God Emperor of Dune

In his commitment to the Golden Path, Leto reigns for 3,500 years with two strategies to save humankind from extinction. In Siona, he achieves the purpose of his breeding program, isolating a genetic trait that protects people from prescient hunters. In “Leto’s Peace,” he attempts to engineer a new human condition, one seared into the psyche of future generations, providing them with the instinct to resist tyranny. Leto functions as both the poison and the cure to what he regards as the ills of humanity. In his logic, Leto places a value on suffering, as he believes that anguish is the only means to truly communicate a “lesson their bones would remember” (255). By forcing people to experience tyranny, he teaches them in their souls to reject it.

In his ancestral memories and prescient visions, Leto has only seen humanity’s failures: its repressive regimes that wax and wane in a cyclical pattern, its proclivity for blind worship, its use of weapons and the military to acquire and maintain power, its commodification of culture and tradition, its passivity and stagnation under technology, and its dependence on a single commodity at the expense of the environment. Humans have failed to see the long-term consequences of their actions, and Leto attributes these persistent cycles to “long forgotten survival patterns which the species had outgrown, but never lost” (380).