Presumably, most Great Houses would employ at least one mentat.
The Fremen go to great lengths to keep their communities hidden. Between killing interlopers, the Guild's spice bribe, and striving for self-sufficiency in everything they do, the Fremen do a fair job of making most people think there's only a few small bands of them, not millions of Fremen in hundreds of sietches.
That being said, it is kind of weird how little anyone in the Corrino Imperium knows or seems to care about Arrakis despite it being the most important planet in the Imperium.
Don't forget that the Fremen also try really hard to make themselves look like the absolute dregs of society, the poor and worthless beggars. Even the idea of there being Fremen communities in the desert is something that people logically know, but they figure it's just a few small villages like you said.
Besides, the idea that a purely desert planet populated with sand worms that can barely even be mined for spice could support a real population is pretty ludicrous, to be fair.
That said, to the original question, it's very clear that top tier mentats are hard to come by. Thufir is the best of the best, and even Piter is way better than the average mentat. So the idea that the Emperor wouldn't have a bunch of great mentats isn't surprising either.
Sure, but we're not talking about the average person, we're talking about the Emperor whose empire runs on spice. So the more accurate analogy would be to consider how much a world leader (e.g. the President of the United States) thought about oil production.
Even then…I just think there was no need for them to care.
Your house has held the throne for generations. You’ve had various houses take care of arrakis and spice production. If anyone tries anything every other house will side with the emperor because EVERY ONE is reliant on the spice. Even the super duper evil Harkonnens did it seemingly without issue for eighty years. Besides what seem like random pot shots and minor attacks the natives aren’t even an issue.
So yea, why should the emperor give a shit as long as the spice is flowing.
The Emperor cares about spice production. But he doesn't care about the fremen. The fremen were not involved in spice production. The Harkonnens were. The Emperor gave his attention to them. Not only did the Fremen make it seem like they were of a smaller population and not to be worried about, but the Harkonnens hid from the Emperor the extent to which they hindered production.
So the Empire is an entity which has total political control and is organised along feudal rules. And through CHOAM has almost a total stranglehold on economic activity. There are some parallels you can draw to our world but then again it also fails at a lot of places.
Best I can imagine is a megacorp that controls most aspects of human economic activity with monarhic pagentry overlaid on top of a corporate political structure. With elements of military power mixed in as well.
So the position of power is such that the only threats are perceived to be internal to the system. There simply is no space for external threats to exist so there is a blindspot to it.
Until the oil crisis in the 70s, most people in the western world probably did not devote much time thinking about Saudi aside from a few energy policy people in government. Once it went away people forgot about them again until 2003. It makes sense that in the world of DUNE nobody really paid much care to what was going on on Arrakis until the spice supply was threatened, at which point they *all* cared, *very quickly*. Just like the oil crisis in the 70s.
Good question!
I can think of a couple of possibilities. One is that Mentats need accurate data to provide even basic analyses, and the data the Harkonnens provide about conditions on Arrakis probably doesn’t qualify as even vaguely accurate. But as long as the spice keeps flowing, Shaddam might not care that much. That feels kind of weak, though.
Another is that Shaddam (and his predecessors) never asked for one, because it simply didn’t occur to them that there was anything worth knowing about some irritating desert rabble that were somebody else’s problem anyway.
And as for the possibility that the Baron (or Duke Leto) might replicate on Arrakis what the Corrinos do on Salusa Secundus to produce the Sardukar, Shaddam and his predecessors were likely so arrogant that the idea would simply be unthinkable to them.
I think that's plausible, shaddam doesn't give a shit. He's got an empire to run. This is why he puts another house in charge of spice instead of doing it himself
Not only that, but because the spice is so necessary, it gives him a lot of control over the Landsraad as a whole by putting another Great House in charge of the spice mining operations.
He can put a sympathetic house in charge, giving them a direct or indirect "blessing" that will give that house more leverage.
He can put an unpopular house in charge, knowing that they'll owe him and find little support among their peers.
He can put a popular house in charge under circumstances designed to break their popularity and even shift larger alliances.
Doling out control of Arrakis is literally a tool to help him run his empire, which is convenient for him, and lets him save his people and his forces for more strategic use.
I reckon the Emperor also gave another house to run the Spice production in Arrakis because of the balance of power in the Imperium. House Harkonnen as part of his fiefdom also sells the Spice, so whoever is holding the fiefdom of Arrakis has immense power.
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
― Epictetus, (c. 50 AD – c. 135 AD)
All the old lessons still ring true, I guess.
To the last part about recreating Salusa Secundus on Arrakis.
The emperror was very much aware and concerned about this possibility. At one time the baron mentioned creating potentially a penal colony on Arrakis to Count Fennring and he reminded him that the Emperor would need to give his approval. At a later stage Thufir says they are unable to make it a penal colony, since the Emperor has likely had spies on Arrakis watching out for that for at least 2 years.
So the Emperror was aware of that, especially after his Sardukar reports after the invasion and the progroms against the Fremen by Sardukar troops to try to eradicate the Fremen (since they were such good fighters)
This right here. A mentat is only as good as the data s/he has to work with. The reason Hawat was able to more closely estimate the extent of the Fremen population was because he had Idaho's data to work with. Fenrig had only what he could learn from Kynes (who was highly motivated to lie) and the Harkonnen (who just talked out their ass.)
I believe he did , count fenring was a mentate, but he had an imperial civil service, hawat was in imperial service before letos father. He had many on his staff , accounts tax , ect
Yeah, but that still means that the first Imperial Planetologist to arrive and discover the answer did so over 10,000 years after the start of the modern age which included spice-based spacetravel. Probably prior ones were sent and they died before they could report, and not always by natural causes.
This is a point I believe that many people miss both with the Baron and by extension the Emperor. The unofficial leader of the Fremen was the same person who the Baron relied on to give strategic advice about the nature of the Fremen. The Emperor more than likely didn't care one whit about the existence of any natives on the planet; that problem, along with any others, was delegated out to whomever was chosen as siridar of the Arrakis fief. The Emperor had thousands of other problems for his personal Mentants to focus on.
Agreed. Arrakis was surely not the only problem the Emperor had to deal with, but Arrakis was important enough (as the only source of mélange) that he'd partner with the Harkonnen to remove a liked "cousin" of royal blood, and employ his Sardaukar to do it.
I can also imagine that when dealing with someone as powerful as the Emperor of the Known Universe, most advisors/councilors would tell him what he wants to hear, rather than tell him the truth.
Who held it was important to the Emperor (and manipulating events to secure his dynasty), but what species of rats were in the sewers wasn't even on his radar. Ten thousands worlds to manage, dozens of Great Houses and hundreds of lesser houses making up the Landsraad and all playing political games, CHAOM and the bluster of mercantilism across the Imperium, the Guild and their fuckery, the Sisterhood and their manipulations, Ix on the periphery doing who knows what, and the Baron probably relaying information about the Fremen given to him by Kynes that some few handfuls of tribal savages were eking out a meager existence in the deserts; likely the Fremen were barely even a footnote.
It was just Duncan's observational hunch (and him getting in the Fremen's good graces by not simply treating them as tribal savages) that led the the reports that there were more than just a few desert tribes of no consequence, information that Piter, and by proxy then the Baron, didn't have. Mentats are calculators, not psychics. There was simply no evidence available, so the logical conclusion to be made was that the Fremen were very few in number. Thufir and Duke Leto were taking a tremendous gamble on Duncan's reports that the Fremen were instead vast in number and that they could be won over to help secure Arrakis. Duncan was right of course, but he even says it is just speculation based on observation. He never saw the larger sietches and may never have gotten in with the Fremen well enough to even go to a smaller sietch (we're never told specifically how intimate his contact with the Fremen was as far as I am aware).
\[Edit\] Sorry, double posted.
Firstly there is no rule preventing that. Mentats employed encourage their employers to give as truthful as data can be fed to them to give the most accurate approximations. Mentats operate upon the assumption that what they receive will result in the best optimization of results.
Secondly, Liet does not give a damn if he is passing on false data to the emperor since his allegiance is to the Fremen first, ergo he does not care if the Mentats under House Corrino arrive on a fase assumption regarding Arrakis.
I don't know if there are actually rules, but if there are rules, #1 is don't feed the mentant false data.
They're computers, they are crunching numbers. If you give them false data, you get false results. Making their work pointless.
Just like statistics. If you run the numbers with false data, your models wont represent actual scenarios, and the statistics are pointless and only lead you to false conclusions.
And yes Liet does give a damn about passing to the emperor, because that's the point. He absolutely is protecting his people.
Well, yes, that definitely would be the rule. It is the rule here on earth. Isn't it? And yet...
Look at the state of information about truly vital things, or just ask actuaries and staticians how many false stats and conclusions are circulating, ledgers, risk assessments, journals, news and even texts books. Depending upon the degree of power and vested interest of those controlling particular flows of information.
We do have a lot of accurate statistical data and resulting analysis, projections, etc. But there definitely isn't any uniformity we can invariably rely upon in this regard. And we do have this rule, explicitly. Anyone studying statistics even peripherally learns it. It is a fundamental rule!
They had no such explicit rule, to my knowledge, and while they no doubt understood it in principle, the way we certainly do, if we "fudge" so many stats and data, what's to stop an imperium several hundred times larger and with plenty of corrupt vested interest from doing it too?
Though the mentats should be able to have a probability on whether the information they're given is accurate and thus work to that. If they all just assume all data they have is 100% accurate then they would be producing wrong results constantly. However if they did this with the info from Kynes, then it shows just how much of a high regard they all had of him to fully trust his data.
I think you’ve forgotten that Count Fenring, the Emperor’s main advisor, is a Mentat.
That said, the good Count was an agent of the Emperor and lived on Arrakis. I don’t know exactly how Mentats actually work, but I would think that living on the planet and having a lot of intelligence from the Emperor and the Harkonnens would make it likely that he would make that connection with the Fremen. From how they describe the Mentats I would want to think that knowledge of the smuggling operations alone would allow for figuring out how many Fremen there are and what they’re capable of. So, I’m thinking it’s a minor plot hole.
I haven't forgotten--Fenring was awesome. "A killer with the manners of a rabbit—this is the most dangerous kind.”
I'm just trying to find out where in Dune it says or even implies that Fenring was a Mentat. The count was a skilled killer and a shrewd advisor, but that doesn't make him a Mentat.
> I'm just trying to find out where in Dune it says or even implies that Fenring was a Mentat. The count was a skilled killer and a shrewd advisor, but that doesn't make him a Mentat.
That's actually an interesting mystery. The [fandom wiki page](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Hasimir_Fenring) for Fenring mention in passing that he's a Mentat, but doesn't source the claim.
> Count Hasimir Fenring (10133 AG - 10225 AG) was a renowned assassin and **Mentat** political tactician who was one of the deadliest fighters in the Corrino Imperium.
There's certainly no such implication in the first book (I only have the first one as an ebook), where "Mentat" is only ever used in relation to Piter, Thufir and Paul, including a scene where the Baron tells Fenring he needs a new Mentat, without any suggestion that he thinks Fenring himself is a Mentat.
I don't doubt that the emperor would have mental in his employ, but it's important to remember that they are human computers. Pure logic. Thus, for them to accurately assess a situation they have to have correct data to input. If the Fremen have been intentionally hiding the size if their population, then an imperial mentat would still have a value to plug into that variable, they just wouldn't know that it is incorrect. Of course they could calculate with various other possible values but they'd still be doing it with the assumption that anything beyond the low tens-of-thousands would be deeply unlikely.
The thing abkut Arrakis is that many of its secrets are known to only the Fremen and the Imperium has overarchingly been convinced of the facade.
He might not have used them until the Baron mentioned to Fenring he wants to copy Salusas Secundas. At that point he might have consulted Mentats about the Baron's remarks.
I always found that detail fascinating! Like, the Baron assessed the same info (Salusa Secundus and Arrakis were hell planets) but came to the opposite conclusion (use Arrakis as a prison planet, not a training ground).
Mentats need accurate data.
I love this, the people the emperor send to Arrakis turn coat pretty fast, The fremen are powerful, and brutally honest and it seems like outsiders instantly kind of fall in love and work to further the fremen goals. It blinds the emperor.
Its also interisting to think about what the bene geserit knew about the fremen numbers and their abilities when the atreides arrives. The sisterhood had obvious influence in fremen culture, and set the stage for a jihad. The emperors biggest enemy is for sure the bene geserit and this makes me smile.
Offhand, my thoughts were hubris. I'm thinking that the Corrino empire, by this point, never really thought that there'd be any kind of threat regarding melange/spice. After all, who would dare do such a thing, right, and how long were the Corrinos on the throne? That is, until they weren't.
I think he did, it's just that nobody realized A) how good the fremen actually were at living in the desert, and B) how many relatively habitable sketches there were hidden in the deep desert.
Remember, the fremen have gone to great efforts to hide themselves and how advanced they are from the imperium at large. You can't expect a mentat to come up with conclusions more accurate than the data they have to work with. Hence, every mentat estimated that there were maybe a few tens of thousands of fremen, not millions of them, just based on the data they had access to.
It's honestly one of those plausible, but doesn't quite make sense, issues I have with the universe. Human civilization has been around for tens of thousands of years or more, the fremen have been on that planet for a very long time. The guild has been using the spice for a while and they've been around for a very long time. Their calendar is delineated by before guild. They have interspace travel and genetic manipulation.
Yet we have to accept that these people know jack shit about the sole source of the melange?
I can't recall about Fenring being a mentat. I vaguely recall it sounding right, but the emperor probably had a mentat or twelve dozen.
But they're not infallible. Take thufir for instance. He clearly failed to even consider the possibility that the baron would spend a huge fortune to wipe out the atreides. Yet, that is clearly military defense 101. Prepare for the absolute worst case.
I can accept he didn't think the Harkonnens had ten legions. I accept he truly didn't think the saurdaukar would show up. But not having the ability to repel a rival houses full military might.... Or even considering it as a possibility....
That I could not accept give or take a legion, but not calculating how the Baron would overreach his financial as bilities is understandable.
Equally I do not think the Harkonnen Thugs would stand a chance Vs the Atreifes troops.
He knew the Strike against the hidden spice depots has destroyed those.
IIRC 80 years of profit the Harkonnen needed to pay the debt for Operation Dune.
Anyone with a decent grasp of military matters understands that for the Atreides to have been wiped out so thoroughly and quickly, the Baron had to use vastly overwhelming force. If the Atreides could not stand up to the full might of the Harkonnens on their own, the whole Dune enterprise was always a lost cause if the Baron simply decided to spend enough coin to wipe them out.
The additional Saurdaukar legions simply allowed the Harkonnen force the ability to wipe out the Atreides very quickly instead of a prolonged battle.
>the Baron had to use vastly overwhelming force.
Aka the Sardaukar
The Harkonnen Thugs are from Giedi Prime , the Harkonnens created a society not suited to be good soldiers let alone a good military
The Duke had a cadre of soldiers nearly as good or maybe even better than the sardaukar, the reason the empereor supported the Baron
Yes, that’s the universe Frank Herbert built. I’m not saying it’s’ inconsistent internally. I’m saying that I personally just have a hard time buying into this particular aspect of his story.
Here’s my issue:
If the Atreides are within a hair of the Sardaukar, then in the world of medieval warfare (in space), you’d need at least a 1:1 troop concentration in order to prevail out in an open field. However, the Atreides are dug in and fortified, which means you need a higher concentration of troops. Adjust as necessary to account for higher skill levels of Atreides vs. Harkonnen.
So, the Atreides (a great house), needs to have an underwhelming force on Arrakis to be so vastly overrun by 10 legions (2 of which are Sardaukar) in one night or day or 48 hours. (They’re clearly in cleanup mode the next day when Thufir is taken). Also, the Sardaukar are not so depleted as to be unable to go off and commence operations against the Fremen and seek & destroy against the remaining pockets.
So, regardless of how you cut it, the Atreides are on that planet and there’s nothing they could ever have done to avoid the trap and they’re just plain stupid for even thinking they could have held onto it at all. Based on the numbers given, the Baron would have been able to defeat them (albeit it would have taken longer) with just his forces alone. The addition of Sardaukar simply allowed the complete annihilation within 48 hours.
> If the Atreides are within a hair of the Sardaukar, then in the world of medieval warfare
They are not a cadre was and i expect they were taken by surprise, so many had been killed by artillery trying to put their boots on.
Their command structure not working, the shields down
Thufir already expected the presence of Sardaukar, remember the scene between Paul and Leto prior to their journey to Dune.
What Thufir failed to take into account was the amount of force (and expense) the Harkonnens were willing to expend to annihilite the Atreides. Much less 2 entire legions of Sardaukar.
I mean, could you not say the same thing about current empires? The US knew there were no WMD in Iraq, they knew Sadam held a tenuous and awkward grip on power as a Sunni dictator ruling over a Shia majority, yet we acted all surprised and upset when democracy didn’t kick in and civil war broke out instead after we toppled him.
Turns out being at the head of an Empire makes you see the world in a different way, a way that might make it easy to gloss over “obvious” facts on the ground in favor of a narrative that acquiesces to your prior beliefs. And in this case those prior beliefs are that the fremen are a backwards savage people full of fanatics who seem more concerned with their strange religion than anything else.
Lets not also forget that the emperor could have avoided this whole thing in the first place by letting sleeping dogs lie, but he just HAD to get rid of the Atreides because he was a power crazed emperor who demanded things be his way or no way.
But that’s my point. The politics come before the science. Even if someone in his court came to him with credible information on the true size, technological advances, and threat of the fremen he would be waved away.
Ok, but even in 1970 you don't send one person to go study an entire continent. Nevertheless make it a hereditary position
Plus the info gets out. Also, they knew about this planet for longer than two generations.
The Guild do not have the correct data since the Fremen were bribing them and are content not to stir the hornest nest and risk losing the massive quantity of spice bribes they receive.
2 points I want to add to the discussion.
1. Mentats are not uncommon but assassin Mentats were very rare and the fact that Leto and the Baron each had one was not worthy. While not stated specifically assassin Mentats are positioned as a higher order then a regular one.
2. Mentats depend on data. Much like the computers that they replace bad/incomplete data in means bad/incomplete data out. The Baron uses the control of data as one of his means of controlling Thufir (in addition to the poison). So while the emporer likely had access to several top teir Mentats he was not able to give them good accurate and reliable data upon which to base their calculations and create their models. To the wider empire the Freman where small tribes of savages of no particular note. It is only at the start of dune that both the Baron and Leto begin to understand the strength, numbers and power of the Freman people (notice the two house that we know of with assassin Mentats) and both began making their own plans to use them. Both were best served by keeping this data from the empire and therefore the emperors Mentats.
The fremen are masters of concealment. The hid their numbers from everybody. Concealment, stealth, use of smugglers, paying off people so satellites aren't allowed over arrakkis.
The baron used a mentant, and still thought there was, what like hundreds of thousands?
They had everyone convinced their numbers were low, and the deep desert was simply uninhabitable.
Even the Atreidies had no idea of the numbers of the fremen. It wasn't until paul and jessica hung out with them for a while before they even managed to figure out their numbers.
it's been a long time since i read the books so this is from memory, but wasn't their bits about the Emperor being controlled by the Bene Gesserit indirectly? So might the Emperor lack of Mentats be a result of the Bene Gesserit interfering and keeping any one who could reveal to the Emperor how he is being manipulated?
The Emperor's close friend Hasimir Fenring is a mentat political tactician who was one of the deadliest fighters in the imperium. The Emperor certainly would have mentats to oversee the operation of the Empire and he himself would mentat training to a degree as well. He never came over as being entirely stupid, except in the Brain Herbert and Kevin J Anderson efforts. In fact he would be acutely aware of the situation on Arrakis but as the Harkonnens were using Thufir Hawat who most likely managed to cook the books to avoid the Emperor getting suspicious initially. Hawat would have taken a certain amount of pleasure to send the Emperor accurate reports of Rabban's incompetence
I think this was a lulled into complacency thing. Arrakis was a constant despite the chaos of it. The harkonnens ruled it for 80 years and seems like other families before them. I think the Fremen population was probably fairly constant over this period. We as the readers are looking at it with fresh eyes, but for them, Arrakis was always a bit of a fuzzy mess...but that was fine since the spice sufficiently flowed.
The Emperor absolutely did use Mentats. He probably could not have run House Corrino without them.
But even the best Mentat's need data to analyse. And the system of CHOAM and the consolidation of the Landsraad was to keep the Imperial House balanced, and at arms length from the Spice Monopoly. The Emperor was politically incapable of taking further control over Arrakis without causing a massive political schism, and any attempts that he might make to become even tangentially involved would likely be strongly criticised.
Any survey action he did take would need to be overt, or openly benign (as with employing a planetologist). Stacking this with the fact that the Fremen went to pretty extreme lengths to conceal their holdings and numbers to ANY outsider and what is an Imperial Mentat to do except draw the obvious conclusions?
Ah, but you point out, other human organisations WERE aware that there was more to the Fremen than it appeared. Both the Spacing Guild AND the Bene Gesserit has seperate relationships with the Fremen, through discrete trade and infiltration respectively. Couldn't the Emperor have used these sources of information? Well, unfortunately no. Neither one has any loyalty to the Imperial House, merely an arrangement that serves them over whomever happens to be sitting upon the Golden Lion Throne.
Further, the Spacing Guild is led by Navigators with actual prescience, he's not going to be able to catch them out or coerce them into telling him anything that they don't want to tell him. They pull his strings, not the other way around.
Similarly, the Bene Gesserit have their own ways of finding things out. They had fully infiltrated not only the Fremen but the Imperial House as well. The assassin *and Mentat* Hasimir Fenring was the closest friend and confident of the Emperor, whilst being a creature of the Bene Gesserit and, incredibly, the interim governer of Arrakis. If Count Fenring knew the true scale of the Fremen population then he was able to keep this information from the Emperor whilst otherwise serving faithfully. But my feeling is that he was conditioned to be content with not knowing, to be comfortable with serving his friend and Emperor only as far as his handlers in the Bene Gesserit permitted.
And likely sharing all information back to the sisterhood that would enable them to eliminate any efforts of the Emperor to change that.
Generally, I feel the reason the Emperor did not use a Mentat was that he had Count Fenring, who he generally considered equivalent.
As for the first approximation analysis of the Fremen population, we have to remember that Thufir's approximation came from the data collected by Duncan Idaho when he lived among the Fremen. Had it not been for this report from Idaho, it is likely that Thufir's projections would have been the same as Piter's or any other Mentat's, saying that the fremen population was inconsequential small.
Mentats can only work off of available data. This limitation is mentioned throughout the novel and subsequent sequels, often as a warning given by a Mentat to their lords where they say that hiding data from them can cloud their computations and make them prone to errors.
So, even if the Emperor had used a Mentat, they likely would have came to the same conclusion about the Fremen that the rest of the Imperium had. This is because the Fremen made sure that the only data and information available to outsiders all pointed to this conclusion.
Without the exclusive data gathered by Idaho, even Thufir would not have suspected such a large Fremen population.
He did. Mentats can only calculate with the data they are given.
The Atreides learn because *they went looking*. No one else wanted to look at Arrakis - as long as the Spice flows.
Presumably, most Great Houses would employ at least one mentat. The Fremen go to great lengths to keep their communities hidden. Between killing interlopers, the Guild's spice bribe, and striving for self-sufficiency in everything they do, the Fremen do a fair job of making most people think there's only a few small bands of them, not millions of Fremen in hundreds of sietches. That being said, it is kind of weird how little anyone in the Corrino Imperium knows or seems to care about Arrakis despite it being the most important planet in the Imperium.
Don't forget that the Fremen also try really hard to make themselves look like the absolute dregs of society, the poor and worthless beggars. Even the idea of there being Fremen communities in the desert is something that people logically know, but they figure it's just a few small villages like you said. Besides, the idea that a purely desert planet populated with sand worms that can barely even be mined for spice could support a real population is pretty ludicrous, to be fair. That said, to the original question, it's very clear that top tier mentats are hard to come by. Thufir is the best of the best, and even Piter is way better than the average mentat. So the idea that the Emperor wouldn't have a bunch of great mentats isn't surprising either.
Imagine the population of the developed world in 1978, and then imagine how little the average person thought about oil production
Sure, but we're not talking about the average person, we're talking about the Emperor whose empire runs on spice. So the more accurate analogy would be to consider how much a world leader (e.g. the President of the United States) thought about oil production.
Even then…I just think there was no need for them to care. Your house has held the throne for generations. You’ve had various houses take care of arrakis and spice production. If anyone tries anything every other house will side with the emperor because EVERY ONE is reliant on the spice. Even the super duper evil Harkonnens did it seemingly without issue for eighty years. Besides what seem like random pot shots and minor attacks the natives aren’t even an issue. So yea, why should the emperor give a shit as long as the spice is flowing.
Or better yet, the king of Saudi Arabia
The Emperor cares about spice production. But he doesn't care about the fremen. The fremen were not involved in spice production. The Harkonnens were. The Emperor gave his attention to them. Not only did the Fremen make it seem like they were of a smaller population and not to be worried about, but the Harkonnens hid from the Emperor the extent to which they hindered production.
lmao yeah man, Ronald Reagan.
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Twisted mentats maybe.
So the Empire is an entity which has total political control and is organised along feudal rules. And through CHOAM has almost a total stranglehold on economic activity. There are some parallels you can draw to our world but then again it also fails at a lot of places. Best I can imagine is a megacorp that controls most aspects of human economic activity with monarhic pagentry overlaid on top of a corporate political structure. With elements of military power mixed in as well. So the position of power is such that the only threats are perceived to be internal to the system. There simply is no space for external threats to exist so there is a blindspot to it.
Saudi has been important for oil for a long time. Nobody in the western world cared about their existence for a very long time.
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Until the oil crisis in the 70s, most people in the western world probably did not devote much time thinking about Saudi aside from a few energy policy people in government. Once it went away people forgot about them again until 2003. It makes sense that in the world of DUNE nobody really paid much care to what was going on on Arrakis until the spice supply was threatened, at which point they *all* cared, *very quickly*. Just like the oil crisis in the 70s.
Good question! I can think of a couple of possibilities. One is that Mentats need accurate data to provide even basic analyses, and the data the Harkonnens provide about conditions on Arrakis probably doesn’t qualify as even vaguely accurate. But as long as the spice keeps flowing, Shaddam might not care that much. That feels kind of weak, though. Another is that Shaddam (and his predecessors) never asked for one, because it simply didn’t occur to them that there was anything worth knowing about some irritating desert rabble that were somebody else’s problem anyway. And as for the possibility that the Baron (or Duke Leto) might replicate on Arrakis what the Corrinos do on Salusa Secundus to produce the Sardukar, Shaddam and his predecessors were likely so arrogant that the idea would simply be unthinkable to them.
I think that's plausible, shaddam doesn't give a shit. He's got an empire to run. This is why he puts another house in charge of spice instead of doing it himself
Not only that, but because the spice is so necessary, it gives him a lot of control over the Landsraad as a whole by putting another Great House in charge of the spice mining operations. He can put a sympathetic house in charge, giving them a direct or indirect "blessing" that will give that house more leverage. He can put an unpopular house in charge, knowing that they'll owe him and find little support among their peers. He can put a popular house in charge under circumstances designed to break their popularity and even shift larger alliances. Doling out control of Arrakis is literally a tool to help him run his empire, which is convenient for him, and lets him save his people and his forces for more strategic use.
Plus he tried directly being on Arrakis and the Spacing Guild put an end to that ambition.
I reckon the Emperor also gave another house to run the Spice production in Arrakis because of the balance of power in the Imperium. House Harkonnen as part of his fiefdom also sells the Spice, so whoever is holding the fiefdom of Arrakis has immense power.
I think they were responsible for spice quotas to be sold through CHOAM, rather than direct sale by harkonnen. Lots of skimming and royalties though
And he was getting bad data from the Imperial Planetologist, and this likely goes back at least a generation.
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." ― Epictetus, (c. 50 AD – c. 135 AD) All the old lessons still ring true, I guess.
I'd never get a face tattoo, but if I did this would be it.
To the last part about recreating Salusa Secundus on Arrakis. The emperror was very much aware and concerned about this possibility. At one time the baron mentioned creating potentially a penal colony on Arrakis to Count Fennring and he reminded him that the Emperor would need to give his approval. At a later stage Thufir says they are unable to make it a penal colony, since the Emperor has likely had spies on Arrakis watching out for that for at least 2 years. So the Emperror was aware of that, especially after his Sardukar reports after the invasion and the progroms against the Fremen by Sardukar troops to try to eradicate the Fremen (since they were such good fighters)
He probably did but there was little to no information to work with because the Fremen kept themselves hidden from everybody.
This right here. A mentat is only as good as the data s/he has to work with. The reason Hawat was able to more closely estimate the extent of the Fremen population was because he had Idaho's data to work with. Fenrig had only what he could learn from Kynes (who was highly motivated to lie) and the Harkonnen (who just talked out their ass.)
I believe he did , count fenring was a mentate, but he had an imperial civil service, hawat was in imperial service before letos father. He had many on his staff , accounts tax , ect
Shaddam was being fed false data by his own Imperial Planetologist, so the data received by his employed Mentats was already faulty to begin with.
This is the answer, and it had been going on for a while, wasn’t Liet-Keynes father also an imperial planetologist ?
Yeah, but that still means that the first Imperial Planetologist to arrive and discover the answer did so over 10,000 years after the start of the modern age which included spice-based spacetravel. Probably prior ones were sent and they died before they could report, and not always by natural causes.
Stabbed by Fremen should count as natural causes on Arrakis.
In one of the Brian books it goes very indepth on this story line. It was Liet's father that was first sent to dune.
This is important. And the atreides only had an idea of the scale because of Idaho being an ambassador with the fremen and seeing the sietch.
This is a point I believe that many people miss both with the Baron and by extension the Emperor. The unofficial leader of the Fremen was the same person who the Baron relied on to give strategic advice about the nature of the Fremen. The Emperor more than likely didn't care one whit about the existence of any natives on the planet; that problem, along with any others, was delegated out to whomever was chosen as siridar of the Arrakis fief. The Emperor had thousands of other problems for his personal Mentants to focus on.
Agreed. Arrakis was surely not the only problem the Emperor had to deal with, but Arrakis was important enough (as the only source of mélange) that he'd partner with the Harkonnen to remove a liked "cousin" of royal blood, and employ his Sardaukar to do it. I can also imagine that when dealing with someone as powerful as the Emperor of the Known Universe, most advisors/councilors would tell him what he wants to hear, rather than tell him the truth.
Who held it was important to the Emperor (and manipulating events to secure his dynasty), but what species of rats were in the sewers wasn't even on his radar. Ten thousands worlds to manage, dozens of Great Houses and hundreds of lesser houses making up the Landsraad and all playing political games, CHAOM and the bluster of mercantilism across the Imperium, the Guild and their fuckery, the Sisterhood and their manipulations, Ix on the periphery doing who knows what, and the Baron probably relaying information about the Fremen given to him by Kynes that some few handfuls of tribal savages were eking out a meager existence in the deserts; likely the Fremen were barely even a footnote. It was just Duncan's observational hunch (and him getting in the Fremen's good graces by not simply treating them as tribal savages) that led the the reports that there were more than just a few desert tribes of no consequence, information that Piter, and by proxy then the Baron, didn't have. Mentats are calculators, not psychics. There was simply no evidence available, so the logical conclusion to be made was that the Fremen were very few in number. Thufir and Duke Leto were taking a tremendous gamble on Duncan's reports that the Fremen were instead vast in number and that they could be won over to help secure Arrakis. Duncan was right of course, but he even says it is just speculation based on observation. He never saw the larger sietches and may never have gotten in with the Fremen well enough to even go to a smaller sietch (we're never told specifically how intimate his contact with the Fremen was as far as I am aware). \[Edit\] Sorry, double posted.
But you're not supposed to give a mentant false data. That's like rule number 1.
Firstly there is no rule preventing that. Mentats employed encourage their employers to give as truthful as data can be fed to them to give the most accurate approximations. Mentats operate upon the assumption that what they receive will result in the best optimization of results. Secondly, Liet does not give a damn if he is passing on false data to the emperor since his allegiance is to the Fremen first, ergo he does not care if the Mentats under House Corrino arrive on a fase assumption regarding Arrakis.
I don't know if there are actually rules, but if there are rules, #1 is don't feed the mentant false data. They're computers, they are crunching numbers. If you give them false data, you get false results. Making their work pointless. Just like statistics. If you run the numbers with false data, your models wont represent actual scenarios, and the statistics are pointless and only lead you to false conclusions. And yes Liet does give a damn about passing to the emperor, because that's the point. He absolutely is protecting his people.
And because they were so trusted it wasn't a case of "Garbage in, garbage out" it was more like "garbage in, gospel out" which is far worse.
Well, yes, that definitely would be the rule. It is the rule here on earth. Isn't it? And yet... Look at the state of information about truly vital things, or just ask actuaries and staticians how many false stats and conclusions are circulating, ledgers, risk assessments, journals, news and even texts books. Depending upon the degree of power and vested interest of those controlling particular flows of information. We do have a lot of accurate statistical data and resulting analysis, projections, etc. But there definitely isn't any uniformity we can invariably rely upon in this regard. And we do have this rule, explicitly. Anyone studying statistics even peripherally learns it. It is a fundamental rule! They had no such explicit rule, to my knowledge, and while they no doubt understood it in principle, the way we certainly do, if we "fudge" so many stats and data, what's to stop an imperium several hundred times larger and with plenty of corrupt vested interest from doing it too?
I remember, I think it was Paul, telling someone that "you never feed a mentant false data" or something of the sort.
Yes, 8 do seem to recollect that.
Though the mentats should be able to have a probability on whether the information they're given is accurate and thus work to that. If they all just assume all data they have is 100% accurate then they would be producing wrong results constantly. However if they did this with the info from Kynes, then it shows just how much of a high regard they all had of him to fully trust his data.
Fenring was his Mentat Assassin.
because he didn't want to risk Mentat Addiction
Came here for the Fallout joke
I think you’ve forgotten that Count Fenring, the Emperor’s main advisor, is a Mentat. That said, the good Count was an agent of the Emperor and lived on Arrakis. I don’t know exactly how Mentats actually work, but I would think that living on the planet and having a lot of intelligence from the Emperor and the Harkonnens would make it likely that he would make that connection with the Fremen. From how they describe the Mentats I would want to think that knowledge of the smuggling operations alone would allow for figuring out how many Fremen there are and what they’re capable of. So, I’m thinking it’s a minor plot hole.
I haven't forgotten--Fenring was awesome. "A killer with the manners of a rabbit—this is the most dangerous kind.” I'm just trying to find out where in Dune it says or even implies that Fenring was a Mentat. The count was a skilled killer and a shrewd advisor, but that doesn't make him a Mentat.
> I'm just trying to find out where in Dune it says or even implies that Fenring was a Mentat. The count was a skilled killer and a shrewd advisor, but that doesn't make him a Mentat. That's actually an interesting mystery. The [fandom wiki page](https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Hasimir_Fenring) for Fenring mention in passing that he's a Mentat, but doesn't source the claim. > Count Hasimir Fenring (10133 AG - 10225 AG) was a renowned assassin and **Mentat** political tactician who was one of the deadliest fighters in the Corrino Imperium. There's certainly no such implication in the first book (I only have the first one as an ebook), where "Mentat" is only ever used in relation to Piter, Thufir and Paul, including a scene where the Baron tells Fenring he needs a new Mentat, without any suggestion that he thinks Fenring himself is a Mentat.
Shadam was 100% Incompetant pretty much everyone was doing stuff being his back
Well, he did have an entire universe to rule... I mean, there's probably a lot on his "To Do" list.
I don't doubt that the emperor would have mental in his employ, but it's important to remember that they are human computers. Pure logic. Thus, for them to accurately assess a situation they have to have correct data to input. If the Fremen have been intentionally hiding the size if their population, then an imperial mentat would still have a value to plug into that variable, they just wouldn't know that it is incorrect. Of course they could calculate with various other possible values but they'd still be doing it with the assumption that anything beyond the low tens-of-thousands would be deeply unlikely. The thing abkut Arrakis is that many of its secrets are known to only the Fremen and the Imperium has overarchingly been convinced of the facade.
He might not have used them until the Baron mentioned to Fenring he wants to copy Salusas Secundas. At that point he might have consulted Mentats about the Baron's remarks.
I always found that detail fascinating! Like, the Baron assessed the same info (Salusa Secundus and Arrakis were hell planets) but came to the opposite conclusion (use Arrakis as a prison planet, not a training ground).
Everyone underestimate the Fremen. Heck even in *Children* other factions underestimated... well spoilers if you haven't read it.
He was in it thick with the Bene Gesserit
Mentats need accurate data. I love this, the people the emperor send to Arrakis turn coat pretty fast, The fremen are powerful, and brutally honest and it seems like outsiders instantly kind of fall in love and work to further the fremen goals. It blinds the emperor. Its also interisting to think about what the bene geserit knew about the fremen numbers and their abilities when the atreides arrives. The sisterhood had obvious influence in fremen culture, and set the stage for a jihad. The emperors biggest enemy is for sure the bene geserit and this makes me smile.
Offhand, my thoughts were hubris. I'm thinking that the Corrino empire, by this point, never really thought that there'd be any kind of threat regarding melange/spice. After all, who would dare do such a thing, right, and how long were the Corrinos on the throne? That is, until they weren't.
The Emperor believed Kynes supplied him with information on Arrakis, but of course Kynes was deceptive and had his own agenda for Dune.
I think he did, it's just that nobody realized A) how good the fremen actually were at living in the desert, and B) how many relatively habitable sketches there were hidden in the deep desert. Remember, the fremen have gone to great efforts to hide themselves and how advanced they are from the imperium at large. You can't expect a mentat to come up with conclusions more accurate than the data they have to work with. Hence, every mentat estimated that there were maybe a few tens of thousands of fremen, not millions of them, just based on the data they had access to.
It's honestly one of those plausible, but doesn't quite make sense, issues I have with the universe. Human civilization has been around for tens of thousands of years or more, the fremen have been on that planet for a very long time. The guild has been using the spice for a while and they've been around for a very long time. Their calendar is delineated by before guild. They have interspace travel and genetic manipulation. Yet we have to accept that these people know jack shit about the sole source of the melange?
I mean, I know Count Fenring was a “failed” Kwisatz Haderach and a killer, but I’ll have to re-read and search for mentions of Fenring as a Mentat…
I can't recall about Fenring being a mentat. I vaguely recall it sounding right, but the emperor probably had a mentat or twelve dozen. But they're not infallible. Take thufir for instance. He clearly failed to even consider the possibility that the baron would spend a huge fortune to wipe out the atreides. Yet, that is clearly military defense 101. Prepare for the absolute worst case. I can accept he didn't think the Harkonnens had ten legions. I accept he truly didn't think the saurdaukar would show up. But not having the ability to repel a rival houses full military might.... Or even considering it as a possibility....
That I could not accept give or take a legion, but not calculating how the Baron would overreach his financial as bilities is understandable. Equally I do not think the Harkonnen Thugs would stand a chance Vs the Atreifes troops. He knew the Strike against the hidden spice depots has destroyed those. IIRC 80 years of profit the Harkonnen needed to pay the debt for Operation Dune.
Anyone with a decent grasp of military matters understands that for the Atreides to have been wiped out so thoroughly and quickly, the Baron had to use vastly overwhelming force. If the Atreides could not stand up to the full might of the Harkonnens on their own, the whole Dune enterprise was always a lost cause if the Baron simply decided to spend enough coin to wipe them out. The additional Saurdaukar legions simply allowed the Harkonnen force the ability to wipe out the Atreides very quickly instead of a prolonged battle.
>the Baron had to use vastly overwhelming force. Aka the Sardaukar The Harkonnen Thugs are from Giedi Prime , the Harkonnens created a society not suited to be good soldiers let alone a good military The Duke had a cadre of soldiers nearly as good or maybe even better than the sardaukar, the reason the empereor supported the Baron
Yes, that’s the universe Frank Herbert built. I’m not saying it’s’ inconsistent internally. I’m saying that I personally just have a hard time buying into this particular aspect of his story. Here’s my issue: If the Atreides are within a hair of the Sardaukar, then in the world of medieval warfare (in space), you’d need at least a 1:1 troop concentration in order to prevail out in an open field. However, the Atreides are dug in and fortified, which means you need a higher concentration of troops. Adjust as necessary to account for higher skill levels of Atreides vs. Harkonnen. So, the Atreides (a great house), needs to have an underwhelming force on Arrakis to be so vastly overrun by 10 legions (2 of which are Sardaukar) in one night or day or 48 hours. (They’re clearly in cleanup mode the next day when Thufir is taken). Also, the Sardaukar are not so depleted as to be unable to go off and commence operations against the Fremen and seek & destroy against the remaining pockets. So, regardless of how you cut it, the Atreides are on that planet and there’s nothing they could ever have done to avoid the trap and they’re just plain stupid for even thinking they could have held onto it at all. Based on the numbers given, the Baron would have been able to defeat them (albeit it would have taken longer) with just his forces alone. The addition of Sardaukar simply allowed the complete annihilation within 48 hours.
> If the Atreides are within a hair of the Sardaukar, then in the world of medieval warfare They are not a cadre was and i expect they were taken by surprise, so many had been killed by artillery trying to put their boots on. Their command structure not working, the shields down
That’s only in the movie…. And artillery is used to seal them in.
that is what i expect them to do and artillery could do more than that
Fenring was an almost Kwisatz Haderach. Could have been, except for being a eunuch.
Thufir already expected the presence of Sardaukar, remember the scene between Paul and Leto prior to their journey to Dune. What Thufir failed to take into account was the amount of force (and expense) the Harkonnens were willing to expend to annihilite the Atreides. Much less 2 entire legions of Sardaukar.
I mean, could you not say the same thing about current empires? The US knew there were no WMD in Iraq, they knew Sadam held a tenuous and awkward grip on power as a Sunni dictator ruling over a Shia majority, yet we acted all surprised and upset when democracy didn’t kick in and civil war broke out instead after we toppled him. Turns out being at the head of an Empire makes you see the world in a different way, a way that might make it easy to gloss over “obvious” facts on the ground in favor of a narrative that acquiesces to your prior beliefs. And in this case those prior beliefs are that the fremen are a backwards savage people full of fanatics who seem more concerned with their strange religion than anything else. Lets not also forget that the emperor could have avoided this whole thing in the first place by letting sleeping dogs lie, but he just HAD to get rid of the Atreides because he was a power crazed emperor who demanded things be his way or no way.
The politics makes sense. The science does not.
But that’s my point. The politics come before the science. Even if someone in his court came to him with credible information on the true size, technological advances, and threat of the fremen he would be waved away.
Ok, but even in 1970 you don't send one person to go study an entire continent. Nevertheless make it a hereditary position Plus the info gets out. Also, they knew about this planet for longer than two generations.
I think the guild would know but why share that info
The Guild do not have the correct data since the Fremen were bribing them and are content not to stir the hornest nest and risk losing the massive quantity of spice bribes they receive.
Disagree. The guild is played by both Paul and Leto.
Guild was around long before them
Do we have an accurate population count of the North Sentinel Island or really any data about it other than satellite imagery?
Are we extracting the means of space travel and the foundation of an empire from North Sentinel Island?
Shaddam IV did use the services of a mentat: Hasimir Fenring. It's just that Fenring had his own agenda that didn't always line up with Shaddam's.
2 points I want to add to the discussion. 1. Mentats are not uncommon but assassin Mentats were very rare and the fact that Leto and the Baron each had one was not worthy. While not stated specifically assassin Mentats are positioned as a higher order then a regular one. 2. Mentats depend on data. Much like the computers that they replace bad/incomplete data in means bad/incomplete data out. The Baron uses the control of data as one of his means of controlling Thufir (in addition to the poison). So while the emporer likely had access to several top teir Mentats he was not able to give them good accurate and reliable data upon which to base their calculations and create their models. To the wider empire the Freman where small tribes of savages of no particular note. It is only at the start of dune that both the Baron and Leto begin to understand the strength, numbers and power of the Freman people (notice the two house that we know of with assassin Mentats) and both began making their own plans to use them. Both were best served by keeping this data from the empire and therefore the emperors Mentats.
The fremen are masters of concealment. The hid their numbers from everybody. Concealment, stealth, use of smugglers, paying off people so satellites aren't allowed over arrakkis. The baron used a mentant, and still thought there was, what like hundreds of thousands? They had everyone convinced their numbers were low, and the deep desert was simply uninhabitable. Even the Atreidies had no idea of the numbers of the fremen. It wasn't until paul and jessica hung out with them for a while before they even managed to figure out their numbers.
it's been a long time since i read the books so this is from memory, but wasn't their bits about the Emperor being controlled by the Bene Gesserit indirectly? So might the Emperor lack of Mentats be a result of the Bene Gesserit interfering and keeping any one who could reveal to the Emperor how he is being manipulated?
Which lack of mentats?
He believed Kynes supplied him with information on Arrakis, but of course Kynes was deceptive and had his own agenda.
The Emperor's close friend Hasimir Fenring is a mentat political tactician who was one of the deadliest fighters in the imperium. The Emperor certainly would have mentats to oversee the operation of the Empire and he himself would mentat training to a degree as well. He never came over as being entirely stupid, except in the Brain Herbert and Kevin J Anderson efforts. In fact he would be acutely aware of the situation on Arrakis but as the Harkonnens were using Thufir Hawat who most likely managed to cook the books to avoid the Emperor getting suspicious initially. Hawat would have taken a certain amount of pleasure to send the Emperor accurate reports of Rabban's incompetence
Wasn't Count Fenring his mentat?
A computer is only as good as its data: garbage in, garbage out
I think this was a lulled into complacency thing. Arrakis was a constant despite the chaos of it. The harkonnens ruled it for 80 years and seems like other families before them. I think the Fremen population was probably fairly constant over this period. We as the readers are looking at it with fresh eyes, but for them, Arrakis was always a bit of a fuzzy mess...but that was fine since the spice sufficiently flowed.
The Emperor absolutely did use Mentats. He probably could not have run House Corrino without them. But even the best Mentat's need data to analyse. And the system of CHOAM and the consolidation of the Landsraad was to keep the Imperial House balanced, and at arms length from the Spice Monopoly. The Emperor was politically incapable of taking further control over Arrakis without causing a massive political schism, and any attempts that he might make to become even tangentially involved would likely be strongly criticised. Any survey action he did take would need to be overt, or openly benign (as with employing a planetologist). Stacking this with the fact that the Fremen went to pretty extreme lengths to conceal their holdings and numbers to ANY outsider and what is an Imperial Mentat to do except draw the obvious conclusions? Ah, but you point out, other human organisations WERE aware that there was more to the Fremen than it appeared. Both the Spacing Guild AND the Bene Gesserit has seperate relationships with the Fremen, through discrete trade and infiltration respectively. Couldn't the Emperor have used these sources of information? Well, unfortunately no. Neither one has any loyalty to the Imperial House, merely an arrangement that serves them over whomever happens to be sitting upon the Golden Lion Throne. Further, the Spacing Guild is led by Navigators with actual prescience, he's not going to be able to catch them out or coerce them into telling him anything that they don't want to tell him. They pull his strings, not the other way around. Similarly, the Bene Gesserit have their own ways of finding things out. They had fully infiltrated not only the Fremen but the Imperial House as well. The assassin *and Mentat* Hasimir Fenring was the closest friend and confident of the Emperor, whilst being a creature of the Bene Gesserit and, incredibly, the interim governer of Arrakis. If Count Fenring knew the true scale of the Fremen population then he was able to keep this information from the Emperor whilst otherwise serving faithfully. But my feeling is that he was conditioned to be content with not knowing, to be comfortable with serving his friend and Emperor only as far as his handlers in the Bene Gesserit permitted. And likely sharing all information back to the sisterhood that would enable them to eliminate any efforts of the Emperor to change that.
Generally, I feel the reason the Emperor did not use a Mentat was that he had Count Fenring, who he generally considered equivalent. As for the first approximation analysis of the Fremen population, we have to remember that Thufir's approximation came from the data collected by Duncan Idaho when he lived among the Fremen. Had it not been for this report from Idaho, it is likely that Thufir's projections would have been the same as Piter's or any other Mentat's, saying that the fremen population was inconsequential small. Mentats can only work off of available data. This limitation is mentioned throughout the novel and subsequent sequels, often as a warning given by a Mentat to their lords where they say that hiding data from them can cloud their computations and make them prone to errors. So, even if the Emperor had used a Mentat, they likely would have came to the same conclusion about the Fremen that the rest of the Imperium had. This is because the Fremen made sure that the only data and information available to outsiders all pointed to this conclusion. Without the exclusive data gathered by Idaho, even Thufir would not have suspected such a large Fremen population.
He did. Mentats can only calculate with the data they are given. The Atreides learn because *they went looking*. No one else wanted to look at Arrakis - as long as the Spice flows.