Humanity, not Heroism
Dune-inspired thoughts on why communities, not heroes, must lead the future.
The second movie in the Dune series, Dune: Part 2 by Canadian director Denis de Villeneuve, recently came out in theaters and I rushed to see it. I think the movie, and the book series on which it is based, tells a powerful story about the world today, and specifically about the transformation of our understanding of leadership in a time of social and ecological collapse. In short, if we are to survive the challenges of the 21st century, our focus must be on empowering the resilience of communities, not the heroism of individuals. Let me explain.
Frank Herbert started writing the Dune book series largely as a critique of the classic hero narrative in which an individual protagonist overcomes a great challenge through luck, willpower and courage. There are no classic heroes in the Dune universe. Instead, there are only powerful individuals making decisions whose rightness and wrongness are not entirely clear.
Paul Atreides, the protagonist, is the long awaited messiah on the desert planet Arrakis, At least that’s what the Fremen, the indigenous people of Arrakis, think. Paul initially hates the label of prophet, claiming it’s just superstition. But he can’t fully let go of it either. After developing precognitive powers, he ends up embracing his savior-hood, dumping his girlfriend and usurping the Emperor, knowing full well that his actions will lead to galactic war. Dune: Part 2 is largely the story of Paul struggling to cope with his entanglement within a larger web of intentions, desires, and processes that have turned him, falsely or not, into the Mahdi, the long awaited one.
Paul’s story is a critique of our modern obsession with heroes and the way we give up our own power to opportunistic leaders. Whether we’re talking sports, politics, or spirituality, humans love to fixate on extra-ordinary individuals. Think of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings . A single character, e.g. Luke or Frodo, goes on a journey to defeat an enemy or obstacle. They pull on the deepest parts of themselves and emerge transformed and purified in the end.
This process is thoroughly described by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero’s Journey, which finds this “hero archetype” in stories and myths all over the world. According to Campbell, this archetype shows up so universally because humans, across space and time, share similar psychological conditions. The challenges of growing up, individuating, love and loss live in all of us.
But this understanding of heroism also promotes a highly masculine and black-and-white approach to reality, in which an individual representing “the good” must face Evil. Again, think of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, where there’s no ambiguity between the forces of good and evil. Chewbacca and Luke represent the good. Anakin Skywalker is also good, until he is corrupted by evil. It’s all a bit simplistic when you dig into it. It’s no surprise that the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, was close pals with Joseph Campbell (the two can be found in conversation in the documentary The Power of Myth).
Sophie Strand in her book, The Sacred Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, points out that Western civilization has gone a little too deep into the hero myth a la Joseph Campbell. Drawing inspiration from natural processes such as composting and symbiosis, she re-interprets the hero as someone who embraces their vulnerability, weakness, and entanglement with wild processes. Her hero is porous to nature spirits, to mycelia strands winding their way through decaying bark, to thunderstorms moving over land, to dung beetles and fireflies.
The classical hero versus the porous hero embody different visions of reality itself. In one, the world is linear, understandable, and manipulable, and individuals shape the world by exerting their willpower. This vision lends itself well to a consumerist, capitalist culture focused on the satisfaction of individual desires and dreams. With the porous hero, the world is nonlinear, mysterious, and beyond the grasp of the individual; the individual is shaped and given meaning by a dynamic, living world; this individual does not fit well into consumer culture because their meaning comes from relationship-building, not the satisfaction of ephemeral desires.
The other critique of classical hero myth is that it’s an idealization of the human being. What defines us principally as humans is not our heroism and individuality. It’s our fallibility and our community. It’s our desire to keep on living together despite our misshapen bodies and compromised environments. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa were, without a doubt, brave individuals with massive impact. But they were also the tip of the iceberg of much larger social movements. Focusing on charismatic individuals - or species or technologies for that matter - is akin to being in a theater, focusing on the brightly lit actors on the stage, and forgetting about all that is happening backstage and beyond that enables the performance.
If Frank Herbert had beef with the classical hero story, it’s largely because he understood how easily we surrender our critical abilities to messiahs, leaders, and wishful thinking. “I think people are responding to leadership overtures out of a very deep-seated, instinctual process that goes back to our tribal roots…And it’s a very dangerous thing in this day and age, because technology has given us the tools of self-destruction. And if you put those tools in the hands of sick leaders, then we’re really in trouble.”
When Dune 2 ended, I sat alone in the dimly lit theater room thinking of how Frank’s words applied to our current time. I believe that techno-utopian progress narratives, instead of empowering us, deeply disempower us by placing our hope on gadgets or increased profits instead of relationships. And consumer culture, by worshiping convenience and self-realization, creates impoverished, isolated individuals. In 2023, the leadership development market in the US was worth over six billion dollars in 2023. How much of that market nurtures egos rather than movements? Can we get explicit about what type of leadership really matters?
We need a vision of leadership rooted in social movements, not talking heads. For me, that has meant letting go of a need for visibility and impact, and instead focusing on the slower and quieter work of building communities that are aware of the changes that need to happen. This involves my communicating more explicitly the challenges of these times, such as the need to grow more comfortable with paradox, uncertainty, and grief, and the need to rapidly degrow and de-consume.
As collectives, organizations, and communities, we need to be aware of what we’re up against. We live in a time of amplifying crises built on an impossible logic: in a growth-based economy, anyone who does not stay ahead of the curve perishes. The arrival of AI, which promises to accelerate innovation, only supercharges this race to the bottom. Philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger calls this terrible dynamic “Moloch,” the god of negative sum competition. His alternative, elaborated in countless podcast episodes and youtube talks, sounds like a deity of positive-sum cooperation, driven by coordination and empathy - what he calls the “third attractor”.
The human universe as depicted in Dune bears a lot of resemblance to the logic of Moloch. Frank Herbert’s complex universe is a world in decline, driven by self-seeking individuals caught in self-defeating systems. As Tyler Bumpus writes, “To Herbert, a hero is rarely a savior. A hero is a symptom—of a malady deep in our collective unconscious. A warning sign of dependency; our addictive habit of relinquishing our own agency to those who would win it for sport. Our most useful leaders, argues Herbert, are not those who charm and enthrall us, but those whose misdeeds are so naked and egregious they shake us out of the spell of hero-worship. Serving as a cruel reminder that leaders are not divinely ordained, but fallible human beings.”
So, for the sake of humanity, the time has come to move beyond the myth of the hero and embrace our shared imperfect humanity. The solutions we seek will not come from above - from billionaires and the political elite - but from the ground up - from the tireless, often unseen work of community organizers, local activists, and everyday citizens who refuse to surrender their agency to false prophets and empty promises. Studies such as this 2024 study by Nature demonstrate that globally we suffer from a massive perception gap: we grossly underestimate the willingness of our fellow citizens to act in response to major crises. In other words, we have collectively self-limiting beliefs about our capacity for change.
Unlike Paul Atreides, I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that the stories we tell about ourselves have consequences, and I’d rather bet on the power and resilience of communities rather than glorified saviors. I want humans, not heroes.