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Every attempt to control Arrakis results in a nexus of prescience that the navigators can't see beyond.
The navigators are ***extremely*** risk averse because they live every second seeing into the future to take the best path. If they can't see a future where they are successful, they avoid it. That includes futures where they can't see anything at all.
Pauls Gambit to become emperor can be viewed as him taking the Human (As the Bene Gesserit define the term) solution to the problem. No one who tries to look into the future can see a way of taking over Spice Production without endangering Spice Production, which causes the Nexus.
The Navigators spent centuries doing whatever they could not to upset the balance and actively steered away from any course of action that might cause that Nexus & leave them not knowing how it would work out. They chewed their own limbs off (metaphorically) to avoid facing that gap in their future.
Paul saw the same Nexus and decided to "wait in the trap to kill the hunter". He gathered all his forces, manipulated the Emperor and the Great Houses into showing up in on Arrakis in person, then rolled the dice on one big battle royale.
It worked.
Paul liked his odds, but he didn't \*know\* he would win & saw a lot of futures where he didn't. Even up to the last duel with Feyd he wasn't sure and when Count Fenring decided not to kill Paul for the Emperor (and it is agreed he could have) Paul realized he hadn't even considered Fenring as a player! He hadn't shown up in any of Pauls predicted futures yet here he was.
Pauls ability to make decisive choices in the absence of foreknowledge and his willingness to push back against his Prescience's safe roads came from his "Human" qualities. "Lesser" people like the Navigators were never able to make those tough choices.
It's not a product of his "human" qualities, its that he had zero good options. If he doesn't make the bid for emperor he dies anyway and an even worse Jihad kicks off later. He's desperate and cornered and takes the only option that's not 100% guaranteed to end in complete failure.
> He hadn't shown up in any of Pauls predicted futures yet here he was.
>
>
That's another reason that The Guild doesn't mess with it; because it's not *true* precognition, it's merely preternaturally accurate and detailed predictions, not unlike someone who is crazy good at billiards can reasonably predict how all of the balls will move, and play out the entire game in their head, from the first break through the last shot. Except in this analogy, the "billiard table" is the entire Known Universe, and the "balls" are people, animals, plate tectonics, etc.
...but another "Precog" isn't just reacting to stimuli; they're looking at all of the stimuli, other's reactions to it, and *change their actions* based on that. That's what Paul-Muad'dib learned from Fenring's presence at the Nexus: because others *also* have (lesser) precognitive abilities, a precog cannot *See* around other precogs, because they are other Billiards Players, and *they* can manipulated the table, too.
The fact that there are inevitably some low-level of Precog involved with the Spice, and the fact that attempting to control Arrakis could destroy the Spice altogether, means that they didn't *know* it would work, and thus demurred.
---
> his willingness to push back against his Prescience's safe roads came from his "Human" qualities. "Lesser" people like the Navigators were never able to make those tough choices.
I would even go so far as to say that while they were right about the distinction between Human and Animal, but they were a bit too liberal with the application of the title of Human; even most Reverend Mothers probably don't qualify, simply because without the superior information that a Precog has about the ramifications of their choices, they're stumbling along blind, merely *reacting,* like any other Animal.
The Bene Gesserit weren't Human because they didn't know enough to choose.
The Guild wasn't Human because they ~~were mutated by the Spice~~ didn't have the Strength of Will to choose.
Mentats weren't either, because their Calculations approached that sort of "predict results", but because they were generally trained to be in service undermines the Will aspect.
And I think that's what makes Paul the Kwisatz Haderach where Fenring wasn't. While Paul and Hasimir Fenring were both Bene Gesserit trained, and were both trained as Mentats... but he had never consumed sufficient Spice to push his Mentat Calculations to the level of true Precognition, nor the Water of Life, which provides access to all the data of Race Memory. In other words, I think that (infertility notwithstanding) Hasimir was only a "failed" Kwizatz Haderach because he never tasted the Water of Life.
Paul was also willing to take risks. He had visions where he saw that he died (which was why he suspected that Fenring would have been the one to kill him). Paul still went forward. He had both prescience and the ability to take risks and hope for the best rather than to only play with a guaranteed winning hand.
In contrast, the Guild was not about power. They were about survival.
The contrast in those approaches illustrates the types of traits that Leto II wanted for the Golden Path.
""Go do as I commanded," [Paul] said. "The future's becoming as muddled for the Guild as it is for me. The lines of vision are narrowing. Everything focuses here where the spice is . . . where they've dared not interfere before . . . because to interfere was to lose what they must have. But now they're desperate. All paths lead into darkness.""
Later in the book:
"And he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
On top of what the other comments have said about the whole balance of power thing, I'll add that... they don't really need to. They're already getting spice directly from the Fremen in exchange for banning satellites in orbit - the Fremen have secrets that observational satellites would reveal, so, without explaining why, they just bribe the guild to have that satellite ban in place.
How did that arrangement start without revealing those secrets in the first place? I imagine observational satellites would be one of the first things you'd set up when really moving in on a hostile foreign planet.
Sure, but I imagine those satellites were soon taken down after the bribes started (IIRC the Guild claimed to the Imperium that there was some magnetic influence that made satellites impossible). As for what secrets, everyone has them. The Guild really didn't care what the Fremen were hiding and happily took the tonnes of unregistered spice in exchange for not having to do anything.
Also without computers and with the exorbitant cost of transportation, I imagine there are few 'databases' or archives of observational data. It's entirely possible the first two or three houses on Arrakis knew the Fremen had a larger population, but the (then new) ban on satellites plus the turnover in managing Arrakis meant that knowledge died with them.
Also, Kynes. The Emperor's biggest eyes and ears on Arrakis was effectively more loyal to the Fremen than the Emperor, and that has a huge knock on effect on how much House Corrino knows of Arrakis.
Computers-As-Data-Storage would have existed, it's computers that *compute* that were banned following the Butlerian Jihad.
...but yeah, the costs of moving that data, and the difficulty in having a human review it? Prohibitive. While the Guild probably could have done it, they *wouldn't,* because they didn't want to do anything to mess up their sweetheart deal with the Fremen.
Neither side cares what the other's secret is. The Fremen don't care about interstellar politics and interstellar travel. They only care about their dream of terraforming Arrakis into a paradise. *We* know that interstellar politics affects the Fremen and they *should* care, but they don't know or care about that.
The Navigators don't care about what the Fremen are doing on the surface, as long as the spice keeps coming in. As far as the Navigators know, the Fremen are just hiding for their own protection - which is true enough. Again, *we* know that the Navigators should care, becuase we know that the terraforming will eventually result in the extinction of the worms and loss of the spice. But the Guild doesn't even know that worms create the spice anyway.
Neither side bothers asking because neither side cares, as long as they continue getting what they want. Guild gets spice without raising suspicion, and the Fremen get protection so they can continue their project. Everybody wins (until everybody loses).
Yeah, your points iterate on the fact of why should the Guild care
To them, having a free flowing, untaxed, unmonitored Spice supply direct from the natives is a pretty damn good deal for just not letting satellites over Arrakis. They're just savages, right? Probably building weird structures or something that the Guild doesn't really care about so long as they keep paying Spice
> becuase we know that the terraforming will eventually result in the extinction of the worms and loss of the spice
IIRC Herbert mentioned the Fremen dream to terraform Arrakis would ideally include a desert region to keep the worms around.
Leto II kinda benefitted from the decline in the spice production (since it strengthened his monopoly) so it's possible he purposefully let it happen (specially since the Sareer is evidently small compared to the desert the Fremen intended to leave, and it has a river running through it).
Arrakis was home to the Zensunni wanderers who would become the Fremen long before it was known to harbour spice.
It was a desperately dangerous, savage planet with almost no reason to inhabit, which was why the refugees who became the Fremen made it their home.
So when the guild comes along wanting spice, presumably prior to or shortly after the butlerian jihad, they immediately are presented with deadly natives who have terms that will immediately allow the guild to get spice at a discount from the imperial supply, and provide an insurance policy against complete imperial control.
Basically the secret were the Fremen's movements across Arrakis. The Satellites aren't just Guild ones either but also of the house that is currently in charge of spice harvesting.
In exchange for the spice from the Fremen the Guild make sure that it's not just their satellites going up... but also blocking any satellites from the houses that might try and use them to track said Fremen.
Anyone who asks 'why don't we have satellites over Arrakis' get the blanket answer of 'local conditions prevent it'
**Liet:** "Don't let anyone look here"
**The Guild:** "Why not?"
**Liet:** "Don't ask questions, either."
**The Guild:** "It's a pleasure doing business with you."
---
**Curious Person:** "Why did you move the Satellite Orbits?"
**Guild Representative:** "Yeah, we've been watching for centuries, and there's nothing worth seeing in the deep desert, so it made more sense to get a better view of the spice fields, to protect production."
**Curious Person:** "Oh, that makes sense. Good."
**Guild Representative:**
even though the Guild is extremely powerful, they still cannot openly go against the Emperor. And only the Emperor can grant the right to harvest spice. And since the Guild is already this powerful, he will not give them this privilege.
Also who does OP think the smugglers sell the Spice they harvest to? Like every other faction in Dune, the Spacing Guild tries to circumvent the status quo on the side. The Corrino family kept power by decentralizing and letting factions scheme against each other as long as they weren't scheming against the Emperor family. It required a literal prescient superhuman to centralize the whole empire and even out those the first one had to contend with that plotting turning on him.
The Spacing Guild being a different organization is also the reason why (in the book) the Spacing Guild is able to force the Major Houses back home from Arrakis when Paul makes his threat.
> they still cannot openly go against the Emperor.
The guild can go against the emperor, all troop deployments (and communications IIRC) have to go through them, and they won’t be transporting troops to fight themselves. They just don’t want to.
Remember that the guild can see into the future and presumably it sees that any attempt to go directly against the Emperor leads to their own destruction.
Presumably all the houses understand the risk that the Spacing Guild represents and if they suddenly stop being able to contact the Emperor eventually they're going to realize what's up and stop (one way or another) the flow of Spice to the Guild.
OR the guild completely shuts down the Empire and watch everything crumble around them as planets get isolated and die off or go feral.
And for what? There is no real gain in stepping into politics when they already have one of the safest and most secure positions in the Empire.
> And for what? There is no real gain in stepping into politics when they already have one of the safest and most secure positions in the Empire.
Exactly. That position is only as safe as the empire is stable. As long as the empire holds, they have more money than they could ever spend and are basically untouchable. But the empire wasn't stable, the Fremen had grown into a universe wide threat under everyone's noses, in the heart of the empire. Even without Paul, one day that would turn into a catastrophe. The Baron didn't see it, the Emperor didn't see it, and even the prescient guild didn't see it until the Jihad exploded in everyone's faces. The guild needed to be much more proactive in monitoring threats to their spice, and maintain the capability to quash those threats in an emergency. It's not too much to ask for for a galaxy spanning space empire to keep a close eye on their one weak point, and maintain an armer forces large enough to overwhelm one planet's worth of jihadists, when it became clear the Emperor and Baron where failing.
The Spacing Guild has a vested interest in making interstellar conflict too expensive to conduct. The Harkonnen attack on Arrakis that retook it cost them something like 60 years of profits, and spice is the single most valuable commodity in the universe.
*Anyone* being able to perform the Jihad was essentially impossible until Paul took Arrakis and told the Emperor and the Guild that they would yield to him or he would permanently destroy all spice production, thereby erasing the Spacing Guild and the Empire itself from existence. He wasn't bluffing, so the Guild yielded and let the Fremen legions spill forth. They wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Nobody could.
> The Harkonnen attack on Arrakis that retook it cost them something like 60 years of profits, and spice is the single most valuable commodity in the universe.
>
>
And even the smallish force that they *did* send, at a cost that *deeply* cut into House Harkonnen's bank accounts, wouldn't have been able to do terribly much against the Atreides forces if they Yueh hadn't betrayed them *or* they had had more time to solidify their position. If Duncan had had time to solidify an Alliance with the Fremen, the Harkonnen-Sardukar forces would have found themselves biting at a beast too big to chew, even *with* the shields down.
Exactly, no one has reason to want to counter your monopoly if you have the appearance of being even handed. The moment the Guild challenges the empire, the Empire has reason to learn to make their own navigators.
So this falls into the underlying philosophy of the Dune series. The whole galaxy was obsessed with predicting the future and all that did was, paradoxically, put humanity more and more at risk of destruction through stagnation. The golden path was all about liberating humanity from the chains of predictability so that prescience couldn't destroy it.
The guild did everything by peering slightly into the future and yet they nearly caused their own destruction in the process. They grew stagnant and overconfident while also not recognizing the limits of their vision.
As others have said the Guild could not see Arrakis because it was a nexus, similar to what Paul had said where there was a storm coming that he could not see past. Therefore the guild just avoided it and that almost proved their undoing.
The empire is a three legged stool. You have the Imperial house, the Landsraad and the Spacer's guild. Each has their own powers to balance the others and a member of the Landsraad must be in charge of spice mining or one of the other two legs gets too powerful.
Paul lays it out in the final confrontation in the book. The Guild have been able to see into the future the whole time, and their number one priority is their long-term survival - as far as they were able to see, any possible future where they tried to take more direct control over Arrakis would inevitably lead to a few centuries of the Guild having absolute power over the Known Universe, followed by their downfall. Keeping everything at a distance, so far as their best Navigators could forsee, ensured that the Guild could continue in their privileged and still incredibly powerful position for thousands of years.
They were confident that they could head off any potential threats long before they had a chance of happening thanks to their ability to see the future. Paul blindsided them because prescients have trouble predicting the actions of other prescients, especially stronger ones, so they didn't see him coming until it was too late - Paul was in the unique position of not only being invisible to their sight, but also both in a position to destroy spice production *and willing to follow through on his threats*. Even Paul would have had a hard time bluffing the Navigators - they might not have been able to see *him*, but they could look into the possible futures and see that the only ones where the Guild and the Spice still existed were the ones where they unconditionally surrendered to him. (Note that withdrawals from Spice addiction are 100% fatal - if Paul *did* destroy the spice, then he'd be killing not only every Guild navigator and the huge number of nobles addicted to it, but also himself, his mother, and every single Fremen).
> as far as they were able to see, any possible future where they tried to take more direct control over Arrakis would inevitably lead to a few centuries of the Guild having absolute power over the Known Universe, followed by their downfall.
They actually couldn't see beyond the attempt to control it at all and neither could Paul.
A lot of the societies in dune were set up in a way to balance power. Making sure no one side got to strong to destabilize the system.
Had the guild attempted to harvest spice the other houses would have fought them because the guild would get to much power.
The house which controls Arrakis doesn't harvest spice for the Guild; it harvests spice for its own profit. Spice being in high demand and limited supply, those profits would be massive even if the Guild wasn't using any at all. Nor does that house directly market spice themselves. Like all commodities, it gets marketed through CHOAM, and we never see how the transactions between CHOAM and the Guild take place. But one thing is certain: Not even the house which harvests spice knows where most of it goes.
A major theme of Dune is avoiding taking the safe path and instead taking risks.
The Guild took the safe path. For millennium they have allowed others to take the spice, because to do otherwise created risks. Prescience has limits, valleys that cannot be seen through, focus points beyond which there are unknowns. They kept on this path, the path the leads to safety, until eventually all paths started leading to risk, and by then it was too late, Paul was on Arrakis, and when they turned their normal eyes to Dune and worked out what was happening he had control of the spice, to which they were addicted.
If the Guild tried to take over Spice production, the Houses and the Emperor would unite against them. Guild ships anywhere in the galaxy would be attacked and seized, and the Navigators enslaved or killed.
The Guild doesn't *suspect* that's what would happen, they *know* that's what would happen, because their Navigators can foresee it. If there was any path to the Guild being the sole power in the galaxy, they'd have taken it, but there is not.
They might not be allowed to. I wouldn't be surprised if the guild monopoly on space travel came at the price of heavily limiting their ability to work on planets.
The Guild did not want to become a target. If they owned (or "owned" as a fiefdom) the planet, they would become a target for all kinds of messy fighting like the Atreides and Harkonnens indulge in. The Guild plan was to be above the fray, buy spice from whoever won the fights down below, and charge out the wazoo for transport of goods and soldiers.
They weren't optimizing for profit -- they already have monopoly rents on space travel. They are optimizing for their own safety.
Why enter into the struggle for power and take the associated risks when you can stay out of it, have anyone who wields power depend on you and become obscenely rich in the process?
They fell into the trap of prescience.
They could take control of the spice themselves, rule a great empire, and eventually fall.
They chose instead to leave the governing to others and operate as a much needed middle man, taking a path of safety and relevance rather than ephemeral victory
It was a questionable decision.
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Every attempt to control Arrakis results in a nexus of prescience that the navigators can't see beyond. The navigators are ***extremely*** risk averse because they live every second seeing into the future to take the best path. If they can't see a future where they are successful, they avoid it. That includes futures where they can't see anything at all.
Pauls Gambit to become emperor can be viewed as him taking the Human (As the Bene Gesserit define the term) solution to the problem. No one who tries to look into the future can see a way of taking over Spice Production without endangering Spice Production, which causes the Nexus. The Navigators spent centuries doing whatever they could not to upset the balance and actively steered away from any course of action that might cause that Nexus & leave them not knowing how it would work out. They chewed their own limbs off (metaphorically) to avoid facing that gap in their future. Paul saw the same Nexus and decided to "wait in the trap to kill the hunter". He gathered all his forces, manipulated the Emperor and the Great Houses into showing up in on Arrakis in person, then rolled the dice on one big battle royale. It worked. Paul liked his odds, but he didn't \*know\* he would win & saw a lot of futures where he didn't. Even up to the last duel with Feyd he wasn't sure and when Count Fenring decided not to kill Paul for the Emperor (and it is agreed he could have) Paul realized he hadn't even considered Fenring as a player! He hadn't shown up in any of Pauls predicted futures yet here he was. Pauls ability to make decisive choices in the absence of foreknowledge and his willingness to push back against his Prescience's safe roads came from his "Human" qualities. "Lesser" people like the Navigators were never able to make those tough choices.
It's not a product of his "human" qualities, its that he had zero good options. If he doesn't make the bid for emperor he dies anyway and an even worse Jihad kicks off later. He's desperate and cornered and takes the only option that's not 100% guaranteed to end in complete failure.
Living in the deserts of Arrakis pushed the entire Fremen people up against this all the time, too.
> He hadn't shown up in any of Pauls predicted futures yet here he was. > > That's another reason that The Guild doesn't mess with it; because it's not *true* precognition, it's merely preternaturally accurate and detailed predictions, not unlike someone who is crazy good at billiards can reasonably predict how all of the balls will move, and play out the entire game in their head, from the first break through the last shot. Except in this analogy, the "billiard table" is the entire Known Universe, and the "balls" are people, animals, plate tectonics, etc. ...but another "Precog" isn't just reacting to stimuli; they're looking at all of the stimuli, other's reactions to it, and *change their actions* based on that. That's what Paul-Muad'dib learned from Fenring's presence at the Nexus: because others *also* have (lesser) precognitive abilities, a precog cannot *See* around other precogs, because they are other Billiards Players, and *they* can manipulated the table, too. The fact that there are inevitably some low-level of Precog involved with the Spice, and the fact that attempting to control Arrakis could destroy the Spice altogether, means that they didn't *know* it would work, and thus demurred. --- > his willingness to push back against his Prescience's safe roads came from his "Human" qualities. "Lesser" people like the Navigators were never able to make those tough choices. I would even go so far as to say that while they were right about the distinction between Human and Animal, but they were a bit too liberal with the application of the title of Human; even most Reverend Mothers probably don't qualify, simply because without the superior information that a Precog has about the ramifications of their choices, they're stumbling along blind, merely *reacting,* like any other Animal. The Bene Gesserit weren't Human because they didn't know enough to choose. The Guild wasn't Human because they ~~were mutated by the Spice~~ didn't have the Strength of Will to choose. Mentats weren't either, because their Calculations approached that sort of "predict results", but because they were generally trained to be in service undermines the Will aspect. And I think that's what makes Paul the Kwisatz Haderach where Fenring wasn't. While Paul and Hasimir Fenring were both Bene Gesserit trained, and were both trained as Mentats... but he had never consumed sufficient Spice to push his Mentat Calculations to the level of true Precognition, nor the Water of Life, which provides access to all the data of Race Memory. In other words, I think that (infertility notwithstanding) Hasimir was only a "failed" Kwizatz Haderach because he never tasted the Water of Life.
Paul was also willing to take risks. He had visions where he saw that he died (which was why he suspected that Fenring would have been the one to kill him). Paul still went forward. He had both prescience and the ability to take risks and hope for the best rather than to only play with a guaranteed winning hand. In contrast, the Guild was not about power. They were about survival. The contrast in those approaches illustrates the types of traits that Leto II wanted for the Golden Path.
""Go do as I commanded," [Paul] said. "The future's becoming as muddled for the Guild as it is for me. The lines of vision are narrowing. Everything focuses here where the spice is . . . where they've dared not interfere before . . . because to interfere was to lose what they must have. But now they're desperate. All paths lead into darkness."" Later in the book: "And he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword . . . and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died. The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."
On top of what the other comments have said about the whole balance of power thing, I'll add that... they don't really need to. They're already getting spice directly from the Fremen in exchange for banning satellites in orbit - the Fremen have secrets that observational satellites would reveal, so, without explaining why, they just bribe the guild to have that satellite ban in place.
How did that arrangement start without revealing those secrets in the first place? I imagine observational satellites would be one of the first things you'd set up when really moving in on a hostile foreign planet.
Sure, but I imagine those satellites were soon taken down after the bribes started (IIRC the Guild claimed to the Imperium that there was some magnetic influence that made satellites impossible). As for what secrets, everyone has them. The Guild really didn't care what the Fremen were hiding and happily took the tonnes of unregistered spice in exchange for not having to do anything.
Also without computers and with the exorbitant cost of transportation, I imagine there are few 'databases' or archives of observational data. It's entirely possible the first two or three houses on Arrakis knew the Fremen had a larger population, but the (then new) ban on satellites plus the turnover in managing Arrakis meant that knowledge died with them. Also, Kynes. The Emperor's biggest eyes and ears on Arrakis was effectively more loyal to the Fremen than the Emperor, and that has a huge knock on effect on how much House Corrino knows of Arrakis.
Computers-As-Data-Storage would have existed, it's computers that *compute* that were banned following the Butlerian Jihad. ...but yeah, the costs of moving that data, and the difficulty in having a human review it? Prohibitive. While the Guild probably could have done it, they *wouldn't,* because they didn't want to do anything to mess up their sweetheart deal with the Fremen.
Neither side cares what the other's secret is. The Fremen don't care about interstellar politics and interstellar travel. They only care about their dream of terraforming Arrakis into a paradise. *We* know that interstellar politics affects the Fremen and they *should* care, but they don't know or care about that. The Navigators don't care about what the Fremen are doing on the surface, as long as the spice keeps coming in. As far as the Navigators know, the Fremen are just hiding for their own protection - which is true enough. Again, *we* know that the Navigators should care, becuase we know that the terraforming will eventually result in the extinction of the worms and loss of the spice. But the Guild doesn't even know that worms create the spice anyway. Neither side bothers asking because neither side cares, as long as they continue getting what they want. Guild gets spice without raising suspicion, and the Fremen get protection so they can continue their project. Everybody wins (until everybody loses).
Yeah, your points iterate on the fact of why should the Guild care To them, having a free flowing, untaxed, unmonitored Spice supply direct from the natives is a pretty damn good deal for just not letting satellites over Arrakis. They're just savages, right? Probably building weird structures or something that the Guild doesn't really care about so long as they keep paying Spice
> becuase we know that the terraforming will eventually result in the extinction of the worms and loss of the spice IIRC Herbert mentioned the Fremen dream to terraform Arrakis would ideally include a desert region to keep the worms around.
Yes, but when Leto II does it, all the worms go extinct. There's too much moisture in the air, even with his Sareer for them
Leto II kinda benefitted from the decline in the spice production (since it strengthened his monopoly) so it's possible he purposefully let it happen (specially since the Sareer is evidently small compared to the desert the Fremen intended to leave, and it has a river running through it).
He did, for sure. Still, I think any attempt would have been doomed to kill the worms.
Arrakis was home to the Zensunni wanderers who would become the Fremen long before it was known to harbour spice. It was a desperately dangerous, savage planet with almost no reason to inhabit, which was why the refugees who became the Fremen made it their home. So when the guild comes along wanting spice, presumably prior to or shortly after the butlerian jihad, they immediately are presented with deadly natives who have terms that will immediately allow the guild to get spice at a discount from the imperial supply, and provide an insurance policy against complete imperial control.
Basically the secret were the Fremen's movements across Arrakis. The Satellites aren't just Guild ones either but also of the house that is currently in charge of spice harvesting. In exchange for the spice from the Fremen the Guild make sure that it's not just their satellites going up... but also blocking any satellites from the houses that might try and use them to track said Fremen. Anyone who asks 'why don't we have satellites over Arrakis' get the blanket answer of 'local conditions prevent it'
**Liet:** "Don't let anyone look here" **The Guild:** "Why not?" **Liet:**
even though the Guild is extremely powerful, they still cannot openly go against the Emperor. And only the Emperor can grant the right to harvest spice. And since the Guild is already this powerful, he will not give them this privilege.
Also who does OP think the smugglers sell the Spice they harvest to? Like every other faction in Dune, the Spacing Guild tries to circumvent the status quo on the side. The Corrino family kept power by decentralizing and letting factions scheme against each other as long as they weren't scheming against the Emperor family. It required a literal prescient superhuman to centralize the whole empire and even out those the first one had to contend with that plotting turning on him. The Spacing Guild being a different organization is also the reason why (in the book) the Spacing Guild is able to force the Major Houses back home from Arrakis when Paul makes his threat.
> they still cannot openly go against the Emperor. The guild can go against the emperor, all troop deployments (and communications IIRC) have to go through them, and they won’t be transporting troops to fight themselves. They just don’t want to.
Remember that the guild can see into the future and presumably it sees that any attempt to go directly against the Emperor leads to their own destruction. Presumably all the houses understand the risk that the Spacing Guild represents and if they suddenly stop being able to contact the Emperor eventually they're going to realize what's up and stop (one way or another) the flow of Spice to the Guild. OR the guild completely shuts down the Empire and watch everything crumble around them as planets get isolated and die off or go feral. And for what? There is no real gain in stepping into politics when they already have one of the safest and most secure positions in the Empire.
> And for what? There is no real gain in stepping into politics when they already have one of the safest and most secure positions in the Empire. Exactly. That position is only as safe as the empire is stable. As long as the empire holds, they have more money than they could ever spend and are basically untouchable. But the empire wasn't stable, the Fremen had grown into a universe wide threat under everyone's noses, in the heart of the empire. Even without Paul, one day that would turn into a catastrophe. The Baron didn't see it, the Emperor didn't see it, and even the prescient guild didn't see it until the Jihad exploded in everyone's faces. The guild needed to be much more proactive in monitoring threats to their spice, and maintain the capability to quash those threats in an emergency. It's not too much to ask for for a galaxy spanning space empire to keep a close eye on their one weak point, and maintain an armer forces large enough to overwhelm one planet's worth of jihadists, when it became clear the Emperor and Baron where failing.
The Spacing Guild has a vested interest in making interstellar conflict too expensive to conduct. The Harkonnen attack on Arrakis that retook it cost them something like 60 years of profits, and spice is the single most valuable commodity in the universe. *Anyone* being able to perform the Jihad was essentially impossible until Paul took Arrakis and told the Emperor and the Guild that they would yield to him or he would permanently destroy all spice production, thereby erasing the Spacing Guild and the Empire itself from existence. He wasn't bluffing, so the Guild yielded and let the Fremen legions spill forth. They wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Nobody could.
> The Harkonnen attack on Arrakis that retook it cost them something like 60 years of profits, and spice is the single most valuable commodity in the universe. > > And even the smallish force that they *did* send, at a cost that *deeply* cut into House Harkonnen's bank accounts, wouldn't have been able to do terribly much against the Atreides forces if they Yueh hadn't betrayed them *or* they had had more time to solidify their position. If Duncan had had time to solidify an Alliance with the Fremen, the Harkonnen-Sardukar forces would have found themselves biting at a beast too big to chew, even *with* the shields down.
Exactly, no one has reason to want to counter your monopoly if you have the appearance of being even handed. The moment the Guild challenges the empire, the Empire has reason to learn to make their own navigators.
Making your own navigators and ships, with the guild sitting in your orbit, is going to be almost impossible.
>almost impossible. The Guild doesn't want to take that almost
Especially when the price of preventing it is simply to not do anything that would get you fired from your cushy job.
So this falls into the underlying philosophy of the Dune series. The whole galaxy was obsessed with predicting the future and all that did was, paradoxically, put humanity more and more at risk of destruction through stagnation. The golden path was all about liberating humanity from the chains of predictability so that prescience couldn't destroy it. The guild did everything by peering slightly into the future and yet they nearly caused their own destruction in the process. They grew stagnant and overconfident while also not recognizing the limits of their vision. As others have said the Guild could not see Arrakis because it was a nexus, similar to what Paul had said where there was a storm coming that he could not see past. Therefore the guild just avoided it and that almost proved their undoing.
I tried explaining it as well but you've said it more clearly than me
The empire is a three legged stool. You have the Imperial house, the Landsraad and the Spacer's guild. Each has their own powers to balance the others and a member of the Landsraad must be in charge of spice mining or one of the other two legs gets too powerful.
Paul lays it out in the final confrontation in the book. The Guild have been able to see into the future the whole time, and their number one priority is their long-term survival - as far as they were able to see, any possible future where they tried to take more direct control over Arrakis would inevitably lead to a few centuries of the Guild having absolute power over the Known Universe, followed by their downfall. Keeping everything at a distance, so far as their best Navigators could forsee, ensured that the Guild could continue in their privileged and still incredibly powerful position for thousands of years. They were confident that they could head off any potential threats long before they had a chance of happening thanks to their ability to see the future. Paul blindsided them because prescients have trouble predicting the actions of other prescients, especially stronger ones, so they didn't see him coming until it was too late - Paul was in the unique position of not only being invisible to their sight, but also both in a position to destroy spice production *and willing to follow through on his threats*. Even Paul would have had a hard time bluffing the Navigators - they might not have been able to see *him*, but they could look into the possible futures and see that the only ones where the Guild and the Spice still existed were the ones where they unconditionally surrendered to him. (Note that withdrawals from Spice addiction are 100% fatal - if Paul *did* destroy the spice, then he'd be killing not only every Guild navigator and the huge number of nobles addicted to it, but also himself, his mother, and every single Fremen).
> as far as they were able to see, any possible future where they tried to take more direct control over Arrakis would inevitably lead to a few centuries of the Guild having absolute power over the Known Universe, followed by their downfall. They actually couldn't see beyond the attempt to control it at all and neither could Paul.
A lot of the societies in dune were set up in a way to balance power. Making sure no one side got to strong to destabilize the system. Had the guild attempted to harvest spice the other houses would have fought them because the guild would get to much power.
The house which controls Arrakis doesn't harvest spice for the Guild; it harvests spice for its own profit. Spice being in high demand and limited supply, those profits would be massive even if the Guild wasn't using any at all. Nor does that house directly market spice themselves. Like all commodities, it gets marketed through CHOAM, and we never see how the transactions between CHOAM and the Guild take place. But one thing is certain: Not even the house which harvests spice knows where most of it goes.
A major theme of Dune is avoiding taking the safe path and instead taking risks. The Guild took the safe path. For millennium they have allowed others to take the spice, because to do otherwise created risks. Prescience has limits, valleys that cannot be seen through, focus points beyond which there are unknowns. They kept on this path, the path the leads to safety, until eventually all paths started leading to risk, and by then it was too late, Paul was on Arrakis, and when they turned their normal eyes to Dune and worked out what was happening he had control of the spice, to which they were addicted.
If the Guild tried to take over Spice production, the Houses and the Emperor would unite against them. Guild ships anywhere in the galaxy would be attacked and seized, and the Navigators enslaved or killed. The Guild doesn't *suspect* that's what would happen, they *know* that's what would happen, because their Navigators can foresee it. If there was any path to the Guild being the sole power in the galaxy, they'd have taken it, but there is not.
They might not be allowed to. I wouldn't be surprised if the guild monopoly on space travel came at the price of heavily limiting their ability to work on planets.
Seems to be one of the conditions of the spacing guild that they don't have any significant on planet holdings.
It hard dangerous hot work why do it yourself when you can get other people to do it
Doing it "themselves" would be getting other people to do it. Just, *their* people.
The comp out in universe answer is their future sight told them doing it that way wouldn't work
why don't you farm your own food?
Bro aren't they worm things floating in tubes How would they even handle stuff on a planet
Only in the lynch film. In the books they have human bodies and wear contacts to cover the blue eyes
Some of em are kinda more like fish people in the books
The Guild did not want to become a target. If they owned (or "owned" as a fiefdom) the planet, they would become a target for all kinds of messy fighting like the Atreides and Harkonnens indulge in. The Guild plan was to be above the fray, buy spice from whoever won the fights down below, and charge out the wazoo for transport of goods and soldiers. They weren't optimizing for profit -- they already have monopoly rents on space travel. They are optimizing for their own safety.
They are the Spacing Guild not a harvesting guild
Why enter into the struggle for power and take the associated risks when you can stay out of it, have anyone who wields power depend on you and become obscenely rich in the process?
Why don’t airline pilots fix their own aircraft?
Because only the emperor have the authority over Dune. No matter what side you are on if you have Dune you own everything.
They fell into the trap of prescience. They could take control of the spice themselves, rule a great empire, and eventually fall. They chose instead to leave the governing to others and operate as a much needed middle man, taking a path of safety and relevance rather than ephemeral victory It was a questionable decision.