Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the roots of Frank Herbert's Dune (2021)

With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant.

Prescience allows for the complete domination of humanity, but to some degree we already working on pre-prescience. Privatized intelligence companies have grown as part of our corporate surveillance state. These companies, like palantir, act as “truthsayers,” divining the state of reality from incredible amounts of information for those with the money to buy it. America has companies that rival countries in terms of power, and these intelligence companies that service them can act as king maker and influence, subtly or directly, with some very giant levers.

The US government is closer to the Landsraad, each house is a corporation, each CEO a duke or baron.

Peter Thiel is likely the reverend mother architect of a recent messianic rise to power.

I am not 100% sure exactly what the Bene Gesserit were supposed to represent, but on a deep level I think they represent intelligence agencies like the CIA.

Social Media has a lot of overlap with “the voice.” With A/B testing various groups with divisive messages, to see what divides most effectively, it creates a means of control. Nobody was commanded to show up on jan 6, but the “command” to do so was heard. This is very in line with frank Herbert’s idea of what the voice was. A/B testing messages on humans at scale is like learning the voice.

We now have Cameras, RF Receivers (blue tooth/driver's license detection), phone backups, website logs, and a host of other surveillance all centralized, maybe not directly, into the hands of private intelligence. With all these sources of information we are getting closer and closer and closer to prescience. We are still limited by computing power to make sense of all the data, but the god emperor of dune was not. With the rise of AI, we now have the potential for a thinking/processing agent with no sense of morality to be assigned to every single individual, in order to carry out the absolute crushing of any nascent dissent before it can become cohesive enough to threaten those in power.

We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. When our rulers do something we don't like, they will laugh and say "what are you going to do about it?" Every potential weapon purchased will be fed into their "prescient" machine, so will every communication with another individual, and every use of transportation. When your personal AI agent determines you are at risk of "doing something about it," an example will be made of you.

The discrepancy is easy to explain; Frank Herbert never owned a copy of Seven Pillars but was instead inspired by a manuscript of desert adventures that he’d found on a train as a boy whilst holidaying in the UK.

They would be technically acceptable yet they would feel exceptional

I see what you did there.

(those who don't follow: you can catch up on the Seven Pillars wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom or like basically any biography of Lawrence, various forwards, et c.)

This should be the transcribed copy of that interview http://www.sinanvural.com/seksek/inien/tvd/tvd2.htm

The part relevant to the OP:

FH: Well, one of the threads in the story is to trace a possible way a messiah is created in our society, and I hope I was successful in making it believable. Here we have the entire process, or at least the large and some of the subtle elements of the construction of this, both from the individual standpoint, and from the way society demands this of you. It’s the references in there, you know, that the man must recognize the myth he is living in, because the creation of an avatar is a mythmaking process. We’ve done it in our…in recent times. Look at what’s happening to John F. Kennedy.

WM: O, sure.

FH: Who was a very earthy, real, and not totally holy man…so here we have a likeable person, now, you see…

WM: Yes.

FH: But real in the flesh and blood sense who by the process of emulation becomes something larger than life, far larger than life, and I’ve just explored all of as many permutations as I could recognize in the process.

WM: Oh, I-I caught overtones of Lawrence of Arabia in the thing, for example.

FH: He could very well become an avatar for the…for the Arabs.

WM: Right.

FH: If Lawrence of Arabia had died at the crucial moment of the British…

WM: Say, when Allenby walked into Jerusalem.

FH: Yes. If he had died…if, for example, he had gone up and killed the people who were destroying his breed, walked into that conference and said, Gentlemen, I have here under my javala a surprise, Bang! Bang! Bang! and he had been killed…

WM: He’d have been deified.

FH: He would have been deified. And it would have been the most terrifying thing the British had ever encountered, because the Arabs would have swept that entire peninsula with that sort of force, because one of the things we’ve done in our society is exploited this power…Western man has exploited this avatar power.