fear is the mind-killer

I finished reading Dune on Thursday. For some reason I always thought I liked science fiction as a kid, but really all I liked was Star Trek and Star Wars, and so to me that meant I liked science fiction. In an effort to see what science fiction was really all about I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then I read Dune. People kept telling me to read Hitchhiker and I already knew half the jokes so I figured that just made sense. Regarding Dune, I watched the SciFi mini-series, "Children of Dune," liked it, and figured I should give the original book a shot. For some reason I always thought of Dune as something too "geeky," like Star Trek conventions. Turns out I was just wrong. I should have realized that way back when after I was told much of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series seemed to get its ideas from Dune. Well now I know.

So Dune. Wow. What can I say? It’s really good. It makes me realize what good sci-fi/fantasy can be. I really liked the politics aspect of it, plots within plots within plots. Politics in today's world has such a bad connotation but I never really thought of it that way. I think of it like in this book. Basically politics is dealing with people. You try to understand why they are doing what they are doing, and what they are really trying to achieve. You can then use this knowledge to help you in your own goals. And now I just made it sound like its just manipulation which really sells it short. I am trying to think of an example to help get my point across but one isn't coming to me right now. Maybe I'll come back to this later.

The other concept I liked was the idea of control over emotions. After I saw the mini-series I started using the "fear is the mind-killer" speech to help myself out with public speaking. It worked quite well for me and so when I read the book this really resonated with me. Right from the beginning when there is a distinction drawn that some people are human and some people aren't, I knew this idea would have my attention. This same concept seems to be in almost anything I think about. In my leadership class they talked about emotions being a chemical reaction, a fight or flight instict, that was good for survival in the caveman days, but not so good to have in the modern era. Star Trek movies seem to say that emotions are what makes us human and pure logic is not enough. And then there's the whole pop psychology thing of head vs heart, which I think is a corruption of Descarte’s dualism idea. So which is it? Does feeling make us human or does thinking make us human? First off I think the pop psychology head vs heart thing is bunk and really is just an excuse. "I know I should study but I really don't want to." If that’s true then you really don't think you should study, you're just saying that because you think that's what people want you to say, or to make yourself feel better or something. So with that idea out of the way I tend to say its the thinking that makes us human. For me many thing that I do, that afterwards I think I handled badly, are because of emotion. If I had just sat there and taken a few deep breaths and composed myself, things would have gone a lot smoother. I am trying to work on this and we'll see how things go.