While Dune tells the story of one man’s rise to power, Dune Messiah portrays the nature of his power once he has attained it. Author Frank Herbert intended Dune Messiah to be an inversion of the science fiction novel’s typical subject matter: the hero’s rise to power. Instead, Dune Messiah deals with a hero’s downfall and the failures of power. Dune’s hero, Paul Atreides, enters the scene as Dune Messiah’s protagonist—the ruler, or Muad’Dib, of most of the universe and the godhead of a powerful religious jihad. Despite his supreme position of power, Paul struggles with a deep feeling of powerlessness. He feels that no matter how much power he gains, the universe still exceeds and contains him. Paul is also endowed with the power of prescience (the ability to see the future), a power which also comes with its own powerlessness. Although he can see what the future holds and therefore prepare for it, he is still “caught in time’s web.” In other words, although Paul has the power to see the future, he cannot control it, nor can he alter the course of fate. It is the paradoxical nature of Paul’s power of prescience that reveals the paradox of absolute power: although Paul has powerful forces under his control, he is still subject to the universe and the future. Dune Messiah explores Paul’s powerlessness in relation to his position as the most powerful man in the universe to suggest that it is impossible for a person to hold total power.
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Power Quotes in Dune Messiah
This moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction can be lethal.
Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.
I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.
His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that the universe still eluded him.
She should have understood long ago this similarity between the spice and the ghola. Melange was valuable, but it exacted a price—addiction. It added years to a life—decades for some—but it was still just another way to die.
“[Genghis Khan] didn’t kill them himself. […] He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”
Once…long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.
Such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. Power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier…including one’s own ignorance.
The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?
“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”
Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws must inevitably replace morality, replace conscience, even replace the religion by which you think to govern.
Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.
The Fremen […] had said Muad’Dib would never die, that he had entered the world where all possible futures existed, […], wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be.
