Frank Herbert’s Amazing ‘Dune’ Quote: ‘All Governments Suffer a Recurring Problem’ (Jon Miltimore, Mar 20, 2025, The Daily Economy)
Recently, I came across a Frank Herbert quote I hadn’t heard before, one far less known.
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
It’s a penetrating thought, and when I first read the words, I wondered if they were too good to be true. Most of us at one time or another have seen a quote online attributed to Morgan Freeman, George Washington, Robin Williams, or some other famous or influential person only to find after a two-minute investigation the quote is pure fiction or falsely attributed.
This is not the case with Herbert’s quote on power. Even though I had never heard it before, it appears in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the final book in the series, and one widely considered the weakest of the Dune novels. (This might explain why I didn’t read the book and was unfamiliar with the quote.)
Herbert’s words on power stood out to me for two reasons. First, it somewhat turns on its head Lord Acton’s famous line that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Unlike Acton, Herbert was not saying individuals are corrupted by power, but that power draws corrupt people.
Second, Herbert’s line is deeply Hayekian. In his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek dedicated an entire chapter to the idea of the worst men in society rising to the top (it’s literally called “Why the Worst Get on Top”).
In that chapter, Hayek describes at length how centralized systems elevate individuals to lead them, and concludes that those possessing the strongest desire to organize economic and social life to their plan tend to have the fewest scruples about exercising power over others.
“To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values,” Hayek wrote, “the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral.”
…managed to avoid electing psychopaths until Donald.