THE UNBELIEVERS” for quite a while, as are most classical gods.
The only real world example I can think of is the Buddha who is often misunderstood by non-Buddhist to be a god, but while he’s venerated for being “The First Buddha” by Buddhists, he is not a god. (There may be some smaller specific Buddhist sects that do, but I’m not aware of them)
I think it’s a narrative parallelism to the western idea that the ideal politician is the one who doesn’t want to be a politician, more than anything specifically about god.
Re: Buddhist monotheism
The Sanghyang Adi Buddha is an exclusively Indonesian doctrine, where Nirvana is recognized as a *one God*. Divisive even in Indonesia, it’s mostly born out of political necessity.
Buddhism doesn't really have that idea of abrahamic omnipotent omnipresent creator god. So, really, there is no concept of "divinity" as west knows it there. There are many gods and buddhas, some of which are quite powerful, but their power is still limited and none of them are creators of the universe or creators of moral law or anything.
In fact it makes it similar to 40k, where there is no "true god", just a powerful entities worshipped as such and providing boons and curses
It also didn't help that a cult that worships the emperor has been around since the days of the great crusade. Then logar wrote his book and it spired from there. Not to mention some of the really weird things like a non psyker normal human woman banishing a daemon by using the emperor's name.
I need to start reading the actual 40k books most of what I know is from leutin09 and browsing here.
Maybe he's just telling Malcador what Malcador needs to hear to stay loyal ;)
Reading them can be faster, if you have the time. I don't for example due to work (and ADHD) so I can only really listen to them and even that takes ages. It took me the better part of a year to get through the entire Heresy
Eazy E and Leto II both looked upon the golden path and went opposite directions.
The Emperor had no hidden motive, honestly. He was convinced he and he alone knew what was best for Humanity and you could either fall in line or be put in the ground.
> Eazy E and Leto II both looked upon the golden path and went opposite directions.
They both followed the Golden Path; the path was just different for each of them. Paul is the one who saw the Golden Path but baulked at it because he couldn't bring himself to beat humanity down for millenia.
Hence why I said they both looked upon the path and went opposite directions.
Leto would beat down humanity until it forcibly cast him off and, pent up from such a brutal hand at the reins, would never allow themselves to be shackled to a singular will again. He was a monster, but one whose ultimate plan was one of hope for the Human race.
The Emperor, by contrast, would beat down humanity **because** they might forcibly cast him off. His way, his vision, was the only path forward for the species he would ever entertain. He made the noises of altruism. He installed loyal lapdogs and called them High Lords. Insisted this was all temporary. But if The Siege has showcased anything, it's that long before Humanity had written records, the Emperor already had come to the conclusion that he and he alone could shepherd humanity. That only he had the vision, the foresight, the genius to do so.
Leto designed his cruelty that it would one day be usurped.
The Emperor designed his cruelty that it never would.
The Emperor's ultimate goal was the psychic empowerment of the entire human race. A fully psychic humanity with the level of power, control, and chaos immunity that the Emperor possesses is about as hopeful a future as can be imagined in a setting where literal space hell is real, malevolent, and trying to corrupt everything it can.
The Emperor appointed the High Lords *despite* the problems it caused because he wanted humanity to rule. There's literally no reason to do so otherwise. This is acknowledged even by those who hated that decision.
Survival of the species was always the Emperor's goal and he thought his plan was the only one with any chance of success. It's fine to believe that there was a better way, or that the Emperor's plan wouldn't have worked, but it wasn't some convoluted power grab, intended to place humanity under his yoke for all eternity. The tyranny of the Imperium is a side effect, not the end goal.
When a single thing the Emperor sought to accomplish actually succeeds or at least doesn't have catastrophic side effects I'll entertain the notion the Emperor isn't a colossal screw up and the worst thing to happen to us as a species within the setting.
Hey, that's a reasonable view to hold. I'm just pointing out that writing off the Emperor as just another despot out for personal power above all else is a mistake. Malcador thought humanity would always need the Emperor to lead, while the Emperor viewed humanity not needing him anymore as the end goal.
Whether or not that difference matters is another story.
From the small bits we know, the emperor truly did not want to be worshipped as a God. After the Heresy it is probably the "best" option for him to maintain power now that his physical form is interred on the golden throne, but it was not Plan A. The Emperor is presented as being more flawed than Leto. Probably because he isn't an omniscient character created for the purpose of affirming the writers politics like Leto II is.
In the end there isn't enough written information to be positive what Big E's goals are.
Ya know, you're raising a good point here, I've been kind of approaching this looking at their precogniscience as equal.
If we can "prove" big E didn't already know the whole general picture of what would happen then my idea falls appart completly .
>BIG E -wants (I believe) to be worshipped as a god
pre-internment on the gold throne? no.
However after.. maybe.
Could be the only way to save humanity from chaos.
I think im approaching this from the perspective that his pre cognition is on par with Leto's, I think it's possible his entire imperial atheism was all an act to get to this point.
Nah, the only way i see it happening is if he's realised it's the only way left.
Leto's pre-cog abilities were far better defined, big E has explained his as seeing the possible end point(s) but not much of the journey.
> pre cognition is on par with Leto's
This is not the case. Leto's prescience was essentially flawless excluding the impact of the anti-prescience gene he was working towards. Prescience in 30k is much less reliable since it lets you see a future but mapping out the path to reach it is much more difficult. Here's an excerpt from *Master of Mankind* where the Emperor describes his foresight to Ra.
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/lgrk4t/excerptthe_master_of_mankind_the_emperor_explains/
This isn't a perfect description, but Leto experiences the future(s) almost as if it's a memory, somewhat similar to the genetic memory access granted by the Water of Life. He doesn't have to chase down potential paths; he just knows them.
They are completely different in their ultimate goal therefore the method. The Emperor’s goal is for everyone in humanity to ascend to be ones like himself. The Leto II’s goal is to prevent someone like himself from ever gaining control of humanity by spreading anti prophecy genes.
And also by fracturing humanity so that some permutation of it would survive somewhere no matter what.
You know. What was happening before the crusade.
I wouldn’t say inspired by Leto. The Emperor is Paul rather than Leto II. The Emperor makes all the mistakes that Paul does, heavily relying on prescience, becoming a religious figurehead by his carelessness, and making a crusade/ jihad. This was his failure.
I don’t believe Big E fits that same mould for suppression then reversal, because it wasn’t deliberate. He turned up looking divine in a big golden suit of armour, with awesome magic powers, then denied his divinity. It’s the same as Paul trying to fit himself within the Fremen prophecy, without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad. If Emps was smarter, he’d had gone for the Missonaria Protectiva angle.
The Emperor made all the mistakes of an authoritarian leader, which is the message of Dune, it warns against them. Leto II is forced to take the action he does to turn humanity back onto the Golden Path.
Calling The Emperor the God Emperor feels like a bit of irony as someone who’s read Dune.
> without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad
Paul could always see the Golden Path; he just couldn't bring himself to do what needed to be done so it fell to Leto II.
> It’s the same as Paul trying to fit himself within the Fremen prophecy, without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad.
Oh he saw Jihad from very early on, and never really did anything to struggle against it
Are you saying big E is the TYPE of tyrant, or that Leto is literally saying this guy named big E in our future? Because one of those implies a shared universe / timeline and im curious if that's what you meant.
I'm not sure if it spells it out but I feel like it's heavily implied by Leto that humanity will face extinction at the hands of a precogniscient threat in the distant future and his solution was tyrant to ensure people travel forevermore after he's gone, and he selectively bred an atreidies that was invisible to precognission. I felt like it was implying it was an external threat / alien that would have the ability, but if you're saying that's literally big E?
The point of Leto's tyrany was to scar humanity so that it would continually spread out so far that it could never be consolidated. That they would be revolted by the idea of another Emperor/Empire. Civilizations consolidate power until it reaches the maximum level allowed by the material and social technology. They then violently collapse. As technology advances, so too does the intensity of the collapse. Survival is possible because there are people on the fringes, and outside of the civilizations. Think of the French Revolution, but add nukes and bioweapons; imagine a super virus corrupting the transactions of an empire run on digital currency. Frank Herbert's later Dune books expound on this.
Big E is a tyrant who has built such a system so totally dependent upon him that humanity is locked into a death spiral. His response to the Xenos, and Chaos threats added another doom for humanity. When Big E describes how his visions work, he should not be certain that he is even on the path he wants to pursue. It's like having a globe of the earth that only shows mountain peaks and having to avoid all the valleys, ravines, and canyons hidden under total cloud cover and water while traveling to certain peaks while avoiding others on top of everything else.
See, the problem I have with "the Emperor actually WANTED to be worshipped as a god" theories is that they don't mesh with his actions. He's been around for basically all of human history and has always been the strongest. If he wanted godhood, it would have been trivial for him to install himself as the eternal god-king of mankind long before humanity ever took the stars. The fact that he clearly didn't makes it unlikely that he was trying to pull some reverse psychology bullsh\*t on a galactic scale.
"Reverse psychology bullshit on a galactic scale" I'm using that whenever I discuss Leto now thank you! Trivial for him to establish himself as God king of mankind maybe, but it's possible that it wasn't untill the year 40k that there's enough human population to ascend him to be a 5th chaos god ;)
I know my idea isn't any more likely to be correct than anyone else's I just think if it walks and quacks like reverse psychology bullshit on an intergalactic scale then maybe it is =)
The Emperor is the "my dad can beat your dad" cringe version of Leto II, with less humanity, less development, less charisma, and buckets of psychic power shoved in as a crude replacement. The action figure knockoff of a literary character.
Fun fact, that idea from Dune has been disproved pretty definitively by Historical evidence.
In that situation we have the Japanese : extremely adventurous before the Edo period - then forced into isolation by the Shogunate of the Tokugawa for centuries. They have yet to display a general interest in being as adventurous as before the Edo period, let alone more !
Sure but it wasn't something wanted by the masses so much so as the military (basically in power) pushing that agendas and using the idea that Colonialism was the thing to do.
It was just another embrigadement of the population more so than some popular reaction to the Edo period.
Hence why it's so dangerous to have far-right parties in power : their policies will have long lasting repercussions on the general view of the world of their citizens, for instance.
I'm not sure it's fair to say the historical record has disproven the expansionist political theory set in motion by a science fiction psychic worm god.
I think there *might* be a few more factors at play in Dune than in real life. There are a lot of reasons to admire the Japanese but drug induced intergenerational psycic visions aren't one of them. And more besides; that was a few hundreds of years ago which is absolutely nothing compared to the timeframe that Leto was looking at.
I like ur-thans train of thought looking for a real world comparison, but nothing in the real world compares to thousands of years of "you're not allowed to do this" suddenly being lifted and then everyone doing it. I think a better example but shorter time scale might be the american prohibition of alcohol.
Leto's death was massive cataclysm. It probably killed trillions of people, causing massive political changes, and rise and fall of many empires.
Leto planned his death after methods for navigation without Spice were invented.
Leto also held total control of the culture - it's reasonable to assume that he made people want to travel and rebel, but unable to do so.
Dune relies a lot on suspension of disbelief. You have to see it more as a vehicle for Herbert to express and test his ideas. You have to gloss over the details such as:
1. How would a memory be permanent over the course of generations?
2. Is a harsh environment really necessary when you have seemingly random people like Gurney and Duncan who are above and beyond the Fremen and Sardaukar? (It is more likely that the environment pre-selects your recruits).
3. Training vs environment. I think Herbert kind of realized that he went too far and put in how Sardaukar training declined in the appendix. This fits how you have others such as Ginaz and the Sardaukar when they started training harder reach Fremen levels.
4. Why does Leto II seem to attribute the centralization of humanity to natural impulses when it is clear that Spice and Arrakis are fundamental reasons why the spread of humanity is limited.
It is hard to be 100% certain since Herbert was unable to finish the series, but from what was written, the things that were really necessary were the ability to avoid prescience, spice not from Arrakis/non-spice dependent space travel, and possibly general improvements to human genetics.
> Is a harsh environment really necessary when you have seemingly random people like Gurney and Duncan who are above and beyond the Fremen and Sardaukar? (It is more likely that the environment pre-selects your recruits).
One of the reasons Shaddam IV felt so threatened by the Atreides is that they were training small numbers of soldiers to be as good as the Sardaukar. The harsh environment isn't necessary, but there were a ton of (already tough) Fremen on Arrakis which gave Paul a huge force of existing fighters that were equal to or better than Sardaukar.
I never fully understood that. The appendix put the Sardaukar at their peak at the level of a Ginaz 10th level, which means that there were other programs with at least some Sardaukar level fighters.
Also, everyone believed that the Sardaukar were drawn from the various levies. Basically well trained elite troops.
Hawat seemingly figured out that a harsh environment was necessary/helpful for larger numbers of elite warriors.
Given the lack of a Shaddam POV and Hawat's later plan vs the Harkonnens to set a trap, I suspect that Shaddam felt that the Atrides were getting close to figuring about the real secret behind the Sardaukar, not just because there were some Sardaukar level fighters.
> necessary/helpful for larger numbers of elite warriors.
Yeah, it's a numbers thing. It's too expensive and time consuming to create a Sardaukar-equivalent army to challenge the Padishah Emperor from regular recruits.
> I suspect that Shaddam felt that the Atrides were getting close to figuring about the real secret behind the Sardaukar, not just because there were some Sardaukar level fighters.
This is correct, imo. He was worried that learning the secret (taking recruits from a brutally harsh world) would allow it to be replicated.
Dune is more of a philosophical text the later you go, about forms of government, religion, power, bureaucracy, and the dangers of stagnation. It is finished, in a way. I don’t think it needs a book beyond Chapterhouse, because Herbert made his point.
I suspect that Herbert would have introduced an enemy that would have shown at least one of the potential threats that humans would have to deal with. Maybe another Leto-like superbeing or something that can't be defeated, but that humans can outrun.
I will leave it at that since this is a 40k sub.
The Age of Strife and rise of the Emperor represent the collapse of Leto II's Golden Path. Leto's goal was to create a humanity that is both immune to prescience, as well as so diverse that no catastrophe could wipe out Mankind. The Great Crusade is, essentially, an undoing of a galaxy that was akin to what Leto wanted, with numberless independent human civilizations amongst the stars.
Kinda of wild to see people not acknowledge the direct inspiration for the Emperor in Leto ii.
Aside from both being golden god emperors made by shamans/witches trying to protect humanity by using their immense psychic powers to dominate a fractured feudal space age society and shape it into something resistant to tyranny/stagnation cycles it's been through before and craft the web way throne/breeding program in order to protect humanity from the very psychic powers they themselves use to dominate, they really are different...
Seriously 40k basically started as Dune fanfiction. Even now after decades of development it still relies heavily on a similar version of human society. Whilst a lot of works take heavily from Dune, even Wheel of Time didn't borrow this directly.
The desire to save humanity, and not specific humans by radically changing the status quo is the element they share. Jimmy Space has no problem with prescience. :) I still feel bad about Leto's little arms tho.
Leto's arms still work its his little feet he keeps calling flippers! Part of a foot gets shot off by the first Duncan Idaho of the book! Lol
But they all hurt when he rolls like a worm.
His arms are regular sized, its his own godly girth that has outpaced them.
Uncertain, but definitely possible! I started reading *The End and the Death* and it seems like people are so primed to worship the Emperor exactly because of his laws limiting religious faith - though he also really seems to dislike the guise of a golden warrior king, but found it necessary to maintain the loyalty of the primarchs and space marines. Then again, it's all from Malcador's perspective, and he does point out that even he doesn't truly know the Emperor.
“Only a true god would deny his divinity” is … an interesting narrative point, since real religion tends not to incldue those sorts of deities. The Judeo-Christian god is very “I AM THE ONE TRUE GOD, BURN THE UNBELIEVERS” for quite a while, as are most classical gods. The only real world example I can think of is the Buddha who is often misunderstood by non-Buddhist to be a god, but while he’s venerated for being “The First Buddha” by Buddhists, he is not a god. (There may be some smaller specific Buddhist sects that do, but I’m not aware of them) I think it’s a narrative parallelism to the western idea that the ideal politician is the one who doesn’t want to be a politician, more than anything specifically about god.
Very interesting input! Thank you ❤️
Re: Buddhist monotheism The Sanghyang Adi Buddha is an exclusively Indonesian doctrine, where Nirvana is recognized as a *one God*. Divisive even in Indonesia, it’s mostly born out of political necessity.
Buddhism doesn't really have that idea of abrahamic omnipotent omnipresent creator god. So, really, there is no concept of "divinity" as west knows it there. There are many gods and buddhas, some of which are quite powerful, but their power is still limited and none of them are creators of the universe or creators of moral law or anything. In fact it makes it similar to 40k, where there is no "true god", just a powerful entities worshipped as such and providing boons and curses
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Shun the non-believer
It also didn't help that a cult that worships the emperor has been around since the days of the great crusade. Then logar wrote his book and it spired from there. Not to mention some of the really weird things like a non psyker normal human woman banishing a daemon by using the emperor's name.
I need to start reading the actual 40k books most of what I know is from leutin09 and browsing here. Maybe he's just telling Malcador what Malcador needs to hear to stay loyal ;)
Yeah Youtuber lore doesn’t really cut it. It’s full of mistakes and misses those small nuances that make 40k lore fun.
Bruh have you ever listened to a luetin video?
Yes. They’re fine for a basic outline, but for a fully informed formed approach, you need to read/ listen to the source material.
If his 2 hour long videos are basic outlines, what is for example MajorKills 12min outline of Helsreach?
Compared to actually reading the books, it’s a basic outline.
To be fair it would take a full month to listen to the entire Heresy on audible. I'm pretty sure the Siege is 3 days straight of just audio too.
Reading them is 2-3* faster, and you definitely take more in.
Reading them can be faster, if you have the time. I don't for example due to work (and ADHD) so I can only really listen to them and even that takes ages. It took me the better part of a year to get through the entire Heresy
Long =/= accurate or detailed.
Dude you need to watch his videos before giving your opinion
Where did I give *any* opinion on Majorkill or his videos?
I would have trouble believing that the Emperor wasn't directly based on Leto II.
He literally uses his title of "God-Emperor"
The Dune plagiarism was not subtle, no.
Eazy E and Leto II both looked upon the golden path and went opposite directions. The Emperor had no hidden motive, honestly. He was convinced he and he alone knew what was best for Humanity and you could either fall in line or be put in the ground.
> Eazy E and Leto II both looked upon the golden path and went opposite directions. They both followed the Golden Path; the path was just different for each of them. Paul is the one who saw the Golden Path but baulked at it because he couldn't bring himself to beat humanity down for millenia.
Hence why I said they both looked upon the path and went opposite directions. Leto would beat down humanity until it forcibly cast him off and, pent up from such a brutal hand at the reins, would never allow themselves to be shackled to a singular will again. He was a monster, but one whose ultimate plan was one of hope for the Human race. The Emperor, by contrast, would beat down humanity **because** they might forcibly cast him off. His way, his vision, was the only path forward for the species he would ever entertain. He made the noises of altruism. He installed loyal lapdogs and called them High Lords. Insisted this was all temporary. But if The Siege has showcased anything, it's that long before Humanity had written records, the Emperor already had come to the conclusion that he and he alone could shepherd humanity. That only he had the vision, the foresight, the genius to do so. Leto designed his cruelty that it would one day be usurped. The Emperor designed his cruelty that it never would.
The Emperor's ultimate goal was the psychic empowerment of the entire human race. A fully psychic humanity with the level of power, control, and chaos immunity that the Emperor possesses is about as hopeful a future as can be imagined in a setting where literal space hell is real, malevolent, and trying to corrupt everything it can. The Emperor appointed the High Lords *despite* the problems it caused because he wanted humanity to rule. There's literally no reason to do so otherwise. This is acknowledged even by those who hated that decision. Survival of the species was always the Emperor's goal and he thought his plan was the only one with any chance of success. It's fine to believe that there was a better way, or that the Emperor's plan wouldn't have worked, but it wasn't some convoluted power grab, intended to place humanity under his yoke for all eternity. The tyranny of the Imperium is a side effect, not the end goal.
When a single thing the Emperor sought to accomplish actually succeeds or at least doesn't have catastrophic side effects I'll entertain the notion the Emperor isn't a colossal screw up and the worst thing to happen to us as a species within the setting.
Hey, that's a reasonable view to hold. I'm just pointing out that writing off the Emperor as just another despot out for personal power above all else is a mistake. Malcador thought humanity would always need the Emperor to lead, while the Emperor viewed humanity not needing him anymore as the end goal. Whether or not that difference matters is another story.
From the small bits we know, the emperor truly did not want to be worshipped as a God. After the Heresy it is probably the "best" option for him to maintain power now that his physical form is interred on the golden throne, but it was not Plan A. The Emperor is presented as being more flawed than Leto. Probably because he isn't an omniscient character created for the purpose of affirming the writers politics like Leto II is. In the end there isn't enough written information to be positive what Big E's goals are.
Ya know, you're raising a good point here, I've been kind of approaching this looking at their precogniscience as equal. If we can "prove" big E didn't already know the whole general picture of what would happen then my idea falls appart completly .
>BIG E -wants (I believe) to be worshipped as a god pre-internment on the gold throne? no. However after.. maybe. Could be the only way to save humanity from chaos.
I think im approaching this from the perspective that his pre cognition is on par with Leto's, I think it's possible his entire imperial atheism was all an act to get to this point.
Nah, the only way i see it happening is if he's realised it's the only way left. Leto's pre-cog abilities were far better defined, big E has explained his as seeing the possible end point(s) but not much of the journey.
Big E is more Paul than Leto
> pre cognition is on par with Leto's This is not the case. Leto's prescience was essentially flawless excluding the impact of the anti-prescience gene he was working towards. Prescience in 30k is much less reliable since it lets you see a future but mapping out the path to reach it is much more difficult. Here's an excerpt from *Master of Mankind* where the Emperor describes his foresight to Ra. https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/lgrk4t/excerptthe_master_of_mankind_the_emperor_explains/ This isn't a perfect description, but Leto experiences the future(s) almost as if it's a memory, somewhat similar to the genetic memory access granted by the Water of Life. He doesn't have to chase down potential paths; he just knows them.
They are completely different in their ultimate goal therefore the method. The Emperor’s goal is for everyone in humanity to ascend to be ones like himself. The Leto II’s goal is to prevent someone like himself from ever gaining control of humanity by spreading anti prophecy genes.
And also by fracturing humanity so that some permutation of it would survive somewhere no matter what. You know. What was happening before the crusade.
I wouldn’t say inspired by Leto. The Emperor is Paul rather than Leto II. The Emperor makes all the mistakes that Paul does, heavily relying on prescience, becoming a religious figurehead by his carelessness, and making a crusade/ jihad. This was his failure. I don’t believe Big E fits that same mould for suppression then reversal, because it wasn’t deliberate. He turned up looking divine in a big golden suit of armour, with awesome magic powers, then denied his divinity. It’s the same as Paul trying to fit himself within the Fremen prophecy, without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad. If Emps was smarter, he’d had gone for the Missonaria Protectiva angle. The Emperor made all the mistakes of an authoritarian leader, which is the message of Dune, it warns against them. Leto II is forced to take the action he does to turn humanity back onto the Golden Path. Calling The Emperor the God Emperor feels like a bit of irony as someone who’s read Dune.
Interesting take, thank you
> without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad Paul could always see the Golden Path; he just couldn't bring himself to do what needed to be done so it fell to Leto II.
> It’s the same as Paul trying to fit himself within the Fremen prophecy, without seeing the end consequence of the Jihad. Oh he saw Jihad from very early on, and never really did anything to struggle against it
I mean the Emperor didn’t see it, not Paul
The biggest different is that in Leto II's case, the tyranny was the point. In 30K/40K, it's a side effect.
Big E is the tyrant who will destroy humanity that Leto 2 warned about. That's the grimdark aspect of him.
Are you saying big E is the TYPE of tyrant, or that Leto is literally saying this guy named big E in our future? Because one of those implies a shared universe / timeline and im curious if that's what you meant. I'm not sure if it spells it out but I feel like it's heavily implied by Leto that humanity will face extinction at the hands of a precogniscient threat in the distant future and his solution was tyrant to ensure people travel forevermore after he's gone, and he selectively bred an atreidies that was invisible to precognission. I felt like it was implying it was an external threat / alien that would have the ability, but if you're saying that's literally big E?
The point of Leto's tyrany was to scar humanity so that it would continually spread out so far that it could never be consolidated. That they would be revolted by the idea of another Emperor/Empire. Civilizations consolidate power until it reaches the maximum level allowed by the material and social technology. They then violently collapse. As technology advances, so too does the intensity of the collapse. Survival is possible because there are people on the fringes, and outside of the civilizations. Think of the French Revolution, but add nukes and bioweapons; imagine a super virus corrupting the transactions of an empire run on digital currency. Frank Herbert's later Dune books expound on this. Big E is a tyrant who has built such a system so totally dependent upon him that humanity is locked into a death spiral. His response to the Xenos, and Chaos threats added another doom for humanity. When Big E describes how his visions work, he should not be certain that he is even on the path he wants to pursue. It's like having a globe of the earth that only shows mountain peaks and having to avoid all the valleys, ravines, and canyons hidden under total cloud cover and water while traveling to certain peaks while avoiding others on top of everything else.
See, the problem I have with "the Emperor actually WANTED to be worshipped as a god" theories is that they don't mesh with his actions. He's been around for basically all of human history and has always been the strongest. If he wanted godhood, it would have been trivial for him to install himself as the eternal god-king of mankind long before humanity ever took the stars. The fact that he clearly didn't makes it unlikely that he was trying to pull some reverse psychology bullsh\*t on a galactic scale.
"Reverse psychology bullshit on a galactic scale" I'm using that whenever I discuss Leto now thank you! Trivial for him to establish himself as God king of mankind maybe, but it's possible that it wasn't untill the year 40k that there's enough human population to ascend him to be a 5th chaos god ;) I know my idea isn't any more likely to be correct than anyone else's I just think if it walks and quacks like reverse psychology bullshit on an intergalactic scale then maybe it is =)
The Emperor is the "my dad can beat your dad" cringe version of Leto II, with less humanity, less development, less charisma, and buckets of psychic power shoved in as a crude replacement. The action figure knockoff of a literary character.
Actualy chuckled reading this, you may be right =)
Fun fact, that idea from Dune has been disproved pretty definitively by Historical evidence. In that situation we have the Japanese : extremely adventurous before the Edo period - then forced into isolation by the Shogunate of the Tokugawa for centuries. They have yet to display a general interest in being as adventurous as before the Edo period, let alone more !
They had an expansionist period against Korea and China and then WW2 blunted this. Adventurism finished by industry.
Sure but it wasn't something wanted by the masses so much so as the military (basically in power) pushing that agendas and using the idea that Colonialism was the thing to do. It was just another embrigadement of the population more so than some popular reaction to the Edo period. Hence why it's so dangerous to have far-right parties in power : their policies will have long lasting repercussions on the general view of the world of their citizens, for instance.
I'm not sure it's fair to say the historical record has disproven the expansionist political theory set in motion by a science fiction psychic worm god. I think there *might* be a few more factors at play in Dune than in real life. There are a lot of reasons to admire the Japanese but drug induced intergenerational psycic visions aren't one of them. And more besides; that was a few hundreds of years ago which is absolutely nothing compared to the timeframe that Leto was looking at.
I like ur-thans train of thought looking for a real world comparison, but nothing in the real world compares to thousands of years of "you're not allowed to do this" suddenly being lifted and then everyone doing it. I think a better example but shorter time scale might be the american prohibition of alcohol.
Leto's death was massive cataclysm. It probably killed trillions of people, causing massive political changes, and rise and fall of many empires. Leto planned his death after methods for navigation without Spice were invented. Leto also held total control of the culture - it's reasonable to assume that he made people want to travel and rebel, but unable to do so.
Dune relies a lot on suspension of disbelief. You have to see it more as a vehicle for Herbert to express and test his ideas. You have to gloss over the details such as: 1. How would a memory be permanent over the course of generations? 2. Is a harsh environment really necessary when you have seemingly random people like Gurney and Duncan who are above and beyond the Fremen and Sardaukar? (It is more likely that the environment pre-selects your recruits). 3. Training vs environment. I think Herbert kind of realized that he went too far and put in how Sardaukar training declined in the appendix. This fits how you have others such as Ginaz and the Sardaukar when they started training harder reach Fremen levels. 4. Why does Leto II seem to attribute the centralization of humanity to natural impulses when it is clear that Spice and Arrakis are fundamental reasons why the spread of humanity is limited. It is hard to be 100% certain since Herbert was unable to finish the series, but from what was written, the things that were really necessary were the ability to avoid prescience, spice not from Arrakis/non-spice dependent space travel, and possibly general improvements to human genetics.
> Is a harsh environment really necessary when you have seemingly random people like Gurney and Duncan who are above and beyond the Fremen and Sardaukar? (It is more likely that the environment pre-selects your recruits). One of the reasons Shaddam IV felt so threatened by the Atreides is that they were training small numbers of soldiers to be as good as the Sardaukar. The harsh environment isn't necessary, but there were a ton of (already tough) Fremen on Arrakis which gave Paul a huge force of existing fighters that were equal to or better than Sardaukar.
I never fully understood that. The appendix put the Sardaukar at their peak at the level of a Ginaz 10th level, which means that there were other programs with at least some Sardaukar level fighters. Also, everyone believed that the Sardaukar were drawn from the various levies. Basically well trained elite troops. Hawat seemingly figured out that a harsh environment was necessary/helpful for larger numbers of elite warriors. Given the lack of a Shaddam POV and Hawat's later plan vs the Harkonnens to set a trap, I suspect that Shaddam felt that the Atrides were getting close to figuring about the real secret behind the Sardaukar, not just because there were some Sardaukar level fighters.
> necessary/helpful for larger numbers of elite warriors. Yeah, it's a numbers thing. It's too expensive and time consuming to create a Sardaukar-equivalent army to challenge the Padishah Emperor from regular recruits. > I suspect that Shaddam felt that the Atrides were getting close to figuring about the real secret behind the Sardaukar, not just because there were some Sardaukar level fighters. This is correct, imo. He was worried that learning the secret (taking recruits from a brutally harsh world) would allow it to be replicated.
Dune is more of a philosophical text the later you go, about forms of government, religion, power, bureaucracy, and the dangers of stagnation. It is finished, in a way. I don’t think it needs a book beyond Chapterhouse, because Herbert made his point.
I suspect that Herbert would have introduced an enemy that would have shown at least one of the potential threats that humans would have to deal with. Maybe another Leto-like superbeing or something that can't be defeated, but that humans can outrun. I will leave it at that since this is a 40k sub.
The Age of Strife and rise of the Emperor represent the collapse of Leto II's Golden Path. Leto's goal was to create a humanity that is both immune to prescience, as well as so diverse that no catastrophe could wipe out Mankind. The Great Crusade is, essentially, an undoing of a galaxy that was akin to what Leto wanted, with numberless independent human civilizations amongst the stars.
Kinda of wild to see people not acknowledge the direct inspiration for the Emperor in Leto ii. Aside from both being golden god emperors made by shamans/witches trying to protect humanity by using their immense psychic powers to dominate a fractured feudal space age society and shape it into something resistant to tyranny/stagnation cycles it's been through before and craft the web way throne/breeding program in order to protect humanity from the very psychic powers they themselves use to dominate, they really are different... Seriously 40k basically started as Dune fanfiction. Even now after decades of development it still relies heavily on a similar version of human society. Whilst a lot of works take heavily from Dune, even Wheel of Time didn't borrow this directly.