Frank Herbert:
Our Prophet

Frank Herbert. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

2,488 words

This talk was delivered on Sunday, October 8th, at a Counter-Currents gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I want to thank everyone who helped organize the event and everyone who came out to attend. I love Texas and am frankly puzzled by its one-star rating.

It is just a coincidence that today’s gathering falls on the birthday of Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, which is the best-selling and most influential science fiction book of all time. Without Dune, there would be no Star Wars. Without Dune, there would be no Warhammer 40K. Dune combines tropes from science fiction and fantasy literature and explores deep issues in political philosophy and political theology. Thus I welcome an occasion to talk about Herbert, who is a true artist of the Right and a deep influence on my own political and metapolitical thinking. But be warned: Herbert had a wild imagination. So take a deep breath, relax, and let your imagination play along.

Mankind was born on Earth. But it would be a tragic failure if we were to die here. There is a deep truth to Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Western man as “Faustian”: ever desiring the infinite. And there is no better arena for the Faustian spirit than the exploration and colonization of the galaxy. Yet space exploration has been stalled for decades now. Mankind has not walked on the Moon in more than 50 years, much less reached for Mars and beyond.

Frank Herbert can offer an explanation for why mankind has spent the last half-century wallowing in the mud rather than reaching for the stars. Based on Dune, I think he would lay the blame at the feet of liberal democracy and capitalism, which are afflicted by increasingly short-term and mundane thinking. Indeed, the only reason we left the planet in the first place had less to do with Faustian striving than Cold War competition with the Soviet Union about which system — liberal democracy or Communism — would have dominion over the Earth.

Cold War competition was an enormous engine of technological development, especially in the West. It forced liberal democracies into some semblance of long-term strategic thinking. It also forced capitalists to treat workers more decently. The result was a golden age for Western workers, whose wages were buoyed by dramatic technological innovations, many of them lavishly subsidized by the state.

But the West’s victory in the Cold War turned out to be our defeat, for two reasons. First, easing superpower competition removed one of the main spurs of technological development. Second, capitalism became global, and instead of increasing productivity through technological advancement, suddenly the craze became cost-cutting through offshoring production and importing cheap labor, the benefits of which accrued overwhelmingly to the oligarchs.

Increasing Leftist control of the culture led to the denigration of space exploration as white, male, and colonialist. Instead of taking humanity into the twenty-first century, the focus became uplifting blacks into the twentieth century — truly an infinite task, but hardly a heroic one.

So what kind of civilization could take us to the stars? Herbert gives the answer in Dune‘s backstory. A galaxy-spanning civilization must cross vast distances, which takes an enormous amount of time. It must also spend enormous amounts of wealth today for the benefit of distant future generations. It would have to plan far into the future. Its form of government would have to be replicable on widely separated worlds between which travel and communication would be extremely slow and expensive. It would, in short, require great decentralization.

Liberal democracies and capitalist enterprises are incapable of such great ventures. They only think of the next election or the next quarter. Wealth and power flow to those who better serve the whims of empowered morons in the present, not distant future generations. After all: What have future generations done for us?

Herbert believed that feudalism, not liberal democracy, is the social form necessary to take mankind to the stars. Thus in Dune, planets are ruled by hereditary dukes and barons who owe allegiance to a distant emperor. Feudalism is hierarchical but decentralized, befitting a world in which travel and communication are slow and expensive. Feudal institutions also supported long-term planning plus vast expenditures and multigenerational labors on matters that were far from mundane, such as building cathedrals and fighting for centuries against Islam.

Hereditary monarchies and aristocracies encourage long-term stewardship. Beyond that, initiatic spiritual institutions such as the Catholic Church and its various monastic and knightly orders — or, in the Muslim world, Sufi orders — provided the institutional continuity necessary to pursue plans unfolding over centuries.

In the Dune universe, three such spiritual orders emerged against the background of what Herbert called the “Butlerian Jihad”: a holy war against artificial intelligence. In the pursuit of security and comfort, mankind had become enslaved by machines, and the only force that could overcome them was a religious revival. Only the sacred is powerful enough to trump the utilitarian and convenient. In the wake of the jihad, mankind had to do without artificial intelligence, which forced us to develop our own intrinsic powers.

The Bene Tleilax order created “mentats,” human beings who had expanded their memories and analytical powers to the point that they could function as human computers. The Tleilaxu also practiced cloning and genetic engineering. Through something called “prana-bindu yoga” they developed “face dancers,” human beings who could mimic the appearances and personalities of others. In the fifth Dune novel, Heretics of Dune, we learn that the Tleilaxu are Sufi Muslims, who take Islamic misogyny to revolting extremes.

The Spacing Guild focused on the development of prescient powers. To develop these powers, Guild Navigators used immense quantities of the most valuable substance in the universe: the highly addictive and consciousness-expanding drug known as “spice,” found only on the planet Arrakis, known to its natives as Dune. The spice had mutated the Guild Navigators into strange fish-like creatures who could see the future, or different possible futures. They used this power to make faster-than-light travel possible by threading wormholes in space.

The third spiritual order is the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, inspired by the formidable nuns and crones the young Frank Herbert knew through his Irish Catholic grandmother. The name Bene Gesserit is supposed to call the Jesuits to mind and roughly means “Well Born,” referring to the sisterhood’s focus on eugenics. The Bene Gesserit also use the spice to prolong their lives and develop their mental powers. They use the “Water of Life,” which is related to the spice, to access the ancestral memories of their female forebears. Through prana-bindu yoga, they have developed the ability to control the chemical processes and involuntary muscles of their own bodies by will alone. They have also developed other yogic superpowers, including a martial art known as the weirding way. By cultivating hyper-observation and abductive reasoning skills, the sisters have uncanny abilities to read people, which they call “Truthsense.” Being women with seemingly supernatural powers, the Bene Gesserit were often disdained as “witches.” 

The sisterhood’s principal occupation is eugenics. Their proximate goal is the breeding of a superman, who can transmute the poisonous Water of Life and access male ancestral memories as well as peer into the future. They call this Janus figure the “Kwisatz Haderach,” which means the “shortener of the way.” Their ultimate goal is murky, but it appears to be to ensure from any peril the survival and upward development of the human race. They are both the guardians and guiding intelligence of humanity.

You can buy Kerry Bolton’s More Artists of the Right here.

Herbert was not so naïve to think that all of history can be foreseen and planned for. Some events are unforeseeable. But the Bene Gesserit planned for such contingencies by pursuing enormous power and also the supplest pragmatism, so they could quickly adapt to any surprise and counter every opposition.

The back story and world creation of Dune are not the only things of interest to political philosophy. The stories themselves also offer many lessons. The six Dune novels fall into three pairs.

The first two, Dune and Dune Messiah, tell the story of the rise and fall of Paul Atreides, the heir to a dukedom who becomes the Kwisatz Haderach, and while pursuing the world-shaking but still petty vendettas of his caste, unleashes a holy war that devastates the galaxy and makes him God Emperor over the ruins. Herbert clearly meant Dune and Dune Messiah to be cautionary tales about the dangers of charismatic leadership and mixing religious fervor with politics. These are sobering lessons our movement should take to heart.

The next two Dune books, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, have become my favorites. (See my essay on them, “The Golden Path.”) They tell the story of Paul’s son, Leto, who inherits his father’s ancestral memories, prescient powers, and throne, but does not become an anti-hero whining about how oppressed he feels by his vast knowledge and power. Instead, Leto peers into the future, sees the extinction of humanity by one of its own inventions (AI again), and sets out to stop it. This task required 3,500 years of planning and execution. But instead of entrusting it to an initiatic order such as the Bene Gesserit, Leto found a way to fuse his mortal flesh with the larval sandworms of Arrakis, who produce the spice, becoming a monstrous colony organism that is virtually indestructible and immortal.

Humanity’s greatest vulnerability is its political unity in Leto’s imperium. Humanity can be ruled because it can be seen, and not just by the all-seeing God Emperor, but by all the forms of communication that make us available to and manipulable by great powers. Thus, Leto sets out to breed a strain of human beings who are invisible to the prescience granted by the spice. He also develops new technologies: a navigation machine that can replace spice-dependent Guild navigators and the no-globe, which is invisible to prescience and any other form of monitoring. The no-globe can be combined with a spaceship to create the no-ship, a stealth craft that can travel anywhere in the universe, unobserved and untraceable. Leto’s goal was to engineer the scattering of the human race beyond the power of any single political order to surveille and control us, thus safeguarding us from any single point of failure. Leto’s death — which Herbert models on the dismembered and resurrected nature gods such as Osiris and Dionysus — triggers the fall of his imperium and the scattering of humanity, thus securing our future. It is one of the most audacious and imaginative stories in all world literature.

I discuss the last two books, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, in an essay called “The Bene Gesserit Novels.” They are less successful as stories, but filled with fascinating political ideas.

So in what sense is Frank Herbert a prophet of the New Right? In Dune, prescience is real, therefore so is prophecy. But Herbert was also very cynical about prophecies. The Bene Gesserit manufacture prophecies as a way of depriving people of their freedom. Many things are not inevitable. Many events are hatched and imposed upon us by scheming elites. Such plans can always be thwarted and opposed. But if you are convinced that certain events are inevitable, you will not oppose those who wish to impose them upon you. Indeed, you might help them. There’s nothing inevitable about Herbert’s vision of the future. But we can make him our prophet by making some of his memes real.

First, there is the Butlerian Jihad. We need to take the threat of artificial intelligence very seriously. AI is not a tool. AI is a new apex species which scientists are eager to create and give dominion over our planet. Then, they assure us, it will make our dreams come true. It is the daftest damned thing imaginable. To get a sense of the folly of AI, imagine chickens laboring mightily to create a new being called “man” with enormous new powers and an immensely expanded consciousness that they literally cannot comprehend, all on the assumption that this new being will selflessly serve them (and I don’t mean on a platter). Ending up on a factory farm is the best-case scenario. It is more likely that AI would simply exterminate us as the only plausible threat to its survival, and it would decide this, wargame out all the possible counter-measures, and set its plans in motion 15 minutes after going online, while humans are still congratulating themselves on their brilliance. We need to muster every possible resource to fight this madness. And the sacred always trumps the merely utilitarian.  Thus we need a real Butlerian Jihad today, before AI goes online. Herbert was much too optimistic to think AI could be stopped after it gains power.

Second, we need to replace liberal democracy, with its short-term thinking and mundane values, with a social system that plans for the distant future, including mankind’s biological and technological self-apotheosis and the exploration and colonization of other worlds. Everything that White Nationalists want politically is consistent with this ambition, as I argue in my essay “Technological Utopianism and Ethnic Nationalism.” No, I am not thrilled with all aspects of Herbert’s imperium, some of which are clearly offered as dystopian. For instance, I strongly reject hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. But if we don’t embrace Herbert’s alternative to liberal democracy, we will still have to find some alternative.

Third, before we have the power to stop AI, halt the demographic and cultural decline of our race, returning it to the upward path, and plan for the distant future, we need to build institutions today that are capable of pursuing such ends. As I argue in my essay “Metapolitics and Occult Warfare,” and as Herbert depicts in his Dune novels, the best vehicle for such world- and age-spanning ambitions is an initiatic spiritual order such as the Bene Gesserit — or the real Jesuits — or the Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and Sufis who inspired the Traditionalist writings of René Guénon and Julius Evola.

You can find this essay and many others in Greg Johnson’s book Novel Takes: Essays on Literature, available for order here

In my essay “Lessing’s Ideal Conservative Freemasony,” I examine German Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s critique of the Freemasonry of his day. Lessing was skeptical of globalism. He believed that the natural political unit was the nation-state. Yet he believed that nations, classes, and religions could fall into needless and destructive conflicts out of petty partisanship. To serve the good of the whole, it is therefore necessary to find men of all nations, classes, and religions who — although they may be passionately attached to their particular interests — are broad-minded and far-sighted enough to look beyond them to the common good. Finding such people, bringing them together, and empowering them to guide humanity was, for Lessing, the core of truth and goodness in Freemasonry.

Where do we find such people? Some of them may be seated next to you in this very room. How do we organize them? What do we do with them? As food for thought, I suggest you sample the highly addictive and consciousness-expanding writings of Frank Herbert.

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