![Goliath’s Curse: History and Future of Societal Collapse with Luke Kemp [PODCAST]](https://4liberty.eu/phidroav/2026/08/Liberal-Europe-Podcast-Format-1-9-1024x1024.jpg "Goliath’s Curse: History and Future of Societal Collapse with Luke Kemp [PODCAST]")
What makes a civilization thrive and why do civilizations collapse? Is human nature inherently good and it is actually institutions that are simply oppressive? What did Thomas Hobbes get wrong in his reasoning? And what are ‘Goliaths’? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Luke Kemp, who researches the end of the world. He is the author of the bestselling book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge. He has advised and led foresight studies for multiple international organizations, including the WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity. His work has been covered by the BBC, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): Can you explain what ‘Goliaths’ are and why you decided to use this particular term instead of civilizations or states?
Luke Kemp (LK): Goliath is largely my replacement term for civilization. When you go to write a book on collapse, the key question is: what is collapsing? Most people would say civilization, but there are two big problems here.
One problem is that archeologists and anthropologists have never had good definitions of what a civilization is. The second problem is that civilization is by and large a term of propaganda. When you think about it, the word derives from the term ‘civilitas’ in Latin, which carries connotations of virtue, moderation, and restraint.
Yet, when you look at the very first so-called civilizations across the world, they are marked by things like large-scale human sacrifice, patriarchy, and slavery, and they were preceded by warfare. The real commonality across all these cases is a distinct shift away from social egalitarianism. Instead, societies adopt a social blueprint in which a few people dominate the many and extract resources from them using violence.
Hence, I go for the term Goliath because these structures are based upon violence, large-scale in stature, and surprisingly fragile. They are just like the biblical tale of David and Goliath.
LJ: What did Thomas Hobbes get wrong in his reasoning and why he is still so popular today?
LK: For those of you who do not know this, Thomas Hobbes was obviously one of the most influential political scientists in history. He was a 16th-century philosopher who largely proposed that without rulers, or without some kind of overarching system of authority, people turn on each other in a scramble for resources. He argued that this reality leads to lives which are nasty, brutish, and short.
It is pretty easy to disprove Hobbes just because he essentially made everything up. He did not have access to archeological or anthropological finds. When we actually look at the Middle Paleolithic—a period from roughly 300,000 years ago to when we start to emerge into agrarian cultures roughly 10,000 years ago—we see a different story. For almost 98% of human history, we lived as nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers in situations that did not have overarching rulers.
Interestingly, we do not seem to be anywhere near as violent as Hobbes proposed. The best archeological and genetic evidence suggests that the lethal violence rate was roughly 1% to 2%. For every 100 people, roughly one to two would die, potentially at the hands of another human. That rate is equivalent to what we have globally today.
Similarly, it seems like people were actually very capable of cooperating at a large scale across multiple different groups. If we look at this genetically, then the average hunter-gatherer group during this period probably had less than 10% of people who were closely family-related. It was not a group of ragtag families warring against each other.
Additionally, they seemed to be capable of cooperating because they were constantly moving across groups. This movement led to huge zones of shared trade, culture, instruments, and genes. For instance, all the way from the East Coast to the West Coast of Africa 120,000 years ago, we find evidence of shared instruments, culture, genes, figurines, and cave art. Rather than being essentially a bloodthirsty group of ruthless savages, we actually find that we, deep down, are very much capable of self-organizing without rulers and are not particularly violent.
LJ: Is human nature inherently good and it is actually institutions that are simply oppressive? Or is discussing human nature in the traditional terms of Hobbes and Rousseau meaningless because we are social animals bound by our institutions, making it impossible to compare a past population of two million to a modern population of eight billion?
LK: I think we can definitely drop the whole Hobbes-Rousseau framing. Rousseau, like Hobbes, had no access to actual empirical archeological or anthropological findings. However, that does not mean we do not have some deeply ingrained evolutionary psychological traits, and I do not think we are all good necessarily. In the book, I talk about the darker angels of our nature, focusing on different traits that can lead to far more antisocial and malevolent outcomes.
These outcomes include things like what I call the authoritarian impulse. There is a very strong base of evidence showing that when people feel threatened, they start to shift towards more authoritarian values. The old idea that people look for a strongman leader when they are in fear is technically correct.
Similarly, there is also evidence that all of us want status, but some people want it more than others, and some are willing to take it through violence. In general, men want status much more. Furthermore, people who rank very high in what is called the dark triad—a set of three antisocial personality traits consisting of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—tend to be much more likely to want power and status. They are highly willing to use violence, force, and manipulation to get it. We do see empirically that even today these people are overrepresented in positions of power.
Last but not least, we also have good evidence that power corrupts. When people are placed higher in a hierarchy, this position tends to influence their behavior, making them less risk-averse, less compassionate, less empathetic, and more likely to cheat both in games and on their spouses. Therefore, this is not a simple kind of Rousseauian narrative stating we are all good deep down inside. Instead, there are clear psychological reasons as to why we end up in institutions that do not seem to bring out the best of us.
LJ: Is there a possibility of having a complex human civilization with a density of eight to ten billion people that would not be based on this Goliath framing, but would be an alternative civilization?
LK: There have been some interesting examples throughout history which seem to have large-scale trade and economic growth, yet remain far less domineering and violence-based than other typical empires.
One example, though we do not have as much evidence as we want on it, is the Indus Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization. This society was roughly commensurate with the early Sumerian city-states. The Harappans had cities of up to 40,000 people and featured a series of different trading hubs. They also had large-scale indoor plumbing, which was just incredible and unparalleled for the time. As far as we can see, they had no kings and no rulers. They did have some military fortifications, but not much, and there was large-scale equality with no big differences across classes. We do not exactly know how they operated, but it does seem to have occurred over centuries. Hence, there do seem to be historical examples of relatively egalitarian societies that may not have featured as much domination and actually seemed to have prospered better.
It is also worthwhile noting that even Goliaths exist on a spectrum. They range all the way from the most brutal despotic empires through to far more egalitarian arrangements. A good example here is ancient Athens, which was admittedly a democracy limited to only 15% of the population, specifically landholding males. Yet, it was still far more democratic for those men than almost any other empire. They ran their society in a very different way by using sortition. They would randomly select citizens, have them deliberate, and hold large-scale assemblies to make choices.
Athens is outstanding not just for its cultural achievements, but also because it marks one of the few times throughout world history that a polity did not increase in wealth inequality. Instead, it started to become more equal. Additionally, it was a time when median wages were exceptionally high for the pre-modern period. Whenever we look across history, whether it is ancient Athens or Florence, we tend to find that having more democratic states usually results in a far better outcome for everyone involved.
Consequently, I do not think it is a reality that we are doomed to Goliaths once we reach a certain scale. Rather, we are more likely to adopt Goliaths when we have certain resources. This correlation is something I point towards in the book. It is not the size of a city which dictates whether it becomes a Goliath, as we have many cities that started out egalitarian. Instead, it is really about the resources and the weapons they have access to.
Across the world, you find Goliaths only emerging in cases where you have certain types of resources that are easily seen, stolen, and stored. These are things like wheat, rice, and corn. In all these cases, the goods are easily seen and can be stored for up to decades. Additionally, when you have these specific resources combined with certain kinds of weapons that can be easily monopolized by a small group, you tend to get these organized crime rackets, which are these Goliaths popping up.
This process is pretty clear in the case of the Near East, whether it be Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China. As soon as you have the introduction of handheld bronze axes and swords, you start to get Goliaths. Hence, this reality is more of a story of organized crime than it is of humans intentionally adopting a particular type of framework simply because we get big enough. While we cannot return to hunting and gathering, I do not see why we cannot have far better, more equal democratic states across the world.
LJ: Is it possible to be a ‘herbivore among the predators’? Or if there is even one Goliath left, does everyone else have to become a Goliath?
LK: I do not think so, but this is a really critical question. When we look at the very first states, there does seem to be a trend where once you get a Goliath emerging, the neighbors tend to become more autocratic as well. You see this dynamic, for instance, between Germanic tribes and Rome. The tribes started to organize themselves in a more hierarchical, authoritarian fashion once they encountered Rome.
The key question is: are they doing this because this structure is what works to compete, or is it instead psychological? It is likely psychological because, once again, when people feel threatened and frightened, they are more likely to try to adopt an autocratic regime. In the book, I tend more towards the latter perspective. The idea that we need to have more autocratic, despotic arrangements in order to better defend ourselves does not really hold true necessarily. We see across many military doctrines that often having more decentralization can be a better option.
Hence, I think we first need to break this issue up. Can you be democratic, can you be egalitarian, and still compete? I do not see any reason as to why not. There is also a second aspect here regarding whether we have to engage in arms races. Can Europe remain democratic, free, and fair, but also choose not to build up a huge military-industrial complex of dangerous new technologies?
In this case, I think the reality is quite simple. There is no real alternative. If we have improving technology combined with arms races in the long term, where does that lead over the space of decades or centuries? There is really only one route here. Still, I think there are good reasons to believe that we can defeat arms races. There are ways in which democracies and fairer societies—non-Goliaths, if you will—can actually compete with Goliaths.
When we look across world history, it is quite clear we are capable of solving arms races. There are numerous times across world history where different groups have resolved arms races without resorting to violence or to autocratic arrangements. The European Union is actually one example. The idea that Germany and France would not be competing, but would instead be closely cooperating and interlinked, would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, and yet here we are. Hence, I think there are really good reasons to believe that we can actually move beyond just competition. Most of this issue is more psychological than it is material.
LJ: Can you describe some of those interesting examples of abandonment, mostly from Mesoamerica or places not necessarily well known to people who write classical history, to explain how it is possible to abandon Goliath and if there are any lessons for us today?
LK: It is pretty easy. You just walk away. I go through multiple different examples here, such as Tiwanaku in South America, Monte Albán in Central America, and Cahokia, which was the very first city of North America, located on the outskirts of St. Louis. There is also Jenne-Jeno in East Africa.
What is interesting is that many of these, excluding a couple like Cahokia, actually began as egalitarian arrangements. They had no clear signs of rulers and no clear signs of wealth inequality, yet they often featured cities, irrigation infrastructure, and large-scale infrastructure in general. Instead, the rulers and the wealth inequality came later.
What is also interesting is that in many of these cases, the system then started to destabilize. You start to see the first signs of large-scale sociopolitical violence, for instance. In many cases, people then just simply walked away from these arrangements.
We see this in Cahokia, for example. Rather than a complete collapse per se, it seems to be a case of consistent, large-scale migration. People just left the area. This departure happened potentially in large part because they realized that the benefits of having a priestly ruling class did not exceed the costs, particularly the cost of having large-scale human sacrifice, and hence they just left.
It is worthwhile noting that this behavior is part of a longer human lineage. In the book, I talk about how nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers, which characterize most of our human history, are not egalitarian simply because everyone is equally poor. Instead, it appears to be a distinct social choice.
When one person tries to dominate the group, everyone else engages in what is called a counter-dominance strategy. They either walk away or kick the individual out of the group. They ostracize them, ridicule them, or execute them. When you look at many of these early case studies, you can think of them as almost scaled-up counter-dominance strategies. You either have people walking away, a lack of ostracism, or, in some cases, revolutions, which act almost like a scaled-up version of a counter-dominance execution.
LJ: Do you think we can become like Henry David Thoreau living in the woods, or does this exit strategy not really exist unless you are somewhere near the Amazon River or in very secluded parts of the world, because it does not seem likely that people will be able to accept coming back to being hunter-gatherers anytime soon unless they are forced to?
LK: No, precisely. There are eight billion of us today, and hunter-gathering can only support pretty low population densities, often less than one person per square kilometer. India, in certain areas, has over 400 people per square kilometer. Therefore, we cannot easily return to hunting and gathering.
There are also reasons why we would not want to. While we recognize the structural costs of Goliaths, there are many benefits to consider. Things like vaccines, renewable energy, and train transport are all good developments we should keep hold of.
Furthermore, I think the strategy of just becoming a recluse is something we cannot do at scale. Nation-states and Goliaths control most of the world. Instead, I think it is really a question of how do we best reform the Goliaths we are in? How do we make them more democratic, more responsive to their citizens, and far more egalitarian?
It is worthwhile noting that throughout this talk, I have referred to democracy and democratic systems quite a few times, but I am not referring necessarily to elections. It is worth noting that if the ancient Greeks looked at us today, they would say, “You are not a democracy, you are an elected oligarchy,” because for them, elections meant oligarchy. Only the rich, powerful, and resourceful actually had the time and ability to campaign in elections. Most people could not.
Instead, for the ancient Greeks, democracy was defined by sortition, which meant randomly selecting people. Today, I would say most of us do not really live in democracies. We live in more democratic systems, but democracy is a spectrum. I think there is a long way to go before we can call ourselves real, true, deep democracies.
LJ: Can you explain why you think that collapse might actually be a good thing, and should we, instead of trying to prevent a collapse, try to accelerate it or be more fatalistic about it because all Goliaths collapse in the end?
LK: Definitely do not accelerate it and definitely do not engage in fatalism. I need to say that up front. In the book, you can describe it more as a situation where collapse has a bright past but a dark future. There are cases where collapse was not necessarily a bad thing. It carries costs and benefits, winners and losers, and for the average person, it may have even been a net benefit.
If we look at, for instance, the collapse of Somalia in 1991 when the Barre regime fell apart, we see interesting data a decade afterwards. Most development metrics had improved. Maternal mortality dropped by 30%, infant mortality fell by 24%, and extreme poverty decreased by 20%. Even compared to their more geopolitically stable neighbors, they were doing better. That outcome was in large part just because the previous regime was so predatory that people were better off under more responsive, local arrangements.
Similarly, if you look at Rome, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, people became taller and healthier. There was even less damage found in their bones. It is easy to assume this occurred because so many people died during the collapse that the survivors had more resources. However, that theory does not really check out because even the people living outside the empire at the peak of Roman power were taller and healthier. Hence, the trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian was kind of true compared to their Italian counterparts, as they were actually much healthier and bigger.
A lot of this comes down to the fact that when you have a collapse, people start to move away from dense urban areas towards more agrarian ones. In these settings, they are less exposed to disease and are more likely to have a diet with more protein and a wider variety of foods. On top of that, these ancient empires were often just criminal rackets. They provided some degree of protection, but they did so at a very large cost. Often, people were better off not being under an empire and not paying taxes to prevent a threat that frequently originated from the empire itself.
As you say, there are still, of course, significant costs. Collapse is routinely accompanied by a glut of violence to begin with. However, it is worthwhile noting this was not a case of everyone trying to kill each other. The violence usually stems from small groups of armed men trying to forcibly recreate a Goliath, as we see in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just one very important thing to finish with is that I really stress in the book how this dynamic is changing today. We now have access to weapons like nuclear weapons and biological weapons. People can no longer easily return to subsistence farming or hunting and gathering, and importantly, we are entirely reliant upon large-scale, industrialized supply chains.
When Somalia fell apart, it was a manageable transition for its citizens. But if Denmark fell apart, I do not think it would be a good thing for its citizens. We live in modern states which do provide a lot more vital public goods, and people are much more reliant upon them. Therefore, the idea that we should accelerate collapse is very silly, and the idea that we should think collapse is inevitable is equally incorrect.
LJ: Does it mean that we should not really worry that much about China because it is doomed to fail, or do you think that big data, artificial intelligence, and technological progress can actually change the equilibrium, meaning that Denmark is going to lose to some Goliaths like China or others?
LK: Technology does change the game here, altering the competitive landscape entirely.
One of the reasons that larger-scale, more democratic states emerged and became dominant post-World War II is because of mass mobilization warfare. You started to have warfare which favored having very large armies, and those soldiers routinely demanded political concessions in return from their states. We saw exactly the same dynamic with ancient Athens and Greece. You had iron weapons that were more easily dispersed across a large population. Having things like the phalanx unit and hoplites meant that smaller-scale mass mobilization warfare was a winning military strategy. Again, the warriors tended to demand more from their rulers and often became the rulers themselves.
Technology today, whether it is drone warfare or mass surveillance, is changing the game. We are entering what I call the Silicon Goliath. This is a situation in which all the different ingredients that usually create a Goliath have mutated. Lootable resources have now become data, for instance. Monopolizable weapons are no longer things like bronze-held axes and swords, but rather things like lethal autonomous drones. Even the concept of caged land has evolved, as we now live in mass surveillance states. These factors all mean we are entering a period of potentially much more stable, persistent Goliaths.
Does that mean China or Russia will win? I do not think so. Actually, my biggest fear here is not that Europe or others will be outcompeted by Russia or China. Rather, it is that the fear and the threat of Russia and China will make us become more like them.
It is worthwhile noting that right now we live in an age of fear already. Russia invading Ukraine has led to rapidly increased expenditure on warfare and military spending across many European states. Yet, the funny thing is, in many ways, this reality should have done the opposite. Prior to Russia invading Ukraine, most wartime scenarios suggested that Russia would sweep through Ukraine in a matter of months and be at the doorsteps of the West very quickly. Instead, they are having an enormous struggle. Years later, they have only taken small parcels of land and are more or less at a standstill.
This outcome, if anything, should have shown us that apart from its massive nuclear arsenal, Russia is nowhere near the threat that we thought it was. But again, I think what we are dealing with here is more the authoritarian impulse. The threat and the fear are making us change our own institutions, and we have far more to fear from that internal shift than we do potentially from the so-called enemies themselves.
LJ: Why do you think these sort of almost very logical solutions are not widely implemented, or even if they are offered, they are rejected, and what is wrong with democracy?
LK: First of all, it is worthwhile noting the reason I propose things like having wealth taxes or having what is called deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy involves the random selection of citizens who then make policies rather than relying on career politicians. I propose these because, first, they actually have a lot of empirical evidence behind them. Second, the key idea of Goliath’s Curse is that as you have increasing concentrations of power and increasing wealth inequality, you tend to get highly fragile states. They become more prone to corruption, elite competition, and bad, oligarchical decision-making.
Why is it that people are not turning towards having these kinds of reforms? I think one large part of it is simply that they are not being offered. When you actually poll people on the far right as to whether they would like to have more everyday citizens in police forces and juries, they say yes. However, they are not really given that choice by the current political establishment.
Indeed, if you look at a Bernie Sanders supporter and a Donald Trump supporter, they are actually very similar in their underlying narrative of the world. Both groups think that right now the world is run by corrupt elites, and they believe that if you had more direct representation of the everyday person, the world would be a better place. To be frank, I do not think they are entirely wrong.
The key difference is that the Trump supporters blame these systemic issues on immigrants and transgender people, while the Sanders supporters blame them on the 1%. I think I know who is right. The big operational difference here is that Trump is actually giving his supporters a really clear, tangible enemy and playing to the politics of fear very effectively.
In contrast, I think the political left has just done a terrible job. I think Sanders, for instance, if he wins the Democratic nomination, beats Trump head-to-head in a general election. But that was not the choice available. Sanders never got a real choice because of the influence of Democratic funders. Likewise, right now across the world, you do not really see a good, robust counterweight to the right. When you do see proper economic populism, like Mamdani, it wins.
Therefore, this trend has a lot more to do with the left’s bad politics, bad messaging, and its inability to actually just appeal to the average person than it does to the inherent dumbness of the voter. My key takeaway here is that we should not be in this situation in the first place. We should not have a political structure where power is based upon who has more control over mass media and who can harvest more votes. Instead, we should have a system like ancient Athens where the people make the decisions directly.
Luke Kemp will be a guest during this year’s edition of the Freedom Games, a festival of ideas co-organized by the European Liberal Forum on October 23-25, 2026, in Lodz, Poland. Find out more: igrzyskawolnosci.pl/event/igrzyska-wolnosci-2026
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movimento Liberal Social and the Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.