Longitude of Power: The Lesson from Star Wars, Dune and Foundation

This article develops the concept of the Longitude of Power to analyse how authority decays not primarily through corruption or defeat, but through duration, optimisation, and institutional fatigue. Using Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation as a comparative political mythology, the text argues that long-lived systems inevitably mistake endurance for legitimacy, converting stability into paralysis and moral authority into bureaucratic inertia. The Jedi Order, the Galactic Republic, Herbert’s God Emperor, and Asimov’s Empire are examined as variations of the same structural failure: institutions that survive too long without mechanisms for self-obsolescence become blind to the conditions of their own collapse. This framework is then extended to the real universe of cultural production through a meta-analysis of New Hollywood. The careers of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola are read as a real-world enactment of the same imperial logic they dramatised on screen. The article interprets Lucas’s sale of Star Wars to Disney as a contemporary analogue of republican surrender through fatigue, while Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis is framed as an intentional embrace of failure as resistance to total optimisation. Drawing on theories of play, failure, and institutional entropy, the article concludes that in late modernity the final form of rebellion is not victory but the willingness to lose. Where power seeks immortality through systems, brands, and infrastructures, meaning survives only through finite, risky, and self-terminating acts. The Longitude of Power thus names the central paradox of civilisation: power always endures, but freedom survives only if it is allowed to fail.