Hey everyone,
Welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video we’re going to discuss the effects
of Religion in Dune. Specifically, what the prevailing religion was,
how that religion preserved a total prohibition on thinking machines for thousands of years, and how,
ultimately, this prohibition reignited the evolution of the human mind,
enhancing consciousness and cognition to almost unfathomable levels
Here’s a quick summary so that this video makes more sense to those unfamiliar with
Dune: Sometime in the distant future (but still thousands of
years before the events of Dune) humans are entirely dependent on thinking-machines;
This mode of existence comes crashing down when humans destroy all thinking machines
to emancipate themselves from sloth and stagnation; in the aftermath of this war,
a new super-religion is formed that combines all other religions; this new religion absolutely
prohibits the creation of any thinking machines; in the absence of thinking machines, humans are
forced to develop their faculties exponentially to fill this void. By the standards of Dune,
the Lex Luthors, Elon Musks, Stephen Hawkings, and Tony Starks would be intellectually destitute.
The principle religious text in the Dune universe is the Orange Catholic Bible,
OCB for short, also known as the Accumulated Book,
the Zenchristian Navakoran, or the Koranjiyana Zenchristian Scriptures.
The OCB is an amalgamation of all major religions from a time in the distant future,
thousands of years before our own time but still thousands of years before the events of Dune.
Religions incorporated into this comprehensive text include:
Zensunni Catholicism, Mahayana Christianity, Maometh Saari, and Budislamic traditions.
In the wake of the Butlerian Jihad, which was the great revolt in which all thinking machines
were destroyed, all the religious leaders of the known universe gathered in a great convocation
known as the Commission of Ecumenical Translators,
which was held on an island on old earth, thought to be one of the Hawaiian islands.
Though beliefs differed, the shared conviction of there being a divine aspect to the universe
was the commonality that allowed the religious leaders to meet, and though
their time together was difficult, the end result was ultimately collaborative and productive.
The commission of Ecumenical Translators was a tumultuous affair marked by disputes
that spawned violence and chaos, nearly bringing humanity to the brink of ruin
on numerous occasions, but in the end, after seven long years,
a form of consensus was reached in which elements of each religion
were combined to form a single overarching religion. The OCB was the religious text that
encapsulated the beliefs espoused by this new religion, but other texts were created, too.
Deep dependence on thinking machines stagnated human development, stifling the mind and
engendering laziness. (If you can imagine all the soft people cruising around on scooters in Walle
you’ve got this concept down pat.) In time, people exploited technology to subjugate other
people. The elite who exploited technology were then overthrown by a powerful AI. And finally,
this led to all out war between humans and machines, which saw humans emerge as
the victors after generations of bloodshed. A quote from Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
says it all: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would
set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The Butlerian Jihad transpired 10,000 years before the events of Dune.
The ban on thinking machines, which was crystalized by the teachings of the OCB,
radically changed the course of human history. Fundamental Edicts like “thou
shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” suppressed any thinking technology,
thus preventing the reemergence of the downward spiral of escalating technological dependence
that would once again see humanity enslaved by the fruits of their own ingenuity.
Profound, paradigm-shifting ramifications that regressed the technological sophistication of
human civilization resulted. Though the total destruction of thinking-machine technology
brought great hardship in the beginning as humans acclimated to once again providing and
thinking for themselves, the absence of thinking technology forced humanity to adapt and evolve.
(Frank Herbert, the author, was deeply inspired by Darwinian theory in his
conceptualization of the framework that structured the Dune universe.)
Instead of being the inception point that brought about an irrevocable degeneration
of human civilization, the absolute ban on thinking-machine technology became the impetus
to expand human consciousness and cognition, enhancing the human mind with new calculative
abilities to fill the void left in the absence of thinking machine technology.
Everyone became more intelligent and more capable, but those trained by the
great institutions, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing guild, or the Mentat order,
were so advanced that it was as if they belonged to a different species. The mentat order rose in
the wake of the Butlerian Jihad. It started to train minds to replace the functionality
of thikning machines. By the time of Dune, the incredible calculative abilities of
mentats had developed to such an extent that they dwarfed even the most powerful thinking machines
that enslaved humanity thousands of years earlier. The Bene Gesserit gained amazing abilities,
The Voice, which was the ability to compel others with speech, among them. And the spacing guild
navigators were able to plot safe interplanetary routes for faster-than-light travel.
And that’s it for this video, if you guys want more videos on Dune
please leave a comment down below.