Dune vs. Star Trek Futures
“Herbert was a quintessential product of the libertarian culture of the Pacific coast, self-reliant and distrustful of centralized authority, yet with a mile-wide streak of utopian futurism and a concomitant willingness to experiment.”
That’s the culture I was raised on here in Oregon and it’s light-years from the smokescreen of Woke Inc being pushed by today’s technocratic corporate overlords and the nanny state they are allied with. This vision keeps us from our power, true community solidarity and adaptive resilience
There are regional roots to visions of the future. Just as UK Leguin’s work owes a deep alliance to the Cascadia Bioregion, so does Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Leguin foresaw a potential future based on Taoist anarchism where Herbert saw an emergent ArchaeoFurturism.
As we head further into the environmentally strained Anthropocene, both are possibilities for communities and more compelling to me than the technocratic vision of Star Trek.
Gene Roddenberry’s ideal was strong on techno-utopianism and weak on an understanding of human behavior or ecology.
Dune is the inverse.
Star Trek’s vision of the future relies on machines and federated governance, where Dune’s relies on human potential, tribalism, the powers of the Will, and human prescience to adapt to harsh environmental and social conditions.
In a world on fire consumed by the glamour of machines, mystified by the promises of the State, and fed upon by Billionaires, Herbert gives a much more interesting visionary map than Roddenberry.
He reminds us Liberty must be carved from life through individual struggle and the focused Will aligned with like-minded communities in bioregionally adaptive ways.
This inner and outer Jihad eventually triumphs over the mass mind, the machine and the state in the face of harsh environmental conditions.