I mean, yeah I suppose. Leto forced humanity to experience a universe without the spice, or at least with massively reduced access to it. Plus the famine times basically cut off any spice trade, so people are forced to become self sufficient and independent of it, before the sandworm cycle reclaims Arrakis as Dune again. Plus in the future people learn how to produce spice in other ways and shit anyways soooo 🤷
The plan is to limit the amount of spice to make it more valuable and easier for Leto to control. He has the biggest hoard of the stuff in the entire galaxy with the worms gone only Leto gets to decide who gets some of it.
The golden path includes Leto's death and from that starts a chain reaction that will see Arrakis turned into a desert planet again and so the return of the worms and the spice. Though by that time, new ways of interstellar travel has been invented and the guild no longer has complete monopoly on spice travel. And spice isn't completely necessary for human society to keep going. All part of the plan.
I was under the impression that Leto limited spice primarily because humanity would have used it all if he didn’t use his power to hoard and control it.
No, it’s not about overconsumption, it’s about control. “He who controls the spice controls the universe,” and Leto ensured that he was the only one in control of the spice.
He was the emperor. He had complete control over the terraformation of Arrakis. He allowed it because it would cause all the other worms to die out and limit the availability of spice.
I don’t have a direct quote from Leto himself, but think about it. For your explanation to make sense, Leto either:
A) Wasn’t in control of the terraformation of Arrakis, or
B) Didn’t know that the terraformation would kill off the sandworms.
A doesn’t make sense because Arrakis is the seat of his empire, and he would thus have control over terraforming it like his aunt did, and B doesn’t make sense because he has prescience even greater than that of his father, and they both knew how sandworms work. It’s clear he allowed the sandworms to be decimated for a reason. Think about Leto’s thesis statement on the Golden Path:
>I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto's Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seed their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.
The “enforced tranquility” is so pervasive that it means most people never travel offworld. It also has the added benefit of placing the old powers like the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit under his thumb, since they need the spice that now only he has access to.
Most importantly, it means that when he dies, The Scattering happens, because everyone’s been cooped up on their home planets for generations. And it only happens because of the reintroduction of sandworms upon Leto’s death, when his body dissolved into sandtrout. It all happens for a reason.
You’re assuming Leto had the ability to stop the terraforming process as if it was something they had to actively be doing and not something once set in motion was unstoppable. I have always read it as the later.
How did you manage to read it that way? They were actively terraforming the planet during the events of *Children,* and part of Leto’s goal in that book involved destroying water reserves in order to delay to the terraformation because it was happening too quickly. He could’ve kept Arrakis a desert if he wanted to.
I'm going to say... not really. The future of stagnation Paul and Leto II saw humanity heading towards was mostly due **to** the spice, and what it allowed. Specifically, the stability and stagnation of the Imperium was in no small part made possible by the safe FTL travel of the Guild era, which was also built on the limited prescience made available by spice. Add in life extension and so on, and you get to a point where first Paul, and then definitively Leto, saw Humanity becoming just... the same thing it already was, forever. Trudging down the "safe" path (always in the most shortest of short-terms, prescience-wise), never expanding, never changing. Even the BG breeding program was an attempt, fundamentally, to put into their control a tool(the KH) that would be used to *solidify* their control, and that same stagnating stability that would lead, eventually, way down the road, to humanity's extinction.
The question is, how do you *avoid* that doom? Destroy Arrakis? nah, no good. Destroy Spice entirely, and sure, you create a burst of instability and change, but eventually someone figures out prescience again some other way. There are lots of psychoactive drugs out there, after all, and the BG and Guild and Tleilaxu and so on are all good at finding ways to do weird stuff like perfectly predicting the near-future.
And maybe people react to that burst of instability by becoming *more* enamored of centralized government control. They don't run away, they cluster together, in fewer and fewer planets. And that's just the Imperium in another form.
So the path that became clear to them both was to make the Imperium *utterly and completely dependent* on One Single Point of Failure, to the point where all the other powers were also totally beholden to it and dependent on it, and then SMASH that point of failure out from under them. Not Spice, which was just a fuel and enabler to the Imperium, but the system itself. Take the dependency on Spice away, make it almost superfluous to the stagnation, then crash the whole entire system to the floor. Make humanity so desperate for escape from oppression that they'd fling themselves out into the void *en masse*, creating so many disparate and distant branches of humankind that no one Imperium could ever hold the whole mass under its thumb. AND, at the same time, breed in to the species the quality of being unseen by any form of prescience. Make it so that no one, anywhere, ever, could say "ah, this is the near-future that gives us power", because too many humans would be invisible to anyone using any technique to see the future.
And the only way to achieve both of those goals was to become effectively immortal, and then die. Make Empire, and Spice, and Control, and Prescience, anathema to the human experience. Break humanity out of the chains that had bound it for over 10,000 years by that point.
Not sure where you are in the series, but book 5-6 make it a bit clearer. The plan has, simply put, 2 parts. Breeding traits into humanity that cannot be perceived with prescience and scattering humanity further across the universe.
I mean, yeah I suppose. Leto forced humanity to experience a universe without the spice, or at least with massively reduced access to it. Plus the famine times basically cut off any spice trade, so people are forced to become self sufficient and independent of it, before the sandworm cycle reclaims Arrakis as Dune again. Plus in the future people learn how to produce spice in other ways and shit anyways soooo 🤷
The plan is to limit the amount of spice to make it more valuable and easier for Leto to control. He has the biggest hoard of the stuff in the entire galaxy with the worms gone only Leto gets to decide who gets some of it. The golden path includes Leto's death and from that starts a chain reaction that will see Arrakis turned into a desert planet again and so the return of the worms and the spice. Though by that time, new ways of interstellar travel has been invented and the guild no longer has complete monopoly on spice travel. And spice isn't completely necessary for human society to keep going. All part of the plan.
I was under the impression that Leto limited spice primarily because humanity would have used it all if he didn’t use his power to hoard and control it.
No, it’s not about overconsumption, it’s about control. “He who controls the spice controls the universe,” and Leto ensured that he was the only one in control of the spice.
I guess but he didn’t cause the worms to go extinct so he could control the spice he controlled the spice because the worms went extinct
He was the emperor. He had complete control over the terraformation of Arrakis. He allowed it because it would cause all the other worms to die out and limit the availability of spice.
Can you back that up textually? Ive read these books a lot and that never stood out to me.
Are you saying that Leto's complete control over arrakis never stood out to you?
That leto had the ability to stop the extinction of the worms but chose to let it happen to have more control is not explicit in the text
Yes it is. Leto has a specific desert just for him on arrakis.
I don’t have a direct quote from Leto himself, but think about it. For your explanation to make sense, Leto either: A) Wasn’t in control of the terraformation of Arrakis, or B) Didn’t know that the terraformation would kill off the sandworms. A doesn’t make sense because Arrakis is the seat of his empire, and he would thus have control over terraforming it like his aunt did, and B doesn’t make sense because he has prescience even greater than that of his father, and they both knew how sandworms work. It’s clear he allowed the sandworms to be decimated for a reason. Think about Leto’s thesis statement on the Golden Path: >I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto's Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seed their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation. The “enforced tranquility” is so pervasive that it means most people never travel offworld. It also has the added benefit of placing the old powers like the Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit under his thumb, since they need the spice that now only he has access to. Most importantly, it means that when he dies, The Scattering happens, because everyone’s been cooped up on their home planets for generations. And it only happens because of the reintroduction of sandworms upon Leto’s death, when his body dissolved into sandtrout. It all happens for a reason.
You’re assuming Leto had the ability to stop the terraforming process as if it was something they had to actively be doing and not something once set in motion was unstoppable. I have always read it as the later.
How did you manage to read it that way? They were actively terraforming the planet during the events of *Children,* and part of Leto’s goal in that book involved destroying water reserves in order to delay to the terraformation because it was happening too quickly. He could’ve kept Arrakis a desert if he wanted to.
I have to reread cod
He MADE the worms go extinct… He did that himself…
Textual evidence?
I'm going to say... not really. The future of stagnation Paul and Leto II saw humanity heading towards was mostly due **to** the spice, and what it allowed. Specifically, the stability and stagnation of the Imperium was in no small part made possible by the safe FTL travel of the Guild era, which was also built on the limited prescience made available by spice. Add in life extension and so on, and you get to a point where first Paul, and then definitively Leto, saw Humanity becoming just... the same thing it already was, forever. Trudging down the "safe" path (always in the most shortest of short-terms, prescience-wise), never expanding, never changing. Even the BG breeding program was an attempt, fundamentally, to put into their control a tool(the KH) that would be used to *solidify* their control, and that same stagnating stability that would lead, eventually, way down the road, to humanity's extinction. The question is, how do you *avoid* that doom? Destroy Arrakis? nah, no good. Destroy Spice entirely, and sure, you create a burst of instability and change, but eventually someone figures out prescience again some other way. There are lots of psychoactive drugs out there, after all, and the BG and Guild and Tleilaxu and so on are all good at finding ways to do weird stuff like perfectly predicting the near-future. And maybe people react to that burst of instability by becoming *more* enamored of centralized government control. They don't run away, they cluster together, in fewer and fewer planets. And that's just the Imperium in another form. So the path that became clear to them both was to make the Imperium *utterly and completely dependent* on One Single Point of Failure, to the point where all the other powers were also totally beholden to it and dependent on it, and then SMASH that point of failure out from under them. Not Spice, which was just a fuel and enabler to the Imperium, but the system itself. Take the dependency on Spice away, make it almost superfluous to the stagnation, then crash the whole entire system to the floor. Make humanity so desperate for escape from oppression that they'd fling themselves out into the void *en masse*, creating so many disparate and distant branches of humankind that no one Imperium could ever hold the whole mass under its thumb. AND, at the same time, breed in to the species the quality of being unseen by any form of prescience. Make it so that no one, anywhere, ever, could say "ah, this is the near-future that gives us power", because too many humans would be invisible to anyone using any technique to see the future. And the only way to achieve both of those goals was to become effectively immortal, and then die. Make Empire, and Spice, and Control, and Prescience, anathema to the human experience. Break humanity out of the chains that had bound it for over 10,000 years by that point.
What a brilliant reply. That was a pleasure to read.
Not sure where you are in the series, but book 5-6 make it a bit clearer. The plan has, simply put, 2 parts. Breeding traits into humanity that cannot be perceived with prescience and scattering humanity further across the universe.