Dune

And Paul's failing is that he is unwilling to go as far as Leto II because he refuses to give up his humanity.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 4th 2021 at 7:53:20 AM

Fulfilling the Golden Path required someone to be an immortal tyrant monster who would be cut off from humanity and loathed by it forever. Paul both admired his son and pitied him for making that sacrifice.

And God Emperor of Dune makes it very clear that Leto II had his doubts about the whole thing too. The Honey Trap scheme in the book wouldn't have worked otherwise.

Edited by M84 on Nov 4th 2021 at 8:05:39 PM

The thing about prescience is also that making humanity immune to it doens't actually do anything to make human extinction less inevitable. It just blinds the people who otherwise have the ability to do mental Save Scumming.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 4th 2021 at 5:47:45 AM

The problem is that Prescience Is Predictable is in full effect. The more one gets locked into a vision of the future, the harder it becomes to find another way.

It also doesn't help that upgraded Hunter-Seekers that use prescience to target people are going to show up someday.

Edited by M84 on Nov 4th 2021 at 8:54:49 PM

Once Paul and Leto unlock prescience, other people solve it too, including developing artificial drugs that mimic the spice and machines that can predict the future. Anyone who doesn't have the "proof of Siona" can be hunted down and exterminated.

It's a rather obvious solution when one thinks about it. Basically, if one's prescience shows that humanity is on the road to extinction and one knows that stuff predicted by prescience cannot be averted, what can one do to avert extinction?

The answer is to reduce the influence of prescience itself. Make humanity less predictable in ways both mundane and fantastic. Force them out of their ruts while breeding people who cannot be seen by prescience.

It's a bit ironic though fitting that it took the most powerful prescient talents, the Kwisatz Haderachs Paul and Leto II, to realize that prescience wasn't the solution to the problem but part of the problem itself.

Edited by M84 on Nov 4th 2021 at 10:46:26 PM

That also says some very interesting things about the omniscience of the Hebrew god.

I also think there is some recursive paradox to Prescience Is Predictable. After all, if you already know what you are going to do and what will happen, that would necessarily alter your reasoning and change your actions, and you'd be able to foresee that as well, which alters your thoughts even more, and so on. You'd probably go mad and do something completely insane instead.

Edited by Redmess on Nov 5th 2021 at 9:47:07 AM

Reliable knowledge of the future is a trap for humans in part because they are only human (or at least they started that way, in the case of Leto II). Humans are fallible and not omnipotent. They make judgements that are not based on the best outcome for the species as a whole because they are unwilling to make sacrifices (explicit in Paul's case); or they have only a limited ability to affect the future (in Leto II's case - he explicitly cannot have everything he wants without sacrificing the Golden Path).

The traditional Judeo-Christian God doesn't have either of those limitations.

In Dune, all prescient visions come with the added caveat that people can only have them while high on drugs. Which should raise the question of whether we can really trust their interpretation of what they see.

I suppose you could argue that after he takes the Water of Life Paul is permanently high, but he doesn't seem to need further melange after that point to have completely reliable prescience, to the point that loosing his sight doesn't slow him down at all.

Paul's prescient visions occur long before he first takes the spice. It is described as an "awareness spectrum narcotic", enhancing the ability of a human to access hidden mental abilities, but the books do not dwell on the narcotic part except in very high doses, such as during the Fremen spice orgy.

For most people who are routinely exposed to the spice, it is just part of their background, like nicotine in a smoker household (though not with the associated health problems). Paul and Alia discuss gaining tolerance to it, requiring increasingly large and dangerous doses to reach supreme prescient awareness.

Leto II lives in a body that manufactures its own spice. He is never without those visions.

Talk about getting high on your own supply.

"I also think there is some recursive paradox to Prescience Is Predictable. After all, if you already know what you are going to do and what will happen, that would necessarily alter your reasoning and change your actions, and you'd be able to foresee that as well, which alters your thoughts even more, and so on. You'd probably go mad and do something completely insane instead. "

You can said in a way human begins arent really prepare to deal with the concept of seen the future.

We see some of this in Paul having horrible bouts of indecision when he comes to "nexus" points. He can see millions of outcomes from each such event and has only a tenuous grasp of what his moment-to-moment actions will do to send himself down one of those paths.

Later, in Dune Messiah, he surrenders completely to that inner vision, but in Dune he's still struggling against it.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 5th 2021 at 11:51:17 AM

Yeah, ironically, you'd have to be a supercomputer to process that much information. Probably a quantum computer, too.

There is a bitter tragic irony in the fact that despite being the most powerful human alive at that point on so many levels, Paul still lost everything.

Leto II otoh avoided this by simply devoting himself to the Golden Path completely, giving up the simple joys and pleasures of mortal life.

At least until Hwi Noree appeared before him and reminded him that he was despite everything still human.

Edited by M84 on Nov 6th 2021 at 9:41:53 PM

He is a Mentat as well as a Kwisatz Haderach. This is part of what makes him so formidable.

The Kwisatz Haderach is basically a Reverend Mother, Mentat, and Guild Navigator. Meaning he's a super powerful prescient who can immediately calculate how paths in the future will go.

Leto II is further upgraded since his sandworm body gives him a constant supply of spice to fuel his powers on top of Nigh-Invulnerability and near immortality.

God-Emperor is very much not an exaggeration to describe what Leto II became when he took in the sandtrout.

Edited by M84 on Nov 6th 2021 at 9:51:30 PM

Yeah, you can definitely see where Games Workshop was taking inspiration from in regards to Dune.

The funny thing is that in both cases people in-universe never really understood what they wanted. But there are some fundamental differences too.

• Leto II died a reviled tyrant. Nobody in-universe really understood that everything he did was to free humanity from tyranny forever. Not just from people like Leto II but from destiny itself. The irony is that he had to be hated for the Golden Path to work since a big part of the driving force for it was because people hated his guts.

• The Emperor is revered as a god after being interned on the Golden Throne. Which is the exact opposite of what he wished for the Imperium. Though he is loved by humanity, it's as something he never wanted to be for them in the first place. His attempt to free humanity from the need for gods ultimately failed.

Leto II got what he wanted and ensured that humanity would have a future, while the Emperor of Mankind failed and his Imperium is doomed to fall.

Edited by M84 on Nov 7th 2021 at 4:42:39 PM

The Bene Gesserit, alone among humans, understood what Leto II was doing and, while they may have shared some of the hatred for him, they learned his lessons very well.

Mind you, I rather like the Character Rerailment of the Emperor in W 40 K that he was a Complete Monster, fascist, and despot that murdered trillions of innocents out of a misguided belief that Religion Is Wrong. For a long time, the game acted like him becoming an actual god via the Starchild would save the setting when it's now clear he'd be every bit as bad as the Chaos Gods.

(I say misguided because in a setting where Clap Your Hands If You Believe, it's ironically one of the few defenses people have AGAINST Chaos).

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 7th 2021 at 9:53:18 AM

Kinda but kinda not?, is intersting that the emperor want to create something that outlive him and dosent seen to graps the fact that as bigger than life he is becoming more and more of a god for imperium state religion, the emperor seen to belive he can create something better with his methods, which it let him closet to a leto II expy of sorts.

It's also not really "misguided" when throughout the Unification Wars and the Emperor's own discoveries that he discovered what worship was happening throughout the galaxy. He just went about it the entirely wrong way through a crucial lack of one piece of information.

I mean the Emperor's visionaryvillain status was a brutal totalitarian fascist society ruled by immortal god kings. Even if he succeeded, it would have been a horrible-horrible future. The irony is Horus sees the future and he's primarily disgusted by the fact they're worshiped as gods rather than the horrible oppression.