> Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.
> ‘Now,’ said he, ‘in what manner was this wonderful thing done?’
> And the officer answered, ‘There was an order, and they obeyed.’
> ‘But are the beasts as wise as the men?’ said the chief.
> ‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’
> ‘Would it were so in Afghanistan!’ said the chief; ‘for there we obey only our own wills.’
> ‘And for that reason,’ said the native officer, twirling his moustache, ‘your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.’
But note that Kipling himself is not as proud of this state of affairs as his character the native officer was:
While the men that walk beside,
Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
Cannot tell why we or they
March and suffer day by day.
"In the end, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah serve up some of the oldest anarchist propaganda, not only by commenting on the corrupting influence of centralized power, but by spending nearly 1,000 pages to reaffirm one of anarchism’s oldest slogans: no one is fit to rule, and no one deserves to be a slave"
Not just Dune and Messiah. The core point of books 4-6 is the unraveling of the Golden Path. Its message: that peace, and society in general, have a tendency to mellow people. Established structures will decay, either in corruption and chaos, or in peace and stagnation. The Golden Path results in what Herbert calls the "scattering": one where a miryad of factions are too remote, too atomic to become part of a uniform society again. It is the opposite of the Empire in the first book. It is a form of multiple anarchic structures, designed to co-exist at best, or thrive through the pursuit of survival / beating competing factions.
> Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.
> ‘Now,’ said he, ‘in what manner was this wonderful thing done?’
> And the officer answered, ‘There was an order, and they obeyed.’
> ‘But are the beasts as wise as the men?’ said the chief.
> ‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’
> ‘Would it were so in Afghanistan!’ said the chief; ‘for there we obey only our own wills.’
> ‘And for that reason,’ said the native officer, twirling his moustache, ‘your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.’
But note that Kipling himself is not as proud of this state of affairs as his character the native officer was: