Petrosjko wrote:Actually, my take on it was that he brought peace at the price of freedom. With travel totally disabled beyond government functions, people lived confined to villages and backwaters, under the control of Leto.
It is the short-time effects (including the castration of Bene Gesserit. Oh, wait...
), but I remember Leto said about arousing the desire of freedom and space travels among the population by denying them such thing.
He seems to be promoting Ixian machines as well, although such thing is commonly loathed among the population.
My guess is he's trying to change the people views on loathing the computers, which is common Dune culture since the Butlerian Jihad:
(1) He denied people space travels and freedom in order to arouse such desire among the population. By banning space travels, people would feel confined and imprisoned, and starts to desire space travels more than anything else (IIRC he mentioned such things to Siona).
(2) He caused a shortage of Spice (some sort of hydraulic despotism or such), which is essential to space travel. In fact, it is the way he denied people space travel.
(3) IIRC he kept telling the people to "not to be afraid of Ixian machines".
However, I still wonder: is it the Golden Path he kept talking about? So humans should stop their overdepency on Spice and start using computers?
And yes, there are some
theory about the Golden Path on wikipedia.Still, nothing of them satisfy my curiousity. Most of them are too
"sci-fi cliche" like the return of the thinking machines and such. I guess it woud be interesting if we could discuss this "Golden Path" in sosio-cultural context. Is Dune culture (before and during Leto's reign) self-destructive? The over-depencendy to Spice, the role of Bene Gesserit, the aversion to computers, and such.
Probably Leto thought that the overall Dune culture is too rigid, and he wanted to change the whole things? (apparently by using "reverse psychology")