Nick

Don't let the "ecology" shit fool you, the Whole Fucking Thing with Dune is just doing a goofy hegelian synthesis of eugenics and social darwinism, two things that are fucked up on their own and certainly don't get less fucked up when you combine them and add swords and precognition

Do you need both eugenics and social darwinism to be that fucked up? No, certainly not, as Herbert demonstrated in The Dosadi Experiment, which is basically Dune but with a protagonist I like more. Herbert was really obsessed with the idea that people subjected to brutal oppression would become more fit due to selective forces.

It's like 80-90% eugenics by volume

He was so hung up on the idea that a population of humans could be made more fit for warfare and political rule by being subjected to increased darwinian selective forces, essentially, that after writing Dune, a decade later he felt like he had to literally do it again in a different universe

dune 2 was so cool, i wish insurgencies were real