The Spice Must Flow - by Chris Bateman
“When they permitted you to mount your father’s throne, it was only on the assurance that you’d keep the spice flowing. You’ve failed them, Majesty. Do you know the consequences?”
- Frank Herbert, Dune
The 1984 David Lynch film adaptation of Dune did much to popularise the concepts of Frank Herbert’s astonishing 1965 science fiction novel. The evocative phrase ‘The spice must flow’ originates in this movie, and does not appear in the novel or its sequels. It perfectly captures, however, the principle upon which the power of the Spacing Guild and the Landsraad rests. Without the spice melange from the planet Arrakis - ‘Dune’ - there is no space travel, and the entire empire will collapse. Hence, in the quote above, Paul confronts the Padishah Emperor. Far from being the absolute ruler of the known universe, his throne is controlled by the power behind it. ‘The spice must flow’ is the requirement upon which the position of the Emperor truly rests.
It is readily apparent, looking back upon Dune from the twenty first century, that ‘spice’ serves as a metaphor for oil. It is what connects the events of these incredible books with the circumstances of the world in which they were written, for Arrakis is none other than Saudi Arabia set among the stars, and the Padishah Emperor stands in for the President of the United States, who regardless of party affiliation maintains an alliance with the House of Saud. This pact ensures that the poor of the Middle East remain in poverty, while the citizens of the United States receive their precious oil so that the automobiles and airplanes will continue to function. The spice must flow.
I will not defend any aspect of the atrocious villainy that led terrorists from Saudi Arabia to crash airplanes into symbolic buildings representing the authority of the United States. But Dune shows us, with grim inevitability, why this attempt at interrupting power on the world stage was futile. For in Frank Herbert’s stories, spice comes solely from one place - Arrakis. But oil does not come solely from Saudi Arabia, it is just that they have so much more of it there than elsewhere. So the wretched cry of misery that motivated those dreadful terrorist atrocities was wasted on a grotesque mass murder, for there was no way on our planet to effectively disrupt the flow of spice.
Yet the metaphors of Dune go deeper and further, for ‘The spice must flow’ is a principle that does not merely apply to the multibillion dollar oil industry. It applies to every multibillion dollar industry, each of which manufactures its own spice, including of course money itself, within the industry of banking. Intimately tied up with the global disaster of the last few years are the political machinations of one of these multibillion dollar industries, although it is forbidden to draw attention to their schemes and deceptions. Polarised into our rival political worlds, we fail to appreciate how the right-leaning support for an economy based upon oil has come to be opposed by a political faction insisting upon very different ways of demanding ‘the spice must flow’.
In Dune, the Bene Gesserit represent another powerful faction seeking to benefit from controlling intergalactic politics. The Bene Gesserit, like the Spacing Guild, are dependent upon spice, for their Reverend Mothers gain their powers through the Waters of Life, which is tied to the life cycle of the sandworms (the origin of the spice). Through moulding the religious practices on countless planets, the Bene Gesserit’s Missionaria Protectiva manipulate innumerable cultures for their own political benefit. Thus through careful and intentional seeding of superstitions, the Bene Gesserit amass political power distinct from the opposing monopoly of the Spacing Guild.
Yet the superstitions of the twenty first century that are open to manipulation transpire not to be those of traditional religion, which are perhaps harder to intentionally influence than Herbert imagined. It is our misguided faith in ‘magical science’ that is the naïve mythological tapestry within which we have been successfully manipulated. What the Bene Gesserit achieved over centuries in Herbert’s fictional universe, the alliance of Big Tech and legacy media in the world of the New Normal brought about in just a few short years. And here, once again, the motive of those who paid for this to happen was the same: the spice must flow.
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