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GIVE US EQUALITY OR GIVE US DEATH?  
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Damian Carrington
August 2, 2025
The Guardian
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_ An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a
global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished. “It is
not about human nature. It is about .. competing for profit and power
and covering [the risks] up." _

Sunrise on Easter Island, photo: Thomas Griggs

 

"We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years
of , 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 [[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] 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 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.”

‘We need dramatic social and technological changes’: is societal
collapse inevitable?
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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
$10m. That’s far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once
said money is just a way for the rich to keep score
[[link removed]]. 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.”

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Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp (Penguin Books Ltd, £25). To support
the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
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Delivery charges may apply.

_Damian Carrington is environmental editor of The Guardian._

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* Inequality
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* environment
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