/lit/ - Literature

>>12492019
i know, this probably isn't making sense. that's fine.

the relationship between the Golden Path and the Spice holds the universe, and the metaphysics, of Dune together. one analogy for it is the one between the Force and the Galactic War in Star Wars. Dune has always struck me as being a much deeper world, but Star Wars has been massively more popular in the US by far, because it frames the conflict much more agreeably in terms of good and evil. Herbert's perspective on these things is much more far-sighted, melancholy, even tragic.

this tragedy today goes unnoticed, because it is covered by irony, by anger, by politics, even perhaps by an epoch that goes all the way back to the French and Industrial revolutions (Land would say it goes back even further, to the Reformation and the Renaissance). it is a double tragedy, however. the intellectuals, and faux-intellectuals (and degenerate mutant schizoposters, like me) are all a part of it. the world of power dynamics, of trying to find some kind of sweet spot between the material and the immaterial, is a thing which has been on our minds for two centuries. in Dune, the need to control the spice and lead things along a Golden Path results only in despotism, in tragedy and failure. in Star Wars, the Force seems to precede the War, but the War is necessary; the War provides an outlet, it justifies the use of the Force. the Force *unused* is nothing; there is always this restless compulsion. it is the same thing in Dune: there becomes a horizon beyond which withdrawing from the Spice becomes impossible; it is a planetary addiction, the addiction of a space-faring civilization. without it there would be nothing, but with it there is only disaster.

i feel as though there is something in this that describes how our world works as well. we are not only addicted to capital, we are addicted to Reverse Marxism, a theory of capital which supplies a religious framework (Revolution!) that structures and stabilizes these fictions that we need. neither Trump nor his adversaries ever really talk about capital itself: they can't. were they to do so the whole thing would collapse. Trump has to deny that what he does he does for capital (and he's right, he does it for a fiction of America that many still believe in), and his opponents have to deny that what they do is for capital either (because they don't; they do it for reified social credit - less Reverse than Bizarro Marxism).

they both want the Golden Path, in a sense. and they are both afraid (justifiably) of being unable to deliver it. everything works purely because you can always accuse the other side of betraying something you don't actually believe in yourself, because you don't understand it, because to understand it would be to destroy the capacity to believe in it.

(cont'd)