Dune and Philosophy

We refuse to sacrifice now to live tomorrow, and we especially refuse to look for some way to turn the trap back on the one who created the trap. We’ve created the trap with our rampant desires

The Lakota Sioux have a saying: mitakuye oyas’in—we are all related

We could give a hundred people enough water to last twenty-five days if we didn’t produce that one pound of beef

Imagine our future: a world in which toilets don’t flush because there’s not enough water. A world in which we can’t shower weekly or even monthly. A world in which people kill over water the way they kill over food . . . or oil . . . today. A world in which crops don’t grow, starvation rises, and we’ll look back fondly on the days when only one in six suffered malnutrition worldwide

animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual

The problem is that we people of the twenty-first century remain animals, caught up in our own desires, tortured by our limited consciousness, unable to hold off the attainment of a thing when we desire it

Only two remain at the time of Dune: the Spacing Guild, focused on mathematics, and the Bene Gesserit, focused on politics

Leto II, by becoming the God-Emperor and sacrificing his very humanity, will remove the possibility of inevitable decline

He attempts with each choice to lessen the impact of that jihad and to lessen the effects of that terrible purpose within him. So he walks into the trap to control the trap so it does not close on him. Or on humanity

All of these aspects of the spice feed into why it’s a perfect allegory for water, but that is a different story