He does talk about the famine times with Hwi, and i believe that he describes the scattering at some point (didn't find it still). But He never ever says that "the GP is the Scattering". In the Hwi dialogue, for example, she is following the steps after the fall of the Empire eagerly, but then, just as you think He will talk about the Scattering, He pulls a "by then it wont matter no more". He does say that people will recover the capacity to travel far away, but that it is a minor thing. In that dialogue He seems to be more interested in the every-planet-is-a-Salusa-Secundus effect of the famine...
You more than anyone must know that it is pretty easy to find Leto quotes about almost any kind of attitude change: be creative, do not bend to authority, take care to not be entrapped by religion, bureaucracy, etc, etc. But does any of that actually related directly to the GP? It is fairly easy to assume that they do, indirectly, but is it enough to say that "they are the Golden Path"?
So, although i know that searching for "Golden Path" is a somewhat artificial measure, is there any other? I am open to try.
Quite frankly, your view of the GP does seem to be unsupported by the book. Let me analyse the few quotes i actually ticked as "scattering". (36) and (39) are talking about completely unrelated subjects, and the only thing possibly connecting them to your theory was the words "anywhere" and "somewhere". If i had presented something like that to support my views you would mock me. But take (53): "i present to you a time that never converges, it will always diverge". That is reasonably related to Scattering, but first it talks about "time" and not "space" and it also uses this idea of "divergence" that seems to me to require a whole lot of explanation.
I also extended this experiment to ChoD, HoD and CH:D, with mostly irrelevant results. HoD and Ch:D are mostly other people talking about the GP, and ChoD does have some quotes that are fairly promising to anyone wanting to "speculate wildly", but nothing about Scatter. I haven't tried to search Dune and DM.
On the other hand, the search on HoD and CH:D does unearth this:
There, the Scattering hypothesis. It is a mentat calculation by the Ultimate Duncan. It is so well in accordance with Freak's theory of the Golden Path that i call it the Freakzilla-Ultimate-Duncan hypothesis. I understand this might sound as a good point, but why should we take it as more valuable than, say, Taraza's opinion:CH:D wrote:She did not reply, held to silence by his Mentat view. Golden Path: humankind "erupting" into the universe . . . never again confined to any single planet and susceptible to a singular fate. All of our eggs no longer in one basket.
I know Ultimate Duncan is a mentat, and he had been Leto's pet dog for 3k years, but... Taraza had access to all the BG mentat's, she had OM well in excess of Duncan's, and after all Duncan was at the time he made his "computation" being fed a restricted amount of data, he was a starved mentat.HoD wrote:It was an eternal flaw. Out there in the Scattering, humankind expanded exponentially, swarming across unlimited space. The Tyrant's Golden Path secure at last. Or was it? Surely, the Atreides worm had planned more than the simple survival of the species.
He did something to us that we have not yet unearthed -- even after all of these millennia. I think I know what he did. My opposition says otherwise.
I don't know. When i ask "what is the Golden Path" i am interested in Lord Leto's opinion. Not that Duncan's is bad, or Freak's, i actually think that it might be an interesting line of analysis, but... They are still different things.
I stand uncorrected. I simply think thou naysayers have not read the books. Cry and moan, if you want, but if you want to discuss Dune for x's sake get rid of your confirmation bias!!!!