IIRC, everything in Dune is supposed to be a horrible example of something taken to its extreme.

It’s like with Nietzsche¹; most fans are not really fans of what the author actually intended.

1. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/360

That's obviously not true, otherwise, all of the hero characters wouldn't be Mentats by CH:D, to the point where you can just assume a main character is a Mentat (among everything else). Heck, even Paul Atreides starts out as almost a Mentat.

The flaw of Mentats is that, early on, they are only Mentats, much as the flaw of Ginaz swordmasters was that they were only swordmasters or Reverend Mothers were only Reverend Mothers, etc. As humans grow and improve through the Dune saga, they gain more capabilities. Herbert was all about the Renaissance Man rugged individualist idea, and that was the goal of the Bene Gesserit: "Grow up, humans!...That's their [the BG's] dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard."

I think you're both right in that the whole hero arc is breaking the stagnation of society split into play-it-safe extremes which are in themselves rather undesirable.

Nietzsche inspired Camus, Hesse, Jung, Mann, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kafka, Freud, Rilke, Strauss, Picasso and many others.

So he clearly had some interesting ideas to share. But yes it's a comic, so I don't expect it to do anything other than straw-man his views.

You completely misunderstand both me and the comic. The point is, as rainonmoon correctly points out, that most followers of Nietzsche are not really actually following Nietzsche.

Point of clarification: it's not straw-manning his views, but illustrating the ways his philosophy is commonly misunderstood because of the ways those ideas have been diluted in dissemination.

The problem is also that this idea is only expanded on in books 2 and beyond, and most people who just read Dune come off with the impression of it simply being a regular heroic story.

I just re-read Dune, and wouldn't say that is entirely accurate. There are multiple times that Mauddib sees terrible things in the future - jihads, death, loss. There is a terribly dark foreboding sense from these visions, but I get the sense that the terribleness is from Paul's actions/status as well as that of their enemy.

Spoilers inside.

I got the impression that Paul saw many possible futures where there was certainty of a bad outcome, and some possible futures with an unknown outcome, and that the path to the unknown outcomes all involved jihad and death. So, at least in the first novel, Paul felt compelled to pursue jihad in order to provide an uncertain future, as avoiding jihad would be worse.

It's been quite some time since I read beyond the first novel though.

Paul foresaw the Golden Path, but I don't think that was until after the jihad in the second book. That's why he went off to the desert isn't it? He took the path and was trapped by it.

Still spoilers.

My interpretation is that Paul didn’t take the golden path. He felt trapped into taking it, but when twins were born, he was freed of that obligation because it opened up a future he hadn’t foreseen.

I think you're right, he knew there was one but didn't peer into it for fear of being trapped by it. Seeing the future makes it absolute in Dune, hence Leto's bloodline development program with Siona.

I understand the terribleness of Paul's status derives from perfect future knowledge destroying his hope.

Imagine looking into your child's face and knowing the exact time and nature of his/her death. I think this is a big reason childhood diseases have the status of especially evil.

I always thought Mentats were a reference to (and an extension of) the original Computers - humans that performed calculations in their head.

> The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613),[1] meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.

They were. Same with the Guild Navigators. Humans replaced the thinking machines following the Butlerian Jihad, taking back agency for humanity, but sacrificing agency for those individuals who became machines themselves.

SPOILERS BELOW:

It think this is an oversimplification. Mentats still had agency--both Piter de Vries and Thufir Hawat have their mentat schemes to kill the Baron Harkonnen.

One of the big points of the Dune series is the indeterminacy of the universe. Computers, being deterministic, couldn't think properly to handle the full universe, so humanity's subjugation to computers (i.e., "machine thinking", both as rule by computer and as habits of thought for humans) was a dead end. Dependency on computers also meant people didn't develop human skills.

After the Butlerian Jihad, the Guild, the Mentats, and the Bene Gesserit all became schools of human development. Mentats aren't just human computers who perform calculations quickly. They cultivate almost zen-like mental states that allow them to sift patterns of data into conclusions, among other techniques. The later books go into much more detail, but part of the point is that they're not deterministic thinkers; they're practitioners of very advanced modes of consciousness.

Most people in the Dune universe are literally vassals of feudal lords. By removing advanced machines, they instead have warped, specialised human beings in the machine's functions: mentats, suk doctors, navigators, etc. They are servants, human cogs in the system. It's dystopian.

That's it. I played Dune 2 and watched the movie so much I thought I knew most about the universe. I guess its about time I pick up Herbert's seminal work. Thanks for your analysis here.

You wouldn't want to have superhuman cognitive abilities? I mean sure...living in the Dune universe would be less than great, but I thought Mentats were pretty cool. They can do all kinds of things in their heads that 99.999% of humans would need a computer with CAS to do. It would be really nice to not have to spend so much time writing code and computer models if I could just think it up.

From a brief look, this is more or less a brain training wiki, but playing up the mentat training angle probably makes the site more engaging and fun.

I think there's a lot of people who wish they could remember more things, or math more effectively without tools or etc. Probably not a whole lot who want to go to the depths of the mentats. In universe, the training would have started before the trainee could consent, which makes it hard to make a choice to become a mentat, you can't choose to begin training, only to continue or abandon if you were in training since early childhood.

I haven’t read Dune, so when I saw “mentat,” I immediately thought of mentats from Fallout (a chem to boost intelligence stats for a brief period).

Which I believe is a reference to Dune :)

I kind of read it as just taking performance enhancing drugs - a thing that's not too uncommon for peak athletes. Thinking of this like mental athletics, I can imagine folks taking drugs for that too (Adderall? :) )

Why not? Perhaps not the ones we followed in the stories, but being a mentat in a factory or research laboratory could be a good job in that universe.