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Damian Carrington Environment editor
Sat 2 Aug 2025 02.31 EDT
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says.
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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?”
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“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
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