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C O L L E C T I O N S |
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DUNE CHRONICLES
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| Paul Atreides |
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There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual
to the other. Proverbs of Muad'Dib Dune Messiah
Once more the drama begins.
Production growth and income growth must not get out of step in my Empire. That
is the substance of my command. There are to be no balance-of-payment
difficulties between the different spheres of influence. And the reason for
this is simply because I command it. I want to emphasize my authority in this
area. I am the supreme energy-eater of this domain, and will remain so, alive
or dead. My government is the economy.
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from
ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man
of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a
difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.
Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of
power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your
energy."
The Fremen must return to his original faith, to his genius in forming human
communities; he must return to the past, where that lesson of survival was
learned in the struggle for Arrakis. The only business of the Fremen should
be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings. The worlds of the Imperium,
the Landsraad and the CHOAM Confederacy have no message to give him. They will
only rob him of his soul.
Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who
learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating
argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms
the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself -- a
barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future
atrocities thus bred.
I will not argue with the Fremen claims that they are divinely inspired to
transmit a religious revelation. It is their concurrent claim to ideological
revelation which inspires me to shower them with derision. Of course, they make
the dual claim in the hope that it will strengthen their mandarinate and help
them to endure in a universe which finds them increasingly oppressive. It is
in the name of all those oppressed people that i warn the Fremen: short-term
expediency always fails in the long term.
This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute,
a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that
things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad'Dib
taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants
have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.
You Bene Gesserit call your activity of the Panoplia Prophetica a "Science
of Religion." Very well. I, a seeker after another kind of scientist,
find this an appropriate definition. You do, indeed, build your own myths,
but so do all societies. You I must warn, however. You are behaving as so
many other misguided scientists have behaved. Your actions reveal that you
wish to take something out of [away from] life. It is time you were
reminded of that which you so often profess: One cannot have a single thing
without its opposite.
The universe is just there; that's the only way a Fedaykin can view it
and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor
promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption
of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this
universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them.
You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their
own wordless way and then, then you will
So understand what is meant by "life
and death." Understanding this, you will be filled with joy.
O Paul, thou Muad'Dib,
Humankind periodically goes through a speedup of its affairs, thereby
experiencing the race between the renewable vitality of the living and the
beckoning vitiation of decadence. In this periodic race, any pause becomes
luxury. Only then can one reflect that all is permitted; all is possible.
What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom
find real loyalties in the commerce. When did you last hear of a clerk giving
his life for the company? Perhaps your deficiency rests in the false
assumption that you can order men to think and cooperate. This has been a
failure of everything from religions to general staffs throughout history.
General staffs have a long record of destroying their own nations. As to
religions, I recommend a rereading of Thomas Aquinas. As to you of CHOAM, what
nonsense you believe! Men must want to do things out of their own innermost
drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what
make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of
the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them,
suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization
collapses.
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