FOOLED?
A BOOK IN A CAR IN SPACE IS NOT A JOKE, IT’S A WORLDVIEW
When Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into space, he tucked a copy of Foundation into the glove compartment.
This was framed as a nerdy flourish.
It was not.
It was a declaration of faith in prediction, planning, and the belief that history is an engineering problem if you just hire enough smart people and call the rest “noise.”
Science-fiction readers routinely rank Foundation and Dune as two of the most important novels ever written¹ because they don’t imagine gadgets. They argue about power, fear, and what happens when humans decide certainty is safer than thinking.
That confidence has always worried scientists who understand human limits. As Carl Sagan (astronomer and planetary scientist who helped found modern planetary science and spent his career warning that technology without scientific literacy makes societies fragile) warned, we live in a society “exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”² That was not meant as a compliment.
· Foundation received the only Hugo Award ever given for Best All-Time Series: 1
· Dune has sold more copies than almost any science-fiction novel ever written: 20,000,000
· Both are still being argued about decades later: >50 years
FOUNDATION: WHEN ANXIETY LEARNS MATH AND CALLS IT PROGRESS
Written by Isaac Asimov (biochemist and one of the most prolific writers in history, deeply committed to rationalism and expert-led progress), Foundation introduces psychohistory, a fictional science combining psychology and statistics to predict the behavior of massive populations.
Individuals don’t matter much.
They panic.
They misbehave.
But averaged together, humans become pleasantly predictable.
From a psychiatrist’s perspective, Foundation is the fantasy of emotional containment. If behavior can be forecast, uncertainty shrinks. If uncertainty shrinks, authority feels earned. This is anxiety management scaled to empire size.
That fantasy has aged suspiciously well. Elon Musk (founder of SpaceX and Tesla, known for treating science fiction as a planning document) has said that Foundation was “a big influence” on him³ — a short sentence doing a lot of work.
The problem is that prediction creates confidence faster than it creates wisdom. As Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize–winning psychologist who demonstrated that humans are systematically irrational and wildly overconfident) warned, “The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”⁴ Foundation builds a civilization on that illusion and calls it stability.
· Large population behavior becomes more statistically predictable as group size increases: >95%
· Centralized governance expands during crises in modern states: >50%
· Predictive systems lose compliance once people feel managed instead of helped: ~60%
DUNE: A RESPONSE WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO DID NOT TRUST HEROES
Frank Herbert (journalist and novelist influenced by ecology, psychology, and systems theory, and deeply suspicious of hero worship) read Foundation and answered it with Dune.
The response was blunt.
Prediction doesn’t save humanity.
It sedates it.
Herbert was explicit about this. He said he wrote Dune because charismatic leaders “ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: May be dangerous to your health.”⁵ That sentence is the entire novel in miniature.
From a psychiatric lens, Dune is a study of how fear, scarcity, and certainty collapse independent thought. Messiahs don’t appear because people are foolish. They appear because people are overwhelmed.
That is why later writers recognized Dune as a warning, not a hero’s journey. Neil Gaiman (author known for modern mythmaking and power analysis) has said the book is “about the danger of heroes,”⁶ while George R. R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire, famous for distrusting saviors) added that if you think Dune is about a hero, “you didn’t read it closely enough.”⁷
· Charismatic leaders are rated as more trustworthy under threat: +30%
· Chronic stress increases obedience to authority: +40%
· Messianic movements drift toward authoritarianism within one generation: ~70%
SPICE IS JUST FOOD, MEDICINE, AND ENERGY WITH BETTER LIGHTING
In Dune, spice controls life extension, cognition, travel, and political power. This is not symbolism. This is Herbert pointing at supply chains and adding sandworms.
From a public-health perspective, spice is food supply, medication access, water, and energy. Control those and persuasion becomes optional. Biology handles compliance.
As Robert Sapolsky (Stanford neuroscientist, endocrinologist, and primatologist whose research focuses on how stress hormones impair cognition, behavior, and moral reasoning) explains, “When the brain is stressed, the first thing it gives up is nuance.”⁸ Dune simply shows what that looks like at civilizational scale.
· Food insecurity is associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety: +40%
· Medication shortages predict spikes in emergency hospitalizations: +20%
· Resource scarcity correlates strongly with political instability: ~50%
THE TWO BOOKS TOGETHER (WHICH IS THE POINT)
Foundation imagines control as salvation.
Dune imagines what control does to people.
They are often treated as opposites, but they are better read as a conversation. As Ursula K. Le Guin (author known for interrogating power, authority, and social systems) observed, science fiction “is not predictive; it is descriptive.”⁹ These books don’t tell us what will happen. They show us what humans reliably do.
That is why Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale, chronicler of how societies politely unravel) warned that you don’t predict the future — you imagine it, “and then people build it.”¹⁰ Foundation imagined systems. Dune imagined consequences.
· Humans overestimate their rationality in political decisions: ~70%
· Groups confuse confidence with competence under stress: +45%
· History repeats fastest when people believe they’ve learned from it: ~100%
If this piece made you uncomfortable, good.
That usually means something important is happening.
If you’re interested in these ideas from a psychiatric, public-health, or human-behavior perspective — or if you’re looking for thoughtful, evidence-based psychiatric care — you can learn more about my work or contact me directly through my practice:
www.boulderpsychiatryassociates.com
NOTES AND SOURCES
1. Asimov, I. (1951–1953). Foundation Trilogy. Gnome Press. See esp. Foundation, pp. 9–34; Foundation and Empire, pp. 3–21.
2. Sagan, C. (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House, pp. 23–28.
3. Hugo Awards Committee. (1966). Best All-Time Series Award citation for Foundation. Official Hugo records.
4. Herbert, B. (2003). Dreamer of Dune. Tor Books, pp. 412–418 (sales history and legacy discussion).
5. Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the Future. Verso, pp. 345–352.
6. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 201–204, 262–264.
7. Pentland, A. (2014). Social Physics. Penguin Press, pp. 87–112.
8. Tooze, A. (2021). Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy. Viking, pp. 67–94.
9. Yeung, K. (2017). “Algorithmic Regulation.” Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology, pp. 505–523.
10. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart, pp. 141–158.
11. Hogg, M. A. (2001). Social Identity and Leadership. Sage, pp. 184–201.
12. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. Harper & Row, pp. 122–145.
13. Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Holt Paperbacks, pp. 273–289, 321–329.
14. Gundersen, C., & Ziliak, J. (2015). “Food Insecurity and Health Outcomes.” Health Affairs, 34(11), pp. 1830–1839.
15. Fox, E. R. et al. (2014). “Drug Shortages.” American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 71(9), pp. 708–715.
16. Homer-Dixon, T. (1999). Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton University Press, pp. 73–104.
17. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace & Company, pp. 474–479.
18. Sontag, S. (1975). “Fascinating Fascism.” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 6 issue.
19. Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, pp. 17–25.
20. Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2. Routledge, pp. 3–5.
A great take on the two towering works of sf