The Butlerian Jihad
A crusade spanning generations, fought to wipe out every thinking machine in the galaxy.
The Butlerian Jihad was the crusade against computers, thinking machines and conscious robots, and it ran for the better part of a century. Humanity had handed its thinking over to machines by degrees and then found it could not take it back, which is the part of the story the later histories tend to skip in favour of the battles. The fighting lasted ninety-three years and cost more lives than anyone afterward could count. What came out of it was not a technology policy but a commandment, written into the Orange Catholic Bible and carried by every faith that followed it: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Keeping that commandment left the species with no computation and no long-range calculation of any kind, so it filled the hole with people instead. The Mentats, the Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit all grew out of that vacuum, and ten thousand years later the Imperium still ran on disciplines it had improvised in a panic.
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