Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Dune: Hard Power

Episode Date: December 12, 2021

In our third episode about Dune we talk hard power: The Emperor, the Landsraad, CHOAM, and the Spacing Guild. We talk about how these four things encompass the political economy of the Dune universe, how they keep each other in check, and how they eventually become unbalanced.Follow the show @SwordsNSocPod or email us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

Hello everyone and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. Welcome back everyone. Today we are going to be doing our third episode about the Dune universe. Specifically today we are going to be doing an episode about hard power in Dune and how it's exercised by different actors. Sort of a contrast to the last two episodes we put out, which were the Bene Gesserit and sort of soft power. Today's going to be more about hard power. As always, I am Darius and with me, I have my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. That's like my catchphrase now. It's howdy. Howdy. They know when I come in at work,

I'm like, howdy. And they expect it. Look, it's good to be known for something. Before we start, I want to do a special shout out to the people of Australia for making our podcast the 127th most popular book podcast in Australia. Holy moly, that's got to be like a whole like six listens. Yeah, that's at least six that's at least six downloads because i imagine australia has only like you know 30 people in it i don't know i've never been there but i promise not to say anything mean about you because you're the first country to chart us on anything so thanks for that aussies in honor of that i think

anytime we chart in a country i think i should make an effort to like say a phrase or something in that country's native language like make them feel welcome uh so to respect our australian listeners i just want to say um rack off my fucking ute thank you oh okay i was not worried about this beforehand. Thanks, Australians. Continue to rate us. I appreciate it. We just dropped off that chart. I will not make fun of your accent or your people anymore. Yeah, so welcome back. Today, like I said, we're going to be talking about hard power. No guests today, but what we're going to do is, like I said, we're going to be talking about hard power. No guests today, but what we're going to do is, like I said, it's a counterpoint to what we've done the last couple of weeks.

We're going to talk about how hard power is exercised in the Dune universe. And there is no other place to start than at the tippity tip top, which is the Padishah Emperor himself, which at the time of Dune is a man named Shaddam IV. Who is this guy? He is the leader of the Landsraad. He is the CEO of Chome. And then he essentially just gets to pass out parcels of Chome, which is the only company.

It's like if every company under the sun had a merger. It's like a British East India Company on steroids. Because it's just everything. It's like if the entire British economy at the height of empire was run by the British East India Company. Like they controlled all imports and exports essentially and that power was like controlled by the the king of england handing out people like shares of that company yeah it's it's like if if every major corporation just got together and smashed together and jeff bezos was the ceo and then he made other people important people by giving them shares to his company

yeah we have jeff bezos potash emperor of you know and just replace chome with amazon and then he essentially elevates other people to positions of power by giving them shares, which in Dune is called directorships, because they get to vote on things, I guess. Directorships of, you know, of Chom Amazon.

And that's how you sort of like wield power directly. Yeah, so at the top is the Padishah Emperor. It's a hereditary title. They're the rulers of the Imperium, which spans the entire

known universe. It's still a lot of places. It's a lot of places, and which, of course, interests to me. Padishah also does come from ancient Persian, meaning the Master Shah. At the time of Dune. And for like basically all of the long, since the Butlerian Jihad before it,

uh, the, the emperors were from house Carino. There were 81, like, or Shaddam the fourth was like the 81st current Carino emperor in a row or something like that. Also the last.

Suck it. Oops. He was the last because his Bene Gesserit wife had been instructed to not bear him any male children.

So again, that's a reference back to last episode where the Bene Gesserit could do things like that. It was literally like they had made the decision that he would have no male heirs because they want they wanted his daughters to be

married to a male of some other bloodline they'd been cultivating uh so they refused to bear him any legitimate sons why didn't he just be like okay i'll just bang another woman well he did uh bang lots of other women he had like slave girls and prostitutes and all sorts of – and concubines, all sorts of other things. But because they didn't come from his legal wife, they weren't legal heirs. They very much followed that sort of very strict sort of feudal legal code. Couldn't he just be like, OK, I'm going to look through the code. OK, I can have more than one wife now and write that in the book. Marry somebody else, bang them, and have a son.

Maybe. Maybe he could have, but he clearly didn't. They talk about how angry he was about it, but he never really tried – did like really went out on the limb to try and make that happen, as far as I'm aware. He had five daughters. Apparently, it's implied that he had like a bunch of like bastard sons more than likely but the legal code is like now those don't count bro well i think i think at the

time of dune there's a lot more necessary political bullshit that shadam has to deal with than say somebody like uh lito the second yeah Shaddam basically says at one point that he wished his daughter his oldest daughter Irulan was like you know like 15 20 years older because he just would have married her to Duke Leto and then they wouldn't have had to worry about the whole power grab or power imbalance because then duke leto just would have been in line for the throne after shadam died so and that's kind of what i think the benny jesuit were going for anyway is they wanted to force him to like marry his daughters off to some other bloodlines but anyway it's a hereditary position and like we just sort of said at the at the beginning he rules over a body called the lansad, which literally means the land council.

It's from old Scandinavian. Herbert himself said that's where he got it from. And these are historical institutions that did exist in Scandinavia and sort of the Netherlands and other places where basically anyone who owned land in a community was entitled to a seat in this local council where you would go and do decision-making. It was their sort of, you know, sort of like proto, you know, democracy, I guess, proto representative sort of government. Like, so you've got all these landowners, um,

who can go and have their voice heard as in sort of collectively act as an oppositional force to your autocratic ruler, which is directly what's happening in Dune. So you have the Lansrod, which is a body that represents all the great houses. And the idea is that all the great houses unified together in the Lansrod represent enough military force to be a counterweight to the Sardaukar and the Emperor's personal forces. So the two are always in tension, how much power the Emperor has and how much power the Lansrod has. And the two of them are always vying for the upper hand, like making and breaking alliances and that sort of thing. Which is something that immediately ties into the beginning of Dune itself. Yes. Because that's the thing that sets Shaddam against Leto, is that Leto has managed to

cultivate a fighting force that rivals the Shadow Car. Yeah. Leto, thanks to like Thufir Hawat and Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck and other, and his own leadership skills has sort of developed an army that Shaddam worries would be enough to like go toe to toe with the Sardaukar. And then once you add in the fact that a lot of the other great houses look to Leto as a leader and as a great person, Shaddam was imminently worried that Leto

would have the power to overthrow him. So that's why he coordinated with the Harkonnens at all to destroy the Atreides. So the emperor himself sort of is the head. He rules over the Lanzarote.

He's technically in charge of the whole thing, sort of the way the Roman emperor was in charge of the Senate. He's technically above it. Like, can he overrule it by fiat? Yes. But if he does, it causes a lot of other problems, like legally and that sort of thing, right? It just makes people upset. It makes people upset and make them work against him. So the idea, as again, I think the Roman sort of Senate during the imperial period is a good example just because of how how well everyone undernows it. Right. Like the power of the Senate waxed or waned depending on the relative strength of the emperor at the given time.

And the Lanzerat and the emperors in Dune sort of work the the same way where like if the emperor is really strong like he has the power to sort of like sort of hand wave away whatever the lands rod wants but if the lands rod is sort of united against him they can sort of overrule him on certain things and that's essentially what happens in the future especially with under paul and then leto the second was like the the power tipped so far in the favor of the emperor that the Landsraad became almost obsolete. Yeah. It survives, I believe. It does survive, I think.

But it greatly diminished power, obviously, especially once the scattering happens. But yeah, once you have Leto II, like, what's Alonso going to do? It's like when you have control, and this kind of touches nicely on something else we're going to be talking about either now or later, is because he had kind of cornered the other kinds of power that are available as well in the other expressions of power in this setting with things like the spacing guild um it's like at that point lito the second to my understanding essentially gets rid of the monopoly that the spacing guild has on space travel space travel so you know that's not just gaining power over the Lanceroth. That's gaining power over the Spacing Guild. And it's like, okay. And he owns Chome because he's the emperor. So it's like everything is consolidated.

That's sort of like a grander scale. I think that's a repetition of the theme, the way I think we talked about before. So like the Bene Gesserit represent humanity pushed to its extreme in sort of like body control, right? Like personal, like your body control. Mentats are human beings pushed to the extreme of mental acuity. You know, like the Fremen or the Sardaukar are human beings pushed to the extreme physically, right? And then someone like Paul and Leto II are sort of bringing all those separate locuses of power and putting them inside one person.

It's like Paul represents Fremen-like physicality and Bene Gesserit training and Mentat abilities. It's all combined in one man. Leto II essentially does that with all these different locuses of power that we're talking about. He brings all these separate points that balance the system, then get brought back together again, where he gets rid of the monopoly on space travel. He overpowers the Lansrod. You know what I mean? He's sort of like all of these separate. He's not really controlled by the Bene Gesserit, right? Like it's another level of sort of this great centralization of all the different focuses into a single point.

And so what we're talking about today is how these powers sort of kept themselves balanced pre-Paul, right? Pre-Paul, pre-Leader II. So again, Emperor at the top presiding over the Lansrod. At base level, the two of them are sort of always jockeying, but jostling between the two of them as to over who has slightly the upper hand, the Emperor and the houses that support him, all the other houses, that sort of thing. The mediating factor here, which is essentially what keeps the Emperor the emperor is what we referenced already, which is the Chome Company, which is a name that I'm not even going to pretend to try

and pronounce the full name of because it's like a number of different languages. Carline, Hunter, Cooper, Advancer, Mercantiles. Yeah, sure. Chome. Yeah. Chome, essentially, it's a mercantile guild. It just controls trade. Just like all of it. Just all economic affairs, essentially, across the known universe transporting of goods. That's the Spacing Guild who we will get to because they're sort of the third point or fourth point sort of in this spectrum. But for now, Chome. Chome essentially operates like a publicly traded company in a way. company in a way. The CEO and largest shareholder of CHOM is the emperor, is the Padishah emperor, and his shares are obviously hereditary, as are everyone's shares. If your parents had one and they die, then you get it. But shares are only given to the emperor and to houses major and

minor. So the bigger your house is, the more powerful, more influential your house is, the more shares you have. And those things are symbiotic because you don't really get big and powerful without shares without or as in Dune, they're called directorships. Like you don't really get to be a big, powerful house without having directorships, really. Like that's one of the big incentives that House Harkonnen is getting out of this, like, backroom deal with the Emperor to take out the Atreides, is that House Harkonnen is going to get a Chome directorship.

Like, that's one of the incentives they've been given to do this dirty work for the Emperor. Because the other key to Chome is that the emperor can on his own whim hand out and retract directorships which essentially pay dividends to people right yes and the way the way i kind of see this and i don't know if herbert intended this or not probably not because i feel like this is a more modern thing, I guess. Especially in the age of neoliberalism as we are in now. But I almost

kind of see it as this company almost replacing the divine mandate that would have been there had... If we're talking classic feudalism, you know, ye olde feudalism it justified its existence to the masses through divine mandate you know yeah divine mandate was like a late medieval early modern type thing so that's when you really got your sort of like absolutist monarchs yes was you

know like the late 1400s through like but even but even like 1600s but even a lot of uh like people in the past you know got they they they got legitimacy by being you know like rome would be like ah yes the pope would be like i bless you god god or the gods favor us um and and this almost kind of takes the place of that um either like divine whatever or like the catholic church like passing out and being like you're allowed to be king that's good i like you um in in the sense that it's what grants the emperor like so much personal control over everything it's and it's what he can pass out to people um to legitimize them as other houses where he's like i'll give you this

and it essentially turns them into a house like a part of the lance rad just from having this directorship in a sense a lot of these houses became powerful enough to be in the land. Yeah. Like you can raise a house minor to a house major, you know, with a directorship or you can destroy the power of a house by removing directorships, that sort of thing. And it's almost this like hyper-centralization of the economy and hyper centralization of uh commerce in general that is essentially whether he means it or not is kind of implicitly being stated in this is like leading to neo-feudalism um as he's created here is this because this is like a neo-feudal future feudal society despite the

the fact that chome is bizarrely capitalist like i said that's why to me it actually reminds me quite a bit of like the early modern period so you're talking like the 1500s when earlier when i was talking about like the dutch India Company or the British East India Company. That's kind of what Shoma reminds me of. Like the British East India Company was this massive mercantile outfit that was still technically owned by the British crown. Like they were part of the they were like part of the crown, but they were a massive like capitalist enterprise. And like, you could make a lot of money in Britain during their empire days.

If you could like somehow be involved with the, in the British East India company, like, you know, by having positions, by having high up positions within them, right? Like obviously it didn't work quite the same way. And this does definitely have like a higher grade of sort of classic feudalism in it with like, you know, your houses and that sort of thing. And the fact that the emperor can just like

sort of give or retract them whenever he wants. But to me, this smacks a lot of sort of that early modern period, you know, where you've got, how do we get things to our shitty island? Well, they come on boats owned by the British East India Company. That's how we get them. Like, what do you want? This company gets it for you. In the modern day, I think our analogy that we made at the beginning is sort of accurate. Like imagine if like Amazon and Google and, you know, like imagine if like all the top, I don't know, 50 corporations in the world all just merged into a single company with Jeff Bezos as the CEO and the largest shareholder, like he's the emperor,

he's in charge of the world. Like there's no question about it. Like that's essentially what Shaddam represents is this sort of mega Bezos, who's the largest shareholder of the one company that does anything. It's just, it just shows a very in my opinion fine line between hyper-centralized like capitalism and feudalism in this which is just hyper-centralized government i mean in a in a way yeah i i mean it's it's structured i don't know the precise definition again if you're talking like late medieval where you actually have sort of the what i'm talking about like everyone's favorite like spanish monarchs right like

like ferdinand and isabella that's this very like divine right of kings we are in charge of everything because we said because god says so and to disagree with us is to disagree with god and we have the power to do whatever we want within our own realms. Like obviously feudalism wasn't always like that. You have places like, you know, the HRE, which are very, the HRE I think is actually somewhat more representative of what's going on in Dune minus Chome. Like if you're just looking at the Lansrod and the Emperor.

Yeah. Electing the emperor aside, the HRE, I think is a bit more accurate because you have like major houses and minor houses. Cause in the HRE, you have like, you know,

the king of Bohemia, who's a king, but he's still under the emperor. But then you also have like, I don't know, the Duke of Saxony and also the count, like whoever the mayor of the free city of Hanover is. It's like all three of those people answer directly to the emperor.

But all those three people are also not all on the same footing. And to me, that's sort of like how the houses in the Landsraad are. Like you've got major houses like Atreides or whoever else. Then you also have slightly smaller houses like Harkonnen. And then there's minor houses like Fenring. Where like they all have autonomy, but to different levels and to different degrees, depending upon the power of like their base of operations.

Because like the king of Bohemia was a king. And within Bohemia, he had his own absolute authority. But any time it came to an issue that was outside of there, he had to defer to Maximilian the Whateverth that was like currently Holy Roman Emperor. And I think that's – Kaiser. that to me, that's a, if you sort of weld the HRE with like the Dutch East India company, you have what Frank Herbert created for Dune, I think. Like imagine if the Holy Roman Emperor could just like raise or diminish

random Dutchies within the, within his lands by like giving them shares of mega amazon mega amazon that's what the a and actually stands for is amazon the combined honda and amazon would be like oh no that almost was like chrysler dodge je Jeep, because it's like Chrysler, Honda. I don't know. It's just like what are any of these companies? And so you have all of these things. Like those are the sort of the competing balances.

M is meta. Sorry, I had to impact it. You're right. It is. We just need a C, H, and O. That'll come to me tomorrow. We'll work on it. We'll workshop it. So that's your sort of big political power fighting is between the Lanzarote and the Emperor. And the power they use toward each other is chome directorships and military might, which is augmented by directorships because that's just money.

which is augmented by directorships because that's just money the other major pillar here that exercises massive amounts of power in the dune universe is the spacing guild yay i love i love for these like just what i think about in the most abstract terms possible you essentially have the pillars of power where you have scandinavian kings in the hre you have amazon and you have space babies that fly through space mutated yeah you have like what jeff bezos like wanted blue or like what elon musk wanted his like space company to be oh my god the space and guild is just oh elon musk elon musk would like do a bunch of melange and not even end up looking or being like a guild navigator he would just like he just does it because he wants because he thinks it's cool so the space and guilt little backstory in in in in book, in Dune, you hear about them transporting like

militaries and people and all this from planet to planet. And you never see them. You don't know what they look like. And you don't really even get that much information about them until later in the book when Paul figures out that the Spacing Guild can only do what they do because of Spice. And then his sort of trump card in that final showdown with the emperor the emperor's like yeah well we can call down all the houses in the world are up there waiting to come down here and fuck you up and paul gets to say no they won't because i can destroy all the spice all of it and then the spacing guild literally can't do can't be. And so that's like Paul's trump card he holds. So why?

Why does Paul have this trump card over the Spacing Guild? And what is it exactly they do? Sorry, go ahead. Well, the Spacing Guild, as my best understanding allows – Who dat? Who dat? allows they um they are essentially a bunch of uh melange fueled navigators that fly their big ships that can fold space and we looked this up and we were like oh my goodness they literally fold space it says it directly in uh the books and in the wiki and in the encyclopedia it's like they fold space they're just tessering for anyone who has watched uh watched who's listened to our um wrinkle in time

you know cast yeah you know they just tested if you listen to the wrinkle in time episode this yeah the space and guild just has a monopoly on tessering um because apparently in this setting uh tessering is incredibly dangerous um if you don't have proper navigation so melange essentially allows uh the navigators to predict the future in ways that allow them to see which path is the safest and And then they take that one. Yeah, I think like Paul explains it as saying like sort of the way he can see the future, the guilt navigators can in a much more limited sense. Like they use the spice specifically to let them see

like where all, you know, inner space objects are going to be, right? Like planets and asteroids and moons and like where the planets will be located when you get there. So they can like plot the most direct course and then they do some tessering and appear, but they, they need spice to do it. And of course of course, Paul also has the benefit of having all of these powers whilst also not uh transforming into a weird

fetus looking uh fish person in a jar of melange um that sits on the deck of the ship and no one is allowed to see because if they saw it they'd be like yeah which we don't get told that in dune no but we find that out in one of the later and it's one of my favorite essentially like weird embryonic fish people that sit in a tank on the on the bridge it's one of my favorite random inclusions that david lynch didn't need to include at all in his film adaptation yeah but i'm so glad he did if he didn't i was about to say david lynch if he was like why are you telling me there's an embryonic fish person and a tank full of spice?

Obviously, I'm going to show you that. I mean, his adaptation convinced a lot of people that the Guild Navigators aren't like they fold space with Melange, which is not true, I guess, in the books. But as true as it might be in that particular adaptation, but no, it's, it's just so that it's just so they can navigate good. Um, yeah, it's the only thing that gives them sort of the limited prescience necessary to do the navigations properly,

because as we talked about in the last two episodes, these are all, all these groups, the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, the Guild, these are, especially those three are all groups of people that developed to replace what they called thinking machines,

computers. Computers. Because after the Butlerian Jihad, in order for society to go back to what it was somewhat before the Jihad, they needed to be able to replicate what computers used to do. And the way they did, the way the Bene Gesserit did that was through like, you know, hardcore body control. The Mentats do it by essentially training their brains to do massive computations like inside their head and the space and guild do it by just doing a shitload of drugs like yeah the space and guild just do so many drugs that they can kind of see the future at the expense of destroying

their bodies oof uh not really something i would you know not gonna lie i don't know what would get you into i suppose they have to hide the navigators because lie i don't know what would get you into i suppose they have to hide the navigators because if they don't no one would ever want to be a part of the spacious guild ever you only get picked to actually see and be a navigator if you're already so far in and so hooked on spice that you don't really have a choice because it is addictive over time not yeah yeah not in small doses but oh once you i think it's especially once you start using it to do things so like the space and navigators once they start using it to like do the navigating you essentially become like

dependent on it i mean even in the book paul talks about like not being dependent on his visions of the future, like seeing them, but then like still being able to live in the moment. And I think that's the thing where like the guild navigators essentially don't fight it. They just let it be because it's the best way to navigate. It's also like, you know, Paul talks about the fact that they've essentially always taken the path of least resistance, and that's why they've fucked up. So the power that the guild holds is that they're the only people who can do faster than light or any really inter space travel. If you want to go from one planet to another, you need the guild to take you. Which means you got the only one. Which means, yeah yeah you got to

pay them and so first off that's how they make all their money so they can afford all the spice they need and you know whatever else they're into but this also comes directly into how they wield power say there's a conflict brewing between two houses the guild obviously have their own needs or wants or goals or whatever say the guild does not want this war between two houses to happen for some reason well they can just look when the when the house comes to them and says hey we need you to transport fighters like our soldiers from this place to this place, the guild can just say, no, we don't want to, or more likely,

more likely what it seems, what they do is they just raise the price exorbitantly. So they say, oh, you want to wage a war against that house over there? Sure. You can do that, but you gotta,

you gotta, you gotta fucking pay. And it's explained in the books that the thing they charge the most for is military transport because the guild for is military transport. Because the Guild has an invested interest, I think, in avoiding war pretty much altogether. Why the Guild, like any, like not any, but like most businesses, what they crave is stability. What the Guild wants out of everything is a stable universe. A stable universe is a predictable universe and also ensures the stable access of their sort of supply lines to spice. Right. If there's a big interstellar war, that might impede their ability to get spice.

And so the Guild charges exorbitant rates on military transport because they typically don't want wars to happen. And so if you want to do a war, you best be willing to pay. And that's like the Harkonnen's whole thing about how much money he had, the Baron had to save up to be able to spend to transport the Sardaukar to Dune to take out the Atreides. He spent generations worth of wealth. And to top it all off, Thufir Hawat and Leto had successfully launched a raid against their Melange storage on gady prime and because they had done that they set back the repayment on that by like eons um because of how much spice they destroyed um yeah and so like that's yeah that's one of the um it was i mean it was good plan because they're like look It was a good plan because they're like, look, the Baron's going to have to pay back the money he owes the guild.

He's going to have to make back the money he spent for guild transport. Mostly because Leto realized that both them and the Emperor were storing Melange. Well, because they knew there would be an interruption in the supply when the fighting started. And that was what tipped him off to the fact that he was probably going to get cooed when he landed on Arrakis. Because he was like, oh, they're expecting an interruption in Spice Supply, so they're expecting something terrible to happen when we land. Yeah, they're expecting me to not have a good time.

So he didn't know necessarily that the Harkonnens were planning anything with the Emperor, like they were paying the Emperor for Sardaukar, but he was like but if spice production is going to get fucked up i want it to fuck them up too um because they're obviously behind this shit um yeah so he raided the storehouse on gaiety prime and yeah like you said fucked up like generations worth of money um So the guild has this monopoly on space travel.

If you want to go anywhere, you need to pay the guild. And if the guild doesn't want to take you, they won't. They'll just tell you no. They'll just tell you no. Or again, they'll charge you exorbitant rates. Or like right when the emperor and all the other houses show up at Arrakis, like at the end of the book, it's known, they talk about the fact that the guild essentially dropped the price

of military transport to an amount that even minor houses could afford because they wanted to have all that power around Arrakis to beat Paul and the Fremen. So what they did was they essentially made it affordable for even minor houses to send troops, to be able to drop down and like loot the place when the fighting started because the guild wanted to ensure that the fighting finished and finished

in favorably towards the existing order, which is the emperor. And thenul was like fuck you this is why you don't build civilizations off of one resource you dumbass yes and then paul showed up and did some ecology on them and sort of economic stability on them and said yeah you just you we have a one resource economy here an extractive one resource economy and i have the power to literally destroy all of it for all of time so don't yeah and that's why the guild stepped back and like ordered all their ships to fuck off with all the other houses on him because they realized that he basically had them um as they say, by the balls. I think I can say that fine,

because everyone in the guild that we're exposed to is male. Oh, yeah. They all have to be men, I believe. It's like a weird mannish cult. Yeah, so I can say they had them by the balls. Yeah, so they're eventually brought down due to their dependence on spice. But obviously in the time before Paul, that's how they exist in wheeled power. And they exist as that tempering force essentially between the Lansra and the Emperor is if tensions ever got too high or something was working to upset the balance. They could just literally physically slow down the conflict. Yeah, they could literally physically slow it down. They could deter it by raising prices.

They could encourage conflict by lowering prices. And by having this monopoly on movement of goods and soldiers, they are in their own way the most powerful force in the universe. Because even the Emperor wouldn't be able to exercise any power if the Guild decided to not transport his troops. There's no reason why they wouldn't, because the Emperor, in my estimation, the Emperor to them is the stabilizing force that keeps the world turning. And keeps them getting spice. And keeps them getting spice. And keeps them getting spice. So they're going to support the emperor.

So in a way, they sort of act as like an auxiliary arm of the emperor. But not always. Like they don't have to. But they kind of do. Because what they represent is an arm of the status quo. Because they have no interest in the status quo ever changing. the status quo because they have no interest in the status quo ever changing um and then once paul and later the second takeover they said they destroy that monopoly on space travel um because later the second doesn't need him because he's you know fucking well yeah i mean it's really it's

just like he can like he hoarded it and you know it's like he was able to essentially just make them do whatever the hell he wanted yeah so it's like so space travel the guild didn't matter at that point because he was just like i have all the spice i have all the spice and you could take it if you want me to if you if you do what i do i'll give it to you yeah i essentially hoarded so much spice launch because he wasn't worried about short-term problems of hoarding it because he could live. 3,500 years, apparently. 3,500 years or whatever. Even though they did still exist after he finally did die, it took a long time for them to sort of like die off as like a group.

So their decline was long and slow. as like a group so their their decline was long and slow but where we where we see them in the first book is essentially like the end of their apex of power where as like this entity that essentially holds the galaxy or the universe sort of um at their own at their mercy whenever they feel like it which sort of makes them own, at their mercy, whenever they feel like it, which sort of makes them, like I said, the third, the third sort of pillar of this, like this hard power struggle, this semi representative body of the Lanserad, the emperor himself and the guild.

Again, all of it mediated largely through Chome because the space and Guild has directorships in the Chome Company, though they don't. They're silent partners. The Bene Gesserit has part has directorships in the Chome Company, even though they're silent partners. Again, that's just how they make money. And then you have all the houses, major and minor and the emperor and all that stuff. So you have all these sort of again again you've got your our five pillars of dune you know the emperor the lawns rod the guild and of course the hajj of our pillars um and they're all sort of holding up this roof that is the like the chome company like it's sort of

this overarching umbrella that sits on top of all of these different institutions of power yeah because i mean especially if you look at it directly with the guild it's like the guild needs the emperor because the emperor has chome and chome makes the money and then money the guild then uses to get the spice so that they can navigate and then but everyone needs them to navigate so they can actually get somewhere. Yeah, and then the Emperor needs the guild to transport stuff so that the Chome can make money at all so that they can extract more spice and give it to the guild.

Look, I'm going to be completely honest. This is, I think, and I have read quite a lot of like, you know, fantasy and sci-fi novels. I think this is one of the best thought out sort of government economic systems. Despite its vagueness at some points, you know, like. Yeah. Like, but, but you're correct. I think you're right.

You know, like, yeah, like, but but you're correct. I think you're right. Like, I just think it's it's funny that that's possible because Herbert includes the information that's necessary and excludes the information that is not. Yeah, I think his greatest trick here is that he gives you enough to show you how complex and I want to say essentially realistic the economy and the political economy is but doesn't bother you with like stupid like unnecessary details yeah you don't know how any of this stuff really operates on a day-to-day basis in any capacity whatsoever especially especially if you're just looking at the first book like you don't even really know anything about the navigators except for the fact that they use Spice to navigate. Yeah.

But that's all you need to know. And that explains the political economy perfectly. Like you understand the vested interests of all the parties, why they act the way they do within this story because of the political economy that Herbert has established. And again, I think it really is one of the most economy that Herbert has established. And again, I think it really is one of the most well thought out ones. And again, lends to why people sort of put Herbert up there with like, you know, with Tolkien in terms of world building,

because it's incredibly well thought out world building. Like most of their sci-fi is just like, yeah, there's people and they do business. Like most of their sci-fi is just like, yeah, there's people and they, and they do business. And it's just sort of like, yeah, it's, it's capitalism in the future or whatever. Right. Like, but like Herbert does that, but he like adds a twist to it. He makes it slightly different from what we expect, but also entirely, I think believable. Yes.

Like obviously once you suspend the disbelief for spice and tessering, but within that sort of the given parameters, there's nothing about this economic setup to me that is unbelievable. Because in this podcast, we've pointed out numerous examples of fairly accurate analogs within the modern world, within our own history like this is clearly a thing human beings would develop in this given situation i mean in the end the best a lot of the best fantasy and science fiction authors especially if you're coming up with your own setting in this way are giant history nerds so like um like that's where tolkien got you know 95 of his shit and that's where i think herbert gets a shit ton of his stuff too um and i mean especially given the fact that

he just straight up uses english not even english sorry that he straight up uses like human languages that already exist as just the words for his stuff. You know, like. Yeah, but he's actually what I think is he's good at there with his world building is that he like he goes, he makes an effort to mix together various languages and cultures in new ways. Like he doesn't invent out of whole cloth a new culture like he doesn't just invent a new culture from the ground up what he does is he goes i'm going to take or a new political system from the ground up but he goes i'm going to take some of this which existed some of this which did exist and this third thing which did exist and if you put them within the parameters of the world i'm building they would synthesize this way so you've got this like scandinavian word that's being that's like

the name of their like sort of parliament but the emperor's title is based in persian right like the fremen are religion is a combination of zen budd like Sunni Islam and Sunni Islam. Right. Like the, the major religion books that we talk about is the orange Catholic Bible, which is a combination of like Catholicism and a number of other religions. Like if you look at the name for the Chome company, there's at least two separate languages just in the full name of the Chome

company. Like his, separate languages just in the full name of the chome company like his i think one of his keys for good world building is that he just like you said he takes what does does or did exist and then this combines them in new and interesting ways and i think that sort of shortens the step you need to take to make it believable. He maintains his verisimilitude very well. That's the word. Yeah. I knew there was a V word, but I wasn't going to –

it was in there somewhere. That's why we have a writer on the podcast, someone who knows the big words. It's your job. I haven't written anything. Sorry. The only big words I know are like various European language words for different roles on a soccer pitch. So, you know, if you want to know what a Ramdeuter does.

Holy shit. Do it a Ramdeuter. It's great. It means a space interpreter. It's fantastic. It means someone who interprets the space properly. Is that like how Germans will smash a bunch of different words together into the ultimate Franken-word? Yeah. I mean, that Raumdeuter is literally like an interpreter of space. It was essentially invented for one player who's like really good

at his positioning on the team anyway that has anything to do with dune that's going to be a separate podcast where i talk about the politics of soccer or something the politics of european soccer oh do you i mean oh football dude there's a lot going on there you don't even want to know football there's a lot going on there but no so i the eu says we can't kill each other we have to we have to punch each other out on the on the on the field because we're not allowed to murder each other now we gotta go full zenit in zadat and just headbutt the shit out of people on like international television during a live event i'm look was it is it wrong yes was it amazing to watch live?

Yes. It was like a Euro or World Cup final, and the players were so heated and talking so much shit that the star player of the best team in the world at literally the middle of the field during the middle of a game just headbutted another dude in the chest and knocked him over and got kicked and ejected from the match. Cool.

Fantastic. Amazing. They actually have a statue of him outside his, outside the national stadium of him headbutting the guy. They built a statue of him. Oh my God. It's fantastic. You can look it up.

Zinedine Zidane's headbutting statue. It's fantastic. Listen, listen, no shade thrown to our European listeners, but y'all are still fucking crazy. So. Oh yeah. You're all European listeners, but y'all are still fucking crazy. Oh, yeah. You're all very insane, but I also want you all to know that you're not going to find many Americans who are more personally invested in your most popular sport than me.

So, you know, you're always welcome here despite how crazy most of you are. And I know literally nothing about people. I mean, if you're like a Manchester United fan, I'm probably going to make fun of you, but you're still welcome here, despite how crazy most of you are. And I know literally nothing about people. I mean, if you're like a Manchester United fan, I'm probably going to make fun of you, but you're still welcome here. Verisimilitude, as of this time. Verisimilitude. Again, today's episode is a little bit shorter. We just sort of wanted to do like a sort of a brief overview

of sort of these sort of the hard power alternatives in the Dune universe. Obviously, there could be more in depth on the House of the Emperor, the House of Carino and how it came to be or the different houses and the lines rod and how it operates on a day to day basis or things like that. But we didn't want to get into those yet. Those are for later episodes. Today was just going to be this one about, you know, sort of political economy. Essentially, I didn't realize fully that's what it was about before we started, but that's what it is.

It's political economy within the Dune universe and like the exercise of hard power. Any final thoughts from you? Well, I mean, I just think it's a smart counterpoint to the Bene Gesserit because theny jesuit are like the ultimate expression of soft power to like this subtle manipulation and hiding everything about yourself and and never actually physically wielding strength in the world but always always having your finger on the pulse and be subtly manipulating things towards one's own ends, whether or not they're successful versus this, which is just you want to fly from X to Z too bad. No,

bye. Give me money. Bye. Fuck you. Yeah. It's just like, and I think it's funny because it does kind of fall into the stereotype.

If you think of like sort of patriarchal stereotype. Masculine power and feminine power. Yes. Being soft power versus hard power in the same way, which I think is kind of the point. But at the same time, like if you think about it like we said with the benny jeseret it's not necessarily presented as though either of these things is a good thing it's it's presented as though these things are a necessary thing in the situation that everyone is

at the time yeah i mean i think we mentioned it in some of the earlier episodes, but I think as a key point is that like a lot of Herbert talking in these books is that centralization of power is bad and leads to bad things. But like a lot of his other stuff, what he's done in the Dune universe is takes things that exist and sort of extrapolated them to their extremes. And so, you know, within a patriarchal society, a lot of the power women can have is soft power because they're not allowed due to, you know, patriarchy. They're not allowed to exercise hard power because of the way society is structured.

So within Dune, the women have sort of banded together to essentially maximize the impact of soft power and that the hard power options have been taken to their maximum. You've got the emperor with the greatest fighting force ever. You've got, you know, that they know of up to that point. Yeah. that they know of up to that point yeah or you know you've got the spacing guild with like the greatest monopoly of the transport of things ever right these are all things that exist within the world but just simply pulled all the way out to their extremes in order to highlight how stupid it is and then and then paul like as awful as he is, effectively comes along and is like, look at how stupid it is. Paul, like, is the synthesis of all of them.

And his one saving grace is that even though he is the synthesis of all of them, he realizes that it's stupid. Yeah. He still does it. He's aware of how horrible he is. And we mentioned that last time. He's aware of how horrible he is, but he still does the horrible shit that he does he still does it anyway but it's which yeah yeah uh but i yeah i think that's what it is i think is one of the i think more sort of impactful like somatic things of dune is herbert taking existing societal things and pulling them apart to the extremes,

stretching them out in order to more accurately be able to see like what they do. Yes. Yes. I think there is, we'll, we'll have to do after, we have to have done a number of other books. I think we're going to have to have a special episode. I think maybe around if we make it maybe like six months if we make it to a year i think we should have a special series of episodes where i want to talk specifically about

fate fate versus free will in a lot in in stories in broad strokes in broad strokes i want to talk about fate because say if we make it to if we know we've been going for a year we'll have covered a lot of various types of stories you're already thinking ahead too because we'll get to that when we preview but yeah i i we'll tell you what's coming up next i think at the end right here at the end but what i'm saying is hopefully you know if you guys you don't want to add us and tell us you think that sounds interesting i think after we've gotten a number of different books under our belts, I think it would be interesting to do sort of an overview of the broad strokes about fate versus free will and how different authors handle it and specifically their views on it. Because there's a very complex answer to it that comes from Tolkien that I already know

because I, of course, have looked into it already. This is a very complex answer there. In other books, it's very much like you think there's fate, but fate's bullshit. There's other books that are very much like fate is real and denying it is bad, which I think, unless you have any other points to make, I think it's time to preview our next series. Yeah, all I did want to say on that point

is that it's something that the fate discussion is something especially in fantasy is something that every single author touches on at least a little bit and even if you're talking even if you're talking something like dune which isn't fantasy but it's it's a space opera so you know it's it's science fantasy if you have a chosen one you have to reference fate yeah if your story has a chosen one the fate discussion will come up and so like everyone has to touch on it so i think maybe for like you know like a sort of a blowout for like our one year anniversary or something it would be interesting to have like a multi-part series on the concept yeah and i'm and i'm super curious to hit that with a lot of different things i'm

because i honestly don't know i can take guesses at tokens i don't know yeah i but yeah we'll we'll get to that eventually but so speaking of that though the next series we'll get to that eventually. So, speaking of that though, the next series we're going to do is one I'm very excited about. And we've gotten back to one that I had not read. But none of us have read, technically. Good. And I knew even less about than Ketho here before getting into it.

It was a suggestion from the person who's going to be our special guest for the next few episodes. Our special guest the next few episodes. Our special guest for the next few episodes is going to be a podcaster that I respect. I've been supporting on Patreon

for a little while now, but I totally didn't use that to wheel him or anything. I actually just added him on Twitter until he liked me. Hey, that's how it works. You know, if you want to be friends with their podcast is the only advice I have is to start your own podcast and then just add them about coming on your show. No. So what I did is I reached out to a podcast that I like. It is the history of Persia run by Trevor. And I reached out to Trevor and just said, hey,

I'd love to have you on the show. I like you. I like your work. Come on my show and let's talk about one of your favorite books. And so he suggested we do The Witcher series by Andrzej Subkowski.

I'm sorry. Andrzej I'm sorry. I'm not Polish I don't speak I apologize to any Polish fans we may have So we're This one we've been working on for a little while because I hadn't read any of the Witcher books at all Ketho, you hadn't read them

but you've watched the show and played the games I had read most of Blood of Elves. I can't remember if I finished it or not. Because I did rent it from the library at a dumb time when I was working on my capstone for senior year, my senior thesis. I was working on it at the same time, and I was like, why did I do this? Why did I do this? I have six other

books to read um and i'm i i don't remember if i finished or not i think i did but i'm not i'm not certain and so we but i finished that and i and i've played all of the witcher one half the witcher two and the witcher three multiple times um yeah I, despite being the right kind of nerd, have never played any of The Witcher games. So like, and I hadn't watched the show. I hadn't done anything. Obviously, I was aware of its existence, right? And like the cultural run, because I exist on the internet.

But like, I didn't know anything about it, really. And so we spent a little extra time on this one. So next week, there won't be an episode because we need time to record. But then the week after that, starting after that, so like starting the weekend, Christmas weekend, essentially, will probably be the first. And this, again, sort of like doing this,

it's probably going to be like three, maybe four episodes about The Witcher because I liked it a lot. We'll be covering pretty much the whole series, more or less. To prepare for it, I'll have read the first four books, I think, to prepare for it for this one. But yeah, we're going to have a fun series about The Witcher featuring Trevor from the history of Persia. And speaking of books that talk about fate.

Oh, buddy. That's the theme. It's basically the main theme of the entire series but don't worry there's a lot of other stuff going on there's a lot of metatextual stuff going on there's a lot of in tech like inter intratextual stuff going on this is this is kind of perfectly returning to our roots i think of finding a story that people on the surface do not think of as being political um at least not when you say i like the witcher people aren't like oh the witcher that's that very political thing like no

no like if you like the witch like oh you like the guy with the sword that kills monsters yeah that's what people usually think yeah and let me tell you from reading the book if especially if you play the games i'm assuming the games focus a lot on the monster killing because that seems like a game thing to do. Yes. But in the books, the monster killing is like not even that prevalent. Most of the time, the monster fighting is just a vehicle for other things to happen. Yeah. And it's all those other things is what I want to talk about because there's a, there is holy shit.

Are there some, is there some, uh, dare I say ideology going on? Ideology. Like, uh, yeah.

Just bust through the door. Just like too much ideology. It's like suddenly like a cocaine addled clown just burst through my wall screaming a weird like yeah cocaine addled like raccoon street creature yeah eating a full blizzy just look i don't always agree with him but i do want to wear own a shirt that just says i would prefer not to he's just he's just a very memeable man. Yeah. So there is, well, we'll save the rest of it, but there's a lot going on in The Witches,

a lot of ideologies, a lot of politics are going on. There's a lot of sociology and psychology going on, which again, like you said, it's sort of back to our foundation. All with a big layer of horny. Yeah, you don't, I will say the horny seems to decrease over time.

I think he was working through a lot of issues at the start. When he working on the last wish he was just like man i'm very horny right now well i think it sort of falls victim to a lot of what i would call sort of like like if you asked a random guy on the internet to write a fantasy story right like there's a lot going on there and i think the longer he wrote the more developed the world got and the less he focused on like how hot all the women were i mean mean, don't worry. He doesn't forget, but like it's less important as you go on, but no, so that's going to be the next one. I'm very excited about those. So we will have a week off in between the release of this episode and the

first episodes of that. So the, but you know, Christmas weekend after you spent too much time with your family you'll be able to listen to an episode where we talk about how horny Geralt is and whether fate is a thing or not, or whether it's avoidable, or racism, or the battle between man and nature, and being a witcher and being caught between both and accepted in neither. Anyway, thank you all for listening about hard power of the Dune universe. We're not done with Dune forever.

We will come back to it at some point. We'll come, we'll come back and talk about religion, I think, and like the hero's journey, but we don't want to do it all at once. So we'll come back to it eventually. journey but we don't want to do it all at once yeah so we'll come back to it eventually but uh thank you all for listening as always if you want to follow the show on twitter you can follow us at swords and sock pod uh you can email us at swords and socialism pod at protimail.com fan mail is super cool email us or d DM us and ask us questions. We're always down for that. Do the podcast stuff where you go to iTunes and tell them we're cool.

Because then if iTunes thinks we're cool, then more countries besides Australia will get us recommended. And people might listen to us in, I don't know, Kazakhstan or some other place that I didn't expect. And that would be super cool. So, yeah, please recommend us to your friends or write the reviews or whatever all the other nonsense is. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can follow me at himbo underscore anarchist. You can follow Ketho at stupidpuma69. Yes, that is serious. Yeah, yeah. You know where to find us uh but no i

appreciate thank you guys all for listening yeah if you know suggestions or whatever let us know we don't know what you think we're planning that far ahead no serene we picked the witcher because i bugged someone until he gave us a suggestion it's great try it maybe maybe it'll work maybe if you recommend me something i didn't think of it would shit we might do it uh yeah thanks a bunch and uh we'll see you next time bye