Have you ever read the book "Dune
" by Frank Herbert?
I was reading an article about the origins of the Dune universe, and this idea that one of the themes of the Dune series is "that people seem to have an inbuilt hunger for a powerful, charismatic leader to whom we can surrender our responsibility for making difficult decisions" and that "even if the original leader resists the temptation to abuse power, the bureaucracy which springs up around him will outlive him, and over time a bureaucracy becomes more and more incented to prioritize its own needs over the needs of people." This was the case in the Fremen Jihad after Paul Atreides came to power.
How about our own history? In human history, how many cases have we seen of such occurrences? Many dynasties in Chinese history were founded by a great man, only to decay when the bureaucracy founded started to prioritise its own needs over the needs of the people it was developed to govern. Have we really learnt from history not to make the same mistakes? Will the system we have developed continue to remember that its purpose is to serve the greater good and not to serve the system itself? Or will we walk down the same path of decay as others have before us?
Frank Herbert himself said it best in his article, Dune Genesis.
" by Frank Herbert?I was reading an article about the origins of the Dune universe, and this idea that one of the themes of the Dune series is "that people seem to have an inbuilt hunger for a powerful, charismatic leader to whom we can surrender our responsibility for making difficult decisions" and that "even if the original leader resists the temptation to abuse power, the bureaucracy which springs up around him will outlive him, and over time a bureaucracy becomes more and more incented to prioritize its own needs over the needs of people." This was the case in the Fremen Jihad after Paul Atreides came to power.
How about our own history? In human history, how many cases have we seen of such occurrences? Many dynasties in Chinese history were founded by a great man, only to decay when the bureaucracy founded started to prioritise its own needs over the needs of the people it was developed to govern. Have we really learnt from history not to make the same mistakes? Will the system we have developed continue to remember that its purpose is to serve the greater good and not to serve the system itself? Or will we walk down the same path of decay as others have before us?
Frank Herbert himself said it best in his article, Dune Genesis.
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