Frank Herbert:

On Getting Our Heads Together

PETER BRIGG

"Yes, we must. intleetl, all hang together, or,

most assuredly, we shall all hang separately"
(Allrihuted to thl' American patriot,
Benjamin Franklin. 1776.1

The concept of the collective mind is hardly a new one in science fiction.
In the recent annals of the genre, stories such as Theodore Sturgeon's
More Than fill mall, Arthur C. Clarke's Childh()()c!',\' End. and John
Wyndham's The ell/y,mlids provide examples. They speak of man's potential
for a vast increase in mental authority through the pooling of minds and
bodies, hut they also speak of the dangerous possibilities that such ~ws(lIlls
will have in passing bcyond the human.
A contemporary examiner of t he collect ivc mind is Frank I krbert, whose
works- beginning with the Pan-Spechi of "The Tact I'ul Saboteur" ( 19(4)--
offer many versions of the phenomenon.' Rehind the imaginative skills of
his various creations lies an urgent and central question: the nature of
his position on the development of such collectivitics. For one is drawn to
the ohvious parallel betwcen ficlional considerations of the collective mind
and the ongoing problems in the United States and other democracies.
The collective mind offers constant promises of security, ease of
communication, tremendous efficiency through effective role definition,

'"fma;c X 111/.1-4
(XI27-1276/XO/O 10 19.1- tOSCH,SO'" Mosaic
 194 Peter Brigg

CO"Operation, and a rationality of behavior based upon shared and commonly

Ulfderstood goals. Against these seductive advantages is ranged the intensely
human desire to maintain selfhood that achieved political expression in the
higb romantic idealism of the French Revolution and the American Consti-
tution. Loss of selfhood and freedom might decimate the initiative and
creativity tbat are seen as expressions of the self and the bulwarks of the
mystique of "get-up--and-go," The frequent modelling of collective minds
upon in sect communities reveals the final terrOr. the denial of metaphysics
posited by acceptance of spel~ies-survival as life's sole goal. Even if the
"mindless hive" wt're actually the highest form of mind, the fact would
remain that it might be devoted to goals conflicting radically with the nal tlral
~pirationS of the human heart and imagination. This fierce opposition
'between the individuaLand the collectivity is finaliy complicated by the
growing awareness among social thinkers and philosophers of the lack of
individual freedom in modem society. producing a situation where the
conflict may actually be betwe.en conflicting collectivities, one of which
is r,ationalized and truly effective but corresponds frighteningly to
totalitarian states, while the other purports to maintain freedom bu~ has
actually usurped it througb, bureaucracy, faceless commerce, and the
manipulation of its citizens.
To explore a collective mind in a science-fiction novel is thus de facto
:to engage in the presentation of arguments for and against the conception
ohhe self asa free, independent creature in contrast to the self as submerged
ina collectivity driven biologically to social, and political structures and
behavior patterns. My concern in this essay is to examine Frank Herbert's
position by discuS$ingthe kinds of collectivities'he describes, their powers,
.dteirmodes ofcommumcati<>n, the means oftheir creation , and the models
Qr:me~phors Herberthasichosen to picture;~$eas yet unrealized states
I)fflJ.llman:behavjQl'/lWin· c()ncen:trat~:upon:,,:di~lDune trilogy, The Green
1#d;n, Hellstrorn'S'HiVe'and,particulal-1y~;:TlieoSttntaroga Barrier,
Is Jaspers Beer
Good For You? in Leon Stove,fhasargued strongly that'Herbert is presenting the blackest
Extrapolation/down
loaded of possible utopi8$ in The Santaroga Barrier,'2 When the citizens of
Santaroga. give up aspectscf their individual selves, however, and begin
to function asa collective entity as a result of a combination of a special
system of education and the ingestion of a fungoid-bacteria called Jaspers,
tbey are united around the most basic of all community goals: survival.
Herbert presents a collective mind that functions as a natural process.
altbough Jaspers is confined to the Santaroga Valley. The references to the
Santarogans as ants and bees seem to be counterbalanced by the individu·
ality of the citizens. Al Marden, the town's patrol captain, snaps at the hotel
clerk whose carelessness has nearly murdered Gilbert Dasein, the outside
investigator. Dasein's love for Jenny Piaget, a Santarogan, is not love for
a zombie but for a lively and distinctive human being. When Dasein envisions
the individual Santarogans as pinpoints of light coming through a black
curtain. there are implications that a positive light hides in Santaroga.
The community's strength lies in a shared unconscious experience \\hich
resembles Carl Jung's concept of the colkctive unconscious Herhert
realistically depicts this strength as an ambiguous virtue, for its energies
make the Santarogans at once in touch with a more complete scme of
themselves than other humans and capable of violence because of their
ready response to their remnining suhconsciolls inslincts to destroy threats
to the Santaroga entity.
More of thp positive aspects of the collective .. creature" appear in The
Green Brain, where \ho~e outside the entity are pictured in a severely
consorious fashion. The ThirJ World has set out to eliminate all insect
life -- except for tame mutated hees-through an ironically named "Interna-
tional. Ecological Organisatinn," and in Brazil the destruction has been
entrusted to bandeirantes, freelance gangs who bid for contracts to de-infest
specific sectors. Standing against this campaign, which is honeycombed
with political corruption and international intrigue, is the green brain of
the title, a pulsating disc four meters in diameter by one half meter in
thickness that is the mentation center for a vast collective of insects. The
collective is capable of creating immense insect mutations and of assembling
millions of insects into simulacra of human beings. Despite the built-in
"shudder value" of these images, Herbert makes it clear that the brain is
the hero of the story; it attempts to understand human beings and contact
them to warn them of the total ecological disaster they are courting.

. We must produce immediate and consequential benefits that the humans cannot
fail to recognise. the Brain thought. If we can demonstrate dramatic usefulness.
they may yet be brought to understand that inter-dependence is circular. inextricably
entangled and a matter of life and death.
They need us and we need them ... but the burden of proof has fallen on us,
And If we fail to prove it. this will be truly barren earth.3

Dune; published a year before The Green Brain, contains collective

personalities whose natures are spread out on a time frame as well as on
a spatial one. Once Paul Atreides, his mother Jessica, Chani and Alia have
ingested the melange, they are in various states of community with members
of their genetic unconsciousnesses. These abilities have an ambiguous
outcome in Dune, but it is clear that Paul achieves a transcendent state
of power, a unique ability to comprehend the complex movement of both
personal and political history. The later Dune books examine the &eDGdc
collective in more detail, climaxing in Children of Dune with the pos5eSiion
of Alia by the Baron Harkonnen, long deceased, and with the role l...c:t!lIl
accepts once he has mastered the infinite lives in hispast.
· Hellstrom s Hive appears to counterbalance the positive collectivities of
Dune. The Green Brain and The Santaroga Barrier. For three hundred
years a festering hive of semihumans has been forcing human evolution
to follo\Y that of insects by breeding neuters, workers, scientists and
specialist leaders. They are not revolted at being "returned to the va.ts"
for their protein and genetic material at death. The community is tech-
nologically advanced, using sonic stunwands as personal weapons and
devising an advanced weapon capable of causing major disruptions of the
earth's crust. The hive has evolved a clear underst~ding of its philosophical
base. as illustrated in Herbert's characteristic insertion of quotations from
texts and speeches,.in this case from the Hive Manual, the words of Nils
Hellscrom, the Minutes of the Hive Council, and the words of Trova
Hellstrom.
On close examination the hive is much less a condemnation than one
first supposes. Its activities are carefully justified in ecological terms that
set it off as a model of biological practicality in tune with the natural
world:
LTrova Hellstrom I
The nature of our Hive's dependence upon the whole planet must be kept under
constant review. 4
Nils Hellstrom
In the sense popularly believed Outside, it is not possible to fight back against
any aspect of nature. What must be understood is. that we fit ourselves into
existing patterns, adapting as our influence on those processes brings about
inevitable change. (p.189)

The hive's specialists are aware of the need to maintain human individu-
ality despite the models they are following:
[Nils Hellstrom J
there is another respect in which we must guard against becoming too much like
the insects upon whom we pattern our design for human survival. (p.185)
IHive ManualJ
Freedom represents a concept that is tied inextricably to the discredited abstract
of individualism/ego. We sacrifice none of thisfreedom to gain our more efficient,
reliabte,and convenient basic human stock. (p.303)

Although selective breeding in the hive and feeding the dead into the food
vats are repulsive, and the "freedom" may be questioned in light of the
functional specificity of hive members, Herbert again makes it clear that
the outside world is a worse situation. In the same manner that Dasein in
The Santaroga Barrier sees himself and other social scientists as tools to
manipulate unknowing masses and, as in The Green Brain, agents of the
International Ecological Organisation are destroying the ecology of earth,
in Hellstrom s Hive the investigators are an intelligence arm of an American
police state who frequently "waste" their own associates in order to preserve
status or maneuver for political gain: "The signs were clear. He must juggle
his own hot potato .... There was only one safe response. He must delegate
authority, but do it so subtly that everything still appeared to be in his own
hands" (p. 69). The agency keeps stumbling over the FBI and highly-placed
politicians who obstruct its efforts or attempt to take control of the case,
It is a chaotic, ruthless and singularly inefficient system. A love interest
between two of the agents points up the fact that their human needs have
nO place in the cold reality of the outside world, The Chief kllew about
her and Eddie. The Chief had a snake's mind, He' say to hil11:;clf: She:~
the one with the best motivation. She '/1 I\'alll to rescue Iwl' hoy/iiend.
Give her the reins" (pp. 225-26).
If one attempts to evaluate Herherfs prenstation of the collective mind,
certain things emerge most clearly. The collectivities find their hases in the
human unconscious, whether it be .lung's collective unconscious, general-
ized genetic unconscious. or specific and personal unconscious. The
collectives emerge in' ways that evolve from mechanical devices to the
adaptive demands placed upon the insect world in The Green Brain.
the Jaspers of The Santaroga Barrier. the conscious breeding process of
Hellstrom ':S Hive. and the melange of Dune. In all the principal novels,
climaxing in Leto II's conversion to a semi-human "maker," the objective
is ecologically positive, representing a view of mankind as part of the
evolving process of planetary life. The "horrors" of human simulacra
constructed from beetles, legless and armless breeding trunks, a man who
puts on the skin of a sand-trout to evolve over four thousand years into
a different-from-human creature, and men behaving as insects and predators
are hardly horrible in the natural world where species-survival is the pattern.
Only to "lovers of nature" who forget that beasts kill and eat beasts and
that insects undergo transformations whose effects upon their "selfhoods"
cannot even be estimated do Herbert's pictures immediately suggest the
repulsiveness of collective behavior. At the core of all these feelings is the
human vanity of individualism, ego and the assumption that man cannot
evolve because there is a fixed part of the self that does not participate
in the biological reality of the universe. It is to the presentation of the
ego, particularly in the Dune books and The Santaroga Barrier that I wish
finally to turn, arguing that Herbert sees man as capable of change not only
in biological terms but in a personality sense, and that the resolution of
ego lies not in conservative defense of romantic individualism but in the
recognition of human flexibility and power to understand and accept change,
to move with the larger currents of biological reality.
In his analysis of The Santaroga Barrier Stoverca~efully examines the
social critique of Karl Jaspers but he de-emphasizes the aspect of Jaspers'
philosophy that deals with the realization of the individuaf,s He does
observe that "In going native, he [Gilbert Dasein I apparently goes a
progress through Karl Jaspers' chain of being, from the lowest to the highest
mode: from dasein. the crude mode of empirical existence on the part of a
spiritually uninformed organism, to a transcendent mode of self-clarification."
But the key word here is "apparently," for Stover concludes this section by
asserting: "Or so he would have done had he followed Jaspers the man, not
Jaspers the drug" (pp. 161-62). I think that it is not completely possible to
dismiss Dasein's personal transformation in this way, for Herbert .has inserted
far too many clues in the book to suggest that Dast<in's transformation is an
arrival atthe plane oftranscendence. despite the fact that Karl Jaspers. a
conVinced believer in the potential of the cognitive process. would probably
bavedistrusted the drug by whicH it is achieved.
The search for transCendent truth can emerge only through the action of
dasein. one's "being-in-the-world" or moment-by-moment eXperience of life.
To Karl Jaspers this process meant that man must become fully aware of
both his personal self-and community self in order to pl~ce his reality
'in a. -transcendent context. The process of dasein approaching reality is
called existenz and .Jaspers speaks of it terms of opening torthe world
<,,{becoming-terms that occur often in The Santaroga Barrier. Dr. Piaget,
the-Santaroga psychologist, says: "I stake a reputation on it. You will be
:an. opening person,"6 and he later inquires: "Have you really opened now?
.Are:yoll seeing? Have you become?" (p. 211). Gilbert Dasein undergoes
'an opening thatbringshini in touch with both social and personal reality.
He recognizes thesodal reality in terms of the binding contract between
allbuman beings, the- unconscious aspects of personality that are more
clearly revealed to the Santarogans than to others. Dasein realizes that
diisunderstanding ofothers has profound implications.: "He lay there rolling
the Ch~ught in his mind, filled by this odd awareness that let him reach
outto--Jenny even when she released his hand and left him alone there on
the grass. There was Ilothing of telepathy in this awareness. It was more
knowledge of mood in those around him. It was a lake in which they all
'SWam. When one distUrbed the water, the others knew it" (p. 120). Later
ff&agaln considers thissocio-psychologicalsituation: "Life exists' immersed
.&t 'a'sea o/'unconsciousness, he reminded himself. In the drug, these
p¢ople gain a view o/that sea "(p. 175).
- A Christian soeialistphenomenologist, Max Scheler7 (to whom our atten-
tion should be drawn by the presence of Sam Scheler as a character in
the novel) haS empha.sized the distinction between the personal and the
llldiVidual, arghing that individualism can stand between men and the
contagious tra~smiSsion of feeling that would create a proper state of being
inlhe'social reality. Santaroga appears as a tree in Dasein's dreams, and in
his waking considerations the tree represents the community, its parts
integrated an'd sustaining one another, although it does have a darker
aspect as a symbol of the potential threat of an unrealized unconscious
content: "The structure of rationalization Piaget had built up assumed for
Oasein the shape of a tree. It was like the tree of his dream. There was
the strong trunk protruding into daylight-consciousness. The roots were
down there growing 'in darkness. The limbs came out and dangled prettily
distracting leaves and fruit. It was a consistent structure despite its
falsity" (pp. 226-27). It is this context Piaget refers to when he explains to
Dasein that education in the valley seeks to step behind language to symhol
and "Pu.rh back at the surface 0/ childhood" (p. 163). In keeping with
Scheler's and Jaspers' philosophies the tree must be thought of as cellular, a
collectivity of co-operating entities rather than as a faceless unity.
Dasein's awareness of social being is accompanied by a classical descrip-
tion of existential self-awakening, which is characteristically accompanied
by anxiety or angst, an awareness that the true self may l1e possible only
at the desperate risk of the loss or "death" of the "old" sl'lf. The risk is
total for it must be done, not thought, and Dasein frequently voices fears
about this "leap in the dark."

A$ he asked the question of himself, he experienced anguish. It wasn't really

fear, but pure anguish, a sense of losing.his grip on reality. (p.231)
The Jaspers, he thought. J call1lut relllm __ .. to ... what ... ] was .. ,before. (p. 112)

For a true understanding of one's reality the existentialists stress that one
must remain constantly aware of physical death. Dasein also, realizes this:
"Know thyself? Dasein sensed then he couldn't know himself withoutdyi~g;
Death was the background against which life could know itself' (p. 185).
Knowing the self also means knowing others on an individual basis, for
one cannot know a mass of others in a single perception. Sorge, concern,
is the concept for this and it is through his Jenny Sorge that Dasein comes
to know Santaroga: "Jenny put her hand on his forehead. It soothed him,
calmed him. The moth of his emotions settled on a strong green limb. The
limb was attached to a tree. He felt the trunk of the tree as though it were
himself- strong, an infinite source of strength" (p. 255). Her concern for him
is expressed in her love and as sorge directs attention to the. temporality of
dasein, so Jenny has existed in his past and their marriage will place ·herin
his future, giving meaning to Dasein's dasein, his being-in-the-world.
Near the end of the novel the "opened" Dasein bumps Dr. Chami
Selador, his cool, psychoanalyst, Oxford-trained Indian boss from Berkeley
to his death off the roof of the Santaroga hospital. Selador, whose Oxford
veneer of Western civilization was momentarily stripped away when he
reacted emotionally and mailed Dasein a pistol for self-defense, seems
to represent the closed selfhood of unopened man, and it is either a remark-
able creative coincidence or a careful choice that his name is almost
'·self-adore." In destroying him, Dasein is symbolically proving that he has
leapt into a new self-awareness beyond the power structure of Berkeley,
mass capitalism, and cool Oxford rationality.
Two obvious counterarguments present themselves to what has been
implied about the merit of Dasein's existential opening to a new self. To
the argument that Karl Jaspers would not have accepted drugs as a route
to the true self we must consider the basic principles of existentialism which
hold that reality can be fully understood only by analysis of all experience.
Drug experience is part of the human experience. To the contention that
Dasein has lost his personality to the hive or become a drop in the ocean
one can point to a question in return: is selfhood, ego, as we know it
 ;" ;,..... :-.

in the Western world, the only possible state of personal existence? Herbert
appears to be following Scheler in suggesting that a personal self might
replace an individual self. thrtt if man engages in the desperate risk of
becoming in touch with his private and social unconsciousness and the
na'turalworld he might develop a new "whole self' no longer cut off from
an enormous section of reality.
In the Dune triology the shift in the value of the human ego is somwhat
dwarfed by the effectiveness of the ec\)\ogical vision, but consideration
reveals how much Herbert has sought to integrate the human collective
mind spread over time with the ecological' situation. In DUlle Paul is
directed towards an .understanding of his self-in-the-world first by the Bene
Gesserit training: "animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given
moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct. .. the animal
aestroys and does not produce ... animal pleasures remain close to sensation
levels and avoid the perceptual. .. the human requires a background grid
through which to see his universe .. .focused consciousness by choice, this
forms your grid."8 And he is so directed by his own gift of prescience
from his genetic inheritance combined with the melange: "This was
Muad'Dib's achievement: He saw the subliminal reservoir of each individual
as an unconscious bank of memories going back to the primal cell of our
common genesis. Each of us, he said, can measure out his distance from that
common origin. Seeing this and telling of it, he made the audacious leap
of decision. Muad'Dib set himself the task of integrating genetic memory
into "Ongoing evaluation. Thus did he break through Time's veils .... "9
ButPau! has attempted to force the universe, and in Dune Messiah he finds
Ilhnself walking a line of destiny so' narrow that physical blindness is no
handicap. He faces this in the moments before he goes into the desert:
"'T,here are some things no one can bear. I meddled in all the possible
futures! could creat.~ until, finally, they created me. '''10
In Children of Dune Leto II and Ghanima both face and conquer their
genetic collectives, although Leto pays the terrible price of partial possession
and gradual transformation. Leto sees himself in his new awareness as a
COllective entity:

His awareness flowed on a new, higher level. He felt the past carried in his cells,
In his memories. in the archetypes which haunted his assumptions, in the myths
which hemmed him, in his languages and their prehistoric detritus. It was all of the
shapes out of his human and nonhuman past, all of the lives which he now commanded,
all integrated in him at last. And he felt himself as a thing caught up in the
ebb-and flow of nuc1eotides. Against the backdrop of infinity he was a protozoan
creature in which birth and death were virtually simultaneous, but he was both
infinite and protozoan, a creature of molecular memories.
We humans are a/orm 0/ colony organism! he thought. (p. 301)

Paul confinns this idea: "This young person confuses you because he's
nQt a singular being. He's a community. As with any community under stress,
 1. J:: I I / '- j t ., \..... ~ . :

any member of that community may assume command. This command

isn't always benign, and we get our stories of Abomination" (p. 406).
Herbert has suggested the potential of man as a coiicclivc entity, both in
the individual and social senses. Leto explains how the rulers of his empire
will be hred: "We'll [his descendants] be an ecosystem in miniature. You
see, whatever system animals choose to survive by must be based on the
pattern ofinterlocking communities. interdcp~nden.:c, working together in
the common design which is the system. And this system will pluduce
the most knowledgeable rulers ever seen" (p. 443). This ecosystem of a
ruling dynasty is planned to play its controlling part in the all-embracing
collective entity of mankind:

He [Leto] felt the chord which connected him with all of human kind and that
profound need for a universe of experiences which made logical sense, a universe
of recognizable regularities within its perpetual changes.
·lknow this universe. (p.369)

From the foregoing considerations of Frank Herbert's studies of the

collective mind a pattern emerges dominated by several principles. From
early experiments of difficult "normal" human co-operation in The Dragon
in the Sea to the experiments with exotic beings such as Pan-Spechi, Chem
and Caleban he expressed a desire to find alternatives to present ego states.
In later work he has come to examine the development of non-mechanical,
organic states of collectivity closely tied to the ecosystem both in imagery
and their physical role in· the universe. If the collective mind is drug-
induced the drugs are natural substances, and changes wrought by developing
collectivity are seen as organic, and evolutionary.afact that Paul Atreides
fails to grasp but one which Leto II puts on like a glove.
Herbert is proposing a trade-off of what we currently understand as
human rights and 6ndividual freedom in exchange for the survival and
developPlent of the race. He chooses .to portray the world where we believe
we hold freedom and individuality as corrupt and chaotic, a body politic.
whose members are not functioning to advance it and which stamps relent~
lessly. upon a planet in peril. He chooses to portray the collective entity
as a being whose parts respond to a common clarity of aims, although in
doing'so he refuses to gloss over the animal nature of the instincts of man,
the species. This rigorously-principled description offers the options of
Santamga,Dune.and Hellstrom's Hive, where the evolution of the ego,
frau'ght with the risk of dissolution, "may lead to a compromise that will
allow a new man to share and survive without being reduced to purely
instinctive behavior.

NOTES
11 Herbert's early experiments in collectivities began in a novel about a military team in
a tiny submarine (The Dragon in the Sea. 1956); stories dealing with multi-bodied single-
ego creatures, the Pan-Spechi ("The Tactful Sahoteur," 1964; Whipping Star. 1970);