Frank Herbert and Proto-Complexity

Frank Hebert Masterpost

Frank Herbert (1920-1986), while most famous for his novel Dune and its sequels, is also, I have discovered whilst pouring through every old interview and speech of his I could find, actually even more interesting as being someone who could be considered an earlier thinker in the domain of ‘proto-complexity’, as well as for his broad interests in various other areas such as greater self-sufficiency and homesteading.

This revelation is perhaps unsurprising given the wide synthesis of subject matter in his works. One of Dune’s major inspirations of course being ecology; a topic Herbert first began writing about as a journalist in 1952, and which is perhaps the canonical example of a complex system. It is no less impressive however to see his early expression and foresight of what would later blossom into a field of theory that today has become one of our most effective and significant approaches to current human understanding of reality (at the time of writing having even just been behind the latest Nobel prize win for Physics).

He was truly ahead of the curve.

The first piece of Dune (titled Dune World) was published December 1963 in Analog (then Astounding) magazine after Herbert’s original conception of it in 1959 and years of research. Struggling with rejection by almost every publisher (finally being printed by Chilton Books, who were known for auto repair manuals) the entire story as he envisioned was ultimately split into a trilogy of novels, with the first releasing in 1965 – which, like most of his fiction, was initially either ignored or panned by critics and the East Coast literati before going on to become classics, and in the case of Dune; the world’s best-selling science fiction. To give a certain sense of where this fits chronologically with some other significant works: Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media were both published in 1964.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate Dune’s staggering influence on everything that came after it. But the intent here is to instead shine some attention on the man behind the pages.

While I have collected every Frank Herbert source I am aware of here, 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.

To this end compiled below in chronological order are a wide range (including a few classic Dune saga ones) of cleaned up quotes:

1957

They Stopped the Moving Sands – (as quoted in The Road to Dune):

“Briefly, the scientists working the Oregon coast found that sand could be controlled only by the use of one type of grass (European beach grass) and by a system of follow-up plantings with other growth. The grass sets up a beachhead by holding down the sand in an intricate lacing of roots. This permits certain other plants to gain a foothold. The beach grass is extremely difficult to grow in nurseries, and part of the solution to the dune problem involved working out a system for propagating and handling the grass.”

1965

Dune:

“To the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of ‘real materials’—to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.” – Dedication

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.” [Kierkegard]

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

“Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new”

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”

“My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. ‘Something cannot emerge from nothing,’ he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ can be.”

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.”

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

“You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, education and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.”

“The absence of a thing, this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we’re addicted to.”

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace – those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the patterns of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection all things move toward death.”

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

“Life – all life – is in the service of life.”

1969

Willis E. McNelly Tape Interview on Dune and its origins:

• “The idea [for Dune] came from an article; I was going to do an article, which I never did, about the control of sand dunes. What many people don’t realize is that the United States has pioneered in this, how to control the flow of sand dunes, and it started up here at Florence Oregon, there is a pilot project up there of the U.S. Forest Service, which has been so successful that it has been visited and copied by… experts, related… departments, from Chile, Israel, India, Pakistan, Great Britain – several other countries. […] It was an area where sand dunes blew across Highway 1, US Highway 1, frequently blocking the highway. And the Forest Service put in a test station down there, to… determine how they could control the flow of these sand dunes, and I got fascinated by sand dunes because
  –
  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.
  –
  […]this was in ‘53 this […] was a long time ago. Sand dunes are like waves in a large body of water, they just are slower, and the people treating them as fluid, learn to control them. […] fluid mechanics with sand and the whole idea fascinated me.”
• “It’s been my belief for a long time that a man inflicts himself on his environment… that is Western man.”
• “We tend to think in Western culture that we can overcome nature by a mathematical means, we accumulate enough data and just subdue it. This is a one-pointed vision of man, because if you really start looking at man, Western man, you’ll see that you can cut him right down the middle and he’s blind on that backside.”
• “This of course was done deliberately for that purpose… […] it’s a turning point of the whole book, […] a pivot you might say, and… the very fact that [Liet] Kynes… who is the Western man… in my original construction of the book… sees all of these things happening to him as mechanical things, doesn’t subtract from the fact that he is still a part of this system because it is observing him, he’s lived out of rhythm with it, and he got […] in the trough of the wave and it tumbled on him.”
• “Ecology as somebody said, and I used this, I don’t recall [likely Paul B. Sears] – I’d like to attribute this, but I don’t recall where I encountered it, I did read over two hundred books […] as background on this novel [Dune]. Somebody said that ‘Ecology is the science of understanding consequences’.” 
• “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.”
• “We need what I would call a science of wisdom.”
• “The stories that are remembered are the ones that… strike sparks from your mind, one way or another, it’s like a grinding wheel, they touch you and sparks fly.”
• “I’ve always been amazed by the statement, or by the label… ‘psychological warfare’, there could be no such thing as psychological warfare. If you develop… a psychological weapon… sufficiently; that it is destructive to any potential enemy, it will destroy you with the enemy…. It’s a two-edged sword without a handle and if you grab it hard enough to wield it, you’re going to [destroy yourself.]”
• “It is my contention that in… especially in Dune, and Dune is an… exposition of this… point, that… man himself is going to change. We have changed… but our changes, the actual basic change is a gradual… climb. Now I don’t see this as progress, I see it as a sort of entropy, and as a growth of complexity. But… that this is such a slow process, that in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years we would still recognize, the emotions, the reactions, all of these things.”
• “I like to use the example of the Berlin Museum beavers, […] before World War II there were a number of families of beaver in the Berlin Museum. They were European beaver. They had been in there, raised in captivity, for something on the order of 70 beaver generations… in cages… World War II came along and a bomb freed some of them into the countryside. What did they do? They went out and they started building dams. […] Now… tribal organization, feudalism is tribal organization and that’s what I’m talking about so – tribal organization is a natural organization of humankind. We tend to fall into it, given any chance at all, given the proper stresses or given the proper lack of stresses.”
• “Our information about the cyclic nature, the interdependence, of our own environment it’s still quite sketchy in many areas.”
• “Now it’s my contention that the difference between a hero and an anti-hero is where you stop the story. And if you’re true to life… if you’re true to life, giving these, these ingredients.. then the story goes on, because human beings go on. Now you can confine your story to one individual… and therefore, as far as [John W. Campbell] he’s concerned, story begins with birth and ends with death… But if you’re dealing with larger movements […] then there is no real ending; it’s just a place where you stop the story.”
• “I’m really hipped on this ecology thing… the consequences of some of the things that we’re doing to our planet. And I don’t mean in the lock-it-up-and-throw-it-away sense of the classic conservationist, in other words turn it all in the wilderness. I don’t mean that. But there are ways of living with our planet not against it, and this is the attitude that we have to develop. And it is an attitude.”
• “It’s my contention that if you immerse a society in a great deal of, what we call fortune-telling you know? that you cloud the whole process…… You see what happened in classic times, in Greek, historic times, when the oracle was, had terrifying accuracy… and there weren’t a lot of Oracle’s around… you went to Delphi or to the local madman who might kill a chicken and look at the entrails, any one of these methods, which I called ignition principles, as far as prediction is concerned. See, I contend that there is such a thing, that you can do it, whether you do it by a subliminal thing, petites perceptions, or whether our predictive faculties are prophecy… and we’ve had our prophets… a product of an accumulation, in the sense of a computer’s accumulating data, or something… mystical in the sense that it’s unexplained, thus far unexplained. I’m looking at it 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.”
• “The basic fallacy in science I think is the idea that we can invent (of course science fiction is based on this) the idea that we can invent anything we imagine… and having invented it, we must use it.”
• “Now this is the Western fallacy. Of course we frown on [the East] because they achieve… their ignition, by methods that we can see are hogwash. […] Hell man you go back to the slitting the neck of the chicken and watching which way the blood spurts – you see what I’m saying by ignition? This ignites a confidence that you can do it… you have to believe you can do it, and believing you can do it, the process is ignited by any one of a million methods, we’ve experimented with many, the direction the birds fly, or any of this.”

Dune Messiah:

“Truth suffers from too much analysis”

“Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.”

“There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.”

“They are not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”

“How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning!”

“A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation”

“No matter how exotic human civilisation becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.”

“There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.”

“If you need something to worship, then worship life – all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!”

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not…yet, I occurred.”

“The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ah, what gentle violence!”

“You do not beg the sun for mercy.”

1970

Frank Herbert: The Ecology of Survival – Ed Leimbacher Interview:

• “We haven’t learned to live with our world yet – just on it. We tend to act before thinking out the whole chain of consequences. That’s the real test of an ecologist – that he understands all the consequences.”
• “The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service were running a test station among the dunes on the Oregon Coast. This was back in the mid-Fifties. They were developing ways to control sand dunes, and the program was so successful that people from Israel, Algeria, Chile and other nations were all there to see how they did it.
• I went there to do a magazine article about the program – and in the course of the visit, I got this flaming idea in my head: what would it be like on an entire planet like the most severe of our deserts? What would go into the eco-systems on a planet like that?
• Concurrently I’d been thinking about the origins of messiah myths in our society and others. I saw that as a motif to run through this non-existent novel, because a good story is more about people than things.”
• “I presupposed a dialectic or a growth patterns, birth, death, regeneration – and I deliberately wanted that poignancy, of looking back on good times, in Dune Messiah you see, the whole Dune sequence is written in layers – it’s plotted in depth as well as in a linear direction. The action, the lyric poetry, the meta-physical, psychological and ecological, they’re all deliberately layered in.
• “I’m really a native of this [the Bay] area and I was missing it. There are things you can do here with a small expenditure of time that take a great expenditure down south. Up here I can be in the wilderness in an hour. In terms of relative degradation of the environment, Seattle’s getting there – but it’s as much better than San Francisco as San Francisco is than Los Angeles.”
• “I went to the University of Washington. I met my wife there at a writing class. But I dropped out of the U because it wouldn’t let me do what I wanted, which was to cross department lines. To hell with requirements. I didn’t want a degree – all I wanted was to pick and choose courses like in a cafeteria line.”
• “I’m damn hipped on this environment thing. I don’t think we should ignore the legislative approach but I don’t really believe we can solve it legally. I’d feel better if something like the churches were involved instead of some government agency – I try to get to those soft spots and apply leverage.”
• “Our ecologists say we’re only about twenty years away from irreversible effects on the environment. But it could happen a lot sooner than that. Wreck just one tanker carrying defoliants to Vietnam and you destroy seventy per cent of the bio-systems on the surface of the ocean – and most of our oxygen renewal depends on the oceans. If one jerk in the Pentagon can put the whole population of the earth in peril that means the government’s power is all askew – it clearly shouldn’t be in the hands of those who’ve demonstrated they keep making the same mistakes again and again.
• Or take those Rhine River time bombs of DDT. We’ve really got time bombs like that all around us – if one of them finally rusts through, we’ve got biological disaster.”
• “Underlying all these things is the idea that we can invent a [b]etter world. That could be a fiction…”

1971

Friends 23 Interview:

• “If a man is walking down a path – and he is made aware of the dangers in front of him… and made aware of something he can do to avoid that danger, to stop, or change his course – he will take the corrective measure.
• I want to make people aware because within that awareness they will see the dangers.”
• “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. 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 a balloon – you see, we enclose our knowledge in a sense, in a very real sense – now as we expand the 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 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.
• There is misunderstanding of power in our society. If one bull-dozer won’t do it, two will. If two battalions won’t do it, four will, and so on. It’s a nonsense thing, because if the issue is an issue of our ignorance, then no amount of battalions will do it. And Vietnam is a perfect exemplary demonstration of this. Our particular nation [the U.S.], which was founded in guerilla warfare and an understanding of some of the ways of using power, seems to have lost that by the wayside. Somewhere we dropped it.
  –
  When George said, “bring that little problem, that little American brushfire into order.” Look at how the news has been emphasised out of Vietnam. Body-count, for instance. There is a particular misunderstanding of the importance of body-count means that they are winning.
  –
  The administration has been very clever in cooling objections to its policies. They’ve been using Agnew as a bellwether. One of the first things they did was to separate the media from people who were following the media for opinion. By discrediting, you see. And with some validity, because the media have reacted to, rather than anticipating, what was going to happen.
  There’s a lot of fear going around, and I don’t know if it’s the administration. It’s part of a polarising process. Look, there are lots of ways to speak of the crises our world is facing now and I can see that a lot of the labels are applicable. We each have our own ways of how we look at them. My own is that I think it is a crisis of sanity. I am working for sanity on the basic of certain assumptions. The basic assumption is: together is sane – apart is insane. But the popular interpretation of insane is deviation from the normal or the usual.
  The norm is almost lemming-like going to its own destruction. And that is insane. So if it is demonstrably insane in an individual, then in a Gestalten sense, for a whole world to do it, why isn’t that insane? Isn’t that a crisis-induced question that someone is allowed to ask? So I say, apart is insane, together is sane. In fact, there’s a very interesting thing: this word together is cropping up in our idiom to mean sane, to mean balanced. Before, it was used idiomatically to mean ‘pull yourself together’.
  As far as Dune was concerned, I was working on a sanity level with these assumptions. I’m very strong on Jungian archetypes, in the sense that these are pretty universal from culture to culture. They have slightly variable manifestations, but you will find the monster in the deep, the golden youth, the riches guarded by the demon, you find the mandala, the divided circle….
  –
  I think that myth-making is a continuing process, we are caught by it. John and Jackie Kennedy are beautiful examples of the modern-day myth. John was caught up in his own myth and was killed by it. Look at it in the abstract. There was no doubt of the danger of doing what he did. He had plenty of warnings. Several people asked him not to go to Dallas because the political climate of that area was explosive [but he wrapped himself] in the myth of the brave young leader. Look at the parade of violence in the way we present our history. It is organised by wars; our major heroes are war heroes, and war itself is glorified. We are polarising in this world in very odd ways, partly a product of fear, partly the product of great many mistaken assumptions about the way the world is made.
  The power fallacy, which has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by our society, is contagious and the radical left has caught the disease badly. There’s a small axiom that we tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. The easiest way to interpret what their drives are is to blank out the rhetoric and watch what they’re doing. The radical left is extremely self-destructive. They’re on a kind of suicide trip. And one of the sure signs of this is if you try to bring it to their awareness they become enraged; and rage is a direct measure of the suppression of awareness. The radical left isn’t alone in this. We have developed a military police in this country. They come out of their fortress in armoured vehicles and they patrol the area of the enemy….”
  “We are time-bombed in our civilisation. This is part of the suppression of awareness. You know, if you extend your awareness out over a sufficient amount of time and space you will encompass your own death. 
  There’s a mortality fear which permeates our world. You can see the manifestations of it all around you. Look at the boulder yards that we call cemeteries which we scatter over a very usable landscape. Look at the attempts we made to create a non-bio-degradable human, a no-deposit, no-return human… It’s nonsense. Humans are eminently bio-degradable. The flesh is mortal. We ought to be planting our humans under woodlocks and orchards; if we want to, put a memorial cenotaph at the corner, with a brass plate for every occupation.
  We must get the biological material back into the cycle. I see it as a warm feeling towards the living which ought to permeate our society, rather than a fear, or an almost debasing worship of death. Many people through this contrictriveness of awareness, tend to very seldom be in contact with their own lives as part of the biological process. Look at all the attempts not to change, or to change only in limited ways. The dyed hair etcetera. How will a person change? Well, he might change his woman every so often, or she might change her man. There’s the attempt to recapture youth, the youth cult. Look at the way people live identified in their roles, because the role is immortal, and change – if you’re going to change, you’re going to die; if you don’t change you aren’t living.
  In the process of doing this, of running from this and hiding from it, many people hide in very solid, very hard cast roles. We have the administrator, we have the writer. I’m a human being who happens to write for a living and writes because he wants to. It’s what I do, but that’s not who I am.”

1973

Vertex Interview by Paul Turner:

• “I have a working title [for Children of Dune – Son of Dune], but I try not to talk about work in progress. My advice to any writer is not to use the energies of creation in talking about what he’s working on; put it into the typewriter. You use the same energies to talk about your work that you use to write it. So I’m very cagey on these things, very secretive, and I hold all this back and then when I sit down at the typewriter it sort of pours out.
• […] I think we all need special environments for various things we do. A writer needs time, uninterrupted time, with the tools of his trade: paper and a writing instrument of some kind. Jack Vance uses pencil or pen. I think he has a rather interesting technique. He uses various colored pens; he has a dish of them beside him. When he gets tired of blue he writes with green, or red, or orange, or black. I use a typewriter. I think that’s the newspaper training. I learned to type at about age fourteen and I touch-type. You train the thoughts to come out of the ends of your fingers in this particular mechanical way. I think you get a kinesthetic link right through the body. The thought comes into your head and goes right through your hands onto the paper, you see. So I need a place where I can sit down and not be interrupted for at least four hours a day, or six, and often much more.
• […] I don’t wait for inspiration. I just sit down and work at creating the thing that has interested me from the start. The three books of the Dune series still interest me very much because of the way these impulses form in the organism we call human society.
• […] The book is being changed by experience. A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You’re there now doing the thing on paper. You’re not killing the goose, you’re just producing an egg. So I don’t worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It’s a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I’ve heard about it. I’ve felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I’d much rather go fishing. for example. or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time and now I’ll write.” There’s no difference on paper between the two. […] you sit down [for example as a reporter] and you just have conditioned yourself to: now it’s writing time and you have a deadline sitting out there somewhere and you’re going to do the very best you can right here at this moment: and so You do It.”
• “We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, “Well, the only answer is….” or, “If you would just. . . .” Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don’t see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don’t think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. We may be contriving a strictly controlled police culture. B. F. Skinner worries the hell out of me. He is right out of Huxley. He is standing there like a small boy saying, “Please let me have a world like this because I feel safe in it!” He is saying, “I want to control it.” He may be very accurate in his assessment that our total society is going in that direction and that maybe he is opting for the lesser of numerous evils, in his view. But what kind of a society would that produce?”
• “I like to do cabinetry; I like to do things with my hands when I’m not writing. I feel that I’m getting as far away as I conveniently can from the activity of sitting at a typewriter and putting words on paper by doing these other things. It’s helpful to me; it’s a kind of a catharsis. I garden. I have six and a half acres in the Northeast corner of the Olympic peninsula in the state of Washington. I am in the process of developing what, I hope, will be a demonstration plot of land in which the demonstration will be that one can live a relatively high quality of life without an enormous, irreplaceable energy drain. I am going to do some hand work on the land. I shovel dirt and move rocks. I am in the process of creating a very small lake/pond/marsh combination by staggering the depth of it. I am going to plant wild rice and a new upland rice which has been developed for high altitude use in the Philippine Islands. I am not one of those people who believes in the “hot” gospel of ecology that man should keep his hands off the land. I believe that when he changes the land he ought to do it with an eye to the future, and with a little loving care so that when he has finished changing the land something is there that is more sustaining than what was there before. I will be able to plant trout in this pond and frogs and that sort of thing. It will attract birds that feed on the rice. That’s why I’m planting it there. I’m going to build a kind of meeting house there–a guest house for friends to come in and have seminars and that sort of thing so that we can rap and exchange ideas. I hope to build it out of stabilized adobe, which is a very fine insulating material. As I dig the adobe out of the ground it will provide me with a basement in this guest house. Some of the land we scoop back for this lake-cum-pond will also provide us with adobe. I felt I had to put my hands where my mouth was. I was going around speaking about these things and it’s one thing to say, “We ought to be doing,” and it’s another thing to just go ahead and do it and say, “Well, this is the way I think we ought to do it and here is the example. I wasn’t right about this aspect of it. I found that to do this particular thing my original approach had to be modified this way.” This is what we always find out when we get our hands dirty. The element of doing it always teaches us much more. That is one of the hangups of education.”
• “I was teaching a lecture course called Utopia/Dystopia, which was an examination of the myth of the better life; how we carry it in our heads. We don’t do anything without resorting to this myth: growing hair on our faces, our choice of friends, the clothing we wear, the kind of government we choose, who we say is the best leader, who we say is a bad leader. We don’t go into a voting booth without taking this myth with us.[…] I developed the course materials. It struck me that academe is far gone down this long road of “education can be done with power.””
• “I enjoy it [teaching classes at Washington State University]. I teach it on the basis of pass/fail. I have to grade for the system, but I give everybody an ‘A’. Grading intrudes on education. It’s quite obvious that we are an unique and different species. That being a sexually reproduced species , we are not all equal. Not in our abilities, our desires, or anything else. Each of us is one-of-a-kind. This happens in a class too. There are people with certain capabilities in one direction which, if you developed a measuring system in that direction, you could say are better than others; but this effectively blocks what you can learn from everyone in the class. Class ought to be a place where teachers learn too. I have what I think is a very effective way of measuring whether people are getting anything that I have to give in a class situation, and that’s whether I’m getting anything from them. If I’m learning from them I know they’re learning from me. Now, I am not saying by this that we should immediately start medical students on a pass/fail system. Don’t read me wrong on this. We have developed a set of parameters for a certain thing. But, we ought to recognize what we’re doing, how we have developed those parameters, and how tightly we constrict them so that the end products are supposed to be stamped out the same. Really, this effectively stops development. Somewhere down the line, you have to have a man who can do something that others cannot do and can demonstrate this capability. He will say, “What I can do is this….””[…]”Here’s how I do it.” Now, obviously, this might not be the only way to do it for all time. It may not be the best way. We may develop far more effective ways of doing these things. But, under a power-oriented society, power adheres to people who have knowledge of how a thing works, no matter how temporary that “working” may be. [… power seldom goes away afterwards. […] Power tends to attract power, so that it effectively constricts avenues of development.
• […] Well [a way to widen the avenues of development would be], if you’re not to go to a completely chaotic society, with all the problems inherent in that, and that’s not the answer, then we need ways that test the most outrageous concepts. […] It was done under so-called “primitive” conditions by several avenues. The hermit could go out and do his thing. But we’re running out of hermit space. The man with an idea that if you cut sections off a log and put a limb through the middle of them and put a load on the limb–you could carry a heavier load, drag it anyway, roll it–that man could just go do it. But our total society has found that if you let the physicists, say, build their wheel and cut their logs–then the resultant product becomes something that is used in a power context and, eventually, maybe a war. Eventually, maybe the destruction of the total planet. In this respect, I’m not as much worried by atomic weapons as I am by the whole structure and how it uses the products which accumulate in it. Far more dangerous to world society, in terms of springing upon us from an unknown corner, is the ability of a chemist and a pharmacist working in a basement, say, in South Africa to produce a mutated disease that would spread like wildfire throughout the world. Very cheap….
• […] It’s very real, and a real potential in our world today.
• […] I see this very clearly, that all of these things are accumulating around us. There are developments in several fields. There’s no way to control these, no effective way to channel them and stop them in terms of present social directives, such as governments and social arbiters. There is no way, for example, to prevent the pharmacist or chemist from working in that basement in South Africa.
• […] I think we are going at it in the wrong direction. We’re thinking of controlling it rather than having a world society where people just don’t want to do that sort of thing, don’t want to destroy their fellows.
• “I would like to tell them [young people, and those who read my works] to be very careful about finding scapegoats. Technology is not a thing out there to be destroyed, thereby solving all our problems. How far back do we cut it? Do we go back to hand saws and hand axes? Which elements of the technology will we discard? I would say to let their imaginations run free. Go ahead, try to imagine things that would be fun and humorous and whatever, things that would be interesting to make. Do it with an eye to how many ripples these things will create and who those ripples may inundate. Eventually, you have to sing for your supper.”

Harper’s Magazine – “Listening to the Left Hand – the dangers of wishing for absolutes in a relativistic universe” by Frank Herbert:

When I was young and my world was dominated by indestructible adults, I learned an ancient way of thinking that is as dangerous as a rotten board in a stepladder. It told me that the only valuable things were those that I could hold unchanged: the love of a wise grandfather, the enticing mystery of the trail through our woodlot into the forest, the feeling of lake water on a hot summer day, the colors (ahh, those colors) when I opened my new pencil box on the first day of school…

But the grandfather died, a developer bulldozed the woodlot, loggers clear-cut the forest, the lake is polluted and posted against swimming, smog has deadened my ability to detect subtle odors, and pencil boxes aren’t what they used to be.

Neither am I.

There may be a quiet spot in my mind where nothing moves and the places of my childhood remain unchanged, but everything else moves and changes. There’s dangerous temptation in the nostalgic dream, in the expertise of yesteryear. The nameless animal that is all of us cannot live in places that no longer exist. I want to address myself to the survival of that nameless animal, looking back without regrets at even the best of what was and will never be again. We should salvage what we can, but even salvaging changes things.

The way of this change is called “process” and it requires that we be prepared to encounter a multiform reality. Line up three bowls in front of you. Put ice water in the one on the left, hot water in the one on the right, and lukewarm water in the middle one. Soak your left hand in the ice water and right hand in the hot water for about a minute, then plunge both hands into the bowl of lukewarm water. Your left hand will tell you the water of the middle bowl is warm, your right hand will report cold. A small experiment in relativity.

We live in a universe dominated by relativity and change, but our intellects keep demanding fixed absolutes. We make our most strident demands for absolutes that contain comforting reassurance. We will misread and/or misunderstand almost anything that challenges our favorite illusions.

It has been noted repeatedly that science students (presumably selected for open-mindedness) encounter a basic difficulty when learning to read X-ray plates. Almost universally, they demonstrate an inability to distinguish between what is shown on the plate and what they believe will be shown. They see things that are not there. The reaction can be linked directly to the preset with which they approach the viewing of a plate. When confronted with proof of the extent to which preconceptions influenced their judgment, they tend to react with surprise, anger, and rejection.

We are disposed to perceive things as they appear, filtering the appearance through our preconceptions and fitting it into the past forms (including all the outright mistakes, illusions, and myths of past forms). If we allow only the right hand’s message to get through, then “cold” is the absolute reality to which we cling. When our local reality has attached to it that other message: “This is the way out,” then we’re dealing with a form of “holy truth.” Cold becomes a way of life.

FALSE LIMITS

We must begin to see ourselves without the old illusions, whatever their character may be. The apparently sound step can drop us from the ladder when we least expect it. Herman Kahn’s opus on the year 2000 never mentioned environmental concerns. A Presidential committee appointed in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt to “plot our course” through 1952 had not a word about atomic energy, antibiotics, jet propulsion, or transistors. Such levels of perception are worse than inadequate; they impose deadly false limits. They beguile us with a promise that “we know what we’re doing.”

The man with broken bones stretched out beneath his ladder doesn’t need to look at the rotten step to know what he did wrong. He believed a system that had always worked before would work once more. He had never learned to question the mechanisms and limits imposed by his perceptions.

In questioning those mechanisms and limits on a larger scale we move into the arena dominated by the powerful impositions of genetic heritage and individual experience, the unique influenced by the unique. Here is the conglomerate of behavior-biology, the two so entangled they cannot be separated if we hope to understand their interlocked system. Here is “process.”

You and I, while we strive for a one-system view of this process, are at the same time influenced by it and influence it. We peer myopically at it through the screens of “consensus reality,” which is a summation of the most popular beliefs of our time. Out of habit/illusion/conservatism, we grapple for something that changes as we touch it.

Must we stop the river’s motion to understand riverness? Can you understand riverness if you are a particle in its currents? Try this:

Think of our human world as a single organism. This organism has characteristics of a person: internal reaction systems, personality (admittedly fragmented), fixed conceptualizations, regular communication lines (analogue nerves), guidance systems, and other apparatus unique to an individual. You and I are no more than cells of that organism, solitary cells that often act in disturbing concert for reasons not readily apparent.

Against such a background, much of the total species-organism’s behavior may be better understood if we postulate collective aberrations of human consciousness. If the human species can be represented as one organism, maybe we would understand ourselves better if we recognized that the species-organism (all of us) can be neurotic or even psychotic.

It’s not that all of us are mad (one plus one plus one, etc.) but that all-of-us-together can be mad. We may even operate out of something like a species ego. We tend to react together with a remarkable degree of similarity across boundaries that are real only to individual cells, but remain transparent to the species. We tend to go psychotic together.

Touch one part and all respond.

The totality can learn.

This implies a nonverbal chemistry of species-wide communication whose workings remain largely unknown. It implies that much of our collective behavior may be preplanned for us in the form of mechanisms that override consciousness. Remember that we’re looking for patterns. The wild sexuality of combat troops has been remarked by observers throughout recorded history and has usually been passed off as a kind of boys-will-be-boys variation on the male mystique. Not until this century have we begun to question that item of consensus reality (read The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare by N.I.M. Walter). One of the themes of my own science fiction novel, Dune, is war as a collective orgasm. The idea is coming under discussion in erudite journals such as The General Systems Yearbook.

Assume this concept then. In it, the giant species-organism is perpetually involved with a moving surface of many influences where every generative encounter is felt as a change throughout the system. Some of the cells (we individuals) feel the changes with the brutal impact of a napalm explosion. To others, the transition from one condition to another comes at such a snail crawl that it’s barely noticed. But always the species, involved with its longer and larger career, responds to the changes at whatever pace conditions permit.

THE SPECIES-ORGANISM

Understanding that pace and its conditions requires a different approach to the total human system, that nameless animal of a species-organism. In this approach you no longer can listen only to the right hand that tells you “this is the cold way it has always been.” You listen as well to the left hand saying “warm-warm-warm.” Somewhere in between left and right you begin to get a glimmering view of things in process now. That glimmering offers the following observations:

* Something like pheromones (external hormones) interacting between members of the human species to weld groups into collective-action organs. (How does a mob unite and hold itself together?)

* Isolation cues that separate groups into identifiable substructures, a system possibly influenced by diet. (Aside from accent and mannerisms, how do members of the British upper class recognize each other?)

* Conflict igniters, possibly sophisticated abstractions of primitive postures and vocal signals. (How do you know that the man coming toward you is angry?)

* Glandular responses to changes in territorial circumstances, responses of remarkable similarity throughout large populations, but with a more complex substitution system than implied by most observers. (Why did most of the occupants of Chicago’s high-rise Lake Shore ghetto abandon it within three years, and what did that experience do to their life expectancy and subsequent behavior?)

In all of the above, you can expect a suppression of group and individual consciousness and an amplification of group conformity. But even if you answered each of these deductions to our present general satisfaction, you would only have begun the process of understanding. Expect that, too, to change.

In our culture, when you make this approach to process thinking, you immediately raise a conflict over whether we individuals (and the groups we form) are reacting on the basis of information. Classical theories of individualism and free will that underlie consensus reality in our society assume a lawless character for the species as a whole. (“Human nature will never change.”) Classical theory assumes that we are profoundly different from blind cells, that human individuals are informed, and that their reactions can be ascribed to a rational basis except in cases of accident and madness. To assume for the species as a whole a response pattern partly habituated (and thus unconscious by definition) threatens belief in reason, whose raw stuff (information) is assumed to be openly (consciously) available to all.

But television directors, politicians, the psychiatric profession, advertising/public relations firms, and sales directors are seeking out predetermined preferences to exploit mass biases. In a very real sense, we already are conducting conversations (communicating) with the species as an organism. For the most part, this communication is not directed at reason.

Process and the species-organism represent a complex mixture whose entire matrix can be twisted into new shapes by genius (Einstein) or madness (Hitler). The course of this process can be misread by an entire species despite wide evidence of disaster. To understand this matrix, consider the problems of rat control. We’ve learned that a quick-acting poison doesn’t work well in eliminating rat colonies. Grain treated with a fast poison tends to kill only one or two rats from a colony. Rats translate the message “grain-kill” without any need for verbalizing. We can, however, kill off entire colonies with a slow poison such as Warfarin. When one rat must go back to the grain seven or eight times before dying, other members of his colony tend not to make the lifesaving connection.

This gives you an idea of what limits may apply to a species’ time sense. The presence of a threat may be known, but its context can remain frustratingly diffuse. What is this strange new lethal disease attacking my fellows? It calls up an ancient scenario out of primitive times when our beliefs were geared to living in the presence of an outer darkness that pressed upon us with terrifying force, mysteriously and inescapably painful. How do you placate the angry spirits of the poisoned waters?

THE LINEAR HABIT

Many things complicate our ability to recognize threats to the species. Not the least of these many may be contained in the observation of Soren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

This Janus-faced view of life comes right out of the old linear swamp. It carries an attractive sense of reality, but it assumes that our affairs flow with an absolute linearity from way back there to somewhere wa-a-a-ay up front. This allows for no optical illusions in time, no compressions or expansions, and it ignores much of our latest computer hardware (ten billion years in a nanosecond) as well as other odd Einsteinian curves and spirals that intrude upon our consensus reality. It’s well to recognize the low probability that one lonely cause underlies any event that inflicts itself upon an entire species. Neither Hitler nor Einstein sprang from a spontaneous and singular generating event. Worldwide pollution has no singular origin.

Yet, the linear orientation of our perceptions (1, 2, 3…;A, B, C…;Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…;January, February, March…) makes it extremely difficult to break away from the belief that we occupy a universe where there are straightforward linked cause-and-effect events plus a few other odd events we call accidents. We are habituated to a noncircular, noninclusive way of interpreting a universe whose circularity and all-inclusiveness keep cropping up in the phenomena we investigate. Events of tomorrow do change our view of yesterday; an ancient Greek’s accident is our better-understood phenomenon. The linear habit remains, however. It dictates that we consign accidents to the unconscious. We keep loading the unconscious with events we do not understand. This burden inflicts itself upon our sense of reality.

Devotion to that linear consensus leads us inexorably into a confrontation with the mathematician who tells us: “We inevitably are led to prove any proposition in terms of unproven propositions.” He’s telling me that all of my pet beliefs inevitably go back to a moment where I am forced to say: “I believe this because I believe it.” Faith!

Mathematics and physics may yet drive the odd realities over the brink. For instance, we now can project complex models of human societies through analogue computers and within a few seconds get impressive readouts on the consequences of paper decisions projected for hundreds of years. This is, of course, subject to the omnipresent warning pasted over computers operated by cautious men of science. That warning reads: “Garbage in – garbage out.”

In engineering terms, we are looking for resultants– sums of social forces through which to examine our world. This often produces a more realistic approach than taking up the components one by one. Any auto mechanic know there are engine problems for which it’s better to make ten adjustments at once. Still, singularity as a belief confounds our attempts to “repair the system.”

Technological playthings distort and amplify our performances to the point where we may believe we are discovering futures that we invent in the present. This may be the most elemental reality we have ever encountered, but the distortions born of mating our unexamined desires to our technology have tangled future and present almost inextricably. Future/past/present–, they remain so interwoven deep in the species’ psyche that our day-to-day activities are often concealed from us. We put out our own Warfarin, unaware of lethal consequences and forgetful of where we have hidden it.

Few who examine our planetwide problems doubt that we live in a Warfarin world. The thrust of my argument is that we are not raising our awareness to the level demanded by the times, we are not making the connections between poisons and processes — to the despair of our species.

SUCCESS AS FAILURE

Planners often appear unwilling to believe that a history of success can produce the conditions for disaster. Rather, they believe that success measured in current terms is sufficient justification for any decisions about tomorrow. (To those who doubt that success can bring ruin to a community, look at the Boeing Corporation, a study of unusual poignancy in its demonstration of disaster brewed from success.)

You glimpse here a hidden dimension of powerful influences upon our survival. Here are the locked-up decisions predicated on capital investments and operating costs. Governments, large corporations, and service industries know they must build today according to long-range projections. Those projections tend to come from planners who know (unconsciously or otherwise) what the directors want to hear. Conversely, directors tend not to listen to disquieting projections. (Boeing’s directors were being told as far back as the early 1950’s that they had to diversify and that they should begin exploring the potential of rapid transit.)

Planning tends to fall into the absolutist traps I’ve indicated. Warm is better than cold, we’ll listen only to the left hand. The limits under which powerful private assessments of “the future” are made predict mistakes of gigantic lethal magnitude.

If we define futurism as exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes our first object of exploration. That nature lies within ourselves. Some who say they are talking about “a future” are only talking about their own limits. The dominant pattern in current planning betrays a system of thinking that does not want to abandon old assumptions and that keeps seeking a surprise-free future. But if we lock down the future in the present, we deny that such a future has become the present– and the present has always been inadequate for the future.

My explanation of this pattern goes partly — where we commonly believe meaning is found — in printed words (such as these), in the noise of a speaker, in the reader’s or listener’s awareness, or in some imaginary thought-land between these. We tend to forget that we human animals evolved in an ecosystem that has demanded constant improvisation from us. In all our systems and processes, including the human brain, our consciousness, and our thinking patterns. The virtuosity of our customary speaking tends to conceal from us how this behavior is dominated by improvisation. This non-awareness carries over into that “talking” with our universe by which we shape it and are shaped by it.

It dismays some people to think that we are in some kind of jam session with our universe and that our survival demands an ever-increasing virtuosity, an ever-improving mastery of our instruments. Whatever we may retain of logic and reason, however, points in that direction. It indicates that creation of human societies probably should become more of an art form than a plaything of science.

To plan for the future, to attempt to guide ourselves into “the better life” projected by our utopian dreams, we are involving ourselves with profound creative changes and influences. Many of these already are at their work unrecognized around us. Inevitably, we change our frames of reference, our consensus reality. It becomes increasingly apparent that today’s changes occur in a relativistic universe. It is demonstrably impossible in such a universe to test the reliability of one expert by requiring him to agree with another expert. This is a clear message from those physicists who demonstrate the most workable understanding or our universe-in-operation. After Einstein, they tell us: all inertial frames of reference are equivalent.

This is saying that there is no absolute frame of reference (local reality) within the systems we recognize, no way to be certain you have measured any absolutes. The very act of introducing the concept of absolute into a question precludes an answer with sensible meaning. (Which hand will you believe, the “cold” hand or the “warm” one?) It serves no purpose to ask whether absolutes exist. Such questions are constructed so as to have no answer in principle.

Accordingly, both Pakistan and India could be equally right and equally wrong. This applies also to Democrats and Republicans, to Left and Right, to Israel and the United Arab Republic, to Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics. Remember: “We inevitably are led to prove any proposition in terms of unproven propositions.” We do not like unproven propositions.

If we face up to this consciously, that might cut us away from everything we want to believe, from everything that comforts us in a universe of unknowns. We would be forced to the realization that the best logic we can construct for a finite system (which describes our condition at any selected moment) might not operate in an infinite system. No matter how tightly we construct our beautiful globes of local reality, no matter how many little Dutch boys we assemble to apply fingers to any holes that may appear, we still have built nothing more than a dike, impermanent and essentially fragile.

BREAKING PATTERNS

It would seem that a futurist concerned with our survival and our utopian dream needs to listen, to observe, and to develop expertise that fits the problems as they occur. But that is not the pattern that dominates human behavior today. Instead, we shape our interpretations of our problems to fit existing expertise. This existing expertise defends its local reality on the basis of past successes, not on the demands of our most recent observations.

The consequences of such an approach can be deadly far beyond the circle in which the planning decisions originate. And in the hierarchical arrangements of human societies it often is just one person who finally makes the profound choice for us all. The reasons behind such decisions can be perfectly justified by the contexts within which they are made. (Have I ever failed you before?)

In the universe thus described, we are destined forever to find ourselves shocked to awareness on paths that we do not recognize, in places where we do not want to be, in a universe that displays no concern over our distress and that may have no center capable of noticing us. God-as-an-absolute stays beyond any demands we can articulate. The old patterns of thinking, patched together out of primitive communications attempts, continue to hamstring us.

Play a game with me, then, and maybe you’ll understand what I am attempting to describe. Here’s a list of numbers arranged according to a logical order. The solution to that order embodies what I mean when I suggest we leap out of our conventional limits. The numbers: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 10, 3, 2.

As you consider how the way we approach a question limits our ability to answer, I’d like you to reflect upon a short paraphrase of Spinoza, changed only to read “species” where the original read “body.”

No man has yet determined what are the powers of the species; none has yet learned from experience what the species may perform by mere laws of nature (chemical, genetic or other) or what the species may do without rational determination. For nobody has known as yet the frame of the species so thoroughly as to explain all of its operations.

~1974

Question and Answer (probably at California State University between 1972 and 1976):

• “I was ever mindful of the Berlin Zoological Garden beaver. The Berlin Zoological Garden had European beaver in cages for about 150 years. These beaver had for 150 years, generation after generation, had known nothing but: god’s hands came into the cage and chose a male and a female and put them into a cage together and they… went and were, they had progeny and then god’s hand came back again and another cage and so on, and then a disturbance came along called World War II, and a bomb dropped, and some of these beaver were released into the countryside, and my god they began building dams. After a hundred and fifty years of cage existence they began building dams. So, I asked myself the obvious question – what do humans do? What kind of dams do we build…?”
  –
  And I looked around myself, I looked at universities, and businesses.. and corporations… governments, and lo and behold… there they were – tribes, feudatories… hierarchical arrangements, the power over life and death. Now don’t kid yourself, when a business manager says ‘you’re fired’, he’s saying ‘go die a starvation you dummy… you’re consigned to the outer darkness’.”
• “You see all these, when you’re talking about something that has any of the, of the colour of science, um and you’re not speaking mathematics, you float the words, you float the language, and it bobs along on, on a lot of other associations which are in everybody’s minds, but everybody has a distinctly unique language, you all think we’re speaking English together right? We’re not, every one of you has a unique language, […] you have a unique experience with a language and it has coloured your reactions to it.”
• “How many of you have read a pig for the ancestors? ‘Pigs for the Ancestors’…? None of you? Oh my god you must read it, you must really read it. I’m sorry, [..] I’ve been pushed to my limits, and the name [of the author] has slipped in the last day or so, maybe I’ll think of it in a few minutes. But, it’s a story about New Guinea natives… who… have a perfect relationship with how many people their territory can support, and they have learned to read when to go to war, by how many pigs there are… and… when they go to war with a neighbouring tribe, well first they they have a big orgy of pig eating, they kill off most of the pigs and they sacrifice them and eat them in a ritual which is dedicated to the ancestors, that why they’re pigs for the ancestors. Then they go to war and… there are serious casualties in the war, among women and children. Now you stop and think about it, if a society is going to restore itself and… you have choices… of what do you need? A ratio of about ten women to one man right? Is that right? That would do it? And you could restore your numbers. If you’ve got the other ratio, it’s gonna take a while… to build the population back up isn’t it? Ten men to one woman, and that is the kind of thing, not those numbers, but that is the kind of thing that happens in the New Guinea wars. So there’s a delay factor built in… to… restoring the population, also you have to remember that the women are the one who tend the pigs and feed them, it’s a ritualised behaviour pattern, and they read when to go to war, when to cut back the population, slow the growth, by how many pigs there are. And it’s been estimated I think probably accurately because I’ve seen the data, that… they never get above about 50% of what the landscape will support. Now, we don’t have any pigs to watch… we watch our leaders… we are conditioned to trust our leaders. 
  –
  You know I think probably the worst thing that could happen to this world, is for us to get as a whole world, into a very tightly linked, that is economically, linguistically, governmentally – a world government. I think it 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, a little bunch over here, and this buffers us against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If a group gets wiped out over here… by a glacier, or a famine, or god knows what, then there’s a hole… and others come in and fill it… but the species goes on, and I think that we are operating on a species survival law, I think that’s what at the root of all this. And the individual you see is at the bottom of the heap in that, our society has turned this over, the individual is top, but you look at all the, the so called primitive societies, the individual’s down the bottom… and we have this myth that… our government, the control function of our society, works beautifully, don’t believe it, it doesn’t. I’ll give you… all kinds of examples – document them. Let’s just take one – 1971 we had a corn blight, right? Corn was just… almost wiped out, price went sky high, so the department of agriculture, because it can manipulate support and how much… land can be planted to a particular product, said well we will plant 25% more corn next year, and we’ll arrange the support programs accordingly. The following year there was no blight and it was a great corn year. It was a perfect year for growing corn, so.. we were just overwhelmed with corn, and the price just went way down, and 20% of the farmers who raised corn went bankrupt… before the government could react and adjust the programs. You see you have a control function here, what does it have in it? It has government, church, well church is kind of losing out lately but it’s still there, family, schools, that sort of thing, and it sits up in a little circle up here and it regulates what’s going on… down here where the large body of existence goes on, and there’s a line coming down which is a control function and there’s feedback going up. Well, a rule is passed, a law is passed or something is done up here in the control function it comes down into this, it sets up reverberations… and there’s a lag time in it, it’s slow, before something feeds back, up to the top, and they know really what’s going on. Bill Cooper, a friend of mine, who’s a pretty good scientist, has an analog he uses of this that I have adopted wholeheartedly – you probably all drive an automobile – okay you’re in an automobile and you have the steering wheel in your hands, you turn the steering wheel, but aha there’s a three minute delay between turning the steering wheel and the front wheels reacting [laughs]. How soon are you going to be in the ditch? Very quickly, very quickly. People wonder why I say the Soviet Union is in bad trouble… and they don’t even know it yet. It’s because they can drive their system fantastically faster than we can drive ours, we’re going to break down pretty soon, because we’ve been driving our system faster and faster and faster and faster, and payoff is jobs, and we’re breaking down right now. But.. for lots of reasons, the tighter linkages in their control feedback function, they’re much more monolithic than we are, they can drive their system faster, and they’re already starting to drive it at about the rate we were driving it in 1950. So we really didn’t get up to speed until about 1960. They’ll be up to speed… by… oh another… three years at the most, with greater and greater consumer demands, with greater and greater pressure, on energy, which over there as here is primarily fossil fuels, and they’re going to surpass us… fantastically, in the speed at which they drive that system… and that speed has a demand equivalent, it uses that fossil fuel. So the system, it’s, it’s like a car you see, it’s going along, it’s doing 50 miles an hour and getting 20 miles to the gallon, they get it up to 70, now they’re down to 17, they get it at 80, now they’re down to 14, they get it up to 150 and now they’re down to 6 miles to the gallon huh? or maybe 3 or 4. Well when the get it going very fast, it’s going to go whoosh and the gas is going to be gone you see, the tank is going to be empty, and unless they spot this, and see the trap into which they’re falling – they just continue speeding up the system as they are doing now, they’re in bad trouble… But we are going to break down. We’re lucky in this country, we’re very very fortunate. We have surpluses that we can still operate on. The nation of India, right now, cannot… change from a sickle economy to the harvesting of grain, to a scythe economy, because they cannot afford the fifteen or sixteen cups of grain that they lose if they, per hectare, if they shift from sickle to scythe, they are that close to what the system is demanding. We’re a long ways, we have big buffer areas yet, that we can deal with, but you’re going to see 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. So here are a few things like people in Santa Ana trading their homes to people in Burbank because the guy in Burbank works in Santa Ana and the guy in Santa Ana works in Burbank, they switch, home for home, and you’re going to see people going much closer to their – where they work. You’re going to see a shift to much more labour intensive activity, bicycles, depend on it, you’re going to see it. This is obvious because, I’ll give you a clue to the future, you’re going to see $20 a barrel oil, in five years… and because of the inflation pressure, and the other… stop-gaps in… pressure to keep us from running out of fuel too quickly, you’re going to see gasoline selling for upwards of $4 a gallon. …Now you translate that into your present commuting problem and you see immediately we have to do something.”
• “Let’s look at what we know happens to an animal population under stress, it happens to trees, plants, all life forms… famine is a stress… birth rate goes skyrocketing up. Right? Okay, then what if we react out of our guilt because we have been… the consumers of all time, and we start shipping.. boat loads of grain… […] What happens? The population just goes whoosh up, and we are not solving the problem, we’re just pushing it farther downstream, where it will be much worse. Do you, do you see what I’m saying? This is why you see people like Garrett Hardin speaking in terms of lifeboat philosophy and triage. Really. I think that the kindest thing we can do, in the long term is make a very brutal decision, a decision which appears at the moment very brutal, but it’s the kindest thing that we can do in the long term, is not to the feed the fire… not send the ships, of grain. See it’s a problem in this country, not in that country, because we will only exacerbate the problem. Then what we should do is work for an exportable… restorable… energy technology which will help the survivors, come to more than a subsistence level of existence. You see what I’m saying? Where we’ve made all kinds of just egregious errors because we’ve transported- we’ve translated our economy.. into what we thought were the terms of another economy, and… just completely upset those economies, upset the whole society. You’ve all heard of the Green Revolution? I recently did a documentary film and I travelled in many places in the world, where we had exported the Green Revolution and I’m here to tell you that the Green Revolution is a disaster, it is a real disaster, in quite a number of places. Let’s take Pakistan as a good example. What happened? We took no consideration of the way that land holdings are held there, so there were many many large land holdings in Pakistan. We exported a way of getting a magnificent return on the existing land, and we will forget of the moment that to do this you have to put outside inputs, you have to put ah um fertilisers in, and we will forget, forget for the moment that we’re using a hybrid… rice and wheat, the IR8… that has a very narrow spectrum of survival, see the natural grains have a wide spectrum of survival, they can survive wide swings of climate and rain and what not, but the IR8 cannot, so what did we do? We handed… a few large landowners… a bonus, they got a lot of money. How were they managing their land before? They were managing them with sharecroppers. So the landowners with a lot of money, turned around and invested that in equipment – tractors, […], gang ploughs, what not, and… […] six out of seven of their existing sharecroppers were just booted off the land and were shoved into the cities, more than 100 thousand families, […] were shoved into the cities in Pakistan where there were no facilities whatsoever to take care of them – just go starve. What Pakistan needed was a labour intensive push, something that made it more profitable to put a lot more people to work, doing whatever they did. They didn’t need machines, they didn’t need our technology… they needed something else entirely. We exported the wrong thing. And this is pretty much the picture of what we have done in trying to export our technology. We have to become much more sophisticated about what we do in so-called underdeveloped nations… instead of making these jackass moves that we’ve been doing.

1974

Science Fiction and a World in Crisis (in Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow):

• “Santaroga [in The Santaroga Barrier] is dangerously stable, poised always on the edge of destructive crisis. Its people seem happy but without individual vitality. They are not enslaved by technological innovation, but neither are they much concerned about creativity and personal development… They also remain self-suspended in time. They have chosen a rather static “good life” to escape the dilemma that Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock details.”

1975

Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction – Sandworms and Saviours – A Conversation with Frank Herbert Author of Dune:

• “It [The Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure] grew out of what I saw was happening to our use of fossil fuels. You see, I wrote my first ecological article about shortages of oil and that sort of thing in 1952. […] A little bit [ahead of the game]- 20 years of more. But it’s interesting to me to note that all the writing I did, including Dragon in the Sea, didn’t do one fraction as much to tell people what the hell was going on as the past six months of living with the shortage. Then you learn it; you’re living it.”
• […] That was a factor [the Cold War]. I believe there are cyclic functions to this kind of international collision. We’re in a process of softening of this kind of international fiction. But I think that we’ll go back into a hardening period later. And then, with any luck at all, we’ll have another softening period. 
• There are just certain kinds of paranoia that function on an international scale – sometimes for good reason. You know, there are people who say: “Let[‘s] go get our neighbours!” This is why I get upset with people who want to go thru a complete unilateral disarmament.
• […] Oh, I think that if we could get that [the World Without War Council] going internationally, that would be one of the best de-fusing processes that could be developed, because it would go right to the root of the things which feed this paranoia. Yousee, people are then talking to each other, and if you’re really neighbors and are helping each other- for example, one of the best things that could happen to this world is for the Soviet Union to become completely dependent on our wheat, and us to become completely dependent on their natural gas. 
• Anything that gets the dialogue out of those characteristics which feed the paranoia and get down to really physical things, where we’re interdependent and have to realize it, is a good thing. We are interdependent anyway, but you have to prove it to people. We’re a colony of boll weevils living in a jar of corn, and there are limits.”
• “[…] still very much interested in ecological matters, I had gone to Florence, Oregon, where the U.S. Department of Agriculture had what was probably the world’s pilot project on the control of dunes. We solved it: how you hold a dune, keep it from covering a house or a road or a forest. And all of the primary work was done down there. Israel, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, India, Chile, all sent people here to learn from us how we did it.
• [Why Oregon] because there were huge sand dunes on the coast down there, with a small town, Florence which would support the staff. Everything was conducive to this kind of pilot project – learning what kind of things would grow in snd, where you planted ‘em, how they held the sand against the wind. You see, sand is just a slow-motion wave when you’ve got enough wind, when it’s loose enough and you’ve got enough wind to move it.
• [They can be as large as] some of ‘em 80, 90 feet tall. But USDA learned how to solidify them there with growth and make wind-breaks out of ‘em, which is essentially one of the first stopping actions which you can engage in to hold an area against the encroachments of desert sand.”
• “Lots of people think that climatic changes bring about deserts, but that’s not the primary cause. There’s more rainfall in the Negev right now than there was in the days of Solomon when it was a lush growing area. No, man made that desert. Man and camels and goats.
• Goats are desert makers. When we were in Pakistan a few years ago, we did a kind of head count on the national census of goats and how they let the ghosts run free in the countryside. They’re browsing animals, you know. We figured that the goats in Pakistan at that time were making desert at the rate of about ten million acres every eight years.
• [The solution is] Not so much that [of stamping out goats] as to stamp out the practice of letting them run free, not keeping them corralled or bridled in some way so they won’t eat out the trees. I’ve watched them climb a tree and girdle it.” 
• “I think that the feudal structure is a recurrent theme in human societies. We have a lot of feudatories around us right now. You look at a corporation – it’s set up as a feudatory. Look at a government bureaucracy or any single bureau, it’s set up the same. It has to do with the chain of command and how it applies. Maybe it goes back to our trial origins; I suspect it does.”
• “Be very careful when talking about cause and effect. I think there’s more of a Taoist flavour in my approach to it. There is this kind of background to the messianic prophet: there are conditions which a large segment of the population defines as either intolerable or borderline intolerable. They can be physical conditions of the surroundings – drought, the sort of thing – or they can be, as they are more often the imposition of tyranny. There is a background of questioning philosophy – that is, the kind of questions that goes to such questions as: Why am I here? Which may be a nonsense question [Laughs] […] It’s asked over and over and over! Maybe what we should be asking is: How?
• You get these inputs into the society. And then you get a thing which we call prescience, which may be an accumulation of petit[e]s perceptions, of small bits of data which a person assembles unconsciously, coming to what he interprets as intuitive understanding of the condition he’s in. However it happens, the person involved sees the future of the course that his society is on, that he is on, pretty clearly. 
• I saw, for example, in ‘52 that we were going to come to a crunch with fossil fuels. It didn’t do any good to see it. I mean, I could be John crying in the Wilderness, for all the good it did. I don’t classify myself as a prophet, but I use this as an example of one of the functions that a writer can fulfil in today’s society which used to be filled by prophets and messiahs. “You keep that up, boy, and you’re going to come to a bad end!’ [Laughs].
• And the other thing is that the person then goes out and starts telling people about this – there is a ministry. Gautama did it, Jesus did it, Mohammed did it.”
• “[The movie rights to Dune had been optioned by] APJAC is Arthur P. Jacobs […] who is no longer alive, but his Corporation lives on. You see, that’s the key to immortality: Don’t be human, be a corporation. […] You know Harlan Ellison’s famous definition of the monster movie? “The Tapioca Pudding That Had Intercourse with Cleveland”?”
• “You know, the indiscriminate spraying of the poison called Sevin in Eastern Washington damn near wiped out the fruit farmers over the, and the orchards – because it wiped out the bees.
• […] American agriculture has not awakened to the fact that what you do is, you build a supportive ecological system out of which you take your share – which can be the lion’s share, an enormous share. But in the process you support more humans as well as more other kinds of life. We’re still at the “Oooh, that’s a dirty bug” stage.”
• “Both Bev [my wife] and I are natives [of the Northwest U.S. Coast], and I figure that this is one of the few areas that can still be ecologically managed – converted to a balanced system. There are other areas in the world, of course, but this is the one I know. So I came back to do what I could about it.”
• “I think it is possible to go at the fulcrum points within the system and change those, redirect things that way. I don’t necessarily believe that we will do this, but that it’s possible. And that’s a better chance than gun and bomb. 

1976

Children of Dune:

“Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

“The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.”

“To exist is to stand out, away from the background. You aren’t thinking or really existing unless you’re willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.”

“To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.”

“Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life’s all about. We’re a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can’t you hear Muad’Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that’s only death disguised! Such a future becomes now!”

“Nature’s beauteous form
Contains a lovely essence
Called by some – decay.
By this lovely presence
New life finds its way.
Tears shed silently
Are but water of the soul:
They bring new life
To the pain of being –
A separation from that seeing
Which death makes Whole.”

“Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nitpicking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; ‘he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?”

“The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”

“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.”

“If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.”

“All you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?”

“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.”

“If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear. I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.”

“One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”

“The Universe is God’s. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified. Transient life, even that self-aware and reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any portion of the wholeness.”

“If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.”

“Men must want to do things out of their innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness – they cannot work and their civilization collapses.”

“Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climate provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and occasionally may observe such things as ‘This is a colder year than I’ve ever known.’ Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They must learn climate.”

“To know a thing well, know its limits; Only when pushed beyond its tolerance will its true nature be seen.”

“The child who refuses to travel in the father’s harness, this is the symbol of man’s most unique capability. I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father’s rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.”

“Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.”

“One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.”

“The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”

People Magazine Interview:

• “You have to stay right up on the edge of what is going on in math, psychology and biophysics – all the hard sciences”
• “That [the Florence, Oregon dune experiments] got me thinking about what we knew about planets and growing things, technology, and how we inflict ourselves on the planet earth.”
• “[On doing your own self-sustaining food production] It’s not so much a back-to-the-land concept as it is a back-to-the-use-of-your-own hands. It’s nice, feeling the earth – like Atlas.”

1977

MacKenzie Interview:

• “What’s the difference how you say it? Pronunciation changes. Language is a very volatile subject. Spoken language, yes. Written language, not as much. But written language also changes. But the spoken language, my god. Accent, variations on pronunciation – a very volatile thing. So what’s the difference how you pronounce it? The only thing I go by is I pronounce a man’s name the way he pronounces it. I figure he should know. [laughs] Atreides is Atreus – the family Atreus out of Greek mythology. [Pronunciation]… That’s missing the point.”
• “I think the only way you can deal with a mixed-up time sense which our society has, and a mixed-up sense of how the universe works… – our society today is absolutes. They’re an odd list of figures – … is to balance. You’re a surfboard driver. You’re always hanging ten. That’s the attitude you’ve got. The real question is how you deal with integrating a past with the now, so that you won’t repeat the errors. [Interviewer cites the popular concept of linear time.] Of course, you’re thinking in linear sense. You’re caught by linear time. (laughs) Time is a river… (laughs) nonsense!”
• “[Regarding present developments on Herbert’s estate:] We put together a development of evolution concept which looks like it was just moved here. And we’re moving along with it. 
• The hang-up that our society has is that our society’s full of people who are light-switch conditioned. Flip the switch and there it is. And the world doesn’t work that way; the universe doesn’t work that way. Our universe works on the basis of seasons and evolution – that is, you may start out to make up one thing, but conditions change, so you develop another.
• But we’re within our boundaries with the development. We just put a double-use house over the pool. The whole pool concept here is for multiple use. Where you see carpentry, they’re solar collectors. There’ll be solar collectors on both sides. I intend to use the pool water – 30,000 gallons – as heat storage to heat the greenhouse at night. We’ll overheat the pool during the day – we generally swim in the mornings – we can draw 20 degrees from 30,000 gallons at night to heat the greenhouse, with a little radiator and small pumps. We’ll even have an alternative of a small windmill to run the pumps.
• I have a plan downstream within the next five years of putting a computer in that little side room in there and running this house off a computer. That is, with sensors at every heat outlet for the furnace. Controlling every vent from the computer, among other things. We’re going to put a chimney up that corner of the sunroof with a big Fisher stove downstairs with a shroud over it, and we will put a duct down the furnace. We’re going to put a rather strong fan down in the duct at the bottom because fans work better pulling than pushing it. And we’re going to put another higher-pressure fan in the furnace system. It wasn’t so new a furnace when we got it.
• We’ve cut the use of oil fuel in this house by a third. What we’re going to do is monitor not only the big Fisher stove – the wood-burning stove downstairs – but the furnace itself and all the vents with a computer. Computers are beautiful for idiot work, you know – just sit there and listen for trouble.
• I know a lot of buildings where they do this. We’ll cut our fuel consumption here by at last another 50 percent of what it’s been. But our aim is to produce something that has a very high quality of life but a relatively low drain on the … energy system.
• I’m not aiming just as you, [the interviewer]. I’m aiming at people who make crunch decisions. And I don’t want to say something to you that I can’t demonstrate. I’m not completely sure about all the things we’re going to do. For example, we did a little experimenting with methane. Methane’s all right for littler stuff, if you have a cheap way of compressing it. You see, you have multiple energy demands to balance. We drive a diesel automobile. It’s an expensive investment, but it’s actually the cheapest car I’ve ever owned. I could sell it right now for more than we paid for it.
• It [Mercedes Benz] has the lowest record of maintenance costs in the world. It’s the most economical to maintain of any car in the world. The diesel fuel takes approximately one third the energy to produce that gasoline does. You’d have to get around 90 miles to the gallon of gasoline to match me in the … fuel energy demands. The car will run 400,000 miles and we’ll have to replace it at that time.
• We’re having trouble getting a manufacturer in the United States to pick up on our windmill device. A buddy of mine [John Ottenheimer] and I sat down two years ago and decided we were going to completely redesign the windmill. So we threw out everything we knew about windmills – “We don’t know anything about windmills.” – and we asked ourselves, “What do we know about air movement?”
• I’m a pilot and I moved right into aerodynamics immediately. He and I built an initial model that got torn down – for the parts, I needed the bearings. We improved that and built another one. We made another model to test a new concept we had involved a way to build a port bottle. But in order to do that, we have a quantum leap in the use of wind for power. No doubt of it at all.
• We have a mill that starts producing – well, depending on how you build it – it starts producing useable power at a five-knot wind. But, very important, we’d still be using it, at full draw, at a 50-knot wind. Other windmills feathered out or were torn apart, but ours was still producing power.
• We’re having a great deal of difficulty getting a manufacturer in this country to go for it, to the point where we’re just about ready to go to Japan.
• Japan is desperate for energy. We’re about ready to go over there and say, “We can’t get anybody in the United States to do this. Here it is.” I don’t want to make a million bucks off it. I don’t even necessarily want to get wealthy. I just want it produced because I know we need it.
• I don’t believe in fission power for the generation of electricity – not for the usual reasons. I would love to build a fission power plant for the generation of electricity. I know we have to find the energy somewhere. I say fission rather than fusion because I’m not sure about that either, but that’s a different bag.
• Breeder reactors are an act of desperation which are only going to cause us enormous trouble – ENORMOUS trouble. We are condemning our great-great-great-GREAT-grandchildren, many times down, to cursing us. If this society goes ahead with breeder reactors, our descendants will rewrite the history books to erase names. They will plow up our cemeteries to use the bones to make their china.
• [On what’s wrong with breeder reactors] They’re targets. We’re going into a period of enormous social unrest worldwide. Right now, one person, one kamikaze – I say we’re going into the time of the kamikaze. As yet we don’t have a means of preventing a kamikaze from hitting his target; we can’t even prevent a kamikaze from hitting a president.
• Right now, one man with a light airplane loaded with explosives could make the entire downriver of the Columbia (River, major waterway separating Washington state from Oregon) uninhabitable – from Hanford over here.
• The thing that really gets me is not that we’re going ahead with breeder reactors, but that we don’t have anti-aircraft facilities and radar facilities around all of our existing atomic plants. We don’t have such defense systems around. It is absolute stupidity.
• When you say that you have guards and protection systems around these plants, there’s an assumption in that, that historically has never been accurate. This is, that all your guards and your protective people – the operative word, ABSOLUTELY – are trustworthy. That they will never go psychotic or anything like that. You’re saying all of these things – like, “We don’t have that kind of protective system.”
• Even then, who did the programming? Who did the software? [laughs] What is your janitor like?
• What we’re doing is committing ourselves to building a system where we need absolute protection. And we have no absolute protection. The consequences of not having that absolute protection. The consequences of not having that absolute protection [are worse] than if we just let it all go to hell and got by without the energy. Go back to burning wood, coal and all kinds of nasty things.
• Weyerhaeuser [a huge wood-processing corporation headquartered in Washington State], for example, developed a marvelous, relatively low-cost system for converting an attic in a city house into a greenhouse, a thermopane greenhouse. A thermopane greenhouse in the attic of a house has some really nice pluses about it. One is, lots of times, even this time [of year] you have excess heat – a little fan will just draw it down into the rest of the house. Number two, you can grow your own winter vegetables and such. So you cut down on the trucking transportation coming in.
• I’ll tell you the other thing about why we’re going to atomic fission. We’re being lied to on the basis of the reason we’re getting them [the nuclear plants]. Great, big, Hitler-type, gigantic lies. The real reason is that you have a fixed market, people who won’t use it. Under those circumstances, the higher the capitalization, the greater the profits. So the choice is being made for high capitalization ways of doing this.
• Take an alternative example, this windmill that we developed – there’s marvelous resource along the ridges watering the Columbia River. Because our mill has high-torque at zero revolutions, it beautifully lends itself to pumping water. We could take downstream water from the Columbia and pump it with wind power back up existing dams and use the existing hydroelectric system to a greater maximum output with this simple windmill that we designed.
• The thing can be built gigantic. We could build them as high as the World Trade Center in New York if we wanted to. Oh, yes. A hundred-story high windmill would be nothing to our model. We could have it in operation in five years. So we could beat the demand [for electricity]. I don’t see anybody is going to go for it], given the capitalization system that we have for production of energy. I don’t know that anybody would want to use this.
• A man in Minnesota who developed a way to cut the use of natural gas for home heating approximately 25 percent in all the houses using it, has been five years trying to get it on the market. It’s a simple damper system. You see, regulatory agencies tend to be taken over by the industries they’re going to regulate. So a very cheap, a very simple damper system that would reduce the natural gas consumption 20 to 25 percent nationwide (and it’s easy to install; a home mechanic could put the damn thing in). He’s been five years trying to get a license. Two major cities in the United States – Mobile [Alabama] and Detroit [Michigan] – tested it and found it a beautiful operating system. It works. It does what he said it would do.
• There seems to be a tendency by special interests in the United States to suppress new, workable technologies.
• This is why we’ll probably have to go to Japan [with the windmill design].
• The thing the consumer public in the United States has failed to recognize is that the interlocking directorates of oil corporations, steel corporations and automobile manufacturers talk to each other. [laughs] What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the country. It might be, but not necessarily.
• I wish General Motors would make a car that I could use. I have a Mercedes 300 diesel. We get 25 miles to the gallon in town and 30 on the road.”
• The problem with propane and methane and the other natural gases is the energy used to compress them. Where methane really shines is in a stationary condition. Let’s say you have an internal combustion engine to run an electric generator. Methane is an ideal fuel for that if you have it available. You can take the coolant from your engine, from the internal combustion engine, and pipe it through your methane generator. It just so happens that this coolant is at an optimum temperature for gas engines. It’s at an optimum temperature for getting the most methane gas production out of your methane engine. So you have a symbiotic relationship between the engine and the methane production.
• You’re sitting in one place; you don’t need to compress it – you can use relatively low compression factors for storage of the fuel (times ten pounds). It’s ideal for cities, for example. It’d be a great way to go. Alcohol may be a better way, I don’t know. It depends on the group.”
• “[On what lies ahead] We’re going to have a lot of violence and upset. It’s no simple, one thing. One of the things that’s involved is the information explosion. Computers are going to have more influence on the society that involves this world for the next 35 years, very likely, than fire did. Computers are going to make an enormous difference.
• I’ll go WAY out on a limb. I think you’re going to see biological linkage between human and computer. The computer is going to enter all phases of life, including what we generally feel is our individual freedom. The minute you can make a simulation model of a segment of society, then it’s predictable that you’re going to be able to refine that down to smaller and smaller bits. So you’re going to be able to tell eventually what… you’ll have uses. You see, this is not a totally bad thing. You’ll be able to tell what the energy demand of the city of Seattle will be. You’ll be able to tell the energy demand of the Mount Baker district. You’ll be able to tell what the energy demand of Pete MacKenzie [the interviewer] will be.
• But you will also be able to tell what you talk, how you can talk Pete MacKenzie [the interviewer] into buying “X”. What are his buttons, yes. Now, the other side of that coin is that, historically, whenever this has happened people have tended to grow calluses.
• They’re having trouble on television right now selling things on television commercials. […] [laughs] It’s one of the untold stories. That television commercials are becoming less and less effective. […] Well, [because] you get talked into buying something by the commercial. You try it, and it doesn’t perform the way they said it would. About the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh time that is, depending on your resistance factor… [laughs] […] TV isn’t all bad, oh no. […] Not necessarily. It doesn’t follow that because some [commercials] are bad, all are bad. It doesn’t follow that because many products are bad, all are bad either.
• […] I was about to bring up the fluoride thing. Human beings are engaged in a long-term, massive experiment, as I call it. We don’t know how long the effect of fluoride in these forms is on our systems. Obviously the middle-term use of fluorides doesn’t seem to cause any trouble at all. In fact, it’s helpful. It’s cutting down the number of cavities. What will be in the long term? Is there a genetic effect? Will there be a residual peaking of some kind of physical problem because of this? We don’t know yet.
• Generally [by the time those questions are answered, it’ll be too late], they have been for centuries. I’m working on a book that I’ll publish next year. It’s called “The Dosadi Experiment.” It concerns a massive psychological experiment on a large population without their informed consent. The implications are all around us. You see, you can do this in science fiction because you’re talking about another world, another people. It’s way over there. [laughs] The reality comes back later.
• This is an extremely interesting area to develop. A lot of people think science fiction is over, we’ve done everything. They remind me of the 1890 congressman who wanted to close up the patent office because we’ve invented everything. He really did. This is a true story.”
• “[Is there some way we can unshackle ourselves from the agreements we’ve made with the universe and function more as ourselves rather than as a recorder that just plays back?] Oh, I think we function. We’re more than playback. We’re more than playback because we have this other thing that’s never been really defined – and I hope never is – called consciousness. We can see ourselves. We can even see ourselves as others see us sometimes.
• We are products of this planet, in a sense, in a very real sense. We are conditioned by the planet. We live nine months in an amniotic ocean where our mother’s chemistry is conditioned by the rhythms of the planet. We’re animals who were conditioning to evolve on this planet.
• I’m not saying that [we’re not just bodies]. That is not an assumption of what I’m saying. But I’m saying this is a factor, a very important factor, in what I’m talking about. The chemistry of our mothers has a very important early influence. And the earliest influences tend to be the most important. … I don’t think there’s any doubt whatsoever about this. We live to the variations in the amniotic chemistry in our mothers for nine months.
• You can dig a clam off the ocean beach out here and move it to a saltwater aquarium in Chicago. For awhile, it continues to operate on the tidal rhythms of its origin. Then it gets onto the tidal rhythms of Chicago. It’ll come up where there’s a high tide in Chicago. So it’s measuring the movement of the moon and sun right now. A clam can sense it. We are, as I said one time, bivalves on the tide edge of the universe. We are.
• We didn’t come by the word lunacy by accident. In major cities, the full moon is when the police and fire departments are most alert, for lunacy. I did a small survey in San Francisco of bartenders. The bartenders to a man – and I got no deviation from this – had customers they only saw during the full moon. They’re full moon people.
• We vibrate to the rhythms of our planet, is what I’m saying. It’d be unusual if we didn’t.”
• “Julius [a friend] said something to me one time that really hit me. He said, “In Western culture, most of Western culture, it is considered effete, and somehow simple, to train the palate.” To educate the palate. [laughs] And that’s right, it is. We don’t do it. It’s economically dangerous, too. Because if you have an educated palate, you demand things from the food industry which the food industry is not willing to give. [laughs]”
• “I have this theory that heroes are bad for society, human society. And that superheroes are super bad. Some of the stuff that Kennedy did, for example, is just coming out. The problem with heroes and superheroes is that we don’t question their decisions.”
• “[Speaking of heroes and how he handles people’s reactions to his success] The role patterns are very fixed in our society. I taught at the University of Washington for awhile. And the first to two classes I had to shatter all of those illusions. Say “shit” four or five times, you know? And sometimes even worse. You really have to do things that break up the patterns.”

TV interview with WTTW’s John Callaway:

• “I’m curious, extremely curious, and I became an investigative reporter very early on, an investigative reporter who didn’t just react… I wanted to know, I wanted to dig, and… that’s a wonderful resource; you’re continually being educated.”
• “Oh no [I was] nothing like that [a scientific genius], I was a 4-H kid, who milked cows in the morning and night… who… did all kinds of odd things – like hoeing gardens.”
• “[My reading habits growing up were] very Catholic. I would follow a line of endeavour, a line of reading, a line of interest until I had, I felt I had exhausted it. I started working for newspapers when I was seventeen you know. I had a summer replacement job for people who were on vacation when I was seventeen on a daily newspaper. I was very lucky, I had a high school instructor who ran his high school journalism class the way a city desk is run so by the time I was seventeen I knew how to be a professional journalist.. and if you catch us young you know… train us early…”
• “Well… I’ve done many things, I have a very checkered career and I’ve looked for jobs that taught me things. I’ve been a speech writer and researcher for a United States Senator for example – that’s where I learned politics. I was a ghostwriter for S.I. Hayakawa, Sam Hayakawa, that’s where I learned semantics, one of the places I learned semantics,I already knew something about it. I was a newspaper writer for years… with a… investigative reporter’s nose. I’m a believer in the high energy life. I just say we have to shift from non-renewable energy to renewable energy, and we have to start taking the steps now, we really do have to start taking those steps now.”
• “This is what we’re looking at: the federal government says we have 40 years, approximately, of… fossil fuels. Now let’s say that their figure is accurate give or take 10 years. That is not a significant figure until you start looking at the depletion… until you start looking at what happens when you’re halfway there, what happens to the price of the remaining fossil fuel.”
• “We have the latitude to do enormous changes in this society. We have the energy resources to make these changes, however these are not simple changes I’m talking about, no they’re not really simple changes. We’re just gonna have to bite the bullet on some things and say this is going to cost us.”
• “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.”

1978

Vector 88 – an interview by David Wingrove:

• “[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. [A sort of formalised anarchy] In a way [..] A kind of ombudsman with clout.”
• “An alien intelligence, per se, has to have characteristics that don’t jive with what we believe is intelligence. 
• […] I think you can understand ‘alien’ the way the theologians have finally decided they will understand God. By negatives.”
• [The ConSentiency universe was designed to be] a quite diverse universe – one with complexities piled on complexities. One which absolutely demands of its participants that they adjust to each other or fall by the wayside.  […] That the stringencies of the interface between different civilisations, different alien cultures, demand new ways of adjusting. And, of course, I’m doing other things. I’m poking a little fun at over-legalising and, alternatively, over-beaurocracising our civilisation. I’m a devotee of C. Northcote Parkinson. Very much so [laughs]. A genius of a man. The marvellous thing – that day on that beach in Malaysia – when he suddenly saw through to the truth of bureaucracy: that they don’t perform a service, ultimately – that they become a parasite. 
• […] [Bureaucracy is] an organism which drains civilisation. It could be argued, and with a great deal of merit, that the Roman civilisation died of bureaucracy – as much as anything else.
• […] It’s a kind of disease. 
• a clean desk often means that the person is getting things done efficiently, which, in a bureaucracy, is a very dangerous way to live. 
• […] Bureaucracy eventually becomes a make-work process. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, but in the U.S. one person is actually producing something, that is, something marketable – is adding to the Gross National Product – to support two people who are, in some instances, supplying needed services and, in some instances, dragging their heels, you might say. 
• […] the services get poorer and poorer.”
• “There are lots of things that are money, that we don’t recognise as money. Wheat is money.”
• “A journalist, if he is alert and stays in the business long enough, becomes somewhat of a generalist. If you have an active curiosity and feed your curiosity. And I would say that just about half of the ideas that I play with – probably, I’m guessing – come from a journalistic background. Interviewing and story-searching that takes you down strange avenues, you see.
• […] I was a yellow journalist. I loved to turn over rocks and look at things scurry, because our society tends not to examine its sacrosanct assumptions and – for very good reasons, I think – wants to believe that people are what they say they are and that conditions are what they are presented as being. But it doesn’t take a child or a genius to see that sometimes the king is naked. 
• […] And I think it is a very necessary role in the society in the United States. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, but it is a safety valve, really. Here, in Britain, you have the monarchy to protect you from revolutionary change – which I think is a very good service. In the United States we have the fourth estate [laughs].
• “I think that Richard Nixon was created as much by the people who opposed him as by the people who supported him; people need their scape-goats and Richard Nixon never was successful in concealing what he was. We get the kinds of government we deserve, you know? In any republic or democracy this is true. Very true. 
• No, I look on Nixon as a very sad figure. He was a product of the culture which projected him, you see. I don’t think there was any day in history when Richard Nixon woke up, twirled his moustache and said “Ah-hah, today I’m going to do an evil thing”, (laughs) No, he did what he thought was right because that’s the way he’d learned to perform in a society which presented these things as right.
• […] I think there’s a bit of it [genuine evil] around. But I don’t think that Nixon was genuinely evil. I think that he behaved in the office more-or-less the way Kennedy behaved and Johnson behaved – and perhaps with a bit more moral rectitude than some of his predecessors. But, he had a fatal flaw. He was an unsympathetic character.
• […] he had no charisma. And that’s always fatal. It’s essentially a Greek tragedy, you see. He didn’t stand there beating his chest like Prometheus and say “But I just did what Kennedy did, you know, and Johnson, and Eisenhower..” And everybody says “Yes, but we don’t like you..” [laughs]. 
• […]But why should that [the sale of Richard Nixon t-shirts] surprise you? He’s a kind of pathetic figure. People are probably feeling shamefaced. They say “Well, our civilisation created him. Why did we make him the only one to wear the hair shirt? [laughs]
• […] We [in the U.S.] tend to bring them [scandals] out and analyse them and say “well, what did he really mean by that?” and “how did I participate in that?” and “perhaps I should discuss this with my psychiatrist?”
• […] I’m well aware of the currents of psycho-analysis in our culture, I was a student of Jung’s – not directly, but second hand; one of my Mentors was a student of Jung’s – and my feeling is that the unexamined assumptions are available to us through our actions – either individually or as a society. What the society does as a whole – if you ignore what it’s saying it’s doing. Don’t look at the rationalisations and protestations, look at what’s happening, look at what the ‘thing’ is doing. 
• […] look at the thing. [..] This is like throwing a searchlight on history. 
• […]  I think that [the historical process] its complexities are not all that easy to unravel, but they’re there. Oftentimes what you see is only the current at the top, boiling on the surface.
• […] I like to get underneath and look at it.. 
• […] ..I like to take things that everybody says “Well, you know that’s true because it’s true”. All assumptions that we have, when we ultimately come down to the point where we believe it because we believe it.”
• “[I like Hesse] And James. I’m a fan of the Irish poets – Yeats, Guy de Maupassant, Po[e], O. Henry. The incisive exposition of character. And I read a great deal of poetry, because poetry is compressed meaning. A great deal of effort goes into putting an enormous amount of stuff in a very small space. 
• […] I have been known to write portions of my work as poetry and then mine the poetry and restore it to prose. […] One of many [techniques I use].”
• “Power seeking power is a very strong motive in our society. Most of the politicians that I know are driven by this. It’s a flaw in all political systems – that the people who usually get into power want power for power’s sake. […] And this is the essential flaw of totalitarian governments. [Their ultimate downfall] and the saving grace of a democracy or a republic is that occasionally we can throw the bastards out. And get a new set of bastards [laughs].”
• “I think that the words ‘Human nature’ is a sort of catchall that doesn’t mean too much anymore. The sophistication of the people who observe their own participation in history and the way others perform is increasing. And that certainly must have its influence on whatever we believe is ‘human nature’. […] And computers are going to make a quantitative difference in this because they are storage and retrieval systems above all else. 
• […] I believe we’ve tried slavery and have found that it is more dangerous to the slave owner than it is to the slave. 
• […] I think [this lesson] it’s very deep-rooted, yes. I think there is a hardcore of very sane distrust in most of civilisation towards the free lunch. 
• […] I’d say since the Middle Ages. But perhaps it’s 12th to 14th century. Since that time. When you see factory workers revolting against the automated factory, I think you’re sensing this – not that this is going to stop the automated factory, because most factory workers, caught in the clutches of union hyperbole, are going down a primrose path, I believe , that is not going to pay them in the end. They are reducing the quality of what they produce. And this is where the automated factory can beat them. You see what I’m saying? If they let it beat them. 
• […] [The trend to go back to hand-made goods is] getting very strong in the U.S..
• […] [As a reaction] To the machine that makes a very nice product that will last quickly.. 
• […] And instead you can make one by hand that your great-grandchildren will be passing on to their descendants. We support that sort of thing, personally, my wife and I. We have had our furniture hand-made, for example, by cabinet makers. 
• […] 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.”
• “I keep looking for surprises. And I know I’ll find them. 
• […] because I think [having a model of what’s going to happen] that’s another dead end. There is no such thing as the future. That’s a protestant delusion because it says that predestination is it, you see. It’s the future and all we’re doing is waiting for it to happen.
• […] I would say, an advocate of the accidents of the universe. I really do believe that we live in an Einsteinian and Heisenbergian universe, where relativity is the name of the game. Not fixed courses. We are not on a railroad track.
• […] I think rules will change. You see, this is asking for absolutes when you say ’rules’.
• […] You must [continue to ask the question why]. I think that absolutes always occur in very isolated circumstances. The single rule to explain everything means you’re very localised. You haven’t moved out into a broader universe. And the same thing is true of what we usually call ’scientific progress’. When we discover something – the way an atom moves or the way the DNA molecule spirals round – what we’ve done essentially is open up a new door on things we don’t know.
• “The universe continually surprises us, in the sense that things are not what we thought they were a generation ago.”
• “[Alvin Toffler is] The voice crying in the wilderness. ‘Future Shock’, that is, […] Toffler, I think, has put his finger on a human characteristic which, at its core, we usually call ‘conservatism’. Now, ‘conservatism’ is bred in the bone – and I think for very good survival reasons. It didn’t do to go out and pick any fruit you saw in the forest and eat it because the damp thing might be poisonous. But somehow we learned that was poisonous, that not, this cures gastritis and this gives you visions of God [laughs].
• […] Or makes you drunk. We’ve done that with a sort of toe-in-the-water conservatism all through human history.
• […] [Sharp reactions to this – movements], I think, is the essence of what Toffler is talking about when he talks about ’future shock’.
• […] There always has been ’future shock’. Yet it moves, [laughs].”
• “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.”
• “I am continually surprised by people and their wonderful inter-actions and by the permutations of society – that sort of thing. I did an extensive journalistic trip through the commune movement in the U.S. and marvelled at it.”

1979

On The Tenth Of Apollo 11 – Frank Herbert:

“Measured against what is about to happen, the Apollo Modules are our horse-and-buggy in space – primitive, but a reality of our time which will open the door on a very different tomorrow. If you ask “Should we be in space?” you ask a nonsense question.

We are in space.

We will be in space.

Mankind will become a creature of space. 

About the only thing which could prevent this would be the total destruction of Earth, at present our only space platform. But our inexorable movement into space changes even that problem. The political reality of a humankind dispersed throughout the Solar System presents a far different picture from that which we face as I write this – all our eggs are in one basket. No politico-economic system now being practiced on Earth can evade awareness of that fact – not if the proponents of that politico-economic system wish their system to survive.

Which begs the question of communism versus capitalism.

Neither system will survive as we know it in space. Communism, which creates an all-powerful bureaucratic aristocracy, cannot survive without high walls around its population. There are no walls in space. Managed capitalism (which is really what we are talking about in the United States) cannot survive unless it controls the lines of energy and materials. No such controls are possible in space.

What we will see can be compared to what mankind faced on hostile frontiers throughout history: a kind of cooperation-by-necessity, an inescapable mutual interdependence for survival. You help your neighbour raise his barn because tomorrow you may need his help.

Our situation at present displays many similarities to conditions faced at the beginning of the Steam Age. The question and pronouncements of that historical period give you a sense of deja vu.

“If God had intended man to go sixty miles an hour…”

“The destruction of the family by these insensate machines cannot be tolerated!” (A Welsh minister in 1841.)

“The displacement of population brought about by these unholy devices are such no civilized people can permit.” (A speech in the British Commons, 1838.)

The real questions of those times were, as they are today, ones of politics and economics and of science and engineering. The questions of politics and economics are always addressed after the fact. Science and engineering go about their business much like a force of nature.

With hindsight, these are the things we know today about the Steam Age: Steam allowed us to do things we could not do before – such as pumping water from deep mines, milling hard metals and moving heavy objects rapidly over long distances or short ones.

Stream also raised enormous political and economic issues which have not yet been resolved because we moved from steam into other energies which did much the same things but with more sophistication,

Reading the history of those times you can see the currents of these times. Many new people rose to positions of great power. Old power centers either adapted to the new conditions or they dissolved. Tremendous leverage gravitated to those who could employ creative imagination to control the new knowledge.

The political issues inherent in this are obvious. The forces of conservatism (which in this sense really defines the status quo) will fight to maintain their present privileges – even if this means delaying our movement into space. In this arena of “pure-power politics” there is no escaping the fact that whoever controls space controls Earth. But the control of the space around Earth does not carry with it control of space beyond such a sphere. That is too simplistic a viewpoint. The movement outward will continue because it represents also a moment of escape from restrictions – no matter how you define restrictions.

What then can we predict about the aftermath of the Apollo Eleven landing and our other tentative outreachings into the airless void which surrounds our lonely space platform?

In the field of politics: (1) People will move beyond the immediate control of any central government just as they did in the westward migrations across the American plains, and the northwestward migrations of the Germanic tribes into what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. (2) Some of these migrations into space will never be brought back into a central fold. (3) Just as those Germanic tribes set a pattern for individual freedom and representative government which helped to shape the British (and thus the U.S.) system, the new migrations will once again re-form social and governmental structures.

In the field of economics (which can never be separated from politics): (1) New products will appear just because they can be manufactured only in the high vacuum of space. (2) Familiar products will be manufactured in space at less cost and higher quality because of available abundant energy and the vacuum. This is especially true in electronics, metallurgy, and precision milling of metals. (3) Cheaper energy in space will open enormous new areas for human habitation – although there still is some question whether electrical energy generated in space can be transmitted back to Earth without inacceptable damage to the planet’s atmospheric shielding.

In the fields of medicine and genetics: (1) Cheap cryogenic storage of whole people and “spare parts” will make profound changes in attitudes towards life and survival. (2) Many medicines will be manufactured more cheaply and be of higher quality in space because of easily available sterile conditions and isolation facilities. (3) Experiments with dangerous disease cultures will occur in safe isolation and, therefore, will become more common, leading to new achievements in disease control. (4) Exposure of human reproductive cells to the heavier radiation loads of space will ignite a much greater mutation rate – most of which will be lethal or sterile. But those who survei with improved space adaptation characteristics will insure a wide divergence from what we now consider to be the human norm. Our descendants in space may look nothing at all like Earthbound humans.

At this moment, there is really no such thing as a space industry in terms of what we can expect to see by the year 2000. As the economic advantages of this outward movement will become explosive. Then we will see a true space industry.

Finally, something should be said about pure science. There is no doubt that off-planet scientific observations will add enormously to our store of practical knowledge: every advance of pure science in the past has had this effect. We can only guess at some of the consequences.
But there will be new materials made possible because of what we learn in space. And a more sophisticated understanding of astronomy and other spacial relationships may generate new ways of moving humans and/or materials across the void.”

1980

Tape Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic:

• “Look the way we’re going, we’re investing – ‘investing’ that’s not really the word – in atomic energy for generation of electricity. I’m not against the technology of it, I’m against the human potential, mispotential of it. The real problem is we’re manufacturing targets, in a world society which is becoming increasingly unstable… Potentially this Hanford project over here, has the potential… of… making… billions of dollars of downstream property absolutely useless. One man in a small airplane loaded with homemade explosives could do that. Do we have barrage balloons around that outfit over there? Are we protecting it against this sort of thing? No, because the unimaginative quacks that operate these things… 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.”
• “Yeah and 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 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. 
• […] That was the real mistake. This is my basic objection to federal aid to education… even the state aid to education. I think education, the cost of it, everything, ought to be kept as close to home, and I mean that home in the traditional sense, as possible. Sure we’re going to make mistakes this way, but the basic… thrust of the society… the moral structure upon which the society… performs its other acts… will remain intact. Now we’ve broken it all up… 
• “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.”
• “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. […] 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.”
• “You don’t mind your friends and you don’t go with your friends because of their faults, you go with them in spite of their faults. This is a human, a very strong human characteristic, and a humanising thing.”
• “Number one this is going to surprise a lot of people but I do not believe in world government. 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 we’ve got to get off this planet, we have all our eggs, literally, in one basket… and [..] I have been addressing myself all along to our descendants. I feel… as though I am one of the few champions of our descendants, who – are alive in the world. I don’t hear many people addressing themselves to the ongoing thrust of humankind. We are a species which has the potential… of being immortal, the species has. I think what a marvelous idea that 100,000 years from now there would be descendants of ours who would be alive; enjoying their lives… because we had solved the survival problems of our time.
  –
  […] I feel that I am [addressing myself to our descendants]. We have to address ourselves to the various elements of this problem. 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. What I do claim is that if we can maintain our diversity… and harness the destructiveness in it… to get us off this planet, and scattered… we’ve done what I would hope to achieve…
  –
  […] Oh I think we have to come back and – like this – but I like to see the scattering, because that’s a protective thing. As far as a world government is concerned, 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 five minute delay, between when you turned the steering wheel and the front wheels responded. […] you’d be in the ditch right away, you know you would.
  –
  And this is the nature of government today, it’s one of the major problems of all governments, even a federal government such as we have. now the strong, so-called strong central government as a matter of fact we do not have a strong central government in the sense that I’m talking about. Our strength would be… in having the government much closer to home, 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. 
  –
  We’re likely to find that but we’re likely to find it in a much different way. We’re likely to go back to a kind of distorted and amplified Western six-gun world. We’re headed that way right now. If a single individual, or just say two individuals. A biochemist and a pharmacist let’s say, in Brazil, can put most of the world at hazard… with recombinant DNA, and that’s what’s available now…. 
  –
  Most people are worried about atomic war, that doesn’t worry me.. very much at all. Enough of us would survive an atomic war… that the human race would go on, maybe having learned something. Biochemical warfare however, has the potential of destroying everyone and everything.”
• “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 pyramid, that inverted pyramid.. that’s a real danger. There’s a lot of profit in it, quick profit, and the people who are 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, […] especially in the kind of world we’re entering. You don’t, in this kind of world, you do not build up… long term… senses of injustice, and resentment. You do not... imagine… that you can control those things forever… Nobody is safe in that kind of a world. However I think there is more goodwill in this world than people really give us credit for having. We haven’t blown ourselves [up].”
• “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, eventually you get to something… which you have to say… you have to address that, that something this way you have to say ‘I believe that because I believe it’. That’s faith. And science is no different from religion in this respect. There are things that we believe about science that we cannot prove… and what is this belief other than faith? […] Part of this comes from a dependency on absolutes. Most of science, or much of science, I don’t know, I hesitate to say most, but much of science, observedly… has not recognised the revolution implicit in Heisenberg and Einstein… that we live in a relativistic universe… where any absolute is a local phenomenon… has to be. […] I come at this from many angles, the core  of the scientific dependency on the single law which will… prove everything…. I think that’s horse pucky. I think that’s a blinder that hides many things from us.”
• “Well necessarily in my reading I’ve [..] done a lot of reading about utopias right back to Thomas More. [..] where we got the word… and… my approach… has always been to go beyond the paradox. 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? And I’ve applied all of these… leverages, these tools I’ve acquired along the way, some of them… poor but my own, country things you might say [laughs], to try to get an insight into these things and what’s really going on there – where does this originate? What is the myth of the Holy Grail? And what happens when you get the hot thing in your hands you see?”
• “He [Robert Bly] also objected, rather strenuously, when I started taking on liberalism, because I have a standard approach to the extremes, 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. This is very imbalanced you see, […] somewhere along the line […] I popped out with a cliche answer to.. something he had said, he says ‘That’s a cliche’, and I said ‘Well when I get this kind of repetitive horseshit… thrown at me – a cliche is all it deserves’ [laughs], and he got a little upset by that… [continues laughing] and he started raising his voice and interrupting me when he would say things and wouldn’t give me a chance to answer, and finally I told him, I turned on him I said ‘Shut up’… he looked at me like this and I said ‘Well…’ I said ‘I have been very patient. I’ve sat here and listened to you and didn’t interrupt… when you were speaking. Now, I want you to return… that favour to me, that’s called courtesy in case you never discovered this [laughs].
• […] So I’m afraid that Bly got extremely upset with me and I, just the older I get the less of this nonsense I tolerate. He is locked in, and won’t question any assumption. I’m willing to question any of my assumptions, trot it out and we’ll, we’ll have a look at it. I’ll present you the arguments that go behind my assuming this, but they are assumptions you see? 
• And assumptions are really a kind of malleable thing, you move ‘em around if you recognise what they are. [they are dangerous] and Bly has this… quality of being locked in, and really not assuming that he has assumptions if you like. […] Otherwise I rather like the guy, he’s a very fine poet, and is no more, in some respects, no more reasonably nutty than the rest of us, but he does… spout… this particular… cloud nine… academy oriented point of view, and academies are dangerous.”
• “Political geography and climatology… all of the…. focused interests that we subtend under ecology I would say. 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.”
• “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’ and you say, ‘How many of you believe politics is a science?’ [laughs] Not a hand [continues laughing]. The word science I think has been kind of stretched out of shape, or pinched into the wrong shape or something, I don’t know.”
• “Well as you probably know I’m not a hot gospel ecologist. I think we got into these problems together… and we’re going to have to get out of them together, and it’s counterproductive to try and produce scapegoats.”
• “And god help us if we go.. the socialist route in that [energy disruptions], because I have become less and less socialist the older I get… and the more of them I see. Each, every damn one of them develops a bureaucracy… to maintain its projects… and… when those bureaucracies make mistakes………”
• “-And it gives us the assumption that we have discovered intelligence, when we haven’t,
• that every gifted child, and every gifted adult who was a gifted child that I’ve ever met, one of the major problems of that person… was to develop a protective colouration… And that within any educational system, we would be a lot better off if we [… made it so] the educators […] would not feel threatened by a truly gifted person coming into their system, and they wouldn’t try to suppress that person or divert them, that they would stand aside and let them go. No way were they going to listen to that, and so I said that I would write a minority report, I said ‘I suspect you won’t print it… but I’ll do it’, and [they replied] ‘oh we’ll print it’. So I wrote a minority report more or less along with what I was saying here, saying that the way you determine a gifted student is they fall outside of your yardstick, which they would call the IQ test, your IQ test doesn’t measure them… and that’s how you know you have a gifted student, somebody who gives you answers that take off at a tangent from the question, with something you hadn’t even thought of, as the questioner. And I wrote a, oh I think it was a ten page minority report [for them to include in their larger publication] [… and] my minority report wasn’t printed, so I called down to Olympia three or four times and never could get the author of this report on the phone – they were always out, never returned my calls. I said well… [laughs]”
• “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].’’
• “The kind of life that you led at that period – here [the Pacific Northwest], depended on the wilderness quite a bit, and by wilderness I mean the open beaches where you could get clams and oysters just from going out picking them up. There’s a saying here that when the tide’s out the table’s set. A lot of the people around the United States look back on the Depression as a very traumatic, very nasty time. I look back on it as one of the most marvellous periods of my life. My father… didn’t have a job, there’s one year when I think he made 10 or 12 dollars in the whole year, but we lived like kings. We worked like hell, we had a farm, we grew all of our own meat, we went out and got salmon and smoked them. I took homegrown apples and smoked salmon to school as my lunch. […] in the fall, right after hunting season, because no local would go out in the woods during hunting season you’d get yourself killed out there [laughs]. We would go out at night, with a powerful flashlight and a rifle, and jack light a barren doe, which was our winter meat, game wardens never bothered us, and as a matter of fact we’ve discovered, from the ecology program, we’ve discovered subsequently that getting the barren does out of the herds is healthy for the herds, we did it, we didn’t do it for that reason of course we did it because that was the best meat [laughs]. They were big female steers, you see? And nice and fat and good eating, and we’d have a staked out abandoned orchard, apple orchard some place, and we’d go sit in the proper position on the prevailing wind and wait, in the dark, until we could see out in the moonlight out there that a deer had come up. My first job when, I can remember when I was… oh 8 years old, I can remember that my job was to take the light, hold the light, point it at the deer, and… our light was a six-volt car battery with a car light headlight on it with a switch you see, and I’d have to aim that thing [laughs] and one of my uncles standing over my shoulder would tap me on the shoulder, my dad would ‘hit that light’ [whoosh] like that right out, and the deer would turn and look and kapow over my head, one shot, cause bullets cost 10 cents back then you know, quite a bit of money.”
• “As far as style is concerned the person who… really shot me off like a rocket was Ezra Pound, […] because he said you have to make your own style, you see… And he said you have to make it new. And I’m sure that those are very profound truths. Of course you build [..] on the background of all that went before. Human endeavour is always a pyramidal thing. 
• […] you stand on the shoulders of whoever went before but you try to make something new out of it. To the degree that you make something new out of it I think you then create an important part of the pyramid. It pleases me for example to find young writers using terms that I invented – plasteel [laughs] ‘Hi, be my guest’ [laughs]. But I hope they hear Ezra Pound as well, because it’s alright, in fact it’s a good thing for a young writer to sit down and try to write… in the manner of some other writer to see what he – why he did it. I’ve played the old Henry game and the Guy de Maupassant and all of these you see, to see what they were doing. But once you see what they’re doing, then you realise then you live in another age, and different things are happening, you have an accumulated dividend you might say, that you can spend, as a writer… because they wrote you see?”

Science Fiction speech: 

• “You might not expect that such… far out shenanigans [science fiction]… could have everyday applications in our lives. But I tell you truthfully that this does. I think there are a lot of things wrong with our and our society, but one of the major problems is we don’t plan far enough ahead. I once had an afternoon… session as a reporter with the vice president of ITT… and one of the questions I asked him was does ITT go in for long range planning? He said ‘Oh certainly’… and I said ‘Well… how long is your long range planning?’ ‘One year’… and I said ‘Well.. what happens when your plan, your one year plan, inevitably goes wrong?’, because one year’s really short sighted, a little myopic. He said ‘Oh yes we have problems, but we have a large contingency factor built into the budget… and we jury rig something, we knock something together that will solve a problem when it comes along’. I said ‘Isn’t that costly?’ He said ‘Well we pass it along to the customers of course’. And I for one am having.. second thoughts about things that are passed along to me, because we haven’t planned ahead. I started talking about a science fiction everyday matter, in the 1950s… the fact that we were going to run out of oil… well that’s 30 years ago. And alot of us could see it because we tend to think in long range terms in science fiction.’
• “We find ourselves in an election year [1980]. How many of you are already tired of the election year rhetoric? Lord preserve us. We’re privileged in the United States that we can write speculative fiction about social and political and economic systems that are different from the one we have here, you can’t do that in the Soviet Union, you can’t do that in China.. they know what’s right… and have an aristocratic bureaucracy.. to make sure.. that you don’t deviate. We can speculate about all kinds of things in this country, we can talk about.. the politics of.. money voting… I’m just thinking in this very science fiction story that I know about.
  –
  Let’s play a little game… with social systems. If you look at… societies in the long range.. imaginative way available to you through science fiction… you come on.. ideas.. which.. surprise even you because they came out of your head… you think of, simple things that have been treated regularly in science fiction, such as.. computer voting, but you also confront some of the problems that are not addressed by contemporary society, and 
  –
  one of the problems with a democracy is that it is awfully susceptible to demagogues… very susceptible, because it’s… quite easy to see that we have various crises, and oh how nice it is… to have somebody come along with a powerful voice, and a glib tongue, and tell us ‘Now here is the solution to our problem’. 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…. An interesting thing to me about that, looking at it in these long terms, is that.. whenever you hear that or its equivalent in our society… ‘You don’t have to pay for this’, what they mean is… that your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren, or your great great grandchildren, or your great to the n power grandchildren, they will pay for it. I read a little history… periodically.. human societies look at the contract signed for them by their ancestors and they say ‘Hey, my signature’s not on that’. Well a lot of little things around, that you look at with these unrosy science fiction eyes […] How about social security? I used to have a friend that had a sign on his desk.. that said ‘security is a dirty word’. When I got on social security there were 90 workers for every.. person drawing social security, today there are now 3 workers for every person, in a few short years there’s going to be 1 to 1. How many of you think that the people paying the bill are going to continue paying it? Well this is very political to stand up here and say it, but… I’m looking at it through these long term science fiction eyes, and I know for a fact, because I read a lot of history, that this sort of thing has happened before… and I firmly expect it to happen again. 
  –
  And you’ll find a great deal of that in science fiction, but we sugar coat it. We tell you an amusing or interesting, or.. a shocking story, and you’re caught up in the story and you read it, and only at the end of it, if you put it down, do you realise – hey… he wasn’t talking about 4000 years from now, he was talking about today. You would be surprised at the number of people who have come to me.. and they’ve said ‘I gotcha. I know what you were doing in Dune…. water was the equivalent of oil wasn’t it?’ And I say ‘Yes… and of water… and of clean air… and of arable land… if you misuse it… the problems will be dumped on to the people who have to survive in the midst of that’.
  –
  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. I can’t stand here and tell you… all of these things we know. I can’t… throw these platitudes out about what shortages we’re going- we’re likely to have. But if you’re into a story and if you’re the kind of reader I am, where you live it, you’ve had the experience for a little bit, and that’s the way we really learn, and at the bottom… I think that is one of the most valuable things available to you in science fiction, to experience… alternatives to what we experience now, to put on… another kind of life, to sample… another time, and another society. I lose myself in a book. I have no… questions if it’s a good book, I’m in it,”
• “I alerted to this earlier today… that the experience.. teaches. You can break down education into.. any kind of categories you wish. I’ve seen many many breakdowns of the steps involved in learning something. And maybe I over simplify but I tend to break it into three pieces. One: the discovery, you discover that there’s this nifty thing out there… that you could do or learn… and then you get a verbal association with it, you read the books, the magazines, you listen to the lectures… the instructors… and then you get hands on… and that’s when you really learn – when you do it. That’s one of the reasons I said today that you really learn to write – by writing. You need guidance of course, but the learning process has to be in your body, in your mind to do it.”
• “How many of you have ever done any association with political science…? How many of you believe politics is a science…?”
• “I came across a journal.. in the Library of Congress one time when I was researching.. for the book ‘Under Pressure’/’Dragon in the Sea’. It was a handwritten journal by a contemporary source, and it describes a scene on the streets of New York, and I believe the year was 1847…  and the journalist, who was obviously awed by Poe… says they were walking… down the street, and Poe was discoursing… on some prevalent theory.. [of hoodi? – unclear] – they used to write like that, you don’t know what the theory was but it was prevalent. And all of sudden Poe was given to flamboyant gestures, and dramatic… ways of delivery, stopped and grabbed his friend by the arm, threw a hand over his forehead and said ‘I have just had a vision of the future…’ and if he had good timing, he waited a bit… ‘Within 100 years…’ that’s 1947, ‘Within 100 years… New York is going to have 10 story buildings.’ Well well, what did Mr. Po leave out of his scenario? Mr. Poe didn’t see the elevator of course… steel frame buildings, the pressure of taxes and especially the pressure of population, on real estate, so you couldn’t go out you had to go up. And Mr. Poe was left far behind… by at least 100 stories. I see a few… like myself who, came through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years and… the Great Depression… and remember a few of the cliches of that time, such as the Brain Trusters… You know what the Brain Trusters were? They were some people that Roosevelt… assigned a job, a very science fictiony job, an ordinary job for a science fiction futurist. He told them – I want you to sit down… and 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 list – jet travel, atomic energy… transistors… antibiotics… surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. 
  –
  Which brings us right back… to science fiction… putting back our big toe out in the water saying ‘well maybe this is what it’ll feel like… maybe this it how it will be… 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. It’d be cheaper in energy, they would pay you less travel time, and they would get more hours of the day out of you, you’d be fresher, no commuting. And he said ‘My god… what do I do with the wife and kids?’ I said ‘You build yourself a sound proof den, with a big strong bar on it, that’s what you require.’ I really think we’re going to have a computer in the home. I really think the computer is going to make more difference in our lives… than the wheel has made, and possibly more difference than fire. But most of the time you would encounter computers… in science fiction… as scary… machines which think. Good heavens machines which think… and that’s very out of the 17th century… when the only thing that could think was a human being. Well rest easily friends, I don’t think computers will ever think even, at least not the way we do. […] but after doing all the necessary research to write a book, a nonfiction book about computers, […] I think the computers are never going to be anywhere near human, they’re a tool… And you learn it first… you will learn it first.. experiencing… the tool and its use, in science fiction, and nonfiction. The interesting thing about this tool is that it’s so fast… we lumber along.. at our 55 mile an hour speeds, doing a few things every second. A computer can execute 4 million different things in one second…. 4 million… that’s time crunch. But what… Max Barnard and I did, I had a companion writing this book with me because… when you don’t have enough expertise yourself you go out and you knock on a door. Max is a computer… programmer with 15 years experience and electronics engineer, and a brilliant guy, and between us.. we came up… with a way that… you could… program a computer yourself. I could teach this system to a child, a five year old, in about an hour… an adult could learn it in two hours. And two weeks of practice.. you’d be pretty good at it, you’d make the machine do what you want to do, which is the real crux of the thing. 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, especially when you’re get into highly technical fields like medical programs and statistical programming for… managing large budgets in big department stores and… things like household budgets… oh your budget isn’t that hard to run. If you can make it do what you want it to do, it’s your baby, it’s your tool… and believe me you’re going to see one in every household. And the minute you see one 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’, this is already being done. We can search libraries for information we need, you need a special recipe that your aunt Harriet gave you… and you’ve forgotten but you know it was printed… in the Buchanan county…. home development cookbook in 1931, fine, bingo bingo bingo on your computer and ten seconds later there it is. 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, and the things that I want to know, and the things that you know….then… I recommend that you read… ‘Future Shock’ again, and of course, I recommend also… that you read lots of science fiction, because we’re dealing with these kinds of problems, and many many more, every week of the year.”

Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984):

• Willis E. McNelly: Do you have any notions about the chemistry of it [the spice]?
• Frank Herbert: Only vaguely, my… my notions were that it was such, of such extraordinary complexity… so many interrelated… molecular bonds, that you ran into a problem similar to the computer problem of the billion gate circuit.
• WM: Which is?
• FH: Well… it just becomes so monstrously complex that no single system can handle the reproduction of its pattern, you cannot project its pattern on the wall and say ‘that’s its pattern’. The billion gate system in a computer… well that would just take us up for hours. […] [let’s] just say that it is an absolutely horrendous… complexity… that you cannot derive… [..] in a single… projection, a comprehensible… pattern describing it. […] My intent was to have an evolutionary process over an extremely long period… build this complex creature out of which a complex substance emerged. Now the vectors are sandtrout – to sandworm. The sandtrout does what many vectors do; it helps create… the environment in which the metamorphosis will, not only occur, but that next vector will survive… you see? […] What I was doing was building complexity on complexity.
• FH: “Let’s say we start addressing the problem of the importation of Japanese automobiles into the United States… There are all kinds of influences on that. […] the… the market in scrap steel, oil, [..] whaling is involved in this.. the agreement on the North Pacific salmon is involved in this. 
• WM: The price of Beef in Japan.
• FH: U.S. technology. [..] our major export right now… is technological know-how. This is one of our problems, [..] we’re exporting the… expertise… which others are using, and we‘ve had lots of examples of this, during World War II for example; the Germans… sent a crack team to Japan, of lens makers, to teach the Japanese how to make better lens, for their binoculars and for cameras and what not, the Japanese learned it beautifully and quickly developed a better quality control system than the Germans had, and improved on the chemistry of the glass so that by the time World War II was over, the Japanese had a real lever on the camera market, they were producing far better cameras than the Germans and very quickly everybody found out about it, life photographers started spreading the word.
• […] you bought a Contax… […] you bought a Pentax instead of Leica, [..] if that was your market level, because Pentax was cheaper, but the lens, the lens themselves… were far superior and the Japanese nationalised quality control systems, they nationalised quality control. The Japanese spotted that popular image of Japan, of Japanese products, that they lasted quick… and that they were flimsy, the ‘cute little Jap toy’, the quotes you see? And they set up a nationalised quality control system to eliminate that image… and they are really tough with it.”
• “Oh that’s their loyalty to each other. Now I based [Bene Gesserit sisterhood] on the fact, on an observed fact, that I think is true, that… women… tend… to have a sympathy for women which transcends any arbitrarily imposed class structure… I’m sure you’ve observed that we, we have lots, we give lots of lip service to it but I think it’s real there. There is a folk wisdom about this, don’t deny the… authenticity, the truths, hidden in folk wisdom. It tends to be sneered at occasionally, but I look at it and say – yes that didn’t arise out of nothing, there has to be something there.”
• “Because any society is no stronger than its ability to choose, or the way it chooses leaders. This is one of our weaknesses right in this society, the way we choose leaders you see. […] We get the leaders we deserve because of the system by which we choose them.”
• “Ok this [the Butlerian Jihad] arises out of the mythology of computers, that they… can think… that they can… become pseudo-human… there are limits on that of course. 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, the treatment of your fellow humans as machines, that… the whole society is going to turn against what they see as the instrumentality…. supporting this attitude. You see? They will focus on… a particular thing… ‘the computer’. Of course they’re hanging an innocent man [chuckles], because no computer can think, it will never think like a human. I’ll say this flatly, I’ll go way out on a limb – computers deal… with discrete bits, no matter how rapidly they deal with them, they are discrete bits like exposures of movie film, each frame. 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 it can do some things automatically, very rapidly, which is the advantage of computers – they do things automatically, without thinking. Now we have two modes of mental operation at least, many more really, but I’ll just address myself to two. One is: the so called instinctual level, where we do things automatically we react, we respond to a behavioural input from outside. And the other is that kind of pattern determination, pattern recognition, which gives us language, art… great inventions… These are patterns, they are imposed patterns. This is part of the wisdom of the Vedanta by the way, where they say that you recognise nothing… except against its background, against a background, and the background of course against which we recognise everything is a background we identify by the label of chaos.”
• “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]. […] He was my model of… what we popularly conceive of, of being the ecologically aware person, who thinks of consequences. 
  –
  And the whole thrust… of everything I’ve been doing in the Dune trilogy and again in the new book, is… to point out a kind of a paradox, in the first place I’m saying in there… that paradox is a hand, a finger, pointing at something that is beyond it. If you encounter a paradox that indicates something beyond it. A paradox should not be a barrier, it should be an indicator, a waymarker. The paradox I’m addressing here is the paradox of infinity. Any, defined, finite, time period… 900 billion years… is a blip against infinity. […] And you have to recognise this, and if you’re talking about consequences… to human survival… then you better have, you better extend your time sense… and leave it open-ended, and that is the real definition of The Golden Path – the open ended time sense. As long as time, as the time sense is open there, then… we are surviving… you see? It has no linear direction… has no choice of who is human… it just derives from human stock, and it goes on, and it’s really the reason Leto does not… actually exterminate the Tlielaxu… or… the Ixians, or anybody else. He says, specifically, that the only people he considered exterminating… were the Bene Gesserit… and he considered it… because they are so near, and yet so far, from their potential, from what they could do, you see? 
• […] [when asked to extrapolate on the concept of The Golden Path] I’ve just given you the definition, this is it, this is the only way you can put it into words – the gate is open. […] The gate is open, that’s all I can say. If you put any more words on it you make it less understandable.”

Omni Magazine – Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert:

“How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader. 

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it. 

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet. 

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don’t give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero’s facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. 

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane. 

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster. 

It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?”

“I had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade. Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high. Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence [dune management] project fed my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It’s an open-ended list. 

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs. 

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation. Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to aim painful barbs. But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do they learn this?”

“As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul’s gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It’s like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It’s like the Cretan Epimenides saying, “All Cretans are liars.” 

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity. 

But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more. 

The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad’Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all. 

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.

Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don’t look to me as your leader.

Caution is indeed indicated, but not the terror that prevents all movement. Hang loose. And when someone asks whether you’re starting a new cult, do what I do: Run like hell.”

1981

God Emperor of Dune:

“It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.”

“The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.”

“The haze of nostalgia covers their days […], making those days into something different than they were. That’s the way today changes history. All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing, but few realize it.”

“When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles.”

“From that welter of memories which I tap at will, patterns emerge. They are like another language which I see so clearly. The social-alarm signals which put societies into the postures of defence/attack are like shouted worlds to me. As a people, you react against threats to innocence and the peril of the helpless young. Unexplained sounds, visions and smells raise the hackles you have forgotten you possess. When alarmed, you cling to your native language because all the other patterned sounds are strange. You demand acceptable dress because a strange costume is threatening. This is system-feedback at its most primitive level. Your cells remember.”

“The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and you find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated.”

“All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore. They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another. The driving force is adrenaline addiction and the desire to gain personal power. All rebels are closet aristocrats.”

“The expectations which history creates for one generation are often shattered in the next generation.”

“Groups tend to condition their surroundings for group survival. When they deviate from this it may be taken as a sign of group sickness. There are many telltale symptoms. I watch the sharing of food. This a form of communication, an inescapable mutual aid which also contains a deadly signal of dependency.”

“Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.”

“ Do you know what guerillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies – in any system which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.”

“There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites – conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.”

“No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.”

“Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.”

“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”

“Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again changes the prey, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera . . . Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces.”

“Beware of the truth, gentle Sister. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then.”

“Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.”

“Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.”

“You think power may be the most unstable of all human achievements? Then what of the apparent exception to this inherent instability? Some families endure. Very powerful religious bureaucracies have been known to endure. Consider the relationship between faith and power. Are they mutually exclusive when each depends upon the other? The Bene Gesserit have been reasonably secure within the loyal walls of faith for thousands of years. But where has their power gone?”

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.”

“Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational.”

‘Who Writes Science Fiction?’ by Chris Platt:

• “…when you’re making hay, and the hay-baler breaks down, and it’s the weekend and the handy little hay-baler repair store is closed, you don’t say, Well, there’ll be no hay this year. You leap in and repair the thing. You don’t even question that you can repair it. Obviously you can.”
• “Self-limitation is the major limiting factor for most people in the world. People could do far more things than they believe they can. They’ve been led to believe in these limitations by various factors – the way they’re brought up, and their families. (But) if you have a quiescent population, it’s easier to govern; you don’t want a lot of people out there doing strange things, producing new things, because new things are often dangerous to people in power.”

Mother Earth News – Plowboy Interview:

• PLOWBOY: Then did you glean the “message themes” for your fiction from exposure to contemporary news events?
• HERBERT: “Heck, no. 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. And I can still clench my hands like you wouldn’t believe. […] There were pigs to feed, and I had corn and such to hoe. I once even reared and canned 500 chickens as a 4-H project. 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. My father had six brothers, so I never lived far from aunts and uncles, and I had cousins all over the landscape.
• And I learned, from childhood, that the family experience can be very important to an individual. Family life teaches a person to shoulder his or her share of responsibility. It’s also quite a supportive structure … and can stage rituals in which all of the members are able to participate. A child can develop a sense of self-reliance and self-worth through involvement in such activities.”
• “First of all, my childhood days gave me some rock-ribbed ideas about the ways people should live together. To put my beliefs simply: I think we ought to be loyal to our friends, we ought to be truthful, we ought to be supportive of family members, and we ought to provide one another with help directly instead of delegating our good deeds to institutions.
• I don’t like governmental “helping”—or any kind of public charity system—because I learned early on that our society’s institutions often weaken people’s self-reliance and damage family bonds as well. Take education, for instance. The teaching of our young ought to be about equally divided between the family, which should lay the ground-work for the child’s learning, and professionals who can pass on useful knowledge that the child’s relatives might not have in their repertoire. Today, though, the professional education establishment assumes that the family doesn’t know what its own members need or want. The result is a classic failure: an institutionalized system that does more harm than good.
• Do you know that—in response to just that problem—my own family left the United States twice? On both occasions we went to live in Mexico because I was not considered “qualified” to teach my children in the U.S., but could home-school them in Mexico. Our youngsters were taught at home when they were young, and they haven’t suffered in the least from it.
• […] By the time you have three or four generations of people who are taught not to trust their families and their families’ knowledge, individuals can really become separated from their roots. The effect is to make people feel like lost wanderers, or to cause them to think of themselves only in the role of their jobs, which is a complete misrepresentation of what it means to be alive.
• Another lesson I learned in childhood is that what people do is just as important as—and maybe more so than—what they say. I had a marvelous object lesson in the difference between words and actions when I was in fourth grade. In those days I was bored to death by school, so I tended to cause a lot of trouble.
• One day our teacher, a great big woman who wore eye-glasses that looked like the bottoms of pop bottles, caught me in the middle of a particularly heinous prank. She told me to stay after school and added, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
• Of course, I could imagine all kinds of horrible things she might do to me. Like the bastinado, or worse! But when school was over, she just made me sit and sit while she worked on papers. After what seemed like ages, she motioned me up to her desk, stared at me awhile—I could feel two holes being burned right through me—and then resumed her paperwork.
• […] Oh, I was [terrified]. Finally, she put her pencil down and said, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.” Well, it was all too much for me. I started to cry. She put her face right in front of mine then and said again!—”I just don’t know what I’m going to do with you.” And I said through my sobs, “Why are you mad at me?”
• With that, she grabbed me by the shoulders, began shaking me roughly, and cried, “I’m not mad at you, I’m not mad at you!” Well, I now know that teachers get long lectures during their training on the importance of keeping their tempers with their students, so I had said exactly the wrong thing to this woman. I may not have understood that at the time, but I didn’t have a bit of trouble realizing that my teacher—who was repeatedly screaming, “I’m not mad at you!”—was nearly out of her mind with rage.
• That incident drove home the lesson that what people say often doesn’t agree with what they actually do. And that discovery played a big part in the shaping my thinking and behavior.”
• […] Absolutely [I try to keep a consistent thread between words and actions]. I already told you that family bonds are very important to me, and that we left the country to be able to teach our own children. There were also years—when our youngsters were quite small—that Bev, my wife, was the family’s major income earner. She went out to the office and brought in a paycheck, while I stayed home and did the cooking, laundry, and housekeeping, took care of the children, and worked on my writing.
• Our children are grown up now, but I still participate in family rituals. In fact, my niece called me last night, and I’ve got to change a previous appointment and go down to Eugene, Oregon because she’s graduating from the university there.
• I also feel strongly—and act on my feelings—that individuals should take their own steps to be more self-reliant and to lessen their impact on our environment.”
• “You see, people keep looking for an absolute final solution, often waiting to use alternative technology until they can build an energy-saving house from scratch, when there are many intermediate steps available to us.”
• “I wrote The Santaroga Barrier with the hope that half the book’s readers would end up saying, “Oh boy, what a nifty society. I’d like to live there” and the other half saying, “You wouldn’t catch me dead in that place.” The underlying message, then, was that one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia or worst possible world—and that any attempt to create a perfect society will fall into the trap of replenishing itself only from itself, and ignoring those differences between people that give us strength as human beings.
• […] Soul Catcher described a collision between two mythologies, those of the native American world and of the European immigrant culture. And, in truth, this very real collision has not yet completed its shaking-down process. Indeed, the two societies still have some grave misunderstandings about each other. Many people, for instance, think that the Indians were the best ecologists this land has ever seen. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Some native American cultures were actually quite hard on their environments. They were just slower—because their populations were small—at causing damage than the whites were.
• […] Some tribes practiced several forms of massive kill—such as driving buffalo off of cliffs—which were sure to improve the lot of the people doing so at the expense of those who didn’t. But since the rate of the environmental change resulting from such acts was too slow to be encompassed by most people’s awareness of time, many men and women think that the native American societies could have lived in harmony with their environment forever if they’d just been left alone.
• […] I look upon our involvement with the environment—and by the way, all of man’s intrusions into the environment are totally natural phenomena—as a continual learning process in which there are no absolutes. Whatever we do causes changes, and we can cause gross disruption to our surroundings as a result of small-order determinations.
• […] Dune was so arid that the very idea of water coming down from the skies in rain, and of great rivers flowing over the land, conjured up visions of paradise. But when that one change was made, it had a regular “domino theory” series of consequences that hadn’t been anticipated. Indeed, by the time Dune reached the stage described in my fourth desert planet book—God Emperor of Dune—the changes had pretty well eliminated individualism!.
• […] I felt that the historical interrelationship between the native Fremen and their desert planet had created what amounted to a religion. They had learned not to question the way to behave in their environment, but to act in certain ways on faith. They were locked into their system. So, even when the environment changed, the people didn’t change their social mythology, their values, or their ways of relating to one another.
• […] You see, I think there are such things as psychological ecology, religious ecology, economic ecology, etc. And none of them can exist in a vacuum. They’re all interrelated. So whenever we make decisions and put them into effect, we ought to review and assess all the potential results.
• The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.
• […] Too many ecologically concerned individuals seem to think that simply getting rid of one noxious environmental pollutant—whether that “culprit” be nuclear power, commercial pesticides, or whatever—will solve all our problems.
• […] The bulk of science fiction authors—and there are some notable exceptions to this rule—are heavily into what I call the technological toy syndrome.
• Writers and scientists who believe that technology alone can solve problems have fallen into a common scientific fallacy: the belief that science can answer any question in absolute terms, that it’s possible to reduce phenomena to one explanation that will operate in a vacuum. That’s not the way the universe appears to me. And it quite clearly didn’t appear that way to Albert Einstein or Werner Heisenberg, either.
• […] There is definitely an implicit warning, in a lot of my work, against big government and especially against charismatic leaders. After all, such people—well-intentioned or not—are human beings who will make human mistakes. And what happens when someone is able to make mistakes for 200 million people? The errors get pretty damned BIG!
• For that reason, I think that John Kennedy was one of the most dangerous presidents this country ever had. People didn’t question him. And whenever citizens are willing to give unreined power to a charismatic leader, such as Kennedy, they tend to end up creating a kind of demigod—a leader who covers up mistakes instead of admitting them—and makes matters worse instead of better. Now Richard Nixon, on the other hand, did us all a favor.
• […] Nixon taught us one hell of a lesson, and I thank him for it. He made us distrust government leaders. We didn’t mistrust Kennedy the way we did Nixon, although we probably had just as good reason to do so. But Nixon’s downfall was due to the fact that he wasn’t charismatic. He had to be sold just like Wheaties, and people were disappointed when they opened the box.
• 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.
• […] I don’t think that [increasing concentration of power by big business and centralized authority] has to continue. 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.
• […] We’ve opened up the Pandora’s box of violent technology. We’re fast approaching a time when one person can make and employ instruments of violence equal to the ones formerly reserved only to massive governments.
• Let’s face it, our society has a tiger by the tail in technology. We can’t let go. We can’t all go back to the farm and be self-sufficient. There isn’t enough land to do so, for one thing. Furthermore, people’s expectations for their lifestyles have been raised, and you don’t monkey around with human expectations. So 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.”
• […] It involves drawing support from technology, but doing so imaginatively. We have to ask the question, “What elements of technology should I use and how should I use them?” A peasant knows, you see, when and why to grab a shovel or a hoe. In the same way, we have to think out our own relationship to the complete environment, our own values and technological options, and make decisions consciously.
• Too often today people don’t examine or question their basic assumptions. Let me give you an example. I once taught a course at the University of Washington that was called Utopia/Dystopia. It was billed as an examination of the current state of our country and our myths of the “better life,” only I had trouble getting my students to really investigate their own premises about technology and lifestyle.
• So I hit on the idea of taking them out for a long weekend hike in the Olympic mountains in the early spring when I knew the weather was going to be cold and rainy. All I told my class was, “We’ll be out in the Olympics for two nights. It’s going to rain. Bring your gear, food, and paper and pencils for taking notes. I’ll meet you at the trail’s head.”
• Now, I’m a hedonist in the wilderness. I own a good down sleeping bag and a fine one-man tent with a fly, and carry a very light pack stocked with trail food and the like. Naturally, my gear is pretty much a product of high technology.
• Once we all got up to our campsite—at a place called the Flats—I set up my tent, dug a drain trench, stashed some firewood under the canopy for the morning, and helped organize the evening meal. We ate and hit the sack … and then the rain came. Well, I was quite dry and comfortable in my tent, but a lot of my students weren’t so well prepared: During the night, I heard voices crying, “My sleeping bag’s all wet! ” or “God, it’s cold! ” I simply rolled over and went back to sleep.
• The next morning, I got up early and built a big fire. The shivering students soon gathered round, we scrounged together something to eat, and afterward I told them to get their note pads. Then I said, “OK, the bomb just dropped and we’re all that’s left. How much of our former technology do we try to reconstitute?” Well let me tell you, those cold, wet people who had eaten an inadequate breakfast looked at society’s technology a good bit more closely than they had when sitting in a comfortable university classroom. Students who’d been saying things like “Oh sure, I could do without all this stuff” began to ask some basic questions, and to comprehend that technology isn’t bad in and of itself. Everything depends on how we use it.
• […] that’s not all there is to it. There’re other aspects to questioning how we use technology. For instance, most people today live in a “light switch” society where they have no actual connection to the tools they use. If the light goes off, they have to call the building superintendent to come repair it. Knowledge has become institutionalized into specialties, and individuals have continually less and less power over their lives.
• We need to use technology differently so that people can understand their tools … and so they can be put back in touch with the natural world. In fact, one of the things our society needs desperately is a way for people to touch the earth personally and gain the restorative strength that comes with weeding or shoveling, from really getting their hands dirty. We need ways that men and women can see the direct results of their efforts.
• […] Yes, [technopeasantry can help develop a sense of self-worth in the individual] but there’s more to it, yet. We have to learn to recognize that we’re always going to make some mistakes, and—knowing that—we shouldn’t tie our careers and self-esteem to decisions that could later prove to be the wrong ones. People must be able to say freely, “Hey, that turned out not to be such a good idea. I’d better not do that anymore.”
• […] Well, it’s [consciously and carefully reevaluating the ramifications of each and every one of our actions and technologies] not going to happen overnight … unless we have a cataclysmic disaster-like some very traumatic natural phenomenon or an enormously destructive atomic war—which requires that we take such new directions in order to survive.
• [Assuming that we won’t be forced into new behavior patterns by a catastrophe, how do you envision the change taking place?] As a result of social evolution. When individuals start making technopeasant choices—such as converting an inner city attic into a greenhouse—and demonstrating that doing so can be both personally rewarding and quite effective, more and more people will be drawn to such actions.
• […But] Hold on there! Yes, individuals will lead the way to a technopeasant society, but I’ve never said that people should strive for absolute self-reliance. I think relative freedom from dependency ought to be our goal. We all, of course, must be wary of systems—such as the whole ripcord welfare state—that systematize increasing dependence, but we must also remember a basic truth about human beings: We are interdependent. I myself am not attempting to live on a completely self-sufficient farm. I never have. Isolation is not part of my basic philosophy. The point is that we don’t necessarily have to be dependent in some of the ways that we’ve chosen to be. I do, though, believe that a person’s ties should be strongest to his or her local community, with looser bonds connecting him or her to larger communities.
• In fact, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that the average North American’s life would improve if our society became more community based. If, say, cities like Seattle or little Port Townsend here developed symbiotic relationships with the surrounding farmland, so that—for example—the effluent of an urban community could become a tool for keeping the land around the city fertile. Such an interlocked region would be able to establish a self-sustaining cycle and not have to waste energy trucking fertilizers and food over long distances.
• […] Small areas are definitely going to have to become more independent. Look at energy, for instance. There’s a growing shift to alternative fuels, and there’s no way in the world the OPEC nations can stop it. Now the most attractive of the new power sources that I see on the horizon is hydrogen. Hydrogen burns cleanly—the by-product of its combustion is water—and has about a six-to-one energy-to-weight advantage compared to the best conventional jet fuel. In addition, we already have the technology to make hydrogen, in a hydride form, safer to handle than gasoline.”
• “Now you must recognize that any change which makes small areas more independent will have both good and bad aspects. After all, there is something to be said for the glue that holds us together as a society.
• […] Remember that we are interdependent. So if you change the situation that has provided the glue of social interdependence, you must institute alternate adhesive forces to hold us together. Look at it this way: It’s very possible that, within the next 15 years, a little community like Port Townsend could be in a position to threaten the federal government.
• […] There are weapons much more dangerous than nuclear devices. Things like contagious diseases that can’t be cured, or substances that can be slipped into food and water supply chains in order to sterilize large populations.
• And the often-touted concept of world government could in no way handle such terrorism, because 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.
• We’re going to have to make very tough evaluations of how we instill morality into our young, and how we help people come to believe that all humans are similar creatures and that the world will be better off if everyone does try to live by something like the Golden Rule. And we’ll probably discover—possibly only after suffering a certain amount of pain—that the only way to spread such values is, naturally, on the community and individual levels.
• Ultimately, I think the individual will become increasingly important in this world. I think the collective society is on its way out. But, in relation to all my statements, you must remember that I’m talking about the kind of individual who has been raised to weigh the consequences of his or her actions, not simply for him- or herself, but for others as well. If we don’t manage to produce such thinking moral citizens, we’re likely going to go down the tube.
• […] I think they’ll be forced on us. Oh, we’ll make some mistakes. We’ll probably have a number of fanatic leaders and such to deal with in the years to come. I don’t see the future as being all sweetness and light, by any means. Learning from mistakes is a very slow process. It may take us 20,000 or 25,000 years to get to where, I feel, we have to go.
• […] I also think that, in the far future, human beings will have scattered—in separate societies—to numerous faraway planets. Don’t forget, though, when you hear me say these things, that prediction is a form of false mythology.
• Why, even the idea that there’s such a thing as the future is a bunch of semantic nonsense because there’ll always be changes and new events that no one can foresee.”

A Few Frank Herbertisms

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

Dune  

If you say, “I don’t want that to happen,” and all the while you are making it happen, which thing are we to believe? Do we believe the words or do we believe the body?

Soul Catcher  

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

Children of Dune  

… you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here’s an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve. My story tells you something about how our societies find a structural necessity for sub-groups.

God Emperor of Dune  

“For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured.

“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”

“You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.”

“Change, yes. And do you know what I mean by long-term?”

“For you, it must be measured in millennia, Lord:”

“Moneo, even my thousands of years are but a puny blip against Infinity …. In the view of Infinity, any defined long-term is short-term.”

“Then are there no rules at all, Lord?” Moneo’s voice conveyed a faint hint of hysteria.

Leto smiled to ease the man’s tensions. “Perhaps one.

Short-term decisions tend to fail in the long-term.”

Adelaide, Australia Interview – Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Fiction Magazine:

• “[I view the purpose of science fiction], to entertain. To ask the questions that aren’t being asked anywhere else. I think it has a scientific function in asking the hard questions. We’ll ask those questions that aren’t being asked elsewhere. They’re fair game for us. What if ecology breaks down? What if this kind of a society develops? Or what if we get a particularly obtrusive police state – the Nineteen Eighty-Four thing? None of these stories, I believe, prevents those evolutionary or devolutionary processes, but they sure as hell alert us to what’s happening. Whole terms have come into the language now – Big Brother, and so on.”
• “Have you ever thought of this room as a natural setting?[…] [Ecology is interaction] – Not just [in a] closed environment; in any environment! We live in a technological world and there’s a feedback system going on. We are inventing things, making things, and they are having an influence on us and our societies. You can break it down. We have political ecology, social ecology, religious ecology, you just go right on. The systems have their interacting feedbacks.”
• “We [humanity] really are [being tested, put under stress and forced to confront what is basic to us, forced even to consider the fact that we are in a crisis situation all the time], all the time. Maybe not under as much stress sometimes as at other times, but all the time. I can give you a few instances. I don’t know whether it’s the same in Australia as in the U.S. – I suspect it is – but when you get into your automobile in the U.S. and start driving, your blood pressure goes up dramatically. Detroit spent quite a bit of money discovering that if you got in your car, turned on the ignition to start the motor, and eight seconds later the motor’s not running, your blood pressure goes right up. You have eight seconds. Now I’m sure that’s a conditioned reaction; the technological toy has conditioned us. Because I know damn well that if my grandfather didn’t get the harness on the horse in eight seconds, his blood pressure didn’t go up. Maybe if he didn’t have the horse harnessed in five minutes and the horse was spirited and skittish, his blood pressure probably went up then. But it’s a different feedback system.”
• “I see that some societies look at them [the various mystiques Leto II mentions behind any civilization which act as barriers against change: “the religious mystique, the hero-leader mystique, the messiah mystique, the mystique of science/ technology, and the mystique of nature itself”] as limitations, especially Western cultures. Another thing happens, too. If you think you know, it tends to prevent you from asking questions. And the mystique of thinking you know, of course, is all bound up in other things – the guilt of ignorance, “I don’t want to look stupid” [laughter] ….”
• “I would like to believe that there will be human beings millions of years from now, enjoying life the way we enjoy it or to the extent that they’re capable of enjoying it then. Alive and enjoying it, you see.”
• “The speech this afternoon about the arms race – that situation worries me. I think that the speaker did not bring in all the peripheral factors that he should be bringing in. He has limited it. He made a very narrow approach to the atomic threat – that particular aspect of an arms race and how it controls what’s built. But he doesn’t talk at all about the obvious stupidity of building enormous naval vessels at a time such as this. And the very fact that these are built cannot be passed over as the admirals’ preparing to fight the next war on the basis of the last one, it really cannot be passed over that way. It really focuses your attention on the fact that the arms race is an economic thing.
• […] And it provides jobs for admirals and captains and commanders, you see (laughter).”
• “I kind of have a leaning towards keeping science fiction in the gutter where it belongs [laughter]. It’s an emotional leaning. I think we have a lot of fun with it, you see. In addition to having fun, I think I’m prodding the guy next to me and saying: “Hey, the king’s naked~” (laughter). […] – The academic tendency is to analyse the life out of it. And analysing the fun out of it too: I want a report on Thursday … [laughter].”
• […] Will McNelly has done it. But Will is a heretic anyway [laughter]. The fact that it doesn’t happen doesn’t bother me, really doesn’t bother me. There are some among my contemporaries who are bothered by that in their own work and are also bothered by the failure of the establishment literati to give them the status they feel they deserve. I think this was Kurt Vonnegut’s problem. I know damn well it was Bob Silverberg’s problem because he said so. My own approach to this is that it’s a waste of energy to bother with that. Do your thing. And as long as you are enjoying it, do it!”
• “I have a kind of amorphous sense of an audience out there and I really care about that audience, I really do. I want them to be entertained. I want to give them the frosting on the cake. I want all these good experiences to come out in it. I sort of see myself as the jongleur who comes into the castle to sing for his supper, telling about the other castle down the highway. And, my God, people pay me for it. What a marvellous thing!”
• “I had a lot of fun doing that [the humor in Whipping Star]. If I can get it in, I do it. But you’ve got to be careful with humour because it can become too ham-handed and it will destroy that sense of involvement in the story. And that’s really a primary concern. You want the people to be entertained, to be involved in the story. You want them in the page just as a good movie maker wants people in that screen.”
• “All the novels write themselves to some degree. That’s marvellous, when the characters take over. But the design, the outline, the pattern of the book, to do a particular thing, that’s something else.”
• “You’ve probably heard that I don’t talk about work in progress, mainly because you use the same energies to talk about the work that you use to write it, and you want to save that energy for the paper. That’s really good advice. If there are any would-be writers around, tell them this, because I’ve seen more and more writers who go tell their best friend the story and you never see the story. And that’s a waste.[…] It’s the best advice I ever had. I got it from a professional. He told me: “Don’t talk your damn story, write it!”. And, boy, I suddenly realized the guy was right. You’re talking ’em and you’re not writing ’em. Save it for the page.”  
• “I was making analogues [in Dune, like CHOAM and OPEC], you see. Water was money. We don’t teach economics in our society, have you noticed that? We don’t teach how the economic system works. Even in the best schools of economics there is a kind of a high level abstraction ladder of remoteness. You’re way up that abstraction ladder and not down there dealing with the nitty-gritty of it. How many of us, for example, realize that if you borrow money from a bank, it’s the same as printing that much new money? Most people don’t know it. Most people don’t even think of the pressure on inflation created by plastic money, by credit cards.”
• […]
• “For example, look at the degenerative force created upon the Spanish civilization by all the gold they found in the New World – a particular kind of economic pressure! It says something about capital and how capital can be used. I happen to be a capitalist, but for a very peculiar reason. I believe that capitalism tends to break down of its own excesses, and we’re forced to make adjustments at that time. The so-called “managed” societies bury their mistakes because the managerial bureaucracy is dedicated to preserving its power. And so they keep perpetuating those mistakes to the point sometimes where you can’t do anything. You’re lost in a morass of one mistake piled upon another.”
• “Do you know what happened to the three and a half million dollars worth of heroin that was taken in the French Connection? It disappeared from the New York City Police Property Room! I’ve been asked several times what would I do to solve the drug problem. Well, in the first place, I wouldn’t try to solve the drug problem. But I would try to reduce the impact of it upon our society. And that could be done quite simply: take the profit out of it! Turn it over to the public health service if you must, but take the profit out of it. Make it available! Cheap! Get the government into this business and you can get your fix for fifty cents. It’s been discovered quite conclusively in the U.S. that more than three-fourths of the new addicts are created by the system – addicts building a market to support their own habits. And less than a quarter of them are what you might call “joy riders”. But the damnedest lies are told about it, and, of course, there is enough profit in it right now that you can buy the sacrosanct briefcase of an incoming ambassador if you want. And I will submit to you that the ambassadorial and consular force of a certain Asian country was one of the main suppliers of heroin in the United States for a long while. It may still be. That’s the way they’ve supported their operations in the U.S.. You can buy an Air Force general; you can buy long strings of border guards; you can buy the key police of a major city in the U.S., say, New York …. […] I think that [someone can] own Senators and Congressmen right now.”
• “Let me give a real capper. I was at the A.A.A.S. in Washington D.C., and a government attorney recognized me in the elevator at the Sheraton and informed me that the American Bar Association had appointed a three-man committee to examine the Gowachin law system [in The Dosadi Experiment] and make a comparison to see if .. now get this … to see if an alien legal system could give us any insights into our own legal system (laughter). I don’t know! [if it’s a compliment] (Laughter.) But it broke me up. Because what I did, you see, was invert our own! […] I inverted the existing Western legal system. ”

Profile of Frank Herbert – John Elkington Interview:

• “I look upon our involvement with the environment – and, by the way, all of man’s intrusions into the environment are totally natural phenomena – as a continual learning process”,
• [but] Whatever we do causes change, and we can cause gross disruptions to our surroundings as a result of small-order determinations.”
• “Our society has a tiger by the tail in technology.”
• “Ecology teaches us how to understand the consequences of what we do. And perhaps that could even lead us to strip-mining, if that were found to be preferable to some other way of extracting a mineral. One of the problems in the U.S. is that we’re still block-cutting in forestry, where we should be contour- and stripcutting. Here’s an example of ecology working in the opposite direction. 
• […]  They say [clear-cutting] it’s cheaper. I’ve done seminars for them and I think they’re open, wanting to hear your arguments. How far up those arguments go in the executive hierarchy, I don’t know. But the nature of the basic resource, of the timber, has not really been looked into properly. They haven’t looked at the long-term, the really long-term necessities. And the cost factors spread out over that longer period. I got into the office once of the executive vice president of ITT and, in the course of our conversation, I asked him if the company did long-term planning. He said, “Of course.” “How long?” I asked. He said, “One year … This was about five years ago. He said, “We have a one year plan and we re-do it every year”. “So”, I said, “What do you do· when your plan goes awry?” He said, “What you do is you put together a hasty patch, you fix it. Then you revise your plan for the next year.” I said, “that’s costly” He said, “We can pass it along.” He thought it was the right thing to do. He was saying this is what we do because it’s best. 
• There have been enjoyable moments [dealing with industry]. There are all sorts of mythologies about environmentalists, about ecologists, and it amuses me to blow the myths out of the water. I’m really asking people: I say, look, convince me that your way is better, let’s see you do it.”
• […] You have to adjust your ecological concerns to the long-term needs of capital investment. I am a capitalist. I personally am a capitalist, but for a very strange reason. I believe that capitalism tends to go down with its mistakes. Managed economies have two things against them. Number one, they need a large managerial bureaucracy. Managerial bureaucracies of that type inevitably become autocratic aristocracies. You see it happening in the Soviet Union, very dramatically. The Marxist dialectic as it is operating there is ensuring repetition. 
• The second thing is that the capitalist system breaks down, and you have to patch and repair it. In that sense, I’m with the ITT man, I just don’t think he’s planning far enough ahead. If you patch your mistakes, you’re learning as you go and you’re adapting. If you’re managing and fixing, you’re locking down today, you’re not getting into tomorrow. You’re preventing tomorrow. You’re preventing the change. 
• My argument to people who are fearful of the Soviet Union is to tell them, don’t worry, they’re staying in the nineteenth century!”
• “My belief is that we have to learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Our successes will take care of themselves. In fact, some types of success are dangerous, since they lead us to believe that we actually know what we are doing. And then the surprise comes. Then the change comes. The new invention.”

Frank Herbert by Tim O’Reilly:

• “Ezra Pound wrote, “If a book reveals to us something of which we were unconscious, it feeds us with its energy.””
• “[the effort of civilization to create and maintain security for its individual members], necessarily creates the conditions of crisis because it fails to deal with change.”
• “I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”
•  “In some people, simply confronting the idea of hyperconsciousness sharpens their mental alertness to a remarkable degree.”
• “The reward of investigating such a universe in fiction or in fact is not so much reducing the unknown but increasing it, opening the way to new dangers, new crises.”
• “If I’d been born in my grandfather’s time, I’d have made my grandfather’s mistakes. There’s no doubt of it. I just don’t want to make my grandfather’s mistakes today”
• “Science fiction is the only area of literature outside poetry that is symbolistic in its basic conception. Its stated aim is to represent the world without reproducing it.”
• “If you want to get anything across, you have to be entertaining first. If you start standing on a street corner, people will tune you out. We human beings tend to have very good filter systems in our heads to see and hear only what we want to see. But analogues give you a marvelous device for getting past that screening system, because people can be caught up in the drama of the story, be deep into the problems of it. Then later on, much later on, they say, Oh, my God, he was talking about this!” And they come out of it with a brand new view of what’s happening in their world.”
• “We come from a spectator society, by and large. Whatever entertainment you produce is supposedly for passive receptors, who sit there and take it… There are a lot of conventions, and you’re supposed to gratify all of them. My contention is that entertainment has a far greater arena in which to perform. But to perform in that arena you make demands on your readers.”
• “The verisimilitude of the surround is half the battle,” he says of the effort to get his ideas across. “And believe me I’m a reporter… [For instance,] when I talk of a Senate hearing, I was there, I know what they’re like, I know how people speak in them. So my characters react the way real people have reacted under similar circumstances.
• “There’s a story in this.[…] I’m a muckraker, a yellow journalist, […] I ask myself, ‘What is the society avoiding?’”
• “Neither Brave New World nor 1984 will prevent our becoming a planet under Big Brother’s thumb, but they make it a bit less likely. We’ve been sensitized to the possibility.”
• “[As a child I lived somewhere] sufficiently lightly populated that you could keep your own chickens and a cow.”
• “[…] in the city, if your [car] breaks down, you go to the garage and if it’s closed you throw up your hands and say you’ll come back Monday. In the country, if your hay-baler breaks down, you’ve got to get the hay in, and you say, ‘Well, get me the tool kit!’”
• “[“Overview” San Francisco Examiner] I think the sky is going to fall. I predict blackouts, more strikes, starvation, all kinds of urban violence. But on a positive note, I also think we are still a society of screwdriver mechanics. Our society is particularly rich in people who, faced with a problem, don’t sit down and say, “We are doomed”; but instead ask, “How are we going to solve that?””
• “One of the most beautiful things that we have going for us is surprise.”
• “[My greatest fear is that we will [tie] ourselves into situations where we can’t change our minds… I think it’s a mistake to think about THE future, one future. We ought to think more of planning for futures as an art form, for quality of life. We have as many futures as we can invent.”
• “Science fiction is to mainstream fiction as jazz is to classical music.”
• “We recognized early on that a marriage was an entity, a third person in a sense, and we put everything into it… She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
• “If you want to give the reader the solid impression that he is not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time, what better way to say to our culture that this is so than to give him the language of that place.. . . That oral tool—it has its own inertial forces; it’s mind-shaping as well as used by mind.”
• “Mysticism isn’t difficult when you survive each moment by surmounting open hostility.”
• “It isn’t the ideas that make the story, it’s what you do with them. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Development of ideas—that’s where the diamonds are.”
• “When you sit down to produce or reproduce an experience, you have [only] one view of it, and you may be successful in reproducing that view so it comes through, but if you’ve done your homework, other things that are not part of what you conceived also will happen.”
• “[In an article written for the San Francisco Examiner in 1968 I imagined a look back in time from 2068 and prophesied a similar revolt in our own immediate future:] Prominent in 2068 history books is the account of the violence at the turn of the century when people revolted against computer control. Computer stored data (growing out of the old National Data Center) had been used to harass and persecute those whose views didn’t conform with those of the majority. In the bloody revolt, most computers were destroyed, their data erased.”
• “[There’s a drawback to] “focused consciousness”. As you bring a focus into sharpness (and call the focus consciousness), you also throw more out of focus.”
• “I saw what was happening. I saw it coming… I don’t think it’s hard to see that the repression of something—and the repression was coming down hard back then—will make it romantic and make it grow.”
• “[I sought out] single experiences… so I could write about [them].”
• “[The use of hallucinogens and other drugs] It’s a dead-end street.”
• “To use such a substance, you pay the great price. You no longer live in the protective and gregarious midst of your own kind. Now, you are the shaman, alone and forced to master your own madness. You have grasped the tail of the ultimate tiger.”
• “History… is manipulated for larger ends and for the greater good as determined by a scientific aristocracy. It is assumed, then, that the scientist-shamans know best which course humankind should take… While surprises may appear in these stories (e.g., the Mule mutant), it is assumed that no surprise will be too great or too unexpected to overcome the firm grasp of science upon human destiny. This is essentially the assumption that science can produce a surprise-free future for humankind.”
• “My [non-Catholic] father really won [against my mother’s ten sisters and other Catholic family]. I was a rebel against Jesuit positivism. I can win an argument in the Jesuit fashion, but I think it’s flying under false colors. If you control the givens, you can win any argument.”
• “[Utopian writers] turn to more and more planning, a pervasive planning-octopus which reaches deeper and deeper into the individual life.”
• “[Santaroga is a utopia based on ancient Chinese ideals-] a sophisticated appreciation of the world [and] the guiding of the senses into heightened awareness.” […] Both look to the ideal society as one of social unity, of togetherness as the ultimate social achievement. The distinguishing of one individual from another has to be held within tight limits. To be different is to be dangerous.”
• “[The danger of philosophical wisdom is that one can be seduced by it. One can come to believe that] if only everyone knew what I know, the world would be okay.”
• “[This is the problem with B. F. Skinner’s attitude in Walden Two and with Karl Jaspers.] I deliberately took Jaspers’s philosophical characteristics and translated them into a performance program from a drug… While I imagine he would have denied it, Jaspers was Platonic. He would have gone right along with the whole idea of philosopher kings… Jaspers is saying, “If you do these sorts of things, you will interact well.” … And if you have that as a central understanding of what Jaspers was up to, then you can build a philosophical matrix that comes from a drug.”
• “There is no single model for a society, a species, or an individual. The aim of that force which impels us to live may be to produce as many different models as possible.”
• “The point of view I was taking [with The Santaroga Barrier] was that… people really didn’t know what they were asking for. They had a kind of amorphous, polarized viewpoint, and Utopia was something which doesn’t hurt the way now hurts. But the real utopian demand was “I want a world that suits me.” This is what I call the Skinnerian fallacy. Because if you read Skinner carefully, [you’ll see that] he is saying, “Please let’s have a world like this because this is the kind of world in which I feel safe.” And… your utopia might very well be my dystopia. So I sat down to write a book [about] which… just about half of the readers will say “He’s talking about a utopia” and just about half will say “He’s talking about a dystopia.” By this approach, I have recreated the tensions that exist in the world all around us over that very issue.”
• “[The Zen parable goes] Before Satori, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. After Satori, once again mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers.”
• “Dune was set up to imprint on you, the reader, a superhero. I wanted you so totally involved with that superhero in all his really fine qualities. And then I wanted to show what happens, in a natural, evolutionary process. And not betray reason or process.”

1982

‘When I was writing Dune…’ by Frank Herbert:

“. . . there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book’s success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.

It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah.

It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine.

It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics.

It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls.

It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance.

Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day.

It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor each of these levels at every stage in the book. There wasn’t room in my head to think about much else.

Following the first publication, reports from the publishers were slow and, as it turned out, inaccurate. The critics had panned it. More than twelve publishers had turned it down before publication. There was no advertising.

Something was happening out there, though.

For two years, I was swamped with bookstore and reader complaints that they could not get the book. The Whole Earth Catalog praised it. I kept getting these telephone calls from people asking me if I were starting a cult. The answer: “God no!”

What I’m describing is the slow realization of success. By the time the first three Dune books were completed, there was little doubt that this was a popular work — one of the most popular in history, I am told, with some ten million copies sold worldwide. Now the most common question people ask is: “What does this success mean to you?”

It surprises me. I didn’t expect failure either. It was a work and I did it.

Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story remained intact. I was a writer and I was writing. The success meant I could spend more time writing. Looking back on it, I realize I did the right thing instinctively. You don’t write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If

you’re really doing it, that’s all you’re doing: writing.

There’s an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give. That was really my intention all along.”

NBC Bryant Gumbel TV Interview:

• “I think it makes people uncomfortable; the idea that a human being can become something other than a human being, especially something mindless out of the depths. I’m very heavily imbued with Jungian psychology so I think that we do have a sense of, of the mindless animal in the depths of all of us.”
• “Don’t trust leaders to always be right. I worked to create a leader in [Dune] who would be really... an attractive charismatic person, for all the good reasons, not for any bad reasons, then… power comes to him, he makes decisions… some of his decisions made for millions of people, millions upon millions of people – don’t work out too well.”
• “I think that our [U.S.] society was formed on a distrust for government and… we seem to have lost that distrust of government. I kid around and I say that my favorite president in recent years has been Richard Nixon; because he taught us to distrust government.”
• “I have a very passionate concern for posterity. Another thing… upon which this nation was founded with a decent concern for posterity. And… unfortunately posterity doesn’t vote [laughs].

1983

Starlog 66 Interview by Chris Henderson:

• “Now fighting the investor sources. They’re always looking for a sure thing, something that someone else gambled with and won. So, they say, “Give me one of those.” 
• At the corporate level, where [..] decisions are made, there’s always a scapegoat. If things go bad, the people who made the decision stay, the scapegoat goes. This is hellishly hard on assistant vice-presidents and on the genre [of science fiction].”
• “I’ve had a very interesting reaction [to The White Plague]. The Irish who have been born and bred in Ireland have said “Yes. You nailed it – you nailed Ireland.” The second and third generation Irish-Americans are the ones who are offended by my depiction of the country.
• […] I don’t hate the Irish. As a people, I think the Irish are caught in a psychological bind and in a para-military bind, because of generations of stupidity originating in Great Britain. And, as usual, stupidity engenders stupidity.”
• “[The White Plague] Its first purpose is to entertain. Second it’s true, I do put a lot of message in with a mess of pottage; I do it every time. The message here is that you better not concentrate all of your attention on the dangers of atomic energy, because Pandora’s Box is open, and many things are coming out of it which are cheaper and much more deadly. The other side of that coin is not the research or the development of these things, it’s how they are used.
• I’m not against scientific research, I don’t want a lid clamped on it – I just want people to start paying attention.” 

Waldenbooks Tape Interview:

• “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.”
• “The errors of the leader are amplified by the number who follow without question.”
• “Charismatic leaders are dangerous because people don’t question them, they see the obvious thing that the charismatic leader is saying that ‘this needs reforming’ so they fall into line behind the charismatic leader, and as I say even if the charismatic leader is absolutely right and perfect in all of his judgments, eventually you’ve got a power structure which it accumulates like filings accumulating in a magnet, all around the polarized places in this power structure.”
• “I’m not your guru, you be your own guru.”
• “The response to him [Paul] was to follow him slavishly, to not question him.
• I think for example that John Kennedy was the most dangerous president we’ve had in recent years, not because I think the man was evil, I think he was a great guy, I would have enjoyed drinking with him and playing cards with him, but because people did not question him.”
• “We’re in a universe which can throw surprises at us despite our predictions… despite our best predictions.. and we have to be able to respond to this universe with all of our options open, we don’t close off any options, if we can respond non-violently, that of course is preferable, but if all that’s left to us is violence, then we dare not close off that option.”
• “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. This is behind a lot of what I write, it pleases me to think that 20,000 years in the future, 20 million years in the future, there will be human beings around enjoying life the way I enjoy life.
• […] As a member of the Collegium of the World Without War Council I have bowed out of active participation, although not out of… belief in that kind of work. I think that we can’t address this problem of war unless we address our own bureaucratic tendencies, our tendencies to create a structure, such as the World Without War Council, which then becomes much more interested in maintaining its own form, its own identity, the ongoing need for its services, rather than to create an organization, a form, which puts itself out of business.
• […] [In my writing I’m] Showing people some alternatives, showing them the consequences of violence… displaying alternative forms, showing them how the old patterns repeat themselves.”
• “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.”
• “We see organizations develop, which work unconsciously, for the most part, to maintain those conditions which require their services. I think mostly unconsciously, that all of these structures, these organizations, become much more.. career oriented, much more oriented on maintaining the need for their own services and their own ongoing participation in power.”
• “I think bureaucracy is self-seeded, yes.”
• “I think you may break it [self-seeded bureaucracy] by… bringing… the final judgment, the final determination, on who holds power back into the hands of what we would like to call the grassroots. I would like to see in the United States for example some real democracy. I would like to see review committees, with… enormous power. [..] Will they always act perfectly? no they won’t, but if they only have tenure for a year then you can go at it again, then you will go at it having learned something from the actions of the previous review committee. […] It’s 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.”
• “In broad terms I am [supportive of defusing a centralized power source]. I think we need certain central powers, but I think we have to limit the tenure of whoever holds that power, and severely limit it and so it’s arbitrary.”
• “We would have to be much more aware of what’s going on. [When I expounded my idea to] a senior bureaucrat in the school system in the state of Washington he said, ‘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.”
• “I’m writing about the political ecology, the religious ecology, the social ecology, and the physical ecology of our world, and I think you do not separate any one part of this from the others, you don’t separate mind and body and understand the human being. And therefore you don’t separate any of these elements and understand what’s going on in our world. We fondly say that in the United States we separate church and state, that’s an asinine statement, there’s nothing more emotional than religion, nothing more emotionally demanding than religion, because it is the promise of survival. You can’t take that out of politics, you get heated emotions.. aroused. I am a political animal and that’s what I’m writing about, I’m writing about the economic ecology, the… the politics of all of these things… that influence our lives.”

1984

Heretics of Dune:

“Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? Leads inexorably to paradox. How? Traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.”

“Explosions are also compressions of time. Observable changes in the natural universe all are explosive to some degree and from some point of view; otherwise you would not notice them. Smooth continuity of change, if slowed sufficiently, goes without notice by observers whose time/attention span is too short.”

“Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.”

“Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment follows this rule since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognise how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.”

“In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, “Something must be done!” and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions which have no other outlet. What we must strive for always! Is to find the natural flow and go with it.”

“The outer surface of a balloon is always larger than the centre of the damned thing! That’s the whole point of the Scattering!”

“At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.”

“Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.”

“Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?”

“Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind”.

“Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress “wild” research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a “safe line of investigations” which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not ensure such a “safe line of investigations”.

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation which produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”

“People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense of happiness. […] The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces”

“By your belief in singularities, in granular absolutes, you deny movement, even the movement of evolution! While you cause the granular universe to persist in your awareness, you are blind to movement. When things change, your absolute universe vanishes, no longer accessible to your self-limiting perceptions. The universe has moved beyond you.”

“This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here you discard all belief in barrier to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no pre-ordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here – the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos.”

“It is your fate forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.”

“Survival of self, of species and of environment, these are what drive humans. You can observe how the order of importance changes in a lifetime. What are the things of immediate concern at a given age? Weather? The state of the digestion? Does she (or he) really care? All of those various hungers that flesh can sense and hope to satisfy. What else could possibly matter?”

“There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening – first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!”

“Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus they change the future as well.”

“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference which inevitably fall short.”

“The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favourable condition controls the rate of growth. (Law of the Minimum)” [Paul B. Sears]

BBC’s Breakfast Time TV Interview by Frank Bough:

• “I was almost a historian, I… seriously considered being a historian, and while I was… in the throes of this.. .decision I came on the idea that… leaders… amplify the mistakes – their mistakes are amplified; by the numbers who follow them without question. And charismatic leaders tend to build up… followings, power structures, and those power structures tend to be taken over by people who are corruptible. I don’t think that the old saw about.. power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely is accurate – I think power attracts the corruptible.”
• “Dune is conceived of as a planet that is totally desert, so that water on it is the metaphor of say oil here… very appropriate at the moment. It is a metaphor of clean air, metaphor of water itself, I mean potable water, and it’s a metaphor for the shortages that we are encountering because of overpopulation, and the story is told in… in terms of the… of people who are recognizable, you’d recognize these people, but they live in a culture that is somewhat different.”

1985

Chapterhouse: Dune:

“Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.”

“The surest way to keep a secret is to make someone think they already know the answer.”

“I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.”

“The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can trffiy. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!” we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.”

“Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies. A perilous state of affairs at the best of times, disastrous during crises.”

“We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.”

“Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.”

“Each life creates endless ripples.”

“All states are abstractions”.

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

“Do actions agree with words? There’s your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.”

“Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.”

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”

“Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.”

“Enter no conflict against fanatics unless you can diffuse them. Oppose a religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles) are irrefutable or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept you as god-inspired. This has long been the barrier to since assuming a mantle of divine revelation. Science is so obviously man-made. Fanatics (and many are fanatic in one subject or another) must know where you stand, but more important, must recognise who whispers in your ear.”

“We witness a passing phase of eternity. Important things happen but some people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes. You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports? History in a news accounts? Preselected at an editorial contrence, digested and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff.”

“People don’t vote. Instinct tells them it’s useless.”

“Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”

“Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.”

“Time does not count itself. You only have to look at a circle and this is apparent.”

“Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. […] Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.”

“The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it must imitate a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect. Our plugs don’t fit.”

“Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen. More questions!”

“Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic colouration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.”

“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!”

“How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort.”

“Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.”

“No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit it out. That’s what our earliest ancestors did.”

“When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed, Be cautious. Allow for surprises. When we create, there are always other forces at work.”

“Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.”

“Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant”

“Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.”

“Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.”

“There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.”

“I am not the river I am the net.”

Frank Herbert: Historian of DUNE – Mile High Futures – Interview by Leanne C. Harper:

• “My theory is that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning on their foreheads that says “may be dangerous to your health.” If you follow a leader without question, you can wind up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid. Or you can wind up in the rice paddies of Viet Nam because you said yes, Mr. Kennedy. You see?”
• “Any time the religion becomes the government, then when you break a law, you are sinning. That’s the ultimate rule of following the leader without question, isn’t it? Because if you have a leader up there saying God speaks in my left ear and I am telling you what God says, a leader of that kind is ultimately the most dangerous kind of leader.”
• “I see that the more things change, the more they become the same. I see the recurrence of the age-old human madness of following a leader without question. Investing your own energies in somebody else’s decision-making. And that is a sure way to destruction.”
• “I use the vehicle of the DUNE CHRONICLES as an entertaining story form because if you don’t entertain, who the hell is going to read you? So I am number one an entertainer […] Just as any good journalist is. There is no such thing as absolutely objective reporting. I learned that very early on as a journalist. You always screen it through your own experiences and those experiences colour what you do. I decided that I was going to build my own audience and entertain them to the hilt, as much as I could. Now when somebody comes in and pays eighteen bucks for a book I’ve written, I owe them a good read. Otherwise I’m cheating them. And I don’t believe in cheating my readers. I believe in challenging them: okay, play this game with me.
• I have a particular kind of readership. I’m talking to them right straight across, eye to eye, and not down. I also listen to them. I read my fan mail and I send no form letters. Everybody who writes me gets an individual letter back.”

Los Angeles Reader – FUTURISTIC (AND PRESENT) MEDITATIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANK HERBERT:

• “The first three [Dune] books were one book in my head.  I wrote parts of the second two before I completed the first.  In fact I wrote the last chapter of the first one before I finished it.  I did develop the other two a bit more because I thought of new stuff.  But when I finished that third book I thought I was through with it.  I had a theory. Charismatic leaders — not necessarily Messiahs, but Messiahs included — tend to create explosive upheavals in human societies which are very dangerous to individuals and to the societies themselves, because they create power structures.  So you get these centers of power and it doesn’t matter a damned bit how pure and good the hero is.  By just being he creates a power structure and so it’s like a magnet: the iron filings, the corruptible, come in and things are done in the name of the leader — as they were done in Christianity, in Islam, in Buddhism, in all major religions and lesser religions. Things done in the name of the leader are amplified by the members, who follow without thinking, without questioning, and you wind up in Guyana drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.  So I wanted to create a charismatic leader, a Messiah you would follow for all of the right reasons.  He is loyal to his people, he’s honorable and he’s true to his friends.  Every characteristic that you could possibly think of, including the prince in search of the Grail, is there in that character — you would follow him right into Camelot.  And there is the power structure that grows up around him; that’s what we deal with in the second book.  That shook a lot of people.  Here was a hero who didn’t make everything all right – He created a power structure.  He did it just by being there.”
• “One of the things I noticed as a reporter — I was a journalist longer than I’ve been on this side of the table — is that in all the marching in the streets in the ’60s, the people who were shouting “Power to the People” didn’t mean power to the people.  They meant “power to me and I’ll tell the people what to do.”  When you questioned them it was confirmed at every turn.
• Power to the people will really happen when the people wake up to the fact that you can’t separate economics from politics, when they wake up to their own motivations, what they want, what can be sold to them.  Because the real pitfall of democracy is that it is demagogue-prone.  We like to have people stand up and tell us what we want to hear.  I have conditioned myself so that the minute I hear a politician standing up there saying nice things that sound good to lot of people my alarm signals go off and I say, “Why, you damned son of a bitch, you’re just another damned demagogue.
• 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.  Take a look at us right now.  We have created a bureaucracy in this country which is completely out of the hands of the people.  Your votes do not touch it.  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 and 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.” And sure enough, that senator was defeated in the next election.  So he was a transient.  But the bureaucrat was, still there, and he retired on a separate retirement system for the federal bureaucracy.
• People ask me what I think about Reagan, or “Ray-gun,” as I tend to call him.  Well, you know, he has several good things going for him.  Number one, we know he’s an actor.  We tend not to think about other politicians as actors.  But they all are.  Mondale’s an actor.  I have good reports, accurate reports on him off camera.  Offstage he can be a real bastard to his people.  You never see that when the smiling man gets up in front of the camera.  He depends on his analyses to tell him what people want to hear.  The other thing about Reagan is that I think he’s pretty much beyond the age where he’s easily corrupted.  His foreign policy scares the shit out of me, but as long as he’s paranoid of the bureaucracy I’ll stand aside and applaud.  And say, “Focus on that baby!” For that much I like him.”
• “Well, I think there are several ways to do it [putting power in the hands of the people].  Governments, being power centers, as I said before, attract the corrupt and the corruptible.  So we have to go after the problem of how do we design our Governments, so that we attract people who are not corruptible, or not easy to corrupt, anyway.  The Romans solved it a long time ago.  Before they got on their empire kick they went out and got a leader and said, “You’re the boss for a year or two.  But that’s it!”
• One of the things I would do – If I could wave a magic wand – I would give us a six-year presidency, ‘no re-election.  A two-term, maximum four-year senator, and a one-term, four-year congressman.  If they can’t discover how the system works in Washington within a month of being there (hell, I discovered within two weeks of working for a senator), then they aren’t bright enough to belong there.  It’s a privilege to work for your society.  Not a right, not something earned by being there forever.  We have to keep them in for short terms, attract good people with high pay.  And if I had my say about it, I’d make it a criminal offense with long prison terms for any military officer to accept a job with a defense after a retirement.  That’s handing the fox the key to the henhouse and saying, “I’m going to be gone for the night.” That’s an invitation to corruption, and of course that’s what we get.
• We have the instruments and we have the precedents for handing power back to the people.  I think government ought to be an experience.  You know, when this [U.S.] government was formed it was called, worldwide, “The Great Experiment.” Somewhere along the line we carved it in stone.  Experiments are things you test and find out what’s wrong with them.  Right?
• I would experiment with a process that is now available to us.  I would call it something like “The Great Theory.” I would select at random, on the basis of those who voted in the last election (we could do this easily now with computers), a rotating core group of 13 good people to serve at all levels of government, high and low.  I would give them absolutely awesome powers, leave them in office for one year, and I would make it damn near a capital offense to interfere with the operations of this whole thing.  I would set it up so that they had a budget, a sufficient budget, but no standing support facilities, no continuing bureaucracies.  Every new committee would have to hire its own people and its own experts under a spoils system.  And, at very high levels, I would give them the power of subpoena, the power to look in any place they wanted to look without question – and the power to fire.
• Now let’s go down to lowered levels.  I discussed this with a member of the bureaucracy in the state of Washington, an official of the school system.  He asked me, “How would you apply this?” I said: “Well, let’s go to the local school district.  Under my system any time the local school district proposes to spend over X amount of dollars, automatically such a review committee would be called into being.  The members would be selected from among those who voted in the previous election.  They’d have the power of life and death over that proposal, the power to subpoena; they could go into the school system and examine the records back to the dawn of history.  They could look at how the school system is operating, how it had been spending its money in the past.”
• This bureaucrat asked me, “Do you think they’ll always make good decisions?” And I said, “No.  But they’d only be there for a year and if they made a mistake it’d be very apparent and the next committee could deal with it.” His next reaction, I thought, was just magnificent, very telling, almost like a classic Freudian slip.  He said: “Do you think some damned housewife could understand what’s going on in the school system that well?” [Laughs] I said: “You bet your sweet bippy I do!” Because if you put the responsibility on people, really put it on them, they rise to the occasion.
• I would also make it impossible for any person who had served on one such committee ever to serve on one again.  Once a lifetime.  It would completely turn around what we think of as the democratic system, because it would make voting attractive.  You’d want to be in on the chance to be selected for this.  And you would know that one of you, somebody who voted, would be right in the seat of power if the need arose.  I think it would -really give power to the people, which is what democracy is supposed to be all about.  Now all of the closet aristocrats will come out of the closet when you propose this kind of thing and say, “My God! At random you’re going to get some real dopes!” And I would say…”What are the statistical probabilities that you would get 13 real dopes?  Maybe you will.  Maybe the monkeys will type the great novel.”
• [Laughs] I’m willing to gamble [we don’t get more dopes this way than the present system].  Now I’ll tell you something interesting 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.  Every time in history we’ve unleashed this, we’ve gone forward by leaps and bounds.  So I’m saying, “All right, this is what history says to me.  So why don’t we do it again?”  That’s what I’m playing with in. the seventh Dune book, moving toward showing the kind of governments that finally evolve out of the situation I have created.”
•  “Let me give you a little example on that one [asking questions about the danger of modifying the ecology of a particular environment to try to “improve” human conditions].  About 20 years ago the U.S. and West Germany pooled their resources — well, we put in most of the bucks and the people – and went into North Africa, and all across most of the southern veldt of the Sahara.  We dug a lot of tube wells – we drilled them, put pumps on them and brought water up.  We did a good thing and then we walked away from it, more or less.  Technologically we sure as hell walked away from it.
• What happened was that they had more water and more grazing areas.  More arable land was opened up, more cattle were put on the land, and the population grew to equal the new food supply.  Then about five years ago, the rainfall, cyclic rainfall, decidedly decreased.  Three years ago it went, practically dry.  Of course the water table went down much faster because they were pumping.  Right now as we sit here talking, 2,000 people a day are dying in that area.  You can’t go in and fix one thing to make everything all right in a complex situation. It’s like an internal combustion engine.  If there is only one thing wrong you may happen on the one thing that fixes it.  But chances are much larger that by just doing one thing you create other problems you’re going to have to adjust.  And you have to keep adjusting until you create a balance.
• For instance, one of the side effects of what we did in some of those North African villages was that we broke down the social system.  Women previously went to the well for water, which they carried back on their heads, and the well was where they solved all their community problems.  By piping water into the houses we cut off that link in their society and all hell broke loose.  There were family feuds, murders, all kinds of things that had never occurred in these places, in that particular way, ever before.  The Green Revolution was another, similar con game.  We went in with a technologically based system into primitive countries, and where before they had depended on manure and animals to pull their plows and that sort of thing, we made them dependent on special soil additives and special seed stock which was, by the way, very vulnerable to disease.”
• “[…When] We’re discussing prescience, prediction, and free will.  Very old ideas.  I started analyzing what people really mean when they use these words.  In the first place, and I’ve said this time and again, if I were to hand you right now an exact and unswervable heartbeat-by-heartbeat prediction that nothing could change your future or what’s going to happen to you from now to the moment of your death, your life would be instant replay, an absolute and utter bore.  You’d be sitting there at this instant saying: “Well, next he’s going to say…” You’d know it all.  Eighty tedious years if you’re unlucky.  Ten if you’re lucky.  That’s why I blinded the hero in the second book.  He doesn’t need his eyes.  He knows everything that is going to happen.  He chose to put himself on that monorail.
• What most people want when they talk about futurism — all the companies that hire me to play futurist for them — they don’t want the future, they want now locked in.  FDR, he did it.  In 1933 he appointed a committee called the Brain Trust.  They were given the primary job of “determining” what the course of technological development and innovation would be for the next 25 years and what influence this would have on our lives.  What had they not come up with?  That’s the fascinating thing.  Faster-than-sound travel, transistors, antibiotics, atomic power, World War II, are just a few small items that these Brain Trusters missed.  What does this say to us?  It says that if you look at history carefully the surprises are the things that turn us upside down as a society.  Asimov in his Foundation Trilogy has the Second Foundation, which can predict the course of the future, and he has his character the Mule in there, his wild card, but again totally within scientifically predictable norms.  Horseshit!
• What technology does to us is distribute the wild cards farther and farther afield.  Because really what’s going on is that the amount of energy that can be aimed and released is getting greater and greater and falling into the hands of smaller and smaller groups.  The availability of this energy is also being disseminated all through this society.  Something I proved conclusively in my research for White Plague.  I got on the horn and I started calling suppliers of equipment I would need to engage in recombinant DNA research myself in my basement.  I introduced myself only as Dr. Herbert.  I didn’t elaborate.  You know, what’s the difference between a Doctor of Letters and a Doctor of Medicine?  Anyway, I asked, “How does my purchasing department get your XR 21?”  Their reply was, “When your check has cleared, we will ship.”  Anything I wanted.
• Now does that mean I want to clamp a lid on it?  No way!  That would only drive it underground and make a black market, which is what we do with hard drugs.  We create a black market.  A very profitable black market by the way, which can buy the inviolate Briefcases of diplomats, buy the police force of an entire major city or enough of it that it makes no never mind.  You know what happened to the heroin the cops seized in The French Connection?  It vanished from the police property room in New York City.  You can’t control these things with a lid.  In fact if you try, like a pressure cooker, you only create dangerous, explosive pressure.
• Survival of the species depends on adaptability, and that depends on variability, variation.  I think that big government is one of the major dangers in our world.  It tends to homogenize a society, and our strength is in our variations.  The bigger it is, the worse it is.  Small governments, small societies — developing their own mores, their own social systems, their own people, going their own ways to a limit — do not endanger their neighbors.  I hope to God we get off the planet soon, because that’s what will happen in space.  The difficulty of communication across space at our present level of technology dictates that if we get off this planet with a viable breeding population of humans, and if they scatter into different directions, each group is going to develop in its own way.  Variation means the species will survive.  And that’s what I’m addressing in the Dune books.”
• [I wrote a sequel to the original Dune trilogy because] I had a character who wouldn’t get out of my head. It fascinated me to think of what kind of a society would develop if it was under the thumb of one individual for 3,500 years.  You know, it’s kind of like an amplification of the Pharaonic dynasties but all in one dynasty.  So I had that character firmly in mind.  It wouldn’t get out.  So I said, “Okay, here’s your society after 3,500 years.  What happens?  What has happened?  What do we become?”  I was also questioning another major premise: that we know what peace is.  And yet for that to be true, every person would have to know themselves in the classical sense.  Every Person would have to know: “Why am I doing this?  What are my motives?  What is my unconscious direction?”  Well, that is a big issue, you know.  A much bigger issue than people generally realize.  So I’m saying, “All right, you think you know peace and what it would mean and you think you know what the future can bring.  Here’s a guy that’s going to give it to you for 3,500 years and enforce it.  The only violence is his.  Experience it for the term of the book, and see how you like it.”  It’s a little demonstration project like 1984.
• And all of these premises are the same premise when you come right back to it.  That evolution cuts off right here.  And this is the destiny of humankind, not a death wish, in my books.  That’s what I’m playing with in the seventh book, moving toward showing the kind of government that finally evolves out of the situation I’ve been creating.
• I’ve been playing these games all along.  Not popular games.  But obviously there are 15 million people worldwide who have said, “Hey, this is interesting.”  So I have an audience out there.  And I’m talking to them, saying, “Take another look at a these precious premises upon which we have based our governments and our ideas of leadership.  Let’s take a good, long, hard look at things.  Do they really work or do we continue to make mistakes – the same mistakes over and over and over?”

Knave – Dune is busting out all over – press conference interview by Neil Gaiman:

• “Now it is my theory – wearing [my] other hat as a historian – that the idiom about power corrupting doesn’t quite nail the problem. The real problem is that power attracts the corruptible. And that’s why you get those places like the Pentagon and the Kremin, [which] are such cesspools, you see? ([I won’t] name any here in England, you name your own.) You get a congregation of the corruptible into these power structures. And therefore I set out to do an evolutionary or devolutionary sequence of books showing what happens. And the first step was to create the kind of leader who could create that kind of power structure. And that’s Dune.”
• “[Ecology] I can define it in a sense by telling you not to isolate it. Don’t isolate it from politics or social forces of any kind, including religion, economics – that’s like trying to separate mind and body. That’s stopping the engine and trying to analyse how it runs. The ecology is the study of how we inflict ourselves upon this planet, and it’s ongoing.”

UCLA Speech:

• “In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt appointed a group that you may have heard about, it’s called the Brain Trust. The Brain Trust was supposed to lay out the course of hard science and social development for the next 25 years through 1958 right? The interesting thing to me was to look at what they did not mention: no transistors, no atomic energy, no antibiotics… no faster than sound travel, no space probes.. […], and no World War II. Now it struck me that those things had some sort of influence on those 25 years, so I started looking at prediction, and I’ve been following it very carefully ever since.”
• “When I’m not writing books I’m experimenting with a dedicated word processor that we’ve been working on for five years, I’m building with my own hands things to reduce the energy load of my house in the Northwest, making… solar collectors out of grab-bag materials, seconds in… thermopane and beer cans, it was fun getting the materials together.
  –
  And these things work. I made a methane collector out of truck inner tubes, which wasn’t, well it was successful, it allowed me to use the methane from poultry manure to singe them when we slaughtered them and put them down in the freezer which I called ‘using everything about the pig including the squeal’. When I wrote ‘Dragon in the Sea’ my preferred title was ‘Under Pressure’ about submersible.. carriers for liquid cargo, I experimented and made.. models, found out how to, how to get a hydrostatic balance, with different cargoes, with oil and whatnot, so that when I wrote the book I was speaking from personal knowledge. I went down in a submarine, at the dock, they took me down, they couldn’t take it out in Puget Sound, but they could, at the dockside with wring ties, submerge it, to show me how it worked – so I went down in a submarine. I did all of these things because… how we influence our surroundings.. the impact of human effort, on the world around us, is the most fascinating thing about our world to me.”
• “Charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead ‘MAY BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH’”
• “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?’ and 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.”
• “Well anyway I wanted to do this thing about messiahs, and charismatic leaders, I mean why do nine hundred people go to Guyana and drink poison kool-aid…? Why do… the citizens of an entire nation, most of the citizens anyway, say Sieg Heil and murder some three million Jews, and Gypsies? Why do they not question their leaders?”
• “And that’s what I’ve been doing. I have been having fun with what I do, which if I give you nothing else, about what you do with your lives, and these interesting things that you’ve learned in this excellent educational institution, ‘institution’ is a marvelous word’… find something that you like to do, and even if you’re supporting your habit… by… something that you don’t like as well, the two together, that’s what I did by becoming a journalist… Remember that, there’s nothing at all wrong with saying that the Protestant ethic… is full of it… that it’s alright to enjoy your work. You don’t have to fight your way out of bed every morning, you can get up every morning eager to go do whatever it is you do. Have a love affair with your, with your world, and remember that you’re not going to be able to predict every consequence of what you do.”
• “Mythology is a great beckoner, it says ‘come on come on it’s great in here come on’, examine your mythologies, examine your absolutist criteria, question things, I have the most fun when I’m writing questioning things that people do not question, the assumptions that everybody knows are true. 
  –
  I’m going to declare a heresy for you… all science, if you go back into its roots, saying ‘Why do I believe this? well I believe this because of these tests and this, this proof, well why do I believe this? Why did I set up this test? Why did I believe that proof?’ All science goes back to something, that we believe because we believe it… we believe it because we believe it, and we have no proof for it, it’s like a religion.
  –
  So when you dig into the roots of science.. [skips] a gray area at the bottom… but it’s like a balloon, and the surface is [skips] word that computer science has given us. I love this language. The surface of the balloon… is their face, with what we do not know, inside the balloon as we blow into it, is what we have proved okay? But as we increase what we think we know, we increase our exposure to what we do not know. This is one of the inevitable laws of our universe. But isn’t it more interesting, to live in a universe, where there are unknowns… to discover… new lands to explore, then to live in an absolute box, where when you find the edge ‘that’s it baby’, no place to go from there. I like the fact… that we cannot predict everything. I like the fact that we live in a universe where anything, may happen, because the alternative to me, is… a constricting dead end.”
• “It is the unexpected, the surprises, that make the important differences in our lives, even some of the nasty surprises,”
• “You don’t pay as much attention to what people say as to what they do. What they do is the real… jungle telegraph, that tells you what they’re really up to.”
• “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 it never has…
• “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.”
• “Yeah we’re natural, we’re part of nature, what we produce is part of nature. It is the interpretation of consequences that interests… me anyway – what happens when you do this? You see I think that, one of the most serious errors that we [in America] made as a democracy was the creation of a civil service, and it was sold to us on the basis of a lie, the lie was: that that was the only way to correct the excesses of the spoils system, it was not the only way. But what it did was it took… a greater and greater element of power out of the control of the voter, it watered down your vote… and every bureaucracy, […], and I have read my history carefully, every such bureaucracy eventually becomes an aristocracy, just as it has in the Soviet Union, they have demonstrated the truth of what I’m telling you. They have developed an aristocratic bureaucracy over there. What are the tests of an aristocracy? The aristocrats get all the perks hmm? They don’t have to stand in lines to.. get their meat, they have cars, they have servants, they have special dachas for their vacations, but the ultimate test is: do they pass the power along to their children…? Yeah.. they do it quite openly now and it’s announced in Pravda… We’re a long way down that road in the United States, we don’t have to go down that road, and I hope we don’t… because I believe, I really believe in power to the people. I think if you put responsibility on people, we rise to the occasion, and I know a lot of closeted aristocrats.. in our society.. some calling themselves liberal, and some calling themselves conservative… who are fostering this bureaucratic growth, and 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. 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…’ 
• “[My view] On science itself? Okay on science, I speak to a lot of political science audiences, and I love to get in front of them and ask them ‘how many of you believe politics is a science?’ There’s a mythology of science – science fiction. Really what most of us write is technological fiction. We say what will happen if this technological development, coming out of science admittedly, runs this course? What happens to the society? To individuals in the society? My view of science is that it is a natural outgrowth of man’s curiosity, and therefore it is natural, it is the consequences of what we bring up that we have to deal with, and it’s very important, extremely important, increasingly important, that we start looking into how we interact as societies, on ONE planet, that’s ALL we have. Now I am not a hot gospel ecologist, we got into these problems, together, we’ve got to get out of them, together. I don’t believe in trying to find the guilty, and saying ‘get them’ and put in a new gang. 
• If I had been born in my grandfather’s time I would have made my grandfather’s mistakes. I just think it’s nonsense, stupidity to make my grandfather’s mistakes today. That’s my view of science.”
• “[On – how can we promote individual-responsibility (which apparently doesn’t exist)] I don’t think a society can do it, I think individuals have to do it. Well you all can make choices you know… we all have to make choices in what we perceive as good and evil. I had to speak at a Jesuit University, at their commencement exercises, not long ago, […] I’ll give you the speech. I got up and I said ‘you’re all graduating today, and you expect me to tell you what you will face out there in that big real world. The only thing I’m going to tell you is: that if only one of you.. chooses to live by the golden rule, this will be a better world’ and I sat down… The applause lasted longer than the speech, I think they were applauding the shortness of the speech, but you see, 
  if you do look at your fellow human beings as individuals, with feelings, and… hangups the way you have some… and say ‘well if I can help you I will… I’ll try not to exacerbate your problems… I won’t always succeed… but that’s my main goal’ then this is a better world, but you have to make the choice individually, and you have to make it all the time, you can’t make it once for the rest of your life. You can be like.. some people are and you say ah, ah ‘well if I don’t George will’ I mean all, that just makes two of you you’ve see and you can each lean on each other and say ‘I’m doing it because George did it, does it’ and George can say ‘I’m doing it because you’re doing it,’ so don’t fall into that trap… and yeah people will take advantage of you,if you try to live this way, but they hurt themselves more than they hurt you, they really do. 
• It’s just an ongoing commitment that you have to make, and you have to do it individually, and society cannot do it for you..”
• “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’.”

Space Voyager – Duniverse Interview by Neil Gaiman:

• “I suppose, [Dune came] from my study of history. It’s my belief that Messiahs ought to have a label on their foreheads, ‘Warning – may be dangerous to your health!’ Not that Messiahs individually are bad, all of them, but inevitably they create power structures, and other human beings come to absorb those power structures. My view of history is that we are fools to follow any leader without question; the power structure develops, and power structures attract the corruptible. It’s not true that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t believe that. What I do believe is that power attracts people who are corruptible. Adolf Hitler. Gadaffi. Richard Nixon – he’s one of my heroes: Nixon taught us a marvellous lesson, he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example. And that’s a lesson we need to have recurrently.
• “Personally I avoid organised religion. My own belief is that we live in a holographic universe – I think every element of the universe contains the whole – and one of the assumptions out of this is that nothing is ever lost, at least in some form. No good, no evil: nothing is ever lost. So what do you put into that cosmic hologram? 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, so we ought to do it. But not as a preach ‘You’re a bad guy because you don’t.’ It has to be a personal choice. Made for personal reasons, not because somebody laid it on you.”
• “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. 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.”
• “You know, I started out in history, and it’s always fascinated me, through omnivorous reading. You can see certain cyclical elements in history – we meet ourselves coming around, like the Worm Ouroboros. But we don’t truly repeat precisely – it’s more of a spiral than a circle, like a spring. And that’s human progress.”
• “It’s like my book, Dragon in the Sea. People read that and ask if I was being prophetic, I say no. I was just writing about something that, it was clear to me, was happening. It was 1954 but I could see that there were going to be oil shortages. I said that in the book. And there was. I said that it was going to get better then worse. And it is. But it’s obvious if you study history. If you’re a historian of any merit at all, you see the currents. A good navigator in a river gets to read the currents and knows where the rocks are. A good historian does the same thing.”

Eye – Introduction:

“Never forget it’s an industry [film].

There is more here than meets the eye. One of the most important things is corporate politics. Big corporations are bureaucracies that often promote people who are best at covering their asses. Such people run scared, fearful of any suggestion they can make mistakes. And they surround themselves with others who run the same way.

Don’t take risks.

Find out what succeeds and copy it.

Some of the most successful practitioners plagiarize and steal without a qualm, knowing they can stall their victims for years with expensive legal maneuvers. Creativity often has little to do with movie making except when writing promotional copy.”

“Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.

That’s how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid.

That’s how the U.S. said “Yes, sir, Mister Charismatic John Kennedy!” and found itself embroiled in Vietnam.

That’s how Germany said “Sieg Heil!” and murdered more than six million of our fellow human beings.

Leadership and our dependence on it (how and why we choose particular leaders) is a much misunderstood historical phenomenon.

You see, we often get noncreative leaders, people most interested in preserving their own positions. They flock around centers of power. Such centers attract people who can be corrupted. That is a more descriptive observation than to say simply that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If you are corruptible and your imagination is confined to worries about loss of power, you exist in a self-destructive system. Eventually, as all life does, you must encounter something you did not anticipate, and if you have not strengthened your creative resources, you will have no new ways for adapting to change. Adapt or die, that’s the first rule of survival.

The limited vision of noncreative people is not difficult to understand. Creativity frightens the unimaginative. They don’t know what’s happening. Things new and unexpected arise from creativity. This threatens “things as they are.” And (terrible thought) it underlines illusions of omnipotence.”

the other Frank Herbert – An Interview by Charles Platt: 

• “I wanted a [computer system] that was specifically tailored for creative writing. None of the systems on the market satisfied that criteria, because none of them was developed by a writer. So I started trying to develop the simplest, fastest, best word-processing computer possible. We’re currently in the third revision of the hardware. It’s all hand-wired, you understandL you have to wire it by hand to develop the architecture. Once you establish that, then you can etch printed circuit boards.
• Right now, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when It’s working we know we’re going in the right direction. And when I come back to the primitive present time, and use my Compaq, I know I’m using something less than what is possible.
• There’s just the two of us [Max Barnard and I], and we’re entirely independent. And our aim extends well beyond word processing. Our idea is also to create a computer that almost anybody could program, using a graphic programming language. You see a picture, you push that key, and that picture tells you what it’s going to do, the way road signs tell you what the road’s going to do. This is far more helpful than an orthodox computer language consisting of words. With a picture, what you see is what you get.
• Let’s say, at Stanford Medical School, a doctor wants a particular program in his computer. He hires a programmer, who is not a doctor, and has to get some idea of what is required. He approximates it, and the doctor says, ‘No, No, that’s not what I wanted, it’s got to do this.’ So the programmer goes back to his drawing board, and comes back with something else, and finally – I’ve heard some of the doctors admit this – finally they just give up. They say, ‘Well, I’ll try to make this work.’ 
• Now if you could teach that doctor, in four or five days, how to make the computer do precisely what he wants it to do, he would sit down and program it himself.”
• “I experimented generating methane from chicken manure in various ways. I wanted to see if it was practical, and it was practical, to a degree. The simplest way was to slit a truck inner tube, insert the manure, then patch the tube. As the manure decomposed, cerating the gas, the tube expanded, producing the pressure that you ended to sue the gas. I was raising chickens then, and we did our own slaughtering. We used the methane for singeing them, to burn off the feathers. So that was like using everything of the pig except the squeal – and maybe even the squeal as well.
• There was a spigot and a pipe attached where the valve used to be, in the truck tube. This could also be connected to a small stove, which we sometimes used for boiling water. The whole thing was improvised, and it looked – well, it looked pretty weird.”
• “People say to me, ‘You’re trying to build an independent establishment in your farm,’ and 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.”
• “I do believe in putting power in the hands of the people. We have never used the jury system to the extent that we could. Now I’m not saying that juries always do right, and always give you justice. But the people who are governed should be able to say, ‘This is the way we will be governed.’
• For example, I would put an automatic jury review, at the local level, on any school-board expenditure over $100,000. Automatically, you’d have twelve jurors who are called up at random from among the people who voted in the last election. And I’d give them subpoena power, so they can ask for records, and get them, and then say yes or no to the expenditure.
• Now of course, this brings you head-to-head with the educational bureaucracy, which will say – never in these words, but this is really what they’re saying – ‘Surely you don’t think some stupid housewife can determine the complexities of these things that we know so much better than they do?’ Well I think that a housewife can.
• This would also be an incentive for people to vote. I think they would say, ‘If I vote, I may be called on to serve on one of these juries.’ I think one of the things that keeps people from voting now is that their vote has very little to do with what’s going to happen. So, let’s bring the government back where it belongs, into the hands of the governed.”
• “[Large centres of power inevitably attract people who are] either corrupt or corruptible. I’ve yet to see a State capital, when I was an investigative reporter, that wasn’t a cesspool, and I think the major cesspool in the United States is Washington, DC. So I think we ought to take power away from these centres, and redistribute it.
• But politicians are only part of the problem. We also have to deal with arrogance in the power structure of bureaucracy. I have heard a very high-level bureaucrat in Washington, DC talk of a United States senator who was causing them some trouble, was a threat to reduce their budget, and so on; and he called the senator a ‘transient.’ Think about the arrogance of that. ‘He’ll be gone in a year or so, and I’ll still be here.’ And there’s a lot of that in the bureaucracy, especially the higher up you go.
• You get power structures based on bureaucratic demands, rather than on the demands of the research; and the primary demand of bureaucracy is, ‘cover your ass.’ This is unfortunate, since we need to takes chances – take advantage of the fact that wild cards sometimes are playable. Give the odd idea some research money, and let ‘em see if it works. Don’t say, out of hand, ‘Oh, that’s crazy, you must be some kind of a jerk to even think that.’
• Most of the major breakthroughs in our history have come from individuals or very small group research-and-development efforts. Whereas, what you get in the bureaucratic system are finance-dominated concepts, where people are more interested in maintaining the life of their system than they are in the original goal, or aim, of the system.”
• “Laws to control things invariably strengthen the powers that oppose that control.”
• “In Dune itself, I created a charismatic leader, a young prince, so that when I inverted it, you would see the dangers of following charismatic leaders, no matter how good they were.”  
• “Ayn Rand is good reading, but pretty simplistic. If I had to name my literary influences, they would be much broader, more Catholic. Ezra Pound’s Make it New really hit me between the eyes, for instance. And then there’s, oh, Shakespeare, Proust, de Maupassant. As regards a system of belief, I’m solidly bedded in Zen.”
• “I wanted to start a research institute, in my little community in the Northwest, where you would have think-tank types to dream things up, and you’d also have craftsmen and machine-tool experts in fully equipped machine shops, so you’d be able to see right away if there was any practical application. I wasn’t overly ambitious; I thought maybe, fifty people, eventually, within four or five years, could be working as a basic crew, and maybe I could finance it. I can’t start it right now, because of taxes.”
• “This country [the U.S.] still has an independent spirit, a fix-it-yourself mentality. This is an enormous advantage relative to Japan, for example. We have a lot of screwdriver mechanics around our country. Look at the money that’s made by Black and Decker. Who are they supplying – industry? No way, they’re supplying basement machine shops, and gargess. Now, maybe all that those people want to make is model boats. Fine; but if they were given the confidence to try something else, maybe they’d go do it.
• True, we’re not turning out all that many engineers, but engineering is not all that difficult to learn. I believe never stopping one’s education. One of my kids said to me the other day, a thing that really touched me. She said that one of the things I’d taught her was, never to stop learning.”

1987 (The year after his death)

TV interview shortly after Dec 1984 film release – aired during Great Ktca Read-A-Thon on 09/28/87:

• “My Arab friends… wonder why it’s called science fiction. Dune they say… is… religious commentary. The thing that has often been aimed at it is that it’s philosophical fiction… rather than science fiction. My own view of it is that – okay we call it science fiction. […] I’ve had friends for years who write science fiction and who object to you’re saying sci-fi, or S.F…. and I joke with them, I said when somebody says sci-fi [..] we say ‘Skiffy’ [chuckles], but I don’t care what they call it you see, I don’t care as long as they can find it on the bookshelf, under that little label on the shelf that says science fiction.”
• “In… creating the characters for Dune… I went to… the Messiah.. story that’s so strong in our… in our mythology. But I wasn’t going to do the Jesus story. I went to the Arthurian legend and I was trying to create a mythology that would give people a different view of… how we give over our lives to leaders. Not just to messiahs but to people who…
• who poses our leaders, who, who make themselves our leaders or who entice us into following them.
• The religious commentary statement in Dune is the one we’ve discussed earlier… that messiahs should come with a label on the forehead ‘May be dangerous to your health’. I think people are responding to leadership overtures out of a very… deep-seated instinctual process that goes back to our tribal roots… when we were… tribesmen and possibly evolved into the wise old men who led the tribe, if we lived long enough… And I think that this is something we… that just comes with the, with the genes, we’re born with it. And it’s a very dangerous thing in this day and age, because technology has given us the tools of self-destruction… and if you put those tools in the hands of sick leaders – then we’re really in trouble.
• When people come to me and say – and insist that I am a cult leader and that I’m forming a cult, if they carry it on too long I finally turn on them and I say ‘Alright we’re going to start a cult and we’re going to Guyana next week and we’re going to start Herberttown and you can have the kool-aid concession.’ I mean Jim Jones is a marvelous example of how nasty a… a sick leader can become and how that sickness can infect the people who follow. The problem with leadership is that leaders are human beings and when they make mistakes their mistakes are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. And that’s why I say think for yourself; ask questions.”
• “What does my fan mail tell me about Dune? That people read it many times, over and over again, and seem to get more out of it each successive reading, which was what I intended. That… people are thinking for themselves; I have a fan letter I got here, from a 16 year old, who thanks me for teaching him that if he was going to make a life for himself he had to do that, and he underlined it the second time, he says I make, underlined, my life. Well that’s very rewarding to a writer to… see that the message got through.”

Frank Hebert Masterpost