Dune

[RoseMorninStar]

Maria, if I'm not mistaken that's kinda the point of the video, how manipulative and self-serving religion is.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

More specifically, the danger of the Messiah complex. As Brian Herbert writes about his father:

The author felt that heroic leaders often made mistakes . . . mistakes that were amplified by the number of followers who were held in thrall by charisma. As a political speechwriter in the 1950s, Dad had worked in Washington, D.C., and had seen the megalomania of leadership and the pitfalls of following magnetic, charming politicians. Planting yet another interesting seed in Dune, he wrote, “It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.” This was an important reference to Greek hubris. Very few readers realized that the story of Paul Atreides was not only a Greek tragedy on an individual and familial scale. There was yet another layer, even larger, in which Frank Herbert was warning that entire societies could be led to ruination by heroes. In Dune and Dune Messiah, he was cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies that invariably led to the great fall.

[Frelga]

I've been wondering whether the use of the word Sietch in Dune was an intentional reference to Ukrainian history, and apparently it is.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1782 ... 43162.html