#Fremen mirage

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that the greatest recurring historical delusion is that the relative "manliness" of two societies in a war has any particular bearing on who will win it.

[krinndnz]

One of the comments says "Dune is orientalist but it's not orientalist in the ways people who haven't read Dune think it is" and I want to expand on that a little by recommending Bret Devereaux's "Fremen Mirage" series of posts. It's not precisely about orientalism, but rather, about the Fremen as the poster children of a Proud Warrior Race Guy sort of archetype that crops up both in entertainment media and in propaganda, and Devereaux diligently takes that archetype apart because it's godawful reactionary horseshit. One of the throughlines in the series is the "hard times create strong men // strong men create good times // good times create weak men // weak men create hard times" meme, which is also godawful reactionary horseshit.

The idea that hard men from hard places are tougher, more morally pure, and more virile than men from "decadent" civilization, is an old one and its origin is far less related to sober observations of peoples alleged to have such virtues than it is to members of the "decadent" civilizations complaining about their own society, which is part of why masculinity specifically is tangled up in it. Anxiety about the preservation of notionally-threatened masculinity is a core part of this archetype and when you hear any supposedly historical theory put forward in terms of threatened manhood, that should be a red flag. If this reminds you of the godawful reactionary horseshit people believe about Sparta, your memory serves you well: Sparta is pretty much the biggest nonfictional poster child for this and Devereaux also wrote an article in Foreign Policy headlined "Spartans Were Losers". I have the warmest regard for whatever editor sent it out under such a blunt and direct headline: it made a bunch of shitfuck reactionaries incredibly mad. Beautiful.

Devereaux's "Fremen Mirage" series is focused on the Fremen because they're a very concentrated example of the trope and since they're fictional, everything that there is to know about them is, in practice, contained in the one book, Dune, which we have the complete text of (as opposed to our evidence about the ancient world, which contains massive lacunae in horribly inconvenient spots and where it's often much easier to establish "they definitely did not do X, because if they did, we would expect to find a lot of Y evidence in texts/sites/artifacts but we find none" than to establish "here's what they did instead of X"). This also means that the Fremen are on exactly one side of the (false) hard-vs-decadent dichotomy, as opposed to the Romans, who have been cast on both sides of it, which is another red flag.

Paraphrasing the first post in the series, the Fremen are:

From less agrarian/settled/"civilized" societies, particularly in adverse environments

Made inherently tougher, more "pure" (morally or otherwise), more suited for war, and/or more masculine by their conditions

Able to defeat more "civilized" competitors because of their alleged toughness/"purity"/warrior-nature/masculinity

The Fremen Mirage, then, is the idea that "decadent" civilizations will inevitably be overrun by Fremen types, who then themselves go "decadent," lose their fighting capacity, and become susceptible to overrun, in a more or less endless cycle. To repeat: this is godawful reactionary horseshit. The Mirage profoundly misrepresents the Fremen types, the "decadent" civilizations, the military conflicts between them, and multiple other things. It is worse than useless as a tool for understanding the past; it will actively derange your ability to make sense of what we do know about the past. It is extremely useful, however, if you're living at the dawn of the industrial age and you're undertaking a project of Romanticism-driven nationalist identity-building — which is where most of the work of turning ancient source texts that describe Gauls, Spartans, and others, into the Fremen Mirage as such, happened. This is the era of most-massive-sneer-quotes-I-can-summon """scientific""" racism and of renewed attempts to base gender differences in biology. In the ancient sources, much of what makes Fremen types distinct is environmental; in the Romantic nationalist sources, it becomes biological and we get things like the British idea of "martial races" (absolute twaddle).

The last post in the series has a good summary, so if you're not up to as much reading I'd check that out, but the series is as long as it is because Devereaux is a historian and thus he lays out his evidence clearly and points to other evidence just as clearly. The summary of what I have to say is that I enjoy Dune as fiction, it's really well-crafted sci-fi, but like any other media, it's important to engage with it critically, and in this case it's nice that that critical engagement leads so directly to "we can use this work of fiction fruitfully as part of scrutinizing the world we live in."

correct me if i’m wrong cos i don’t watch dune.. but i’ve seen people call paul a tragic character. except isn’t he a whole white coloniser tricking indigenous poc into believing he’s a prophet to serve his own interests? that’s inherently evil that cannot be a tragic character imo

so yes that is correct that is what happens. the tragedy is that he is a sixteen year old boy who gets a vision of this happening and he is TERRIFIED and absolutely does not want this to happen at all. He does not want the holy war he does not want to be the chosen one he initially very much wants to fight alongside the fremen as equals trying to liberate themselves from their current colonizer without becoming the messiah because they have common political cause.

And then the entire second half of the first book (and the second movie) are about the concessions he makes to himself bit by bit by bit (well it’s the only way to save his mom and sister. well it’s the only way to prevent nuclear war. well he does want his revenge. well maybe he IS special.) Until by the end he has lost 100% of his humanity, fully wants to be the messiah and is willing to manipulate people into thinking so, and has declared himself duke of arrakis in his father’s name and made a play for the imperial throne.

you’re right that it’s evil. the book and these movies agree with you. the tragedy is watching a child who desperately wanted to avoid this slowly completely lose himself to it anyways. i don’t think “tragic” and “evil” are inherently mutually exclusive.

[ghostofacrow]

Dune discourse is uniquely annoying because there's a bunch of extremely obvious, in-your-face orientalism perpetuated by the main characters that's being discussed at nauseum and is very easy to dismiss and completely overshadows any actual issues with the movie, like the refusal to use recognisable arabic phrases or the hiring practices. I'll be charitable here and assume that people have a rightfully negative reaction to how those images of white people, particularly Jessica, are used as marketing material, instead of just not getting the point, and with how often concerns like this are overlooked, I can understand why they aren't receptive to "no this thing that media does uncritically all the time is meant to be bad THIS time actually trust me bro just read this 1000 page book".

Seemingly the entire film crew having cold feet about including references to real world anti-colonial movements or just normal Arabic would always be concerning, but especially given the current situation in Palestine and it's all overshadowed by the colonisers in the book acting like colonisers because every other issue is more complicated. Dune, as a text, still believes in noble savages and "hard times create hard men" nonsense. I'm really not coming at this from a "don't criticise the thing I like" angle, but debates about Jessica's outfit have made me learn nothing besides occasionally seeing really cool pictures of real arabic clothing, while reading Haris A. Durrani's dissections of the books and the current adaptation has actually tought me a lot of stuff about both the book and the real world.

If you haven't seen his Dune essays, you can find a collection towards the bottom of this page: https://history.princeton.edu/people/haris-durrani

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization < This blog post isn't specifically about Dune, but it uses the Fremen as an example to discuss the historic origins of the noble savage trope (Acoup is generally a cool history blog, mostly focused on greek and roman history)

I love Dune but it's so problematic, just not for the obvious reason and dissected Frank Herbert's actual politics and the strange intersection of conservatism and anti-colonialism is fascinating. You should criticise Dune, I would just like the criticism to be better, especially because focusing on the thing that is framed as bad in the story gives every chud an easy way to dismiss criticism of the text as bad media literacy

[tanadrin]

For all he talks about and is plainly interested in histories and societies and institutions, it’s funny how much Frank Herbert fails to understand. It’s not just the Fremen Mirage, although that is part of it—he doesn’t understand that a society that is rife with blood feuds and which kills its wounded is one that is profoundly weak, indeed on the brink of collapse. Especially in a very harsh environment���cooperation is the human superpower! It’s cooperation that fosters success and the knowledge that your fellows will risk their lives for you that fosters cooperation. They’re a fun literary construct, but the Fremen don’t really resemble a successful society at all.

[necarion]

The numbers are hard to get clearly, but it looks like the Ukraine war has had around ~80,000 total deaths and ~400,000 casualties, since February 2022.

The Battle of the Somme lasted about 5 months and had something like 3x that, with 3.5 million men fighting.

The United States currently has 1.4 million active military personnel across all branches of the military. The Chinese is about 2 million. A war between China and the US would start with fewer troops than a single 5 month battle had on the Western Front in WWI.

No modern military has the capability of absorbing those kind of losses.

However, the other thing here is that people are not the limited resource here; that would be munitions. Yes, in an active war you'd need a lot more soldiers. But likely the single most effective use of the American population would be in manufacturing and logistics.

And if you don't think "people who are good with spreadsheets but kind of out of shape" wouldn't be useful in a modern war...

before the invasion made it clear that the Russian ability to project military force could best be described as "shambolic" there was a lot of big talk reminiscent of Devereaux's "Fremen Mirage" posts (which I keep thinking of as The Fremen Mystique...) in which the Russian army is a formidable fighting force honed by the brutal environment in which they live (because it's cold? poor? vodka soaked? unclear), while the riches of the Decadent West lead it to field armies of effeminate men (and nonbinary men) who are too busy having gay sex / doing the housework while their wives have lesbian sex, picking out exotic new neopronouns, and transing their gender to do anything useful like developing effective anti-tank weapons or efficient logistics or combined arms tactical doctrines etc.

obviously this is nonsense! but it's surprisingly compelling nonsense given the frequency with which it comes up.

[st-just]

We found a deep concern present in seemingly all societies across history that proper, martial masculinity – true manliness – was being steadily eroded by the times.

-Bret Devereaux, The Fremen Mirage

[titleleaf]

While normally it’s his Fremen Mirage series that I’m reccing people in a Dune context (basically a deconstruction of the irritating, orientalist tropes around ~*~*~*decadent~*~*~ effete morally bankrupt peoples and the simple, morally upright Noble Savages) I really want to revisit the ACOUM series on the Dothraki and the way SFF can treat even really massive groups of nonwhite or nonwhite-coded people as culturally and politically homogenous. That blogger approaches things from a very milhist side of things but in general: interesting to me.

[sunyot]

Meanwhile, on the Set of Dune pt.2

The Martian sun beat down on the set, turning the vast sand dunes into a shimmering mirage. Zendaya, swathed in a Fremen stillsuit that felt more like a second skin, squinted at the revised scene notes fluttering in her hand. Timothee, clad in Paul's regal robes, materialized beside her, his brow furrowed in concentration.

"So," he started, clearing his throat, "they want us to add more…tension during the confrontation scene."

Zendaya snorted, the sound muffled by the stillsuit mask. "Tension? We practically declared war on each other in the last take."

Timothee's lips twitched, a hint of a smile playing on his features. "Maybe they want…extra spice?"

She raised an eyebrow, a playful glint in her eyes that seemed to pierce the harsh sunlight. "Extra spice, huh? You think Denis wants us to channel a sandworm attack?"

His smile widened, a flash of white teeth against his tanned face. "Only if it involves you pinning me down, Chani."

A jolt of heat shot through Zendaya. Was it the desert sun, or something else entirely? She quickly schooled her expression, channeling Chani's stoicism.

"Careful, Paul," she said, her voice low and dangerous. "Don't get ahead of yourself."

His smile faltered for a moment, replaced by a flicker of something she couldn't quite decipher. Was it longing? Or just good acting?

"Right," he cleared his throat again, the professional facade firmly back in place. "So, any ideas on how to ramp up the…spice level?"

Zendaya met his gaze, the desert wind whipping her hair around her face. The line between Chani and Zendaya blurred for a moment. "We could try…" she started, her voice barely a whisper.

Suddenly, a booming voice cut through the air. "Alright, lovebirds! Let's get ready for the next take!" Denis Villeneuve, the ever-observant director, stood a few paces away, a knowing smile playing on his lips.

Zendaya and Timothee exchanged a startled glance, their cheeks burning under the director's gaze. Was it just her imagination, or was there a hint of amusement in his eyes?

The tension on set was always electric, fueled by the intensity of their characters. But lately, it felt…different. A spark had ignited, a current that crackled between them when the cameras weren't rolling. Was it just the desert heat, or was there something real brewing beneath the surface?

As they took their positions, Zendaya couldn't help but steal a glance at Timothee. He was Paul Atreides, the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach, a role that demanded strength and leadership. But in his eyes, she saw something else – a vulnerability, a flicker of something that mirrored the longing she felt.

"Action!" the director yelled.

They launched into the scene, their voices echoing across the desolate landscape. But this time, the anger in Chani's voice felt tinged with something else – a frustration that mirrored Zendaya's own internal struggle. Should they act on this undeniable chemistry? Or was it best to stay professional, to safeguard the film?

As the scene ended, a heavy silence descended. Zendaya felt a knot of confusion tighten in her stomach. Timothee stood a few feet away, his expression unreadable.

"That was…powerful," Denis finally said, his voice serious. "Let's take a break, everyone."

Zendaya watched Timothee walk away, the weight of the unspoken hanging heavy in the air. The desert wind whispered secrets around them, but the answer remained elusive. Should they let the spice take hold, or let it fade with the setting sun? Only time – and perhaps another scene filled with charged emotions – would tell.

[aharonov-bohm-affect]

I'll refer you to the standard objection to this idea.

Why DO we need to invest more in STEM (assuming you're talking about education, like most people saying that phrase these days, otherwise that need is self-evident)? Do we want the next leaps forward being undertaken by people who were pushed & prodded or coddled into the fields? "Hidden Figures" turned me against STEM programs. I want a Katherine Johnson who had to FIGHT for her STEM skills sending us to Mars not those twit kids in the ads showing us how virtuous the investing companies are.

I'd rather have the next Katherine Johnson be free to pursue her interest in mathematics.

I don't think forcing people into STEM is the only way to "invest more." Education at an early age (and parental involvement) can nourish a lifelong love of the sciences, just as it can nourish interest in the arts or sports. One of the reasons I'm so hard on the teaching of science (and history) is that we teach them in the worst ways - rote memorization of theorems and concepts. You want people to love science, have experiments in elementary school where you set something on fire.

Also, from a practical perspective, we will need good STEM graduates. The US will need people to run the fabs. Chips are one of the dimensions of Cold War 2.0, and the US will need to ensure domestic capacity to help maintain their quality. Invention and innovation can help spur economic development and improve quality of life - that makes everyone's lives better off.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[random-thought-depository]

Re: this: that "West Hunt" blog did make me think of Argumate's (edit: ack, I originally misattributed it to @ghostpalmtechnique, sorry) point of "someone needs to formulate an explicit hypothesis for anti-HBD more rigorous than “evolution stops at the neck”," like, it would be nice to see a version of that sort of analysis that didn't have a disturbing whiff of eugenicism hanging over it.

In addition to the points I made in my original reply to that, another thing occurs to me:

Shitty eugenicist takes like "white people are genetically superior because [reasons]" and "modern society creates dysgenic selection pressures [with the implication that a solution is abolition of the welfare state, return to patriarchal gender roles, or both]" rely on the proposition of significant evolution in (relatively) very short timescales, decades to millennia, but humans are exactly the sort of species I'd expect to mostly evolve very slowly.

1) Humans are just long-lived and slow-breeding. Even very intense selection pressures would take many decades or a few centuries to significantly change a human population.

2) Dovetailing with 1), human societies tend to change significantly over the timescales you'd probably need for significant evolution to happen, in ways that would probably change the selection pressures. The selection pressures operating in 2023 Britain are probably pretty different from the selection pressures operating in Queen Victoria's Britain, which were in turn probably different from the selection pressures operating in Henry VIII's kingdom of England. Well, modern Britain and Victorian Britain are only 5-7 generations apart! The constellation of selection pressures that existed in Victorian Britain just didn't have much time to operate before they were replaced by a different constellation of selection pressures; by implication, they probably didn't change the British population much, even if they theoretically might have if the socio-economic conditions of the Victorian era had somehow continued for thousands of years.

3) Humans mostly mate monogamishly (not a typo), which means sexual selection is pretty weak in human populations.

4) Humans are smart highly sophisticated tool-users, which means we usually pre-empt biological evolution with much faster cultural innovation and then use technology to protect ourselves from selection pressures. Confronted with a place that gets really cold in winter, humans invent warm clothing long before we could evolve fur, and thus never experience the selection pressures that would cause a dumber species to evolve fur.

5) Related to 4), humans are a highly social and cooperative species, we have compassion for injured, sick, weak, and disabled members of our own kind and we keep them alive, and we've been doing that for as long as we've been human, it's one of the signature traits of our species. This means human reproductive success tends to be much more even than the reproductive success of a less cooperative species (say, tigers), and selection pressures that would be very powerful on a less cooperative species will often be pretty weak on humans.

6) Humans are smart sophisticated tool-users, which means the success of human individuals and groups is often down to things that have very little to do with genetic fitness. For instance, in conflicts between groups of humans (or hominids), the winners are likely to be the side with advantages in numbers, resources, technology, and/or coordinating institutions, with the comparative genetic fitness of the two groups being a secondary and likely trivial factor. Imagine if the Zulus and the Lakota were eugenic superhumans with a 20% genetic fitness advantage over Europeans; it probably wouldn't have saved them from the British Empire and the US army (respectively); "whatever happens, we have the Maxim gun and they do not." This ties into a point about the Fremen Mirage; even if "Fremen" actually are tougher and better fighters than "civilized" people one on one, "civilized" people would probably still usually win, because the "civilized" would usually have massive advantages in population, resources, technology, and coordinating institutions (that kind of comes with the territory of being "civilized"). I think which side has advantages in resources, numbers, technology, and coordinating institutions probably mostly comes down to which one starts with a more favorable geographical position a lot of the time; if Australian aborigines were genetically superior to Europeans, history would probably have played out very similarly to OTL, because it's just hard to build an advanced civilization from scratch in Australia.

7) It's worth noting here that the low early life mortality rates and near or below replacement rate reproduction of most of the modern world just doesn't leave a lot of room for big differences in reproductive success. If evolution was slow in historic human populations, in modern human populations it's probably positively glacial.

---------------

Well, Social Darwinist eugenicism is basically an attempt to persuade us to do less of 5), so I guess it's consistent in that (grotesque) kind of way, but even from an amoral evolution fairy perspective there are reasons humans give a lot of aid and charity to weaker members of their groups:

First, humans are long-lived and slow-breeding, take a long time to mature, and have exceptionally difficult and hazardous pregnancies. I'd expect a social species like that to treat every remotely viable progeny as precious - y'know, like we actually more-or-less do! Even a newborn human represents a very significant investment on the part of the mother, and a very significant opportunity cost to her if they die and she has to make another baby to replace them. An adult human is an even more significant investment, and an even more significant cost to society if they die and have to be replaced (both in muscle-power, brainpower, and skills and in opportunity cost of all the time and resources you'll spend creating, rearing, and educating their replacement). Even from an amoral evolution fairy perspective, it makes sense to adopt a "a bird in the hand is worth two on the bush" approach to actually existing humans vs. theoretical higher-performing genetically fitter humans. Think of this in terms of the small bands most Pleistocene humans would have lived in, where a single person would be a non-trivial percentage of the group's real or future potential labor force, as well as a non-trivial percentage of its genetic diversity. In that context, even from a totally amoral sociopathic evolution fairy perspective it makes sense that e.g. you'd keep a sickly child alive instead of letting them die and putting the mother through another draining and hazardous pregnancy hoping her next baby will be "better." Similar considerations still apply today, albeit more weakly because we've become such a successful species.

Second, it's game theory bro. Our killer app is intelligence and tool use combined with cooperation, and that rests on making cooperation a better option than defection for most group members. People don't like being treated as culls. Social Darwinist eugenicism is murder on social solidarity. It's not an accident that it basically always functions as institutionalized abuse of disempowered people (the Spartans killed 'imperfect' babies i.e. the most powerless and defenseless members of the homoioi, modern eugenicists targeted the poor, disabled, and ethnically marginalized for 'negative eugenics'); treating people like culls is only politically viable if you only do it to people whose preferences are radically discounted by the existing socio-political order, and even then, they will fight you if they have any power to do so at all (and/or the people who care about them, e.g. parents of disabled children, will fight you). Eugenics is taboo among blue-pilled lib polite society because there was a massive backlash the last time people tried it, as you'd expect if you viewed its victims as agents capable of effective resistance.

[bayesic-bitch]

bret devereaux's whole fremen mirage thing is very true, so I keep wondering why frank herbert didn't just say that long-term spice exposure makes fremen slightly psychic. Like maybe they have an intuitive knowledge of the next 1/4th of a second, which would make them near impossible to kill in 1-on-1 combat by someone who hasn't grown up with spice. It neatly solves all the weird cultural essentialism and historical inaccuracy of hardship creating military prowess. It doesn't even have to cut into the political commentary -- the kind of spice exposure the fremen get could be only possible from the long-term low-dosage exposure by living in Arakis's desert, so the hardship of desert living is a necessary pre-condition to this kind of military prowess.

[racefortheironthrone]

Have you read Dr. Bret Devereaux's series Fremen Mirage and his criticisms of the Dothraki? He's a military historian and does similar work on the historical and political basis of fictional works.

Yes, I have - and I believe I left some comments on his blog directly. Overall, I think a lot of his criticisms of the Dothraki are pretty fair, although I think sometimes he over-extends his thesis and fails to appreciate certain aspects where GRRM has complicated the picture somewhat.

[nightbringer24]

This whole thing with AC: Valhalla has reminded of the main thing I don’t want to do with the dökkálfar in my story: buy into the Fremen Mirage (to borrow the term from Dr. Bret Deveraux).

To cut a long story short for those who don’t to read several articles about it (which are worth looking at for the historical value in it), the whole ‘hard times make hard men’ meme is... it’s such bullshit, especially when applied to the likes of the Vikings and the Spartans.

In my story, the dökkálfar closest to being the stereotypical Vikings are actually fucked over by the fact that they can’t compete with the Late Medieval-styled humans in the Adretian Empire and Rûsland, or even the southern Dökkálfar who are becoming more like the mainland humans (though just about keeping their own style and sense of culture), even though they continually refer to them as ‘soft’ and ‘weak’.

[st-just]

The state is a system of social organization that is so prevalent in today’s world that all too often we take it for granted that it is the only form of social organization, or the chief one, when in fact it has been around for only a tiny minority of our species’ tenure on this planet

-Brett Devereaux, The Fremen Mirage: War At The Dawn Of Civilization

[asklordcaptaincastronova]

(Because it’s not training whatsoever, it’s the agoge, a indoctrination tool, the fremen mirage is also bullshit have a nice day)

[captainjonnitkessler]

Do you know the historian Bret Devereaux and his blog "An Unmitigated Lesson in Pedantry"? It's a look at pop culture from a historian's perspective, I think it'll be your jam. Particularly recommend the Fremen Mirage series.

I don't, but I just read the Fremen Mirage posts and enjoyed them a lot, so I'll definitely check out more of the blog. Thank you for the recommendation!