The Political Philosophy of Dune

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In this video, we look at the politics of the Dune series by Frank Herbert through the lens of Ibn Khaldun, and in turn, we explore Ibn Khaldun’s theories through the lens Dune. Ibn Khaldun was a 14th-century historian, philosopher, sociologist, economist, and “social scientist” more broadly. He is most famous for the “Muqaddimah.” Through the lens of the Dune I and Dune II movies (and the Dune Novel series more broadly), we will explore Ibn Khaldun’s proto-realist theory of religion, group power, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the cycle of empires. Enjoy!

Timestamp:

0:00 Intro
2:00 Ibn Khaldun’s Influence on Dune
6:20 Group Solidarity & Collective Power
10:55 Theory of Religion
18:04 Royal Authority & The State
24:46 Prophets & Charismatic Leaders
28:44 Religion vs Group Solidarity
32:35 The Cycle of Civilizations

Thanks to ​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@epochphilosophy and ​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@ArtinSalimi for reading quotes.

Written, narrated, and directed by Tony Chamas (1Dime)
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Okay, so I never expected to be making a video essay on Dune, especially given the large amount of videos already on it. But I saw Dune 2 with some friends last weekend, and phenomenal movie by the way. Much better than the first one. And the whole time while watching, I couldn’t help but think, surely Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune novel series, must have read Ibn Khaldun. And scrolling through Reddit, it turns out that I’m not the only one to make this connection. But there’s yet to be an in depth video on it. For those who don’t know who Ibn Khaldun is, well, you’re in for a treat. And it might make you appreciate the story of Dune even more. Regardless if you have or haven’t seen the film or read the original book series by Frank Herbert, for those who don’t know already, Ibn Khaldun was a 14th century thinker writing at the time when the Islamic Golden Age was far in decline. He was vastly ahead of his time, often considered to be the godfather of sociology, a trailblazer in economics, and was one of the world’s first proper historians who tried to create a materialist science of society. Watching the second Dune movie that recently came out, it now became clear to me that the Dune series clearly illustrates many of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas. Like his theories regarding group solidarity, religion, and the rise and decline of empires. Just over a year now, I wrote an essay that closely examines some of Ibn Khaldun’s more esoteric, dare I say, heretical insights. Offering a reinterpretation of his work to further illustrate his more materialist theory of class struggle, and his realist, almost Machiavellian theory of religious authority, that essay will be published in a collective volume that will be coming out with Iskra books sometime by the end of this year. I talked about some of the themes that I touched on in that essay in the podcast that I did on Ibn Khaldun that you can find on 1Dime Radio, on my second channel, and all podcast platforms. One of the podcasts that I did on Ibn Khaldun featured the historian Adnan Hussain, co host of the Guerrilla History Podcast. That one was an exclusive episode that I do for my patrons on Patreon. If you haven’t already, you should probably become a patron if you like the work that I do on this channel. You already know the deal. But for now, this video should give you a little introduction to the ideas of Ibn Khaldun through the lens of Dune. If you didn’t know already, there was this thing called the Islamic Golden Age, in which the Islamic world was having sort of an enlightenment of its own, and it was in many ways far ahead of Medieval Europe. But by the time Ibn Khaldun was writing, the Islamic Golden Age was pretty much over, and had been in decline for quite a while, with the fall of various dynasties over time. Ibn Khaldun has often been compared to Machiavelli, due to his first hand experience climbing through the Game of Thrones of North African politics, which attuned him to the cynical realities of power and government. He had been involved in politics for quite a long time, about 20 years. Later, as a government official himself, Ibn Khaldun was capable of pragmatically negotiating with adversarial figures like the famous conqueror Timur, known as Tamerlane. Ibn Khaldun had even spent some time in prison for allegedly conspiring in schemes against powerful officials. His first hand experience in politics, along with his breadth of knowledge and his intellectual rigor, was why he was able to critically analyze the nature of government and authority, and spent the last 30 years of his life writing and teaching, and in which he would write his most famous work, the Muqaddimah, which is one of the greatest works of social science of all time. It encompasses history, politics, philosophy, psychology, geography, theology, economics, law, education, rhetoric, art, aesthetics, military strategy, and the sciences. Books. You want to read them, but you don’t. And maybe you try, but you’re dyslexic. Like me trying to read this script right now. If this is you, then you should definitely consider the app Speechify. By far the best text to speech reader that has ever been built. With it, you will read way more, I promise. And if you get it using my link, I will get a little commission. So it’s a win win for both of us. Now, I could not confirm whether Frank Herbert himself said he had read Ibn Khaldun, but the historian Robert Irwin, who has a decent biography on Ibn Khaldun, claimed that Frank Herbert had indeed admitted to reading Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. Regardless, it’s very clear that the story of the Dune Series is heavily influenced by Ibn Khaldun’s ideas. and the historical context in which Ibn Khaldun was writing in. Well, for starters, let’s look at the Fremen, the group of desert people on the planet known as Arrakis. At first glance, they could be modeled off of the Arabic Bedouin peoples, who had historically inhabited the deserts of the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and what we would know as Iraq and Syria. The story goes that after many years of deep divisions and constantly fighting with each other, various Arab tribes became united under the banner of Islam. Under the leadership of Prophet Muhammad and his relatives. From there, the Arabs would go on one of the most successful empire building conquests of all time, which led to the spread of Islam all across the world, throughout the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, including Andalusia in the south of Spain, which is where Ibn Khaldun grew up. He had written quite a lot about nomadic Bedouin people and contrasted them to sedentary people, those who lived in a settled civilization. The Bedouin Arabs would go from being a nomadic people to a settled civilization as the various Islamic caliphates were established. It’s more after. However, I believe that the Fremen of Arrakis and Dune are inspired by a mix of the Bedouin Arabs and another nomadic desert tribe, the Amazigh, the desert tribes of North Africa who were historically referred to as the "Berbers", which is the more common but technically not politically correct term used to describe them. At the time in which Ibn Khaldun was writing, the Arabs had lost much of their direct control over North Africa to the ethnic Berbers. Many of whom had become culturally Muslim by this point. I know the correct term is the Amazigh, but let’s just say the Berbers for now because that’s probably easier to remember for people who don’t know anything. Ibn Khaldunun had spent a lot of time dealing with the Berbers throughout his political career. He was in charge of negotiating with the Berbers and sometimes hiring Berber tribes as mercenaries to further the goals of the Caliphate government that hired him. Now there are many blatantly obvious ways in which the Fremen and Dun parallel the North African Berbers. For starters, the terms Fremen and Amazigh practically translate to the same thing. Amazigh literally translates to free man in English, whereas Fremen is sort of playing on the words "free man". The Fremen of Arrakis also follow a religious survival book called the Kitab al-Ibar Which is quite literally the name for one of Ibn Khallun’s books. The Fremen society, although still somewhat hierarchical, especially after embracing a messiah, being Paul Atreides, given the name Muad’Dib, was relatively egalitarian, tough, united, brave, resilient, and able to overpower the Harkonnen, a superpower that was much larger and wealthier. This is because the Fremen strongly possess what Ibn Khaldun called Asabiyyah in most English translations of the Muqaddimah, Asabiyyah is typically translated to "group feeling"-basically a bond of group solidarity and tight social cohesion. But as we will see, it’s a lot more than that. It is the social glue of human social organization, it is the fuel of social cooperation that drives people to sacrifice their lives for the interests of the group. For Ibn Khaldun, Asabiyyah is the bedrock of political power, and it’s a foundational element for the establishment of civilizations. How Asabiyya changes can greatly determine the rise and fall of dynasties. Now, some people with surface level readings of Ibn Khaldun have compared Asabiyyah to modern day things like patriotism or even ethno nationalism. This is a misunderstanding, and it leads to the false conclusion that you absolutely need ethnic homogeneity to have Asabiyyah. Sociocultural homogeneity, perhaps, but not ethnic homogeneity. For Ibn Khaldun, it is not the blood ties themselves that constitute Asabiyyah, but rather people’s imagined connection to them. In order for As Sabih to exist, Ibn Khaldun says that, quote, the real thing to bring about the feeling of close contact is social intercourse, friendly association, long familiarity, and the companionship that results from growing up together and sharing the circumstances of life and death. Basically, for Ibn Khaldun, blood ties themselves do not matter if you do not feel a close connection to the group associated with them, because, quote, the The consequences of common descent, though natural, still are something imaginary. Although Asabiyyah is ultimately an imaginary feeling, it has its basis in the real conditions of existence. Namely, the social relations and material realities that a community experiences. According to bin Khaldun, communities that live in tougher circumstances, particularly nomadic groups with precarious circumstances, Tend to cultivate greater Asabiyyah, as they are compelled by necessity to work together in order to survive. Whereas in settled civilizations where people are more well off, people can more easily get by on their own without having to develop close ties to their community. In Dune, on the planet Arrakis, it is said that nothing can survive there without faith. The Fremen’s religion plays a big role in facilitating social cohesion and getting them through tough times. It’s important to make clear that, for Ibn Khaldun, Asabiyyah does not simply refer to any strong group feeling within a community. It refers to a unique form of tribal solidarity with a collective will to power. He does not use such Nietzschean terms like will to power, but I find this to be a good way to describe what he’s getting at. For Ibn Khaldun, groups with Asabiyyah do not tolerate being taxed by foreign powers, and because groups with Asabiyyah are the hardest to conquer, they are also the most well primed to eventually conquer other groups themselves. and establish empires of their own. Some famous examples of this would be the Romans, the Germanic Barbarians, the Aztecs, the Mayans, and of course, the Bedouin Arabs, and the Berbers, who also established their own empires but on a smaller scale. In other words, groups are compelled by material necessity to eventually dominate or get dominated. If they are strong enough to resist domination, then they are likely strong enough to eventually dominate other groups. And, without giving too much away, this is more or less what happens with the Fremen as they eventually engage in an interplanetary conquest after defeating the Harkonnen. Just think about it. If you’re from a group that has lived with extremely poor circumstances for your entire existence and you finally defeat your oppressors, you now have the confidence and the hunger to go on a conquest of your own. The point is that the material circumstances enable them to conquer other groups. They might choose not to conquer other groups, maybe that would be a good thing, but they probably will. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun provides various real world examples throughout history of how small armies with greater Asabiyyah were able to defeat much larger armies from wealthier civilizations. Due to having stronger Asabiyyah and superior cooperation, Asabiyyah is social power, and in Dune, the social power of the Fremen allows them to defeat the much larger and wealthier Harkonnen army. The Fremen were able to accomplish this with the help of three strong forces, one being their strong Asabiyya that they developed to survive in harsh conditions, two being their religion which gave them a eschatological purpose and a reason to sacrifice themselves for the interests of the group, and three being unified around a messianic leader, being Paul Atreides, who’s given the name Muad’Dib. Now it’s important to clarify a point that’s often missed when reading Ibn Khallun’s work. For Ibn Khallun, religion can help facilitate Asabiyya, But for Ibn Khaldun, Asabiyyah is by far the most important thing. It’s what comes first, before religion. Ibn Khaldun did believe that groups could possess Asabiyyah without an organized religion, but religion would certainly help give a group an additional power. However, religion loses its power without Asabiyyah. And by the end of the video you will see why. Magic is a way of making people believe that they are going to get what they want, whereas religion is a system for persuading them that they ought to want what they get. Religion, and supernatural belief more broadly, have remained central characteristics of human societies throughout virtually all of recorded history. The etymology of the word religion has its origins in the Latin word religere, meaning to bind. And this makes sense. Religion binds people together, through shared customs, norms, rituals, origins, and ends. Religion provides an explanation for the universe and the human place within it. And during about the last ten millennia, it has also been a justification for hierarchy and inequality, and all sorts of bad things. It’s a mixed bag, to say the least. Religion is a central theme of Dune, and many videos have already been made talking about this. But from what I’ve seen at least, most of them only seem to capture the more surface level anti religious theme. The most obvious takeaway regarding religion that most people get from Dune is a negative one. Dune shows how religion is used to control and exploit the oppressed. The series depicts various empires like the House of Atreides and the House of Harkonnen fighting over who can steal the spice of Arrakis. Kind of like how western imperialists get involved in the Middle East for oil, and how they covertly prop up fanaticism to destabilize their geopolitical rivals. The leading protagonist, Paul Atreides, along with the Bene Gesserit, for their various separate reasons, encourage fanaticism within the Fremen to fight against the Harkonnen. And there are plenty of real world examples of this throughout history, from the US backing the Mujahideen, precursor to Al Qaeda, in order to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also back during World War I, when Germany propped up radical Islamic groups within French and English colonies. But despite what people say, Dune is not one sidedly anti religion. If anything, Dune seems to be more against religious fanaticism rather than religion itself per se. And most of all, it’s a warning against trusting messianic charismatic leaders. Dune demonstrates the power of religion in unifying people, giving purpose to their suffering, while simultaneously showing how this power of religion can be a double edged sword. It’s also implied in the story that the success of the Fremen in defeating their colonizers would have been impossible without their religion. Despite being a practicing Muslim, Ibn Khaldun had a more practical, realist analysis of religion based on its objective function, rather than a moral case for it solely based on the virtue or truthfulness of the religious doctrine itself. What’s quite interesting is that despite writing in the 14th century, Wittgenstein explicitly acknowledges in the Muqaddimah that it is possible to, quote, have a political institution with an "intellectual rational basis." Yet despite acknowledging the possibility of a semi secular government and being a big admirer of Aristotle, He still argues for a political institution with a religious basis. Ibn Khaldun did not advocate for a political system with its basis in religion merely because he believed in the goodness of the ideas of Islam, which he may very well have believed in, but rather because he saw religious authority as the most effective form of maintaining order. Ibn Khaldun had a rational basis for his preference for a political system governed by norms established by religious laws. As he says, this is partially because, quote, the entire world is trifling and futile. It ends in death and annihilation, which is why human beings want a purpose that goes beyond their worldly welfare, unquote. In other words, religion is cope. And the more brutal conditions you have to cope with, the more copium you need. This is what Karl Marx really meant when he said that religion is the opium of the people, and the heart of a heartless world. People do not necessarily become religious because they are stupid. Unconsciously or not, they in part choose to maintain their faith as part of an evolutionary instinct to deal with the immiseration of life. As a naturally pattern seeking species trying to live with the fragility of existence and the inevitability of death, humans seek out explanations to make sense of the chaos of reality. Religion is one of the ways in which people can collectively build up the tenacity to withstand unbearable conditions. For Ibn Khaldun, quote, The preservation of the species is one of the necessary intentions of the religious law. Regardless what you morally think of religion, it is undeniable that it certainly has its evolutionary utility. Religious practices like fasting and abstinence from the greatest hedonistic pleasures enhance discipline and tenacity. Rituals facilitate community. Common customs and norms facilitate social cohesion. And prophecy gives people a sense of purpose that gives meaning to their suffering. It prescribes the hope of divine justice to cope with a fundamentally unjust world. Religion aims to give everyone within the social hierarchy a purpose, regardless of how small, large, powerful, or powerless that individual is within that community. With it, they have a meaning and a role in the greater whole, and feel as though they are contributing to something, regardless of how insignificant that contribution may be. Ibn Khaldun showed that religion can get people to renounce their individual desires in favor of the collective. Suppressing egoic feelings like mutual jealousy and envy, thus helping them maintain their Asabiyyahh. Making people more simple minded and conformist at the individual level, helped them become more cooperative and effective at the collective level. Religion is irrational in many ways from the standpoint of individual self interest, but it’s highly rational from the standpoint of the evolution of the human species. At least it was at a certain point in time. Or is it still? That’s a question for a future video. Fast forward to the 18th and 20th centuries, the gradual dissolution of religion during modernity was a dilemma that the greatest minds grappled with. Max Weber struggled to find out how modern society could deal with the disenchantment that comes with secularization, and Friedrich Nietzsche aimed to figure out what would come after the death of God. And while Nietzsche was heavily critical of what he saw as the life denying ascetic practices of religion, he didn’t see the death of God as a good thing. In fact, he was extremely worried about it. He believed it would lead to nihilism. In today’s world, the question of religion is often taken for granted. Many of us know that religion is a tool used to control people, and religion has rapidly declined in popularity in the western world. But what comes after religion, and whether it’s better or worse, remains an open question that we shouldn’t just take for granted. In the second Dune movie that just came out, Chani, who’s played by the lovely Zendaya, isn’t convinced about the whole prophecy thing. She wants to help her community for rational reasons, not because of the prophecy. Yet, her skepticism is not shared by the majority of her community, and her warnings about the prophecy being used to enslave her people fall on deaf ears. And it just goes to show how difficult religion is to get rid of. Countless examples throughout history have been a testament to this. The French Revolution, despite trying to eradicate the church and replacing Christianity with a more civic religion, Basically failed, and the French Revolution eventually just brought Napoleon, and after Napoleon, France got a monarchy again? Even communism couldn’t really eradicate religion. I mean, they tried, but after the fall of communism, religion pretty much sprouted up all over the places where communism took a hold. Like, almost instantly. There is a scene in Dune II where Paul has doubts about his mission, and says that he is not the Messiah. Yet, this only reinforces the Fremen’s belief that he is indeed the Messiah, a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. Another theme of Ibn Khaldun’s work exemplified in Dune is that of prophethood and its relationship to what Ibn Khaldun calls royal authority. What Ibn Khaldun called royal authority is basically a form of what we would call a state, quote Not every Greek feeling has royal authority. Royal authority, in reality, belongs only to those who dominate subjects, collect taxes, send out military expeditions, protect the frontier regions, and And had no one over them who was stronger than they. In other words, royal authority is established through the institution of state functionaries that in practice require a de facto monopoly on violence, that is, the legitimate use of violence, giving them the authority to exercise force over many groups. This is pretty much how Max Weber defines the state, which is the most common definition of the state used by the social sciences. According to Ibn Khaldun, royal authority is quote, the natural goal of Asabiyyah. Prior to the formation of a state in the so called state of nature, people within pre civilized groups like tribes, clans, families, fight with each other over control over a given territory and scarce valuable goods. While Asabiyyah may be enough to unify a tribe, it is not always enough to unify all of the tribes within a given region, and a tenet of unity is required in order to establish a civilization on a bigger scale. See, Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the state is quite different from those of the anarchists or conservative social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes. Ibn Khaldun does not think that royal authority is necessarily natural to all societies. It is not something natural to all tribes. He doesn’t think that all tribes necessarily are "authoritarian" but rather he believes that the ones who establish civilizations are, by necessity. And that is because in order to unify all these different groups. You effectively need to establish a monopoly on violence, and create what he calls royal authority in order to unify all these groups who might otherwise not agree on a common authority to follow, and a law in which to obey. Put simply, in order to unify all the required tribes in order to establish a civilization, you need royal authority, aka a state, and while one can object to the type of authority being royal authority, which we’ll discuss later, generally to unify very disparate ethnically divided groups. You require a sort of centralized authority with a common ideology that people can worship or obey. Stateless societies never really go beyond a local level. As soon as you get on a bigger scale, you inevitably require a centralized authority. At least according to Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun believed that most tribal societies without royal authority can be organized to a certain extent, but they typically do not get past a certain level of organization, because there are competing wills at play, and nobody wants to take orders, so they just end up squabbling with each other and stay divided. But what changes the situation is a charismatic leader with a strong following with the power to unite these different groups, and the leader himself is more so a unifying head of a broader ideology. This is how royal authority is established. To put it this way, even among tribes, there are various competing group feelings. Various different Asabiyyahs. One of the various tribal group feelings will be superior to them all. To unite and weld them into one broader group feeling, comprising all the various groups. The result is that all the various groups fall under the influence of one superior group feeling. And one of these people representing this superior group feeling will be the leader who has superiority over everyone else. The leader is the head of the royal authority. And the royal authority, the state more broadly, uses the power of the military apparatus as a sort of restraining influence, as Ibn Khaldun calls it. To put all these disparate elements in check. To prevent infighting within the group. It’s basically authoritarianism. There’s really no way around it. But Ibn Khaldun did not really believe that there was an alternative way to establish civilizations. At least he didn’t see any examples in his time. While Ibn Khaldun did not live to see the liberal enlightenment in which people would strive for less authoritarian states or states in which power was at least shared to the greater extent or constrained, we can certainly look at better states and less authoritarian states and states that perform better for different outcomes. But If you take Ibn Khaldun’s theory, there’s really no way to establish a civilization from scratch without a certain kind of coercion. Not really any ones that go beyond a local level, bigger civilizations. But whether the authority and power is a royal one is certainly objectionable. But Ibn Khaldun made his case for one, for a reason. The royal in royal authority in this context refers to dynastical authority, justified through religious doctrine. Such as the Caliphate, which was the main form of royal authority in Ibn Khaldun’s time. And the Berbers also had their kingdoms, with Berber kings, and even Berber queens. The leader, the head of the royal authority, is typically connected to the ideology that legitimizes this authority. In Dune, Paul Atreides is the leader who becomes the head of the royal authority of the Fremen. The sacred royal aspect of royal authority adds a sense of arbitrary legitimacy that is very powerful. There is a reason why monarchy is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, form of state. Even the Enlightenment couldn’t fully overcome it, with many countries in the age of the bourgeois revolutions opting instead for a constitutional monarchy, instead of becoming a fully democratic republic. This is because the monarch was seen as a major symbolic component of the state’s legitimacy, and still is in many countries even today, like Spain, Sweden, and Italy. And, of course, England. Monarchy, or dynasty more broadly, is a form of what the sociologist Max Weber would call traditional authority, in contrast to what he called rational legal authority, the kind of authority that exists in most modern democracies, in which authority is rationalized by the consent of the governed, through elections, and through an impartial legal process, one that isn’t connected to the divine right of kings, Although many governments had aspects of both forms of authority, and still do to this day, constitutional monarchy for instance, was a way to get both forms of authority. In a dynasty, the monarch, the caliph, or the leader in general, acts as a unifying head of the civilization. It’s akin to a sacred paternal authority that unifies the past and the present of a civilization through their hereditary relation to the civilization’s founders. In political Islam, the leader is typically supposed to be related to one of the twelve prophets of Islam. For instance, there is the office of Imam, or the Imamate, a title for the spiritual leaders that occupy the head of state. And they are generally supposed to be distantly related to one of the prophets. And this relation is supposed to give an almost infallible legitimacy to their authority. An example of an imam in modern times would be the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, which would be an example in Shia Islam. Now let’s take a closer look at the theme of prophethood, because it’s a big theme in Dune and a big part of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. Ibn Khaldun states that, quote, Dynasties of wide power and large royal authority have their origin in religion based either on prophethood or truthful propaganda. In this statement, Ibn Khaldun is not using propaganda in a derogatory sense. And by truthful, he simply means that the religious doctrine should at least in theory, be in the interest of the people, and that people should, for the most part, follow it willingly. In societies with high levels of Asabiyyah, people typically follow the leaders willingly. But in societies where people only follow the law out of coercion, it suggests a great lack of Asabiyyah, which would make the social organism as a whole much weaker. In this story of Dune Paul Atreides is said to be the Lisan al Gaib. The Fremen term for the Prophet, the Messiah. Paul is essentially supposed to be what is called the Mahdi in Islam. In Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi is supposed to be the last prophet. It was supposed to emerge at a certain point in order to bring justice, peace, and restore a golden age of religion at some point before the end of the world. In Dune II, we see Poletreides stepping into his role as the messiah for the Fremen people. The combined forces of Asabiyyah, religion, and the messianic leadership of Poletreides helped mobilize the Fremen towards a holy war, what is literally called a jihad in the story of Dune, in which they not only beat the Harkonnen, but eventually dethrone the sitting emperor. And effectively gain control over the Imperium, with Paul Atreides eventually becoming the new emperor. And spoiler alert, but not really, because this is pretty much alluded to already in the movies, so if you saw that you already kind of know what happens anyway. But in Dune Messiah, the second Dune novel, which is likely what the third Dune movie will be about, billions of people end up dying in this holy war launched by the Fremen led by Paul Atreides. And the story shows that even though many people do genuinely desire a messianic leader in order to give them hope. It warns against the dangers of this, no matter how benevolent this leader may or may not be. Even though Paul Atreides is initially just there to guide the Fremen against the house of Harkonnen so that he can get revenge for his father and the house of Atreides, Paul genuinely grows to like the Fremen and genuinely cares for them, and he is sort of pushed into this role due to circumstances. But after becoming emperor, Paul becomes progressively more despotic, and gets a lot of people killed. Long after the Fremen take control of the universe, through the Jihad, the messiah Paul Atreides eventually becomes a myth, that ends up being worshipped long after his death, with the clergy spreading what became the religion of Muad’Dib. He becomes a sort of relic, a myth in order to justify an existing authority, an existing fanaticism. But while against fanaticism, and the dangers of trusting charismatic leaders, he’s still It is implied in the Dune story that propping up the religious fervor of the Fremen was the lesser evil to the Harkonnen, and was overall necessary in order to defeat the Harkonnen Empire. Now if you have watched or read Dune, then you would know that the other groups, like pretty much all the houses in the Imperium, also have their forms of religion. So this begs the question, if the other groups in Dune have religion as well, then what makes the religion of the Fremen so much more powerful? Is it just that their religion is more fanatic? Well, the Harkonnen are also depicted as fanatics as well, having an ideology that resembles a kind of fascism. And according to the Dune Encyclopedia, the Harkonnen also have their origins in inhospitable conditions. So it’s not just a question of toughness either. Well the answer is, as alluded to before, is that the Fremen simply possess stronger Asabiyyah, stronger group feeling. But more importantly, according to Ibn Khaldun, Quote, religious propaganda cannot materialize without group feeling. That is, religion cannot truly be effective without Asabiyyah. What did Ibn Khaldun mean by this? Herein lies what I would argue is Ibn Khaldun’s most important contribution to the theory of religion and ideology more broadly. Ibn Khaldun believed that, while religion can help foster unity among different peoples and help them cope with their suffering of everyday life, religion by itself loses its power without Asabiyyah. This is for two main reasons. First, every mass political undertaking, by necessity, requires some degree of strong Asabiyyah. Secondly, if religious hegemony exists but group solidarity declines, People will still obey the rulers, but do so passively, and not fully out of their own free will. Asabiyya fosters willful active consent for the dynasty, while religion without Asabiyya leaves the dynasty only with passive consent. The power of an authority is at its absolute highest when the will of the ruled is an extension of the will of the rulers, when people voluntarily adopt the will of the authority as their own. As we will see in Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of the decline of civilizations, Asabiyyah inevitably diminishes over time with each passing generation, and inhabitants become more disconnected from the founding tribes. In a situation in which group solidarity has diminished but religious tradition still remains, The people still obey the laws and social customs of the royal authority, but merely out of customary tradition. This gives the appearance of a compliant public that still supports the authority. And this can still work insofar as people still obey, but only as long as other tribes with stronger Asabiyyah do not conquer the complacent population, who don’t possess enough Asabiyya to make the sacrifices in order to fight against the invading groups. Passive obedience through following tradition is one thing, but to willingly get people to sacrifice their lives to defend the civilization? What you really need is Asabiyyah. Without it, religion really loses its effect on people, as it becomes more of a set of empty symbolic rituals that people automatically perform rather than a binding force to maintain the collective social bond. In such a situation, if a nomadic group with stronger Asabiyyah were to invade the settled civilization, the dynasty would be relying on their standing army, as their settled population wouldn’t be willing to fight and die for it. For example, just look at the Monarchs of England. Do you really think that if England was invaded by Russia today that people would be dying for King Charles? I doubt it. The settled civilization would just be running for their lives. It would be every man for himself, trying to survive, but not really fighting and dying for each other as a community. It’s one thing to be religious. Say the Hail Mary and go to church as a traditional custom. It’s a whole other thing to be willing to sacrifice your life for the community. This is crucial for conservatives to understand because it shows why you can’t just restore the loss of community and social solidarity simply by bringing back religion or appealing to tradition and vaguely to family values. If we were to understand the decline of collective solidarity in our own societies, then no one would be idealist and foolish to blame it all on feminism or some ideology. The root cause is usually a material one, in our case, most likely the evolution of capitalism and its colonization of all spheres of social life. Given that religion can’t truly be effective without Asabiyyah, Ibn Khaldun stresses that dynasties cannot rely too heavily on faith alone in order to rule successfully, and they must not confuse the potency of religion itself with the real basis of political power, group feeling, Asabiyyah. But now this begs the question, so if religious fervor was still intact in the Harkonnen civilization, Then why did they, and other superpowers who also had a religion of their own in the Imperium, decline? Well, we can obviously conclude that was the decline of Asabiyyah, but what caused the decline of Asabiyyah? Remember, the Harkonnen had a form of religion, had their origins in tough conditions, and had superior technology, so how did their Asabiyyah become inferior to that of the Fremen? Well, I’m not immersed enough in the Dune lore to know for sure. But we can form a pretty strong guess as to why when considering the factors that Ibn Khaldun believed caused Asabiyyah to decline, which he believed was one of the main causes behind the decline of empires in general. Most popular accounts of Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations generally go as follows. First, there is a nomadic or primitive group bound together by strong Asabiyyah who fights off their conquerors from a sedentary civilized society. After successfully resisting their conquerors, they then conquer their opposition and various other nomadic tribes in the process. After the establishment of royal authority, a state with a state sanctioned army that submits the conquered groups, they then begin constructing a new civilization. Now the victorious group takes over much of the wealth and achievements of the previous civilization. After they become a settled civilization of their own, with great wealth and strong royal authority, the rulers seek peace and tranquility. Preferring to enjoy the fruits of their conquests, the civilization’s population grows, increasingly moving into cities and towns, and growing commerce and trade allow the new population to get access to all sorts of new luxuries and cultural delicacies. This is a stage in which the fruits of civilization are enjoyed. Sedentary life and luxury allow for the development of culture as we know it. The flourishing of arts, music, architecture, literature, poetry, philosophy, academics, and fine food. Things that make life worth living. But as a civilization’s population grows and its empire expands to the point of overreach, group solidarity inevitably diminishes over time. As the next generations of inhabitants grow up in a state of tranquility, with the ease of comfort and luxury, they lose the grit and the hunger necessary to overcome adversity. This is most strongly the case with the rulers and the wealthier classes of the civilization, who become decadent, complacent, and take their fortune for granted. The Asabiyyah of the population as a whole declines over time as the dynasty gets wealthier, and generations become increasingly disconnected from the founding tribe. Thus they would be less likely to defend the dynasty if it was to be invaded, because they have way more to lose, and they don’t really feel a strong connection to their ancestors, at least not to the point where they would fight and die for the collective. In contrast to a comfortable, wealthy, settled civilization, nomadic peoples are more hungry. Literally, as they are more likely to be in a facet state. Ibn Khaldun often praised the austere discipline of the Berbers, and their face shapes. Ibn Khaldun saw these nomadic groups as more likely to be brave, as they don’t have much to lose, and much of their population is well trained to fight, because they do not rely on a centralized state army to protect them. In Dune, House Corrino, which controlled the Imperium, became immensely wealthy, but eventually lost power to the Fremen, as Shaddam Corrino IV, the emperor of the universe basically, Had become decadent and overconfident. And his Sardaukar soldiers, who had once been known as the toughest soldiers in the galaxy, became complacent and cynical. Even before that, in the history of the Dune Universe, previous civilizations stagnated due to reliance on thinking machines that led to a drastic decline in human strength and ingenuity. Now, for all the socialists watching this video, you might have an objection to Ibn Khaldun’s theory. Surely, the wealth of the average person in a settled civilization couldn’t have been that high. There would still be rich and poor. However, And you would be right. This is another crucial factor at play described in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah that is usually missed by most people who read his work superficially, and that is class conflict. Although it’s not obvious, Ibn Khaldun sort of has a theory of class struggle. The only scholar I’m aware of who puts emphasis on Ibn Khaldun’s theory of class struggle is Yves Lacoste in the book that he wrote on Ibn Khaldun published by Verso Books. Whether intentionally or not, Ibn Khaldun demonstrates that the state is a relation of class rule. And in many ways, he prefigures a lot of what Marxists would later say. And it’s not surprising that Ibn Khaldun didn’t take his theories of class struggle to their logical conclusion, given his own aristocratic background. In the Muqaddimah, particularly the third chapter, Ibn Khaldun indicates that Asabiyyah already starts to decline in the early stages when royal authority is established. This is because royal authority marks the formation of a new hierarchy that did not exist before. In this chapter, Ibn Khaldun shows how the wealth disparities that arise with the newfound class divisions that come with royal authority cause Asabiyya to deteriorate, which sows the seeds of the dynasty’s downfall. Ibn Khaldun states that when a dynasty is firmly established, it quote, dispenses with group feeling. But why does this happen? Well first, the new government of royal authority is something strange, and people have some resistance submitting to it as they no longer obey the leader out of their own free will, or at least not everyone does. And according to Ibn Khaldun, this is in part because the ruler, quote, gains complete control over his people. claims royal authority all for himself, excluding them, and prevents them from trying to have a share in it. In other words, royal authority marks the entrenchment of class rule. While in nomadic primitive societies, hierarchies for the most part are based on esteem and not huge wealth differences, royal authority marks the entrenchment of a new class hierarchy. Whereby one class dominates another. Ibn Khaldun illustrates this phenomenon in this fascinating quote. As long as glory was the common property of the group, and all members of the group made an identical effort, their aspirations to gain the upper hand over others and to defend their own possessions were expressed in exemplary unruliness and lack of restraint. They all aimed at fame. Therefore, they considered death encountered in pursuit of glory, and they preferred annihilation to the loss of it. Now, however, when one of them claims all glory for himself, he treats the others severely and holds them in check. Further, he excludes them from possessing property and appropriates it for himself. By all glory to himself, Ibn Khallun refers to the fruits of the conquest, the luxury, property, and the booty acquired from the conquest, which gets controlled by a ruling class, which in this case would be the rulers of the caliphate. The Caliph in the aristocracy, the royalties, who is able to tax their population for generations, and government elites and merchants also have a lot to gain. Here it is evident that one privileged class of people gets access to most private property and wealth while the rest are subjected against their will through state force. Therefore there is a clear connection between the decay of Asabiyyah and the emergence of class hierarchies. and the unequal distribution of wealth that comes with royal authority. This is crucial to point out, because most interpretations of the Muqaddimah focus solely on the detachment of the future generations from their previous generations who founded the dynasty, and they generally focus on the decay of the population as a whole, the decadence of All people in the civilization rather than focusing on the ruling class highlighting the class divide. The fact that some people have the luxury to be decadent. While others likely do not. Ibn Khaldun likely did not want to offend his superiors and thus he was a lot more vague about the classes he was talking to. When it came to things like decadence and decay, people were much more willing to fight and sacrifice when they thought that they had something to gain from the conquest. But when it becomes increasingly clear that people are only getting a very small slice of the pie, people are less likely to fight and sacrifice themselves for the society. As a result, the dynasty begins to increasingly rely on new precarious nomadic groups to fight their battles, which are needed to supplement their military force in addition to their standing army, as they get increasingly less people of their own to fight in battle. You see this a lot with Russia today, relying on private military contractors, and relying on Dagestanis and Chechnyans to fight their battles in Ukraine. Now, hiring foreign mercenaries from groups who live in tougher circumstances is a double edged sword. Such groups typically have less to lose and are more willing to fight, but they can easily turn on the empire that backs them, as they do not share group solidarity with it. Eventually, as an empire gets weaker, with its population less willing to die and defend the dynasty, neighboring groups, particularly the nomadic groups, Start to give them a hard time and gradually conquer more and more of that empire’s territory until it eventually just falls into the hands of foreign groups. New groups move in and eventually take over the civilization, beginning the civilizational cycle all over again. Civilizational cycle repeats itself. But let me know if you agree with Ibn Khaldun’s rather cynical take on the cycles of history. I tend to espouse a more Hegelian Marxist view of history. History tends to progress. But it doesn’t necessarily progress in one way. History can go in both directions. There are periods of regression, and periods of enlightenment, periods of decay. Ibn Khaldun was a product of his time, and it was dealing with the history that he had available to him. Ibn Khaldun did not live to see the Enlightenment that spread through Europe, North America, and across the world. The Enlightenment gave birth to the hope that we can overcome some of these setbacks. And while empires certainly rise and decline, humanity finds itself dealing with new, more important contradictions. But I’d be curious to know about what you guys make of this whole theory. Leave your comments below. And definitely check out my podcast on 1Dime Radio if you want to learn more about Ibn Khaldun’s ideas, particularly the exclusive podcast that he did on Patreon. If you enjoyed this video, you should definitely become a patron. If you’ve been watching this channel for a while, at this point, why not? You get exclusive content that you do not get by becoming a patron of most other YouTube channels and if you appreciate the work that I do here as well as on the podcasts that I do, then this is pretty much how this channel stays alive. Thank you very much to the patrons who have supported me thus far, especially these generous folks on the screen. See you in the next video.