March 28th, 2025
Difficulty
Dune, Text-Editor, and Ego
I finished another read through of Dune by Frank Herbert this past week. The experience was different than my past readings because I felt that I was looking at it with a much more critical eye than I did in the past. The feeling of escapism was there certainly, but I found I have come to a more nuanced understanding not only of the books internal meaning, but also its placement in the larger scope of reality. Primarily, I see how much Herbert's world-building is less a singular moment in history catapulted into a future setting, but rather a broad, sometimes subtle amalgamation of histories imperial eras. For example, the notion of the Spacing Guild being a independent organization rather than being a part of any single royal dynasties "Navy", feels partially inspired by the way in which the Chola Empire expanded into overseas conquests without the use of navy, rather choosing to rely on merchant corporations do ferry soldiers across the waters. However, I do feel as through the object orientalism of the narrative is impossible to ignore. While it's better than the film's treatment of Arabic, Islamic, and Bedouin peoples, the book is still aggressively romanticizes those cultures for the sake of a western story, about white people, made for a western audience. The lack of follow-up or exploration of those Middle World influences later in the series, further emphasizes this point.
Earlier this week I began working on a text-editor program for my own end. I write these blogs directly in VS Code, directly in html. This isn't terrible, but I'd rather be able to write in something like Word than convert into html, although without the need to copy and paste. Simply writing a blog, then "saving as html" would be the ultimate goal. I wrote the preliminary software using Tkinter in Python, and it's been working well so far. The next step would be to add the various basic word-processing functions (italics, bold, etc. etc.), before working on a way to convert that processing into html tags.
Loneliness begets Ego. It is difficult to sit alone, without a understanding of at least another's mind and soul, and not develop a hostile sense of difference towards other human beings, towards life in general. To that end, I find the more monastic philosophies towards enlightenment, towards the dissolution of the ego, to be far less compelling than the ones that stress the importance of community and love in the path towards peace.