I like the idea of the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell’s book got me through some rough times. But the idea of being a hero has some pitfalls as well. Of course everyone is the main character in their story, but I don’t think it’s everyone’s purpose to be the hero.

Maybe you’re meant to be support staff. Nothing wrong in that. Not to mention, you have to slay a dragon to earn your hero badge – dragons being a metaphor for troublesome people – and if everyone is a hero, everyone is also a dragon.

Dune author Frank Herbert has a great quote about that. “The difference between a hero and an anti-hero is where you stop the story.”

If you think about it, that has to be true. The story goes on after the hero wins the prize. Especially with a scale as epic as the Dune series. So the hero wins and now he has a ton of power. You expect him to stay the fresh-faced innocent from the beginning of the story?

Herbert said part of Dune’s message is to show the difference between morals and ethics and how they can come into conflict. Morals being the rules of a culture, which are imposed and which can change. Ethics being the higher values of what is proper regardless of the law.

“It’s an exercise in showing the fallacy of absolutism,” Herbert says.

In Dune, Paul Atreides’ ethical norms are challenged by moral necessity. He has to destroy his enemies to survive and has to adapt to another culture’s morals, which arose of necessity in a desert culture.

Dune is also about ecology. The way the Imperial system impacts the environment of Arrakis. (The inverview above shows how progressive he was about the environment. He was already concerned about plastic pollution in 1965.)

Dune was born out of an ecological study he conducted for the U.S. Forest Service. His findings led him to study desert cultures including Arabs, Navajo and people of the Kalijari, and they way they husband their water supplies.

Ecology, he said, is the science of understanding consequences. “The book is about the consequences of inflicting yourself on a planet.”