Thread by @evolvingcalm

Dune is one of the greatest pieces of science-fiction of all time.

But having spent more than a month pouring through every Frank Herbert interview I could find (timing coincidental) what's awe-striking is how far ahead the writer was and the quality of his insight.

Here's why:

What's most impressive about Herbert is his broad interest and understanding of domains - from what you could call 'proto-complexity' & ecology, to politics, semantics, self-sufficiency & even homesteading.

(Considering his books maybe it's no surprise)

See for yourself:

theaugustry.com/frank-herbert-…

If nothing else for a quick taste: this 1981 Plowboy interview by Mother Earth News is perhaps one of the best single examples demonstrating the wide range of his interests and how his thinking was of a proto-complexity nature.

motherearthnews.com/nature-and-env…

Here's some more Frank Herbert quotes:

"I'm always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and then can be expanded to the macrocosm, or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, in the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn't think were similar."
1969

“Our information about the cyclic nature, the interdependence, of our own environment it's still quite sketchy in many areas.” 1969

“Western man has assumed that all you need for any problem is enough force, power, and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach… even the problem of our own ignorance.” 1969

Looking [..] through Western eyes now, you should undoubtedly see; that it's a mechanical scientific principle, and if you get enough data to bear on it you'll understand it, though this doesn't necessarily follow of course that we can understand everything in the universe.” 1969

“Adaptability is the key to survival in an ever changing universe. And the pressure of our civilization, time after time, have been conformity, rigidity, and non-variability. This is observably an error. A moralistic thing. The authoritarian model.
[cont]

There are several fallacies in the assumptions upon which we base our civilisation. One of them is pride in knowledge. It’s destructive. If the today body of our classified labelling; the thing we call knowledge, could be conceived of by analogue as putting something into
[cont]

a balloon. The interface of that balloon with the unknown increases by the square of what we put inside it. So again, in a very concrete sense, the more we know, the less we know. I am reasonably certain that the unified field theorists are barking up a wrong tree, because [cont]

it is also observable that when you approach a [complex problem with a simplistic answer or simplistic] method of changing it, the chief thing that you do is increase the complexity." 1971

"I'm not as much worried by atomic weapons [...]. Far more dangerous to world society, [...] springing upon us from an unknown corner, is the ability of a chemist and a pharmacist working in a basement, [...] to produce a mutated disease that would spread like wildfire." 1973

“I like to do cabinetry; [&] to do things with my hands when I'm not writing. I feel [..] I'm getting as far away as I [..] can from [..] sitting at a typewriter & putting words on paper by doing these other things. It's helpful to me; it's a kind of a catharsis. I garden. 1973

"World government. I think would be an absolute disaster because we don’t really control societies. The natural form which gives resiliency to the landscape... is for there to be little bunches here, a little bunch there, & this buffers us against [...] outrageous fortune." ~1974

"You’re going to see ah some dramatic changes in things, in areas such as the Los Angeles basin, very dramatic because this is an energy sink, the basin is, it is using much more energy than the entire nation can afford to pour in to one area just to keep that area alive." ~1974

"The computer is going to enter all phases of life, including what we generally feel is our individual freedom.[..] But you will also be able to tell [..] how you can talk [someone] into buying "X". What are his buttons. The other side [..] is that, people tend to grow calluses."

“I say frequently that... I do not want to be put in the position, and I refuse to be put in the position; of having to tell my grandchildren, and I have grandchildren, I'm sorry there's no more world for you - we used it all up.”
1977

“[The original idea of Bureau of Sabotage came about because] I just figured that there was no natural predator for bureaucracy and that this was an unnatural situation, because there are natural predators for almost everything else."
1978

"I don't feel that I really own anything. I'm a steward of certain things and my stewardship certainly will be judged in the centuries to come not only on the basis of some artistic interpretations of what we've done, but also of how the things endure.”
1978

“I feel every ten years you should pick up something new. [...] It's what you should do. Kind of renew your ability to adjust to the marvellous things that are around us in this civilisation.”
1978

"No, because the unimaginative quacks that operate these things [nuclear power plants]... don’t think that’s possible... in fact they would be outraged by my saying this because they would think that my saying it might create it."
1980

“There are lots of things that are done by professional educators... to convince the children in their custody... that their families are a pack of jerks that don’t know up from down, you know this, this is true, and undermining the influence of the family - [cont]

-is one of the most dangerous things any society has ever done, and we’re paying the piper right now for a lot of that. Education and the family should have been in cooperation for a long, much longer time. Our mistake is taking it away from local control. "
1980

“Words are not all that important. It’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say but it’s true. People learn much more by example.”
1980

“The danger is in following, in massive following, of such a leader, cause he’s gonna make human mistakes, but he's going to make them for millions of us.
1980

This is the danger of the bureaucracy, the primary problem of a bureaucracy such as we have, is that it covers up it’s mistakes... most frequently covers them up until it’s too late to do anything about them... that’s deadly.”
1980

I think world government is extremely dangerous, because it would tend to have a powerful and centralised single force directing everything we do. And... to my way of looking at things that’s not survival.

"I think world government is extremely dangerous, because it would tend to have a powerful and centralised single force directing everything we do. And... to my way of looking at things that’s not survival."
1980

"One of our strengths is in our differences... No perfect view.. of what is required for human survival exists. I don’t think there's any [who] individual has it. I certainly do not claim it. "
1980

"The danger in world government is the delay time, between the directive and the action. It’s as though you were driving an automobile, in which there were a 5 minute delay, between when you turned the steering wheel & the front wheels responded. [..] you’d be in the ditch." 1980

"Our strength would be in having the major influence of government much closer to home, so we see what the consequences are, we know what, who created those consequences, and we can deal with those consequences on a very quick, a very responsive, local basis."
1980

“The problem using chemical fertilisers is that these fertilisers come from an energy resource which is vanishing. And we are building a population onto that inverted pyramid. That’s a real danger. There's a lot of quick profit in it, & the people who are [cont]

-behind it think they can get in and get out safely. Well they may be able to get in and get out safely, but I doubt it."
1980

"Any... any set of assumptions that we follow, whether we call them scientific assumptions... or religious assumptions, if you trace them back to their roots, and start weeding off everything you see now what is below that and what is below that, [cont-]

eventually you get to something which you have to say ‘I believe that because I believe it’. That’s faith. & science is no different from religion in this respect. There are things that we believe about science that we cannot prove... & what is this belief other than faith?"
1980

"To my way of thinking a paradox is merely a finger pointing at something beyond it. Any time you encounter a paradox you should look beyond it, you should say to yourself that paradoxes don’t really exist.. so this is a screen hiding something else - so what’s beyond this?"
1980

"I say that scratch a liberal and you’ll find a closet aristocrat, and you scratch a conservative and you’re going to find somebody who prefers any yesterday over any tomorrow."
1980

"Ecology is a late cover really as far as a discipline is concerned and I worry about specialised disciplines anyway... because I think that our world is kinda overrun with specialists, and that what we’re desperately in need of is... generalists.”
1980

“A couple of times I've been invited by political science departments, so I really enjoy standing there on that platform and saying, ‘How many people in here are studying... political science? Put your hands up’ & you say, ‘How many of you believe politics is a science?’ [laughs]

Not a hand.

The word science I think has been kind of stretched out of shape, or pinched into the wrong shape or something."
1980

“I’m awfully distrustful of power structures. People ask me if I was ever trying to start a cult and I say ‘For the love of god, read the books again’ [laughs].’’
1980

One of the problems with a democracy is that it is awfully susceptible to demagogues, because it’s quite easy to see that we have various crises, & oh how nice it is to have somebody come along with a powerful voice, & a glib tongue, & tell us ‘Now here is the solution'. 1980

"Yes I can imitate those political jesters too."

And oh how nice it is... to hear them say we don’t have to pay for it...
Whenever you hear that or its equivalent in our society what they mean is... that your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren, or your great to the n power grandchildren, they will pay for it."
1980

Dune was hailed as the first... ecological... consciousness novel, and I must confess to you I did that with great... deliberateness and malice of forethought. I thought it was about time because I realised that... you can’t preach at people.
1980

"That’s when you really learn - when you do it"
1980

"[Roosevelt] told [the Brain Trust] - I want you to sit down & give me a list of the important scientific developments we will have to deal with, in the next 25 years, now that’s through [to] 1958. Let me tell you... the things that the Brain Trusters did not include in their -

Jet travel, atomic energy... transistors... antibiotics... World War II...

Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise."

1980

"If every household has its own... computer terminal... and you don’t go to the library or the grocery store, or even to the office’. I was talking to a journalist friend of mine not too long ago, and I said ‘You ever thought about it? -

- If you have a word processing system in your office, which they did, it would be cheaper for your company to lease a telephone line and put that terminal in your home… so that you can write from home."
1980

The problem we have with computers is we have to depend on computer programmers... who really can only guess at the bottom line of what you want it to do... they're not absolutely sure... ever.
1980

And the minute you see [a computer] in every household you’re going to see... entrepreneurs coming along saying ‘Hey... with a printout on those home things we could send them a newspaper over the wires’
1980

If you don’t think that’s going to make a big difference in our world, that speedy intercommunication, that almost magical interlock between the things that you want to know, and the things that I need to know... then... I recommend that you read ‘Future Shock’ again."
1980

"My view of it is that they... at root are a machine... and one of the pitfalls of machines is that they tend to condition... the people who use them to treat their fellow humans like other machines. And you carry that on too far and that’s going to become so abrasive."
1980

"Human beings if we deal with discrete bits, if that is the basis of our operation, our behaviour, they are so fine, so rapid, so multi-linked that... I think, I despair of our ever separating a bit out.

The best description of what we do is that we operate within a continuum, where there is no starting and stopping... it’s a flow, unbroken, it’s a continuum.

When you try to copy that, to make an image of that, from a system that is confined to discrete bits you are... reduced to a system which will never really reach the continuum level.

However [a machine] can do some things automatically, very rapidly, which is the advantage of computers - they do things automatically, without thinking."
1980

“My view of Liet Kynes was a perfect model of the shortsighted... ecologically aware, who wants a particular condition, he’s thirsty he wants water, he doesn't like brown landscape he wants green... so he... moves to [simplistically change things]." 1980

"I developed all of my basic ideas during my childhood years on our family's farm.[...] I milked cows—by hand—for over half of my early childhood years on a small subsistence farm in Kitsap County, Washington." 1981

"We raised all our own food, so—although I grew up during the Depression—I never had to worry about being hungry. In fact, I remember those "bad years" as marvelous times because I spent them in the company of a kind of large, extended family." 1981

"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind."
1981

"There is definitely an implicit warning, in a lot of my work, against big government & especially against charismatic leaders. After all, such people—well-intentioned or not—are human beings who will make human mistakes.

What happens when someone is able to make mistakes for 200 million people? The errors get pretty damned BIG!"
1981

"I think it's vital that men and women learn to mistrust all forms of powerful, centralized authority. Big government tends to create an enormous delay between the signals that come from the people and the response of the leaders.

Put it this way: Suppose there were a delay time of five minutes between the moment you turned the steering wheel on your car and the time the front tires reacted. [...] Governments have the same slow-response effect. And the bigger the government, the more slowly it reacts.

So to me, the best government is one that's very responsive to the needs of its people. That is, the least, loosest, and most local government."
1981

"I feel that as communication systems improve—and with the new computers that are continually being developed, communications are coming on like gangbusters—people won't be so dependent on the often one-sided reporting of the conventional media for their information.

Folks will see that we can take control of some social functions now handled by big government—schools, taxation, whatever—and that the "bigger and stronger is always more effective" idea is a phony bill of goods.

So I see an evolutionary movement toward a certain kind of fragmentation, and not just because of improvements in communications."
1981

"What we need is a new way of relating to our society and its tools. And it was in an attempt to envision just such a change that, some 15 years ago, I coined the phrase "technopeasantry.""
1981

"[World Government] that particular dream suffers from what must be one of the few immovable laws of the universe: the basic truth that the more you try to control, the more there is that needs to be controlled."
1981

“I look upon our involvement with the environment (all of man’s intrusions [..] are totally natural phenomena) as a continual learning process”, [but] Whatever we do causes change, & we can cause gross disruptions to our surroundings as a result of small-order determinations.”

“I think that the idea of power corrupting, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is not on the mark - does not hit it. I think what happens is that power attracts the corruptible.”
1982

“Yes I think we're the best equipped survival animal that this planet has ever produced. I don't depend just on rationality, I depend on the need to survive, on the urge to survive, on the, on the desire to survive as a species."
1982

“Well my only response politically is that I vote against anybody in office [laughs]. I think that we've had the examples of how to deal with political power, and that is to give it very briefly.” 1982

“I think bureaucracy is self-seeded, yes.”
1982

“[Enormously powerful review committees are] another check and balance that I would like to reinstall to our democratic system, [...and] not only localized - I would like to have it at a local level, at the county level, at the state level, and at the federal level.”
1982

"A senior bureaucrat in the school system in the state of Washington said [to me], ‘You think some damned housewife could understand the complexities of what the school board has to do?’ and my response immediately is ‘YES’ you bet I think a housewife would understand them-

-she would understand these things out of necessity, I think if you throw the responsibility, the full responsibility, on the people they rise to the occasion.”
1982

"I don't think there's a fucking bit of difference between a bureaucracy that is instituted by a democratic regime, a state; socialist regime, a communist regime or a capitalist regime."
1985

"One day when I was working in Washington, D.C. as a speech-writer for a U.S. senator from Oregon, I was at a meeting of the Department of Commerce & a very, very high department official, a lifetime bureaucrat, was talking about another senator, who was giving them some trouble

And this high bureaucrat called this senator a "transient.""
1985

"in MY reading of history: Every time we have pulled the lid off the human desire to govern our own affairs, to be free of government - we've had a renaissance of some kind. We've had a social -renaissance, we've had a political renaissance, an artistic renaissance."
1985

"Every time in history we've unleashed this [freedom], we've gone forward by leaps and bounds."
1985

“Charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead ‘MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH’”
1985

“I think the most dangerous president we've had, or one of the most dangerous at least, not because he was a bad guy, but because people didn't question him, [...] in this century was Jack Kennedy because people said ‘Yes sir Mr. Charismatic Leader, what will we do next?’

we wound up in Vietnam. People don't realize that he was one of the major moving forces getting us into Vietnam, because he locked us into a commitment there.

And I think probably the most valuable president, of this century, was Richard Nixon, because he taught us to distrust government...and he did it by example... which is the best kind of teaching.”
1985

“Where does the word ‘iatrogenic’ come from? It means a disease or other difficulty, created by the doctor, or what is done to you in the name of the doctor. Why is it that we keep approaching the problem of hard drugs the same way, even though we know the system doesn't work."

“You see, I think that there is a bad idea... around in our world, and that idea is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think what really happens is that power attracts the corruptible.”
1985

It doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether it's a fascist bureaucracy, a so-called capitalist or oligarchic bureaucracy, or a communist or socialist bureaucracy, to the people looking up at the bottom of it they're identical."
1985

"When was the last time you were treated courteously by a bureaucrat..? They don't have to treat you courteously, you can't fire them, you can't vote them out of office…"
1985

“Destination Void was an exploration of our... unconscious commitment to the idea that ‘the only thing wrong with the universe is that we haven't invented the right machine yet’.”
1985

"My own personal choice is to live by the Golden Rule - try not to do to others those things you would not like them to do to you - not always successfully, I’m afraid. But I think that if only one person in our universe or in this world does this then it is a better world."1985

“I don’t think that it’s the axe that cuts down the forest. It’s how the tool is used. You have to be pretty dense to think it’s the tool that is at fault. I believe that - progress is the wrong word - I believe that the evolution of technology is inevitable."
1985

"Progress is a peculiar word. It’s a windowscreen we pull down to hide the future from ourselves. It’s the sort of word that doctors use, you know ‘How is the patient doing?’ ‘Progressing marvellously’ when in fact the guy just died.”
1985

“People say to me, ‘You’re trying to build an independent establishment in your farm,’ & that’s absolutely wrong. The independent, self-sustaining farm is the modern version of building a sailboat and rowing to Tahiti. There’s a myth about it. I don’t believe in it.

You’re part of society and you ought to be aware of the necessity of interacting with it.”
1985

For sources of all this and more see:
theaugustry.com/frank-herbert-…

As epic as this thread is

There's way more than could ever fit

For even more, along with some longer form, see:

https://twitter.com/evolvingcalm/status/1449192155973517313?s=20

When was the last time you were treated courteously by a bureaucrat..? They don't have to treat you courteously you can't fire them, you can't vote them
out of office...