Review – Goliath’s Curse: a history and future of societal collapse, Luke Kemp

Take a deep dive into the causes and consequences of human societal growth and collapse. Our human nature is the cause of our predicament and also our saviour. We are programmed to dominate and to resist domination. “Democracy is humanity’s default political system” p38. Lots of examples across time and geography. Thus wealth equality plus power equality achieved though democratic political systems is the pathway to humans thriving on a well planet.

Goliath’s Curse: a history and future of societal collapse. Luke Kemp, 2025, Penguin Viking. And as an audio book by Penguin Audio.

First, I encourage everyone to read the full work for the incredible depth and breadth of information and detail that Kemp shares, rather than only the very brief summary I give in this review. The power of his reasoning and strength of his analysis can only be truly appreciated by doing this.

The background to understand the present

That said, Kemp’s argument goes thus:

Avoiding domination is hard-wired in the human species. Counter-domination measures existed to enforce this since human pre-history. Status seeking is also hard-wired into people. Status is rewarding psychologically materially and evolutionarily. Psychopathy in some and an authoritarian tendency in others (and both in a few) is also hard-wired in some people and clearly can confer some evolutionary advantages for individuals. These Kemp labels, borrowing the phrase, ‘the darker angels of our nature’.

These conflicting tendencies were prehistorically resolved by inbuilt human counter-domination measures and democratic, non-dominated societies prevailed.

With the Holocene and regular or periodic lootable resource abundance, the balance was tipped toward psychopathic and authoritarian individuals being able to dominate others. Thus, the darker angels of our nature with the presence of lootable resources will always drive the emergence of Goliaths. Kemp names these systems of domination-by-violence of the many by a few, Goliaths, to purposefully distance them from the more usual title of civilisation.

Counter-domination usually prevented domination being institutionalised, sometimes permanently. This tendency for Goliaths to trigger counter-domination leading their collapse is their curse.

However, in five regions a cluster of factors enabled the new domination order to take hold. These five regions are China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. The factors that impaired counter-domination were a surplus of lootable resources especially food stuffs creating dependence, improved monopoly in advanced weapons capability (eg bronze, iron) and horses enabling superior violence, and caged land, that is no escape routes allowing people to just leave.

These dominance hierarchies extracted resources and wealth from nature and other people via tax on lootable resources and exploitation of peoples labour.

Once established, evolutionary pressure drove emergence of competing Goliaths in an eat or be eaten dance. So, unless actively or environmentally constrained, Goliaths multiplied, evolved to be more successful at domination and extraction of resources.

The book explores the factors permitting Goliaths to rise and to collapse (their curse), what happens when a Goliath collapses (it’s mostly good news unless you are a member of the elite), and why some Goliaths, particularly the current global Goliath, are so persistent.

The now

Kemp then brings his focus to the modern Goliaths in a period of global heating and ecosystem collapse to explore how humanity might go when we study the lessons from the past and apply them to our immediate future. 

In early weak Goliaths, people successfully took counter-domination measures. In imperial Goliaths, elite feuding, corruption, oligarchy and bad decision making, over extension, hollowed out the Goliath until a shock toppled it.

In our modern global Goliath, increased wealth inequality, spilling into inequalities of power as autocracy (rule by inequality of power), theocracy (inequality in access to knowledge) or military dictatorship (inequality in the use of violence) emerge. Each results in a more extractive economic system, with the interests of the elites overruling the interests of everyone else human and non-human. Consequently, any benefits Goliaths might have provided have now dried up and the costs increased and externalised to individuals, society and the ecosystem.

Colonial and current postcolonial corporate empires seemed resistant to the Curse. However the current corporate colonial global Goliath has multiplied catastrophic risk, which it has externalised and is taking an elitist individualised response to personal survival.

Where to from now

History teaches us there are three possible pathways going into the immediate future.

1. Self termination: that is Evolutionary suicide (like cancers), Goliath eating itself / humanity.
2. A world in chains (super dominated dystopia) or, least likely,
3. A world with a shackled or killed Goliath.

We are at the Endgame where we face a clear choice: a final collapse of complex industrial urban society or to kill the Goliath.

Kemp’s core final, hopeful message, gleaned from the history of part collapses, is that collapse is not inevitable.

We need to loudly and clearly tell the story of how to avoid collapse. We know broad, inclusive societies and institutions make better, future thinking decisions. We know less corruption is better. We know more wealth equal societies are more resilient, well and happy. We know a better system is brought about by the redistribution of power. We know what to do and we have the social and technological tools to make these changes.

His answer is to harness the better angels of our nature, our collective intelligence, to make political systems more responsive to the deliberative will of the people using sortition and deliberative mini-publics. That is to intentionally make our political systems operate more democratically. That is wealth equality plus power equality achieved though democratic political systems is the pathway to humans thriving on a well planet.