 Dune is one of only a few movies that I think definitely deserves a remake. So ever since I heard that Denis Villeneuve, who I certainly hope you'll remember as the director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, was attached to a new film bringing Frank Herbert's award-winning fantasy epic to life, I've been pretty excited to see what he would do with it. Obviously, given the release date of this video, I haven't seen that film yet. But most of the trailers for Dune have impressed me, and I'm pretty confident that the casting and filmmaking are going to be dramatically better than David Lynch's bizarre version from 1984, which I have seen several times. The sleeper has awakened! Fortunately, I have also read, or at least listened to, Dune, so I'm pretty familiar with the source material. The story features a ton of fascinating ideas about economics, political philosophy, messianic religion, and the future of humanity that are going to be really fun to explore on this series. Plus, let's be honest, Dune's plot is a little complicated, and I figured it might actually be helpful to walk you through the basics of the setting, the characters, and the story. So, get ready to be transported 20,000 years into the future, into a world that is a little too much like humanity's past, on this episode of Out of Frame. Dune is a deeply complex story that involves an array of interesting characters and unique settings. Its politics and plot are driven by people's personal motivations and realistic economic limitations. There's monsters and magic, mystery, and large-scale action beats, so it's easy to see why this best-selling novel won the first-ever Nebula Award in 1965 and a Hugo in 1966. And although I have faith in Villeneuve's ability to tell a good story, it certainly won't hurt for everybody to get a crash course in the world of Dune. But don't worry, I'm not going to spoil the entire plot or everything that happens. Obviously, I can't spoil much of the new movie even if I wanted to. My goal is just to get you up to speed enough to understand some of the core ideas. And I think the simplest way to do that is to break my synopsis into three parts. Setting, characters, and plot. So let's start with the setting. Roughly 20 millennia from now, humanity has spread out across the universe, largely thanks to the essentially magical properties of a substance known as melange, or the spice. Which is described as having a cinnamon-like smell, and a euphoric experience that varies from person to person, and with each instance of consumption. Spice is as important as it is rare, found in mind on just one planet, the desert wasteland of Arrakis, Dune. The fact that the spice is so rare makes it extremely valuable, and yet, curiously, most of the people who live on Arrakis are incredibly poor. You better believe we'll be talking about that a little later, but first, let's talk about the characters. Over the centuries, some humans who have been affected by the spice have developed various primarily mental superpowers, such as clairvoyance. Some have evolved into an entirely new species, like the mysterious navigators of the spacing guild, which use melange to fold spacetime and traverse the stars. There are also Mentats, who have used spice to become ultralogical human computers. And there's the all-female religious sect known as the Benageserite, who, in addition to having powers of suggestion and manipulation, have also learned to control their physiology so they can choose the sex of their babies during pregnancy. Meanwhile, the creation of artificially intelligent machines has been outlawed in order to keep people from growing lazy and weak. So some of the people in this universe are trained to the peak of what's physically and mentally possible, even without relying on spice. It's all pretty interesting. The specific characters we follow are mostly comprised of the elite. Our heroes are from House Atreides. We have Duke Leto Atreides and his Benageserite consort, Jessica. Along with their Mentat and assassin, Doofir Howatt, Dr. Wellington Yue, Swordmaster Duncan Idaho, Minstrel Warrior, Gurney Halleck, and most importantly of all, their 15-year-old son, Paul. Our villains are from the competing House Harkonnen, including the grotesquely fat Baron Vladimir, his nephews Fade Rautha and Glasso, or the Beast, and his disturbingly pro-torture Mentat, Pyder De Vries. There's also, of course, the Patasha Emperor, Shadam Karino IV, and his advisor, the Benageserite Reverend Mother, Gaius Helen Moheim, Princess Irulan, and Liet Kynes, who is the Imperial Ecologist on Arrakis. Lastly, we have the two major peoples of Arrakis, including the city-dwelling Arrakeen and the mysterious Desert People known as the Fremen. Oh, and also, there's 450-meter-long sandworms. Got all that? Cool. Let's talk plot. Up to a point. What you need to know is that the story begins with Emperor Karino giving House Atreides the privilege of taking over planetary government on Arrakis. This is a big deal, and it seems like a great honor, except it's actually a trap. For reasons that I won't explain here, the Emperor is working with House Harkonnen, which had been the previous and much more callous overseers of Arrakis. Least to a long-standing feud, Baron Harkonnen's goal is to put Duke Leto in a position where his entire family will be destroyed. I don't want to spoil the details of the plan or the various twists that must inevitably emerge in order for it to come together, but one thing you should know is that Leto knows it's a trap and accepts the position anyway, hoping to outwit Baron Harkonnen and capture the immense wealth generated by the spice trade for his own house. This new fiefdom compels House Atreides to leave their lush homeworld of Kaladin and move to the dangerously inhospitable world known to some as Dune. When we first meet Paul, he is basically the best at everything. He's an incredible weapons master and fighter. He's been trained by his mother to think like a Bene Gesserit. He's curious and intelligent. He's been unwittingly trained to become a Mentat, and he's even a competent young diplomat. On top of that, he has prophetic dreams about Arrakis, water and of a young woman with deep blue on blue eyes. I'll be honest, he's a bit of a Gary stew. That said, we also learn why he is the way he is. Paul's mother, Lady Jessica, was originally told by the Bene Gesserit order to conceive a daughter with the Duke, but she chose to have a boy for two reasons. First, she actually does love Leto Atreides, and that's what he wanted. But secondly, she had a premonition that if she bore a son instead of a daughter, that boy just might become the first-ever male to fully attain the powers of the Bene Gesserit. It would involve a dangerous ritual, but if Paul survived, he would be forever known as the Quesats Haderak, which is something the Bene Gesserit had been trying to create for centuries through a genetic breeding program. But choosing to have a boy instead of a girl brought Jessica shame and resentment. And so, when the Reverend Mother Mohime comes to Caledon to test Paul's humanity, she ultimately concedes that it might indeed be possible for him to become the Quesats Haderak. And in the end, Dune is largely a story about Paul Atreides achieving his full potential. Anyway, once everybody from House Atreides lands on Arrakis and starts exploring their new residence, the Harkonnen's nefarious intentions are almost immediately revealed. Paul gets attacked by a slithery drone known as a Seeker Hunter, and he only survives because of his world-class training and quick reflexes. Meanwhile, Lady Jessica discovers an opulent garden in their new palace, which seems to have had the sole purpose of flaunting the Harkonnen's wealth, and finds within it a note that suggests there is a traitor close to Leto. As the political intrigue heats up, we learn more about the people of Arrakis, mostly from Duke Atreides' advance man, Duncan Idaho, and from the planetary ecologist and judge of the change, Liet Kynes. The Fremen are thought to be a small and mysterious group of strange desert dwellers who believe in a messianic prophecy. Turns out, there are a lot more of them than they generally let on. And partly because they've been so deeply infused with spice melange, they've learned to inhabit some of the most dangerous landscapes imaginable. Once more, when Fremen like the Shoutout Mapes meet Lady Jessica and Paul, they start wondering if their messiah has finally arrived. Obviously, there's a ton more story to talk about, but at this point you should know enough to understand the world. And now that you do, let's talk about some of the most interesting ideas in Dune. In my opinion, one of the best things about Frank Herbert's writing is that in spite of its wild setting and characters, it's actually extremely realistic. I really think it's a model of internal logic in storytelling. Take, for example, the way it depicts the value of water. On the Atreides' home planet of Caledon, water is everywhere. There are vast oceans, rivers, and rainstorms. Relatively speaking, water is not particularly limited or scarce, so the people living on Caledon are able to consume a lot of it. At virtually no cost, it's easy to get. Anyone can use just about as much of it as they could ever want or need, without that becoming a problem for anyone else. It's just not an issue. As a result, water does not play a significant role in the politics or economy of Caledon. But on Arrakis, totally different situation. There, water is extremely scarce. As a result, it affects everything about human society on the planet. It's expensive. It's a sign of wealth and status. People who have water use it sparingly, and its value is so great that the housekeepers under House Harkonnen's rule developed a grift where they would take wet towels from the palace and sell whatever moisture could be rung out of them to people on the street. The Fremen treat it with religious reverence and wear what they call still suits, a technology that helps them reclaim all but a thimble of water lost from their own bodies while living in the desert. They even draw water from the dead. All of this is not only great writing in that the logic of the world that's being created actually makes sense, but it's also a fantastic lesson about subjective value. In economics, there's this idea called the Diamond Water Paradox, which talks about the seeming contradiction between the fact that water is objectively more valuable to human survival, and yet diamonds are much more expensive. This has been a subject of discussion among great thinkers going back to Playdale, but Scottish economist Adam Smith is probably most famous for observing the phenomenon in his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. As he put it, nothing is more useful than water, but it will purchase scarcely anything. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use value, but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it. The thing is, it's not really a paradox or a contradiction at all. In the late 19th century, the Austrian economist Eugen von Bomberk started what economists now refer to as the Marginalist Revolution by observing that economic value is subjective and that prices are determined by the marginal utility of a given good or service. Marginal utility is the idea that as a good becomes more or less scarce, and as an individual satisfies his or her wants and needs, the value of whatever that good happens to be will change. If you are extremely thirsty and have only one bottle of water, you probably wouldn't sell it to me at all. Or, if you did, it would take a very high price for you to be willing to give it up. On the other hand, if you are not extremely thirsty and you have 100 bottles of water, you may be willing to part with one or more of them for free. Economic value isn't a fixed, universal, or objective thing. The average price of a good or service is not based on the amount of labor or the cost of the resources required to produce it. It's a function of supply and demand. Value changes depending on individual's desires and preferences, and it's based on the availability of whatever it is that they want, relative to how many other people happen to want the same thing at the same time. That's why on Caledon, water is so cheap people swim in it and take it for granted. But on Arrakis, it's one of the foundations of their entire social structure. The same thing is true for the spice on an intergalactic scale. Remember, melange comes from just one planet, and yet it is utterly essential throughout the universe. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. As Baron Harkonnen put it, he who controls the spice controls the universe. Now, if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed something that doesn't seem to add up. Arrakis is the only place you can get spice. Spice is worth more than any other substance in the universe. It's tens of thousands of years in the future, and yet much of the Arrakeen population is materially poorer than a lot of people alive on Earth today. How can this be? Fans of this show are going to be shocked to find out that the answer is government. If you check out other people's analysis of the story, you'll find a lot that don't really understand economics or history and get this all wrong. And I won't be surprised if some major conceptual errors worm their way into Denis Villeneuve's version of Dune as well. But we need to get this right. Dune is not an example of capitalism gone awry. The political system in Frank Herbert's universe is imperial feudalism, and its economic system is explicitly mercantilist. What does this mean? Well, it means that the entirety of interstellar society is controlled by a centralized political authority, in this case an emperor. And because its territory is so incredibly vast, this authority has delegated some of its power to lords, such as dukes and barons, who are empowered to rule over various planetary fiefdoms. And as has often happened throughout human history, this empire maintains its power through a combination of threats and acts of violence carried out by its superior military force, economic incentives, and religion. In spite of being the original settlers on Arrakis and initially discovering the incredible properties of spice, the Arrakeen and Fremen are not legally allowed to own productive land or keep the proceeds of their work. Furthermore, the empire has chosen to adopt a mercantilist economic policy. What's that, you ask? It's the idea that the state should play a dominant role in the economy, in particular by controlling commercial activity. Everything the law-abiding citizens of Arrakis produce, like spice, belongs to the empire, and the emperor decides what to do with it, and who profits from it. You might not be surprised to learn that it's not the Arrakeen or the Fremen. In a mercantilist system, the government directly supports favored companies or corporations and inhibits competition. They typically do this through tariffs, subsidies, and regulations that restrict who is allowed to participate in commerce. In Dune, virtually every important industry that gets mentioned at all is associated with a massive corporate guild or union, and these guilds enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly over whatever it is that they do. For example, the spacing guild has the exclusive authority to control space travel and banking throughout the universe. Spice mining is similarly controlled by a monopolistic union, and of course we have the Chome Company, which actually owns, distributes, and directly profits from Melange. One of the key benefits of being granted authority over Arrakis is that it includes a directorship in the Chome Company, which means getting a share of the profits and tremendous political power. To really drive the point home, Chome is, in fact, an acronym. It stands for Combine Onet over Advanced Mercantile. This is a bit of a mishmash of languages, but as best I can tell, it means the honorable union for the advancement of mercantilism. So again, this should go without saying, but the political economy of the universe in Dune is not built around free market capitalism. To the contrary, it is representative of the very system that Adam Smith was critiquing in The Wealth of Nations. In fact, you will find no advocate of free markets who believes that the state should have this kind of power over individuals' property and economic decisions. Mercantilism is not capitalism gone wrong. It's what people all over the world did before capitalism, and they're inherently conflicting ideas. Even if you have what sort of looks like a market economy, if you squint real hard when the land and resources are controlled by feudal lords, the only jobs available have you working for state subsidized monopolies, and the distribution sale and profit from all the goods and services you produce exist to serve the empire, you don't have anything that even remotely looks like economic freedom. And unfortunately, the less free economies are, the poorer people living under those conditions tend to be. For example, let's look at the Arrakeen and Fremen living on Arrakis. With no legally upheld property rights and strict limits on commerce that prevent them from setting up competing spice mining operations of their own, individual entrepreneurs from the native population of Arrakis have no functional way of using the one massively valuable resource their planet has to offer to enrich themselves. So instead of being the wealthiest people in the entire universe, as would probably make sense, they are relegated to being one of three things. Government lackeys, serving whichever lord happens to be in power at the moment, impoverished serfs, eking out a living in the cities, knowing that whatever income they produce will be taken by the state, or Fremen, living dangerous lives in the desert outside the law. As a result, the people of Arrakis have no purchasing power with which to flood their entire planet with water, food, and other resources they could have easily acquired in exchange for their magical spice. As you can see, there are serious material disparities between the rich and poor in Dune. But just like the truly problematic wealth inequalities we see in the real world, this disparity is so severe because some people are explicitly granted special privileges by the state that no one else is allowed to have. Individual rights are only applicable to those who have managed to find favor with the empire, and those are the people who become wealthy at the expense of everyone else. In a world where individual rights were universally respected, we would see a multitude of property owners who become entrepreneurs. We would see the proliferation of innovative businesses and commercial enterprises that can only exist when markets are actually free and people are allowed to offer the products of their vision and labor to consumers who have a choice whether or not to pay for them. And in that world, those people who genuinely create value for others would find that their endeavors are profitable, thus allowing them to expand their businesses, hiring even more people to help produce even more goods and services which ultimately enrich the lives of even more consumers. And equally importantly, everyone would be allowed to keep the income they have legitimately earned using it to improve their own lives as they see fit. The disheartening thing is that no one in the universe Frank Herbert created seems to recognize the underlying problem, including the Fremen. Instead of rallying their people for political and economic independence and overthrowing the state in the name of building a new constitution that guarantees clearly defined individual rights, they wait thousands of years for a messiah to come and save them by overthrowing the existing order and taking the throne for himself as not just an emperor, but a god. Sadly, that's also pretty realistic. But all the Fremen ever really needed was the right as individuals to make their own economic choices. If they had that, the spice would flow, everybody in the universe would benefit, and the Fremen would have become insanely rich. None of their people would have had to worry about much of anything ever again. Dune is an incredible book, and I'm absolutely hoping the new movie is good because, well, the first one wasn't. And I think this is a story that deserves to be told to way more people than just those of us who actually like reading lengthy science fiction novels. As much as I complain sometimes about inconceivable societies in fiction, the world Frank Herbert created is surprisingly astute. Its political and economic systems create virtually all of the problems its world's inhabitants experience, and the solutions most of those people come up with are often very similar to those that people living under the same kinds of institutions have developed in the real world. And yet, we also get incredible set pieces, mutants that can see pathways through space, spice-induced magical powers, and giant sandworms. Pretty cool. What's less cool is how often people misunderstand the ocean of difference between economies driven by private property rights, entrepreneurship, and freedom of choice for producers and consumers, and economies that are dominated by a powerful government. In the words of the late great George Mason University economist Walter Williams, capitalism is relatively new in human history. Before the rise of capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one's fellow man. We don't need emperors and lords or even presidents and congressmen commanding our land, labor, and resources. We don't need the government to choose winners and losers and grant giant, well-connected corporations monopolies over the production and sale of our most important goods and services. If we want a prosperous society that actually creates wealth and raises standards of living for the vast majority of people, what we need is economic freedom. And that is the future I want to see. bonus content where we answer Q&A. Supporters also get a private channel on Discord, free swag, and access to other cool stuff. So if you love what we do, please consider a monthly contribution. And speaking of our supporters, I want to give a special shout out to our associate producers. To Connor McCowen, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor, and Vega Starlight, thank you. Lastly, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, ring that bell icon, and if you really want to make sure you see everything we publish and get even more exclusive content, join the weekly out-of-frame email list. And as always, don't forget to find us on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Thanks for watching.