The following offers one probable
answer
Environment
‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and
future of societal collapse
An epic
analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming
unless inequality is vanquished
Damian Carrington
Environment editor
Sat 2 Aug
2025 16.31 AEST
“We can’t put
a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can
understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most
likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at
the University of Cambridge.
“I’m
pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.”
Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over
5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often
striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by
enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives
of ordinary citizens.
Today’s
global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could
lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders
who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and
Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons,
artificial intelligence and killer robots.
The work is
scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when
setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of
the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic
societies and an end to inequality.
His first
step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda
by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes,
where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct,
you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of
evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer
societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of
thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of
chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
Instead Kemp
uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society
built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over
poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical
warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were
steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.
Goliath
states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and
resources, he argues, but need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The
first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be “seen, stolen
and stored”, Kemp says, unlike perishable foods.
In Cahokia, for example, a
society in North America that peaked around the 11th century, the advent of
maize and bean farming led to a society dominated by an elite of priests and
human sacrifice, he says.
The second
Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were
far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia
followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel “caged
land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people
could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped
between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example.
“History is
best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating
a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory
and population.”
All Goliaths,
however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and
this is because of inequality.” Inequality
does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The
Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common
lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.
Instead, it
is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources,
arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people
and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting,
corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion,
environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The
hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as
disease, war or climate change.”
History shows
that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp,
from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western
Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious
regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from
domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome,
people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Collapses in
the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but
collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. “Today, we don’t have
regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath.
All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,”
Kemp says.
He cites
three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than
previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence
as elites try to reassert their dominance. “In the past, those battles were
waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons,” he says.
Second,
people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services
and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering.
“Today, most of us are specialised, and we’re dependent upon global
infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,” he says.
“Last but not
least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than
in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for
example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level.
Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons,
technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered
pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.
Kemp says his
argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark
traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a
walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a
cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master
Machiavellian manipulator.”
“Our
corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of
people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”
Kemp points
to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards
societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups
which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate
change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly
wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and
the fossil fuel industry.
“The key
thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not
about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us,
competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.”
The global
Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess
match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a
fundamental transformation of society.
He believes
the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could
be achieved. “First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic
societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. That
means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital
technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that
more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says.
“If you’d had
a citizens’ jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered
how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would
have said: ‘Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation
campaigns’? Of course not,” Kemp says.
Escaping
collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to
rig the democratic system. “I’d cap wealth at $10 million. That’s far more than
anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich
to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk
of destroying the entire planet?”
If citizens’
juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long
brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared
god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats
claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their
techno-utopias. “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than
the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered
into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.
“Today,
people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than
we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete
bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social,
altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition.
This is what we’re built for.”
Kemp rejects
the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on
history. “There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,” he says. “Nor
does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable
and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they
cause. That’s just making our economy more honest.”
He also has a
message for individuals: “Collapse isn’t just caused by structures, but also
people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying
it. In other words: don’t be a dick. Don’t work for big tech, arms
manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don’t accept relationships based on
domination and share power whenever you can.”
Despite the
possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects.
“I think it’s unlikely,” he says. “We’re dealing with a 5,000-year process that
is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of
inequality and of elite capture of our politics.
“But even if
you don’t have hope, it doesn’t really matter. This is about defiance. It’s
about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be
exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn’t contribute to the
problem.”
Goliath’s
Curse by Luke Kemp was published
in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin
Here is the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse
I have to say this all makes a lot of sense to me. The book should be a very good read!
David.
