When I was in my teens (a lifetime ago), I read a lot of fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien. G.R.R. Martin. C.S. Lewis. Terry Brooks.
And then there was Frank Herbert, best known for his novel Dune (1965) and its many sequels. Though I didn’t read the entire Dune series, I loved the first two books, which follow Paul Atreides, the heir of House Atreides, as his family is assigned control over the desert planet Arrakis, home to the spice melange, the most valuable resource in the galaxy.
Herbert set a new standard for sci-fi, building entire worlds and cultures that integrated complex ideas and events from our own world, touching on a variety of themes — politics, religion, ecology, and power.
For years, I had not thought about Dune. But during the pandemic I recalled how Paul Atreides warned about the danger of fear.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
It was a passage that always stuck with me, and I wasn’t alone.
The quote — part of the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear and a mantra recited by Atreides during a critical test early in the first novel — is probably the most popular quote from the Dune books, and one routinely shared during the pandemic.
Recently, I came across a Frank Herbert quote I hadn’t heard before, one far less known.
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
It’s a penetrating thought, and when I first read the words, I wondered if they were too good to be true. Most of us at one time or another have seen a quote online attributed to Morgan Freeman, George Washington, Robin Williams, or some other famous or influential person only to find after a two-minute investigation the quote is pure fiction or falsely attributed.
This is not the case with Herbert’s quote on power. Even though I had never heard it before, it appears in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the final book in the series, and one widely considered the weakest of the Dune novels. (This might explain why I didn’t read the book and was unfamiliar with the quote.)
Herbert’s words on power stood out to me for two reasons. First, it somewhat turns on its head Lord Acton’s famous line that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Unlike Acton, Herbert was not saying individuals are corrupted by power, but that power draws corrupt people.
Second, Herbert’s line is deeply Hayekian. In his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek dedicated an entire chapter to the idea of the worst men in society rising to the top (it’s literally called “Why the Worst Get on Top”).
In that chapter, Hayek describes at length how centralized systems elevate individuals to lead them, and concludes that those possessing the strongest desire to organize economic and social life to their plan tend to have the fewest scruples about exercising power over others.
“To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values,” Hayek wrote, “the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral.”
The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, when Stalin and Hitler were ascendant and the world was immersed in totalitarianism. Yet Hayek did not see the brutality of these systems as “accidental by-products,” but the natural progression of nation-states in which checks on power are destroyed or abandoned.
“Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans,” he wrote, “so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure.”
This is why “the unscrupulous and uninhibited” are most likely to rise in such systems, Hayek concluded.
I have no idea if Herbert ever read Hayek, but his observation that governments have a powerful tendency to attract “pathological personalities” sounds remarkably close to Hayek’s idea that “the worst” get on top.
As to the nature of power and whether it corrupts man or attracts the worst, I suspect it does both. Either way, history shows the result is much the same. For every George Washington, there are a hundred Robespierres.
