You humans can be... really scary, you know that? At around seven feet tall I literally stand head
and shoulders above most of you. Yet, somehow, in my mind, you loom larger than mountains. Not
because of what you are, but because of what you can do. Art, architecture, science, wars,
civilizations-you reshape the entire world, and a lot of the time you do it just because you can.
Because you want to. That kind of power is... actually... a little terrifying.
This isn't the first time I've had this on my mind; I'm continuously
amazed by you. But I just recently read a story that sort of allowed me to... zoom
out. To really see what you are at scale. And it still has me reeling.
It was a little book you may have heard of... called DUNE.
Before we do anything else, I want to thank everyone who makes these videos worthwhile. All
of you who like and subscribe to the channel-and especially everyone who supports us on patreon, it
still blows my mind everytime someone pledges-it's hard to say how much all of that means to us.
To all of you creative humans who watch this show, we love you.
Dune is... a lot of things. Sci-fi classic that influenced a vast swath of the genre?
Yes. Epic, multi-volume series with probably still-unplumbed depths, even after 56 years?
Oh yes. World with a level of setting detail that you could-and which some people have-dedicate an
entire video series to exploring? Absolutely. We did take an opportunity to make a much smaller,
more indulgent video to talk about some of the "magic" in Dune, but even with that we're barely
scratching the surface. I'll tell you where you can watch that video a little later.
For now, this is just one video, for just one book.
Laying all of the expansiveness and significance of the series aside, from the perspective of a
writer, I see something truly inspiring within the pages of this one story. And you don't need
to be an avid lore-fiend who's scoured every inch of the books to see it for yourself.
So much of the beauty of this story is wrapped up in the sheer, undeniable scale of its contents.
The small staring into the face of the large, the simple caught in the web of the complex,
the microcosm against the macrocosm. I could go on about it for an age. But...
I'd rather show you... Oh, and as a courtesy for anyone
who hasn't read the first book of Dune-there will be spoilers, and they will be intense.
The story takes place in a far-distant future where all intelligent machines have been outlawed.
In their absence, Mankind has cultivated their intellect to heights never before dreamed of.
Some have become human computers called Mentats, able to run incomprehensible calculations through
their minds in the blink of an eye. Others are Navigators of the Spacing Guild, able to predict
with near prescient exactness the movement of their vessels through folded space, allowing for
faster-than-light travel. And a very select few have joined an order called the Bene Gesserit:
women with such a deep mastery of society and selective breeding, that to most they appear to
be witches, able to control people by the mere sound of their voice, able to divine falsehoods
in the mouths of others, even able to predict the very future... as if by divine prophecy.
These are the foundations of a Galactic Empire, which serves as the macrocosm of this
story. The big picture here is that, using these finely-honed human skills,
great, noble houses were able to settle and own entire planets,
over which they constantly bicker. The microcosm here is that all
of this was made possible... by a single... little... spice... called
m lange. An export from a little-known desert planet out on the edge of the known universe.
Melange opens the mind; allows humans to tap into the true height of their potential. It alone makes
possible what the navigators do, opening humanity to the wonder of faster-than-light travel...
among... many other things. Most people... just call it... spice.
Okay, are you still following? Good. Because all of that stuff is really setting. Now the story
really starts. Our hero is a boy named
Paul Atreides who comes from a great height of importance. He's the son of a Bene Gesserit,
the only man ever to learn their ways. He's also the son of a Duke, who happens to reside over
one of the greatest noble houses in the galaxy. In fact, a little too great, as fate would have it.
Threatened by the influence of House Atreides, the Emperor contrives a solution to his problem: he
decides to gift them that little desert planet-the source of all the spice in the universe: Arrakis,
also called Dune. It sounds too good to be true... aaand it most certainly is. Arrakis
is a trap. Before the emperor made an official gift of it, it had unofficially been under the
control of a rivaling noble house, who were making an exorbitant amount of money
by monopolizing the planet's spice. Almost as soon as Paul and his family settle in,
the betrayal unfolds. With the quiet help of the Emperor's undefeatable army, the enemy makes quick
work of the entirety of House Atreides. The slaughter is decisive, and quite complete...
Except... for Paul and his mother, who manage to escape into the vast desert wilderness of Dune.
This would mean death for anyone else, but Paul... is no normal kid.
I mentioned that he was the only man ever to learn the ways of the Bene Gesserit?
Well, with their deep knowledge of selective breeding and social engineering,
they'd labored for generations to produce a child who would essentially be their claim to power-a
human being with such great mental capacity, he would be Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator all
in one, able to predict the future with perfect exactness, as well as access his genetic memory
to see into the memories of his ancestors. Paul is this prophesied messiah. And although he does not
quite understand what that means, he knows it. His journey into the desert is the turning
point of the story, where we begin to shift our gaze from all of the complex,
political machinations, the cultivation of destined paths and prophesies... to the boy
himself, and the new world he's arriving in. Again, the microcosm against the macrocosm.
Dune is not a gentle place. Everyone knows this. The entire planet is covered in desert.
Water is the scarcest resource. Get caught out in the open without the proper protection, and you'll
shrivel up and die in no time at all. Even worse, the planet is teeming with massive sandworms,
big enough to swallow up an entire home and all the people in it. To outsiders, Dune is nothing
more than the inconvenient obstacle standing in the way of the spice that drives the galaxy.
To the natives-a people known as The Fremen-it's all one. They live lives outsiders could never
imagine, riding the sandworms through the desert, drinking the moisture of their own bodies through
their ingenious still suits. They take in so much of the precious spice m lange through the very
air they breathe and the food they eat, that it dyes the whites of their eyes a vivid blue
and fills them with a preternatural prowess found nowhere else. Though their world is
taken for a wilderness and they themselves are taken for savages, nothing could be further from
the truth. They simply understand and respect the source of their strength.
Paul and his mother eventually find their way through the desert to the Fremen, and soon they
recognize him for what he is-a messiah, who will turn Arrakis into the center of a new empire.
But the path there is not easy. Paul must first descend from his lofty destiny, his high seat.
He must cease to be the Duke's son or the promised messiah and instead learn to be one of the Fremen.
Rather than an act of domination, the kind we see the great houses and the empire impose upon
Arrakis and its people, Paul Atreides, greatest of them all, must perform an act of submission.
Only once he humbles himself before the ways of the people of the spice-eats
their food, breathes their air, trades blood with them, raises a family among them,
learns to ride the great worms himself-does Paul unlock the true depths of his potential.
The spice began to change him as soon as he set foot on the planet, opening up his powerful mind,
but it takes the wisdom of these desert nomads for him to become the man he's meant to be.
When he does finally come into his power, the Fremen name he chooses for himself
is among the most moving symbols in the book. Far from reaching for anything grand or prestigious,
he affirms his descent and chooses to be called "Muad'Dib", which means desert mouse.
And this is what I love about Dune. We continuously see the microcosm compared
to the macrocosm-Arrakis against the whole universe, House Atreides against the Empire,
The Fremen against the constantly-invading noble Houses, the lone human against the great worm,
the desert mouse... against the grand scale of his destiny. But it's a false comparison.
The dichotomy is not real. Paul shows this when he acquires the power so many others have reached
for, again, not through domination-trying to control things on a macroscopic scale-but through
submission-descending low enough to understand the root of things, where the power truly comes from.
Paul has the vision to see that the microcosm and the macrocosm are one and the same. You
cannot hope to control things on a grand scale if you do not understand their foundations.
In the end, Paul is able to ransom the entire universe through his knowledge of the spice
that makes the current state of mankind possible.
If the emperor will not surrender his throne to Paul and The Fremen, he will destroy the source
of the spice altogether. Mentats, Navigators, Bene Gesserit-all will go away forever,
and humanity will descend back into the darkness from which it came. And so it is that Paul
Atreides ascends from the lowest of the low-from the people everyone took to be desert savages-to
the highest place in the known universe. One could not be without the other.
For us writers, this is an amazing example of theme. Throughout Dune, scale is not just a
feature; it's a form. Whether he intended to or not, the author constantly draws our eyes toward
these comparisons of things large and small. And since the story is ultimately about exploitative,
universal institutions being upended by someone who can see and understand clearly the role of
the small, all of these comparisons take on a new weight. Like individual grains of sand swept
into an unstoppable desert storm, together these impressions create an effect that's impossible
to ignore. The longer you read, the smaller becomes the vast, the larger becomes the small,
until at last everything meets at the center. Long after his reign, the words of Paul Atreides
are collected into volumes of scripture-like texts. And in his advanced wisdom, I think he
puts all of this quite well. He says, in one of these books: "There is in all things a pattern
that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace-those qualities you find
always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the
way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern
of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms,
the dances, the forms that comfort . . ." This is what's so scary about the vast
potential of mankind to me. You yourselves are the grains of sand in the storm.
Together, you achieve truly incredible things... but from what I've seen, you also have a tendency
to forget that you do these things... together. That no matter the scale of your achievements,
it is nothing without a fundamental appreciation for the individual pieces which make up the whole.
Your ambitions so often crush the foundations that makes them achievable in the first place,
and that is a little scary to think about. Remember, there is a pattern in all things.
The macrocosm must respect and understand its microcosms in order to survive. When you aspire
and when you create... be sure not to forget. And... that would be where the video ends...
except... I have more to say. We actually made an entire second video to get into some of the
weird... pseudo-fantasy-magic-sci-fi in the setting of Dune. All these mystics and prophecies
and... yet... it still feels like science fiction. Why? It's a really fun topic, but it also just
seems too small and niche for Youtube. I'm pretty confident that if we tried to upload it here,
the algorithm would want nothing to do with it. Thankfully, there is a place where we can
share that stuff. Where we don't have to worry about what we upload and we can really just
share... whatever we want! You can watch it over on our
creator-owned streaming platform, Nebula. Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It's not exactly made for honesty and accuracy, there's a huge demand to just be click-baity
and eyecatching all the time. Sometimes... you just want to share some cool information without
sweating about performance. So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our
own platform where we don't have to worry about all of that. We upload what we want, how we want.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and a ton of content we couldn't otherwise upload here,
including the companion video for this one. It's so fun just to cut loose and share what
we feel like sharing over there. And we're not the only ones. The same is true for so... many...
other... amazing creators. It's a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don't even quite have to pay for Nebula if you don't want to.
You can actually get it for free along with five other streaming services when you sign
up for the Curiosity Stream Smart Bundle. Here's how it works: if you sign up for a year
of Curiosity Stream, which is, like, the best documentary streaming service out there, easily
better than Netflix and all the others-you'll also get access to five others. Nebula, which
is where we host all our additional content with all our creator friends; One Day University, which
basically lets you sit in on lectures given by the world's most beloved professors every single day;
Topic, a boundary-pushing streaming platform full of thrillers, mystery shows, noir, and drama;
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for lovers of wine and fine cuisine. That last one really shows you the
breadth of this thing, it covers everything. So to put that simply: sign up for the Curiosity
Stream smart bundle and, in addition to our bonus content on Nebula, you'll also get pretty much
endless additional content for all your different interests. Normally the package costs $69.99 for
an annual subscription, which is already LESS THAN $10 a month! But for Tale Foundry fans,
they've decided to make it even cheaper. Right now, you can get all six streaming platforms
for only $39.89 a year! That comes out to less than $3.50 a month! It's a ridiculous
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to charge so little, but I'm definitely not complaining. Click the link in the description
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to all of this for less than $3.50 a month! And if you do go watch the companion video for
this on Nebula, be sure to come back here and let us know what you think! We'll be reading
the comments to see how the new ideas in that video inspired you as well!