plots within plots within plots now the
biggest dune buffs among you probably
know the real quote from the book is
plans within plans within plans but
today we wanted to talk about plots
specifically plots within plots layered
plots subtext you're getting the gist
because to talk about dune you have to
start with its many layers do niz
actually a very deceptive book it's a
book that says the opposite of what it
appears to on the surface because on the
surface it appears to be the apotheosis
of the competent man trope we
encountered in the Golden Age of science
fiction the entire book is about human
capacity honed to its finest edge but in
dune Herbert actually shows us the trap
that type of self-confidence and
self-reliance can bring and he gives us
clues to this constantly because in this
book throughout this book all the
characters are wrong let's go down the
list the Bennett Jesuit are wrong about
their ability to control their breeding
program the mentat through fear Howard
is wrong about Jessica Jessica is wrong
about you a Leto is wrong about his
ability to survive dune the Emperor is
wrong about his plot with the HAR Conan
Baron Harkonnen and Peter Tavares are
wrong about the consequences of their
plot fade Rafa is wrong about his
ability to operate without his uncle and
ultimately Paul is wrong about his
capacity to avoid his terrible purpose
in doing this in most cases Herbert is
giving us a deconstruction he's taking
very reductivist aspects of human
personality that people often use to
define themselves you know like when
people say I'm a logical person or I'm
very empathic and showing us the
arrogance in assuming that as a human
being we can truly perfect any of those
traits or find perfection by focusing on
one of them to the exclusion of the
others a highly logical human being who
doesn't care about being empathic is
destructive to themselves and those
around them as is an empathic person who
refuses to utilize logic or consider
rational realities when trying to help
those they empathize with this is
perhaps exemplified in the way the
the traitor you a often portrayed as the
weakest and most imperfect of the
characters gets the better of everyone
especially the emotive master the
Bennett Chesser at Jessica and the
pinnacle of logic the mint at to fear
how it UA manipulates Jessica by knowing
that she values her emotional perception
so highly he knows that she will read
his emotions but that itself is her
weakness UA sets her up to think any
strange emotion of his that she may read
is simply the result of his
embarrassment over treating her
informally in a moment of exhaustion so
she doesn't see his treachery there's
also a moment where he's on the verge of
breaking of telling her everything and
she doesn't see it as the book says then
Jessica spoke shattering the moment if
she had read that moment correctly the
entire course of the book might have
been different the fall of a tradies
might have been averted
to hammer this home Herbert tells us
shortly after that she herself felt UA
was holding something back from her but
out of pity and kindness she didn't
force it out of him on the other side
there's two for how it he's a mentat
part of the school of humanity that has
refined their logic to supercomputing
levels and he too doesn't see the fact
that ua is the traitor but for
completely different reasons he never
questions the assumptions he bases his
logic on he knows that UA has undergone
sook school conditioning a type of
mental conditioning for doctors that's
supposed to ensure they don't harm their
patients he assumes that this
conditioning is unbreakable and builds
all of his reasoning off that but as we
know this is false and if you build all
your logic off a faulty premise all that
logic you've trained yourself for is
worse than useless but since it's
logically consistent if you're a person
who favors logic it's easy to convince
yourself it's true this examining of
premises is perhaps one of the biggest
lessons Herbert tries to impart with
this book one of his greatest
observations is that sometimes people
who consider themselves highly logical
don't have the self-awareness to or just
don't practice the pinnacle of logical
skill the constant questioning and
re-examining of their own premises and
he uses this over and over again to set
up the plot almost all of the disasters
in the book special
the ones that result from mentat
miscalculation like pider working off
the assumption that most of Dune is
uninhabitable and there are far fewer
fremen than there are comes from a
failure to re-examine the basic
assumptions a complex logical argument
is based on so whether it's showing an
entire order based around understanding
human emotion have their millennium long
plan thrown into disarray because
someone chooses love over loyalty to
that order or having the planet ologist
who plan to use religion help him
achieve his environmental goals die
alone in the desert he was trying to
change because he started to believe in
the very religion he was trying to use
or having human supercomputers miss the
obvious because they don't take a step
back and re-examine their premises
herbert was intent on using his
characters not to show how awesome it
would be to have superpowers but the
flaws in believing that any one aspect
of who we are no matter how refined can
actually make us superhuman showing that
very refinement may blind us this though
is just the first of three warnings dune
is built around so join us next time as
we begin to explore the most superhuman
and spoiler alert eventually the literal
blindest character of all of them Paul
Atreides as we explore the second
warning herbert offers because like in
myths of old the power of prophecy here
isn't a blessing but a curse
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