Societal Collapse

Are we close to societal collapse? A new book by Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge provides a serious warning, based on 5,000 years of historical analysis, that our self-termination is very likely. In Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, he documents that our trajectory of increasing inequality is a primary symptom and precursor of a global collapse.

He is pessimistic about the future but optimistic about people. His book considers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years. These show that people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites. While these are often depicted as catastrophic, they generally improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

The early Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived in egalitarian civilisations that did not allow any individual or group to rule permanently. That began to change about 12,000 years ago. Settled agriculture produced grain and valuable commodities that could be stored and thus looted. Next came the invention of more powerful weapons in the Bronze Age, enabling growing inequality with one group dominating and plundering others. This led to inequality of power, with more hierarchical forms of organisation. That power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors, producing ideologies to justify their rule. The resulting states and empires with vast bureaucracies and militaries divided up and dominated the globe.

Kemp prefers to call these Goliaths rather than civilisations. Whether in the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, the first kingdoms and empires were anything but civilised, with war, patriarchy and human sacrifice. We regressed from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years, becoming more like chimpanzee or gorilla social organisation. They were societies built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women, steeped in violence and often fragile. They had three requirements: a surplus food like grain, maize or beans that could be dried and stored, and thus seen and stolen; weaponry monopolised by one group; and some geographic boundaries like oceans, deserts or mountains that prevented people from simply fleeing.

For Kemp, history is a story of organised crime, with one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population. The few people high in the dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism compete for resources, arms and status. The elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, making societies more unequal and fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, miserable masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The society is hollowed out and eventually collapses from shocks such as disease, war or climate change. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but were probably better for most people. We have long been 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.

History for Kemp shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse. For the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. However these societies were always regional, and most people knew farming and could return to self-sufficiency. This is not the case today.

Now we live in a single global system of capitalism. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be far worse than previous events. Collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance, and now we have nuclear weapons. Today we are specialised and dependent on global infrastructure and will fall if that fails. In addition all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past, whether climate change of 3°C, nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk. The next collapse will be global, swift, irreversible, and disastrous for all.

Rulers driving extreme inequality are strong in the triad of dark traits: narcissism, cold psychopathy and Machiavellian manipulation. Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people, amplifying the worst of us. For Kemp, these “agents of doom” are the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. It is large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk. 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. This is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering up all the risks. Kemp is pessimistic about our prospects, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics that are going to be incredibly difficult to reverse. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. All of us now face a choice: we must move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality, or the next collapse may be our last.

SOURCES: publisher's description, and Damian Carrington's excellent review in The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-hi…