The End of Star Wars and the Rise of Dune

In this article, originally a video essay on the YouTube channel “Formscapes”, the authors delve into the intricate evolution of two monumental science fiction universes, examining the cultural and philosophical underpinnings that led to the decline of the Star Wars franchise and the emerging prominence of Dune. Through a comprehensive analysis, the piece explores the shifting paradigms within Western culture that have influenced public sentiment towards these narratives, highlighting Star Wars’ alignment with past cultural ideologies and Dune’s resonant themes that challenge contemporary perspectives on power, identity, and human nature. This reflective comparison not only sheds light on the reasons behind the changing tides of popular science fiction but also suggests a deeper societal readiness to engage with more complex and mature explorations of our future.

Part 1: Star Wars

It’s difficult to overstate the immensity of the cultural phenomenon that is, or rather was, the Star Wars franchise. Even though there had not been a Star Wars film release for almost a full decade when I was born in 1992, the franchise was as much a cultural phenomenon during my childhood as any other media franchise of that era, and in fact, it was much more so. Star Wars didn’t seem like yet another fleeting media product which had been vomited forth by the incessant content manufacturing of the entertainment industry. It was a story which truly felt timeless, and as such, it drew a very acute captivation from children and adults alike over the course of numerous decades.

Nonetheless, over the years, I have come to see that in the grand scheme of things, the timelessness of Star Wars was quite ironically precisely due to the manner in which the franchise was situated in a very particular cultural Zeitgeist. And it is now becoming increasingly apparent that the cultural age which facilitated the dominance of Star Wars is now definitively coming to a close, and that the death of the Star Wars franchise is itself a very striking and powerful signifier of that very fact.

The original Star Wars film was released in 1977, just 2 years after the close of the Vietnam War. This was a period in which the United States, and the First World more generally, was coming to reconceptualize itself following an acute crisis of self-identity. Vietnam had paralleled and co-internalized the existentialism which had characterized modernity. It was a movement which had called into question virtually all of the basic traditional institutions of Western culture.

The post-World War II era had seen a pronounced cultural high of optimism, Jovian ambition, and abundance. And yet, beneath the euphoria of this high were festering tensions and contradictions which were destined to rupture the inflating postwar bubbles. The conflicts of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were not merely external challenges; they were challenges to the moral foundations of the entire project of the United States, and by extension, the entire project of postwar neoliberal globalism.

As these conflicts came to a close, a new sense of Western self-identity would need to form and solidify within the Western mind. Over the course of the preceding decades, Western culture had seen the metaphorically explosive ascent of popular media through film and television, as well as the quite literally explosive ascent of human beings into the interplanetary void through the efforts of the American and Soviet space programs. Within this moment of history, then, what better symbol for a new Western self-identity could there possibly have been other than a Hollywood science fiction film franchise?

Beginning with the somewhat obvious, the villainous Empire of Star Wars is quite clearly coded in the language of the Second World War. Imperial soldiers are called Stormtroopers, alluding to the paramilitary units of the German National Socialist Party. The uniforms, architecture, symbolic motifs, and general demeanor of the Galactic Empire are quite clearly intended to gesture towards the pop-cultural imagery of the German National Socialists. Within the implicit mythology of Star Wars, the archetypal image of the fascist Empire serves as a foil against which the identity of our heroes, and by extension the identity of the audience, is set in contrast.

The heroes of Star Wars, covertly, are shown to be a motley crew of mostly ordinary people who don’t necessarily seem to represent a concrete political body or national identity. These heroes are simply the rebels, those who resist the disciplinary, mechanistic, and life-crushing powers of fascist imperialism with their spirit of camaraderie, independence, and creative ingenuity. The great enemy with which these heroes were set against was the embodiment of the dark father, the imposing tyrannical power of an archetypal Jovian king who has become a victim of his own misguided will to power.

Through such mythologization, Star Wars managed to capture the Romanticism and rebelliousness of the hippie movement and interweave those forces with the mythologies of the American Revolutionary War and the mythologies of World War II. Specifically, in a manner that disavowed the darkness of the archetypal father, the cruel imperialism which the American war machine had been revealed to be over the course of the Vietnam War. Star Wars reaffirmed that the great evil of the modern world was indeed the intolerance, totalitarianism, and militarism of fascism. But this image of evil was recontextualized in such a manner that the injustices of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War could be rendered comprehensible.

The implicit suggestion being presented by Star Wars was the idea that the evils of fascism, racism, American imperialism, and even the British imperialism which America had fought against during the Revolutionary War period, were in fact stems which emerged from the same archetypal root: the misguided and corrupted power of the dark father. Differentiating ourselves from that great enemy would then allow for a positive sense of self-identity which cleanly affirmed the values of post-war neoliberalism, while simultaneously disaffirming the moral failings of the Western world itself.

The Westerners, and Americans in particular, who left the theaters after seeing the initial premiere of Star Wars, probably slept more soundly that night than they had been able to manage for well over a decade. Though it is unlikely that any of them could have clearly stated the reasons why. Over the course of the following decades, Western culture came in many ways to fall into ever greater depths of disillusionment, ironic nihilism, and cynical, calculative pragmatism. The cultural tensions and contradictions highlighted by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal were never truly resolved. And throughout the final decades of the 20th century, these problems seemed to become ever more acute.

In many ways, nonetheless, Star Wars continued to shine forth as a kind of beacon, as an ideal of what the project of Western democracy was meant to be, and what the ultimate aim of liberal democracy were meant to achieve. Despite our increasing cynicism towards the imminent actuality of Western culture and politics, we nevertheless continued to orient ourselves in relation to the ideals which Star Wars represented, even as those ideals seemed to slip ever further away from the realities of Western democratic culture.

The year 1999 saw the release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the first in what would become a new trilogy of Star Wars prequels. Sixteen years had elapsed since the last Star Wars feature film, and the release of The Phantom Menace was met with both immense excitement as well as immense disappointment for many Star Wars fans. Unlike the original trilogy, The Phantom Menace conveyed a significantly more ominous tone overall, in which the occult intricacies of political intrigue and espionage featured heavily, and in which a narrative groundwork is laid in preparation for exploring the rise and inevitable fall of the archetypal Sky father. The ambitions of writer and director George Lucas seemed to have been oriented towards bringing into focus exactly where things went wrong, a very appropriate endeavor for a cultural milieu within which the ideals expressed by the original trilogy seemed to be rapidly slipping away from the lived reality of the Western world. Perhaps George Lucas himself sensed a looming danger within the cultural dusk of the 20th century that perhaps the ideals of liberal democracy might indeed succumb from within to the ever-present threat of fascistic imperialism, which thus compelled him to create a narrative which explored the way in which the ideals represented by the Star Wars mythos might come to mutate into their malevolent shadow forms.

During the interim between the release of The Phantom Menace and the second prequel film, Attack of the Clones, one of the most catastrophic and traumatizing events in American history played out on national television for all to witness. The September 11th terrorist attacks of 2001 demarcated a very distinct “before” and “after” in American history, and even modern history itself at a global scale. These events were utterly shocking to an American culture which had, since the end of the Cold War, felt itself to be safely situated as the final victors at the end of history. But perhaps even more significant than the September 11th attacks themselves were the geopolitical events which issued forth from them. In their wake, the cultural aura of fear, confusion, vindictiveness, pain, and rage which resulted from the September 11th attacks would be channeled by the United States military-industrial complex for the purpose of generating near unanimous public support for two simultaneous ground wars in the Near East, a massive expansion of US military interventions globally, and an unprecedented expansion of the federal surveillance tactics which would become completely unrestrained by constitutional limitations of personal privacy and property rights. The American public was led to believe that the military involvements being funded and conducted on their behalf were intended to keep them safe, that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were serving the purpose of preventing events like the September 11th attacks from ever happening again. 

Yet over the course of the following decade, it would become increasingly and painfully clear that this idealistic interpretation was, in fact, a very carefully contrived fantasy. And that the reality beneath that fantasy was in fact much uglier and much more sinister. Despite initially widespread public beliefs to the contrary, President Saddam Hussein had essentially no involvement in the organizations which were believed to have orchestrated the September 11th attacks. Despite reports from US intelligence organizations, it would eventually come to light that Iraq was not, in fact, in possession of any alleged nuclear weapons. Despite repeated reassurance from the United States executive and military branches, the Afghanistan conflict would prove not to be a quick and surgically precise mission to neutralize a clearly defined threat but rather the conflict would prove to be an unimaginably expensive and bloody debacle, which would come to encompass the entirety of the next 20 years.

Beneath the thin veneer of noble and defensive aspirations, Americans would eventually come to see that the reality of these conflicts was, in fact, a tangled web of financial motivation, geopolitical resource capturing, and neoconservative imperialism. The truth beneath the rhetoric was revoltingly hideous, and perhaps even more insulting to the American people was the fact that the institutions of power which had conducted these operations had barely even made an effort to conceal the true motivations which actually fueled these conflicts.

Within this climate of amplifying rage, disgust, fear, and disillusionment, the Star Wars prequels, much unlike the original trilogy, provided no answers but rather only questions. Even before the prequel trilogy itself was complete, Star Wars fans knew where the story was going. It was a trilogy of prequels, after all. It was a foregone conclusion that the story’s hero would become the shadowy father, and that the idealistic Republic would be transformed from within so as to become the great devouring machine of fascistic imperialism. The question then was not whether this mythologized rendition of liberal democracy would fail, but rather if this failure was inevitable within the personal narrative arc of Anakin Skywalker. The descent into madness and darkness was fueled by misguided ambition, fear, and arrogance. 

Yet, the devolution of Republic to Empire was much less clearly a failure which could be attributed to the moral faults of the Republic culture. Villainous forces did indeed conspire to orchestrate the downfall of the Republic and the rise of the Galactic Empire, but these villains did not succeed due to failings of Republican democracy. Rather, they succeeded precisely because they were able to take advantage of the weaknesses inherent within democracy itself. Simply put, the Republic did not succumb to Empire because it failed to properly align with its own democratic ideals but rather because of weaknesses which are endemic to those very ideals.

Perhaps then, we could take this to imply that the Galactic Republic, despite its lofty ideals and aspirations, was already fatally flawed long before the plot to the prequel trilogy even began. Correlatively, then, perhaps the republics of Western liberal democracy had already lost their way long before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars made their true color so blatantly apparent. The Galactic Republic of Star Wars was already a titanic machine of bureaucratic, political, and financial power long before the Clone Wars began.

In contrast, we see no such monolithic power institutions when we look to the heroes of the original trilogy. What we see instead is a loosely organized assemblage of freedom fighters without any clear hierarchy or formalized power relations. We are left then with some very serious questions and no clear answers. Is such a loose confederation of freedom fighters doomed to transform into a titanic political power structure which is destined for imperialism? Is there any way to subvert that vicious cycle, or are we fated to continue riding that cynical wheel due to inextricable features of human political organization itself? Is there some fatal flaw in the very ideals of Western liberal democracy, and is there any way that these ideals can be amended so as to prevent the metamorphosis of Confederation into Republic, of Republic into Empire, and of Empire into ashes? 

So, this is the part of the story where it seems like I should probably talk about the Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy. The reality, though, is that I really just do not have much to say, and I really just don’t think that there even is much to say. I watched the first film on release and, frankly, I barely remember anything about it. I tried watching the second film at one point, and I fell asleep halfway through it. I never saw the third film, and honestly, I just don’t really want to.

The bottom line here is that these are films which had no real interest in actually picking up where George Lucas left off. These films are not interested in the questions which the prequel trilogy left hanging. Instead, the Disney Star Wars sequels are essentially nothing but fanfare and nostalgia baiting, and saying any more than that about them would, in my opinion, be to take them far more seriously than they actually deserve.

However, although I believe that these films are abject failures, I also believe that it is acutely appropriate that they would be abject failures. The aura of disenchantment and disillusionment which surrounded the period of the prequel trilogy has only come to amplify over the course of the past couple of decades. The peoples of Western liberal democracies have only become ever more cynical towards the very ideals of Western liberal democracy itself.

In a sense, the sequel trilogy seems to be asking us to simply pretend that this aura of disillusionment doesn’t exist or doesn’t really matter. The sequels seem to be suggesting that if we simply defeat the evil villains, then this time, we will finally be able to do liberal democracy correctly. And yet, as we have already seen both in reality as well as within the Star Wars mythos, this seems like a very empty promise, a non-solution which doesn’t really address the core inconsistencies which bring about the spiral of Republic and Empire.

Ultimately, I think that this is where the story of Star Wars, as a cultural phenomenon, was inevitably going to end. We have come to a threshold which the Star Wars mythos is simply unequipped to cross. The duality of Good and Evil presented in Star Wars is ultimately a very simplistic one: evil is simply the will to power, and good is simply the will to freedom, which must contend with such power. This is simply not a narrative which is capable of looking further into the depths of this dialectic interplay or into the final teleological implications for humanity which are implicated by these dynamics.

Yet, even though the mythos of Star Wars might be incapable of carrying us forward through the dark forest which we now find ourselves within, there is another. 

Part 2: Dune

Even though the original Dune novel, written by Frank Herbert, was originally published well over a decade prior to the release of the first Star Wars film, the Dune franchise has always seemed to lurk beneath the surface of popular culture as a kind of darker, more mature, and more serious counterpart of the Star Wars franchise. George Lucas borrowed heavily from Dune in numerous ways, and therefore, comparisons between the two have always been rather obvious, for better or for worse.

Yet, parallels between these two sci-fi mythologies go deeper than superficial motifs. George Lucas was greatly inspired by the works of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, who had made use of Carl Jung’s psychodynamic theories in developing an archetypal model of mythical story structures, which we now know as the monomyth cycle or Hero’s Journey. Frank Herbert, on the other hand, drew influence directly from Carl Jung himself. According to his son, Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert assigned Jungian archetypes to each of Dune’s characters and even created mandalas as a way of modeling the relationships between these archetypes within his narrative.

Unlike so many science fiction works of the 20th century, Herbert’s vision of the future is not one of incessant technological and social progressivism. The Dune universe is not a world in which humanity has shaken off the atavistic vestiges of superstition, religiosity, dogmatism, and totalitarianism. The world of Dune is a very far cry from the neoliberal social democracy in space that we see, for example, in the Star Trek franchise.

Unlike both Star Trek and Star Wars, Herbert’s Dune does not present us with a single shred of delusional optimism with regards to the Enlightenment aspirations of liberalism, secularism, or technological soteriology. Despite these striking differences, however, Dune is much like Star Wars, a story which is deeply concerned with the relationships between power and freedom. The Dune universe is a world in which democracy and republicanism are, if anything, distant memories of a fleeting era which has been all but forgotten by the incessant glacial power of astronomical time. Technology is seen with a kind of grave reverence by a civilization which has experienced for itself the ways in which technology is able to dehumanize human life and facilitate the domination of human beings by corrupt and degenerate tyrants.

As we follow the narrative of the original Dune novel, it initially seems that Herbert’s framing is rather straightforward. Despite being deeply at odds with the mythos of liberal democracy, the problem of this world is that of tyrannical power. The apparent solution to that problem is not democracy, but rather monarchist power, which embodies the ideals of human excellence: courage, strength, leadership, empathy, and justice. As the story progresses, however, this framing rapidly reveals itself to be much more complex and much less optimistic.

Paul Atreides, the initial protagonist of this narrative, comes to transform into the very tyrannical evil which he had originally fought against. Yet, unlike with Anakin Skywalker within the Star Wars franchise, Paul’s transformation does not occur because of his inability to control forces of resentment or ambition which arise from within him. Rather, Paul finds himself becoming the very tyrant which he set himself against because he becomes swept up in currents of human history which far exceed his own personal will.

Within the second installment of the series, Dune Messiah, we see Paul lamenting his inability to control the forces which he inadvertently played a pivotal role in unleashing. The interstellar Jihad of his Fremen Empire is a religiously fueled catastrophe which he understands is simply no longer in his hands to control. Paul is tortured by his precognitive visions of the future, as he sees that the destiny which he is now a part of is both horrific and far too immense to be alterable by him, even as he sits at the apex of the most powerful empire that humanity has ever seen.

Even throughout all the various twists and turns of espionage, intrigue, and unflinchingly piercing examinations of the human spirit, Herbert nonetheless very clearly presents the nature of both the core problem and ultimate solution to the human journey from the very beginning: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

Over the course of Dune’s third installment, Children of Dune, Paul’s son Leto II comes to see the terrible destiny which awaits humanity and further comes to see the truth of his father’s failing. The destiny set out before humanity, the Golden Path, demanded something that Paul simply could not bring himself to do: to merge himself with the Shai-Hulud, or sandworms of the planet Arrakis, sacrificing his own humanity so as to guide human civilization along the only path by which the human spirit could avoid being annihilated by what Leto would call the Great Enemy. Only through such a merger could the Kwisatz Haderach, the true messiah, become the God Emperor and then bring about the Famine Times and the subsequent Scattering, through which humanity itself would come to be transformed into something capable of surviving the darkness of the deep future.

Seeing this demand as unacceptable or impossible, Paul recoils from the world he had created and retreats into the deep desert to wander alone. In many ways, it is unclear whether Paul passed on the task of becoming the God Emperor to his son because his own fear prevented him from sacrificing his humanity, or rather that Paul, who despite everything, remained a human being with a very human ego, simply could not have carried out the task of becoming God Emperor. 

Unlike Paul, Leto II was a pre-born, meaning that rather than being a vessel for a singular human ego, Leto’s psyche was instead an amalgamation of the entirety of his genealogical ancestry. Leto II was not simply Leto II, but also Leto the First, Paul, Jessica, Vladimir, Haron, and all other human beings who came before him. Lacking a conventional human ego and its instincts of self-preservation, Leto II accepts his role in bringing about the Golden Path, or rather, in becoming the Golden Path. Now devoid of his own humanity, yet simultaneously a godlike synthesis of everything humanity had ever been, Leto the Second establishes an imperial dominion of absolute authoritarianism, which will constrict humanity for the next 3,000 years.

Leto’s decision to do this was not for the sake of his own power, nor for some authoritarian ideals of disciplinary absolutism. In fact, his motivations were quite the opposite. Leto saw that among all of the various futures which faced humanity, there was but a single path by which humanity could manage to survive. This path would require human beings themselves to be utterly transformed, and Leto’s totalitarian empire was intended to bring about the gestation of such a transformation. Leto saw that he was required by this destiny to instill within humanity a primal genetic aversion to authoritarian power, an ancestral memory of a trauma so great that it could not be forgotten.

Once this collective trauma was instilled through Leto’s enactment of the Famine Times, Leto himself would come to be assassinated, and his great interstellar empire would then collapse, leading to the Scattering. Reacting against 3,000 years of authoritarian control, humanity’s instincts would lead it to venture forth beyond the limits of the known universe and into completely uncharted space, where human beings would come to evolve and struggle in ways that would otherwise have never come to pass. Only through this forced evolution would humanity come to realize its own inner potentials in such a manner that the great enemy could be overcome, and humanity could emerge victorious from the prophesied final battle at the end of the physical universe.

And yet, even though two more novels followed “God Emperor of Dune,” continuing the stories of those who struggled throughout the wake of Leto’s imperial reign, the saga comes to an end without us being clearly shown the great enemy or the great battle at the end of time. Or at least, so it might seem. Although the great enemy is never directly identified by Leto II within the novels, Herbert is nevertheless consistently clear that the ultimate danger facing humanity is, in fact, fear. Within the Dune saga, it is never simply a misguided or misanthropic will to power which brings about the horrors of tyranny and empire. Rather, we instead see that the true danger lies in the fear-driven willingness of human beings to forfeit their own agency and autonomy to charismatic leaders and messianic demagogues.

We fear uncertainty, we fear danger, and we fear our own weaknesses, and we are thus ever inclined to sacrifice our freedom to those who promise us safety and certainty. Unlike “Star Wars,” the great evil of the Dune saga is not power, but rather weakness. More specifically, it is a spiritual inadequacy of courage and independence which leads us repeatedly into the maw of the monstrous forces within us, which threaten the very soul of humanity itself. From the very first pages of “Dune,” Herbert tells us that to be a human being is more than to simply be a member of the species Homo sapiens. Paul’s trial of the Gom Jabbar encapsulates the core narrative motif of the entire saga: the Gom Jabbar is a test of fear and pain, and it is only through this confrontation with fear and pain that Paul is able to demonstrate for the Bene Gesserit that he is not merely a Homo sapien but is, in fact, truly human, truly capable of the courage and strength which are required in order to preserve the freedom which is, in fact, our humanity. 

Frank Herbert once stated that if he were to ever end the Dune saga, he would end it with the coming of a true democracy. The statement might seem rather paradoxical at first, given just how utterly pessimistic Herbert may have been with regards to the Enlightenment ideals of progress, scientism, and secularism. Nonetheless, if we properly contextualize this statement in relation to the core narrative of the Dune saga, we can see that such an ending is the only possible conclusion to the dialectic of freedom and power which Herbert saw as the central dynamic of human history. 

Yet within Herbert’s vision, it is never enough to simply defeat the evil tyrants and empires, as those very forces of evil issue forth from within our own souls. In order to bring about a true democracy, then, humanity must do more than simply fight for neoliberalism against the forces of imperialism or fascism. We must become more than what we currently are, orienting ourselves towards the virtues which are necessitated by the freedom and power which have come to develop within us. 

We can either meet the demands of the destiny set forth by our humanity, or our humanity will be annihilated by that very destiny. Herbert never provides us with a clear mythical image of what a true democracy might look like, and I think it is actually quite appropriate that he did not. Herbert leaves that act of imagination to us, as it is only through our own ability to envision possible futures that such a world might be generated by us. No one is coming to save us, and no one can tell us who we need to be or what sort of world we need to create. Such is the nature and the price of human freedom.

So now, returning to our own present cultural zeitgeist, it feels very appropriate that the death of the Star Wars franchise would correspond to the death of the neoliberal vision within which Star Wars was able to play such a central pop cultural role. It is even more appropriate then that the death of Star Wars should also coincide with the seemingly long overdue rise of Dune as a popular cinematic franchise. Dune is a narrative which could not have become a powerful force within our collective imagination within a culture which still naively clung to an Enlightenment neoliberal optimism which Frank Herbert simply did not believe in.

It is only now, after we as a culture have been forcibly confronted with the undeniable failures of the postwar cultural ideals, that we can truly begin to take seriously the implications of Frank Herbert’s vision. Within the Star Wars franchise, the Jovian powers of ambition, leadership, and authority are consistently cast in a very negative light. Anakin Skywalker’s moral corruption directly parallels the development within him of such Jovian archetypal forces. Luke Skywalker, on the other hand, never truly becomes a leader or authority figure but rather remains a kind of aesthetic, priestly figure throughout his narrative. 

Paul Atreides, in contrast, is a hero who does come to embody these Jovian ideals, ideals which are not only seen in a negative manner in the Baron Harkonnen but also seen in a very positive light in Paul’s father, Leto, and later in Paul himself. Paul’s failing is not seen to be due to his power or ambition, but rather his failures are, if anything, due to his inability to more fully embody the courage which is required of him by the horrific future he is destined to bring forth. Paul is therefore, in many ways, a more traditionally masculine hero than either Luke or Anakin, as his narrative does not implicitly reject the paternal Jovian powers of the archetypal king. Paul simultaneously recaptures the regal authority and decisive leadership represented by his father, while simultaneously incorporating these Jovian attributes with the more feminine, intuitive, and naturalistic spiritual dispositions represented by Chani and the Fremen.

Within a cultural landscape which has recently been so dominated by the intentional and politically charged subversion of the hero archetype, there could never be a more opportune time for a hero such as Paul Atreides. Moreover, the villains of Dune are not simply evil because they are totalitarian or because they desire power. Rather, the Harkonnens are evil because they are degenerate, a point which is made even more clearly in the Dune novels than in the recent film adaptations. Leadership and authority themselves are not implicated as the sources of evil; the evil of the Harkonnens is instead due to the fact that they have lost touch with their own humanity. They see themselves as having become more than merely human, when in reality, they have in fact become much less than human.

The saga of Dune, therefore, is not a mythos in which power is seen as a corrupting force in itself. Power is seen as being absolutely necessary for human survival. The danger, instead, lies in power which has become untethered from the virtues which produced it, a process by which power comes to mutate into a cancerous and morbid parody of heroic or monarchic regality.

Part 3: Conclusion

Given the current state of our culture, I think that I can rather safely proclaim that the future of popular science fiction, the future of our vision of the future, now belongs to Dune, and that this transition has been a very long time coming. We are now, perhaps, far more cynical about the ideals and aspirations of democracy and liberalism than we have ever been before. But, this cynicism may also clear the way for a much more mature and more realistic understanding of where we are and where we might be going within this historical journey.

The mythos of Dune seems to imply that in order to escape the tangled entrapments of imperial violence and power, we must create a new kind of human culture. And this means refashioning ourselves into a new kind of human being, which is not so easily ensnared by the coercive powers of technology, dogmatism, and collective fear. Unlike Star Wars or Star Trek, Dune provides us with precious few reassurances and no comforting fantasies. There is no clear light at the end of the tunnel because we are in a situation which we must dig our way out of.