#1285 Luke Kemp - Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Luke Kemp. He's a research affiliate at the University of Cambridge, and today we're talking about his book Goliath's Curse The History and Future of Societal Collapse. So Dr. Kemp, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to

00:22 Luke Kemp: everyone. I got it. Thank you for having me.

00:25 Ricardo Lopes: So tell us first, what do you mean by the term Goliath in your book and also what characterizes a state because we are always constantly using this term state state, but what does it really mean?

00:47 Luke Kemp: Let's start with Goliath. Goliath is essentially my replacement term for civilization. When you go to write a book on collapse, the obvious question is what is collapsing? Most people respond to civilization, yet I found when I tried to look for good definitions of civilization, they were hard to come by. There was just a real lack of a consistent idea of what characterizes it as civilization. When I looked at it empirically instead, when I actually tried to look at what is common across all these early civilizations. You do find one thing, which is they are all a movement away from egalitarianism towards a dominance hierarchy, in which a few people impose rules using violence and others and extract resources from them. The second problem with the civilization is that it's always been the term propaganda. It comes from the Latin root civilitas, which means to live in cities, but it has connotations of virtue, moderation, wisdom, restraint. When you look at these first civilizations, if you will, they're always marked by things like mass human sacrifice, slavery, patriarchy. Doesn't seem particularly civilized to me. Instead I thought Goliath, with its biblical connotations of, Intimidating size, violence, and surprising fragility was a much better description of what we're actually seeing happen here. The state is slightly different. A state, probably know the typical definition from Weber of a monopoly on violence, that's not quite correct. The idea that it's a legitimate monopoly on violence wouldn't apply to most early states who very rarely had a monopoly on violence, and who decides what what's legitimate, right? Mhm. In this case, what most scholars agree on as a state is essentially a set of centralized institutions that impose rules on a given population in a confined territory. There's overlap, as you see between state and Goliath, but they are kind of different. A state is just a political apparatus. Well, the Roman and Goliath, for instance, wouldn't just be the empire, it's also the difference between slave and master, rich and poor, man and woman, all the other accompanying dominant hierarchies that hold the society together. So Goliath is a much larger fixture, but the state is usually the beating heart of the Goliath.

02:59 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, I just wanted to ask you, uh, when you mentioned civilization, is civilization, I mean, whatever it means, of course, because as you mentioned, there is a diffused term and even I remember back in 2024 interviewing Doctor Amanda Padeni, she's, uh, an expert on ancient Mesopotamian because it is referred to usually as the cradle of civilization. We discussed that term and she also told me, she's a historian in. This case, and she also told me that it doesn't have a um an agreed upon definition, so it's a bit of a diffused term for historians, political scientists, and other people like that, but uh you said at a certain point or associated civilization with the rise of inequality. I mean, is it necessarily the case that all um. Let's call them that way, pre-civilized societies, um, traditional societies like, for example, hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, and others, are they all necessarily egalitarian because back in 2023, for example, I interviewed Dr. Manvier Singh, who's an anthropologist, and he wrote. A very interesting paper together with Luke Loaki about going beyond the egalitarian nomadic model of hunter gatherers. So I mean apparently there are or there were even some, not many of course, but some tribes. Uh, TRADITIONAL societies who are not, um, equal, I, I mean, there's some inequality in them,

04:46 Luke Kemp: right? Absolutely, and I cover both Mandar and Luke's work in the book as well. In short, there are certainly signs of having more hierarchical and unequal different groups of hunter-gatherers, as well as pastoralists. In general, they're united by certain kinds of resources, resources that only become available after the Paleolithics. This is where I disagree with Mountvier and Luke, they think these existed all the way during the ice ages, and there's simply not much evidence of that. And instead, when you actually see these groups across the world in places like the Pacific Northwest of both Canada and the United States, where you have these hierarchical hunter-gatherers who live in more sedimentary conditions, they usually rely upon aquatic resources, things like smoked fish. And as we'll see later in the discussion, this is usually the key to having any kind of Goliath, and interestingly, I think when people look at these more unequal, hierarchical hunter-gatherers, they usually think, They look in some way more civilized, right? They have a hierarchy, they often have rulers, they have things like slavery, they have large monuments, they have sometimes even human sacrifice, and they often live in at least temporary villages. So it's simply, it's definitely not the case that egalitarian, If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have to be egalitarian, but it is certainly the case that prior to the rise of the very first Goliaths, the predominant mode of living was being a nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherer. Worth noting with caveats of people begin to settle down more, you have this kind of fluid movement between sedentary and nomadic, but despite those caveats, it is a pretty clear movement from egalitarianism towards domination.

06:20 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, I'm going to ask you a little bit more about prehistoric societies in a bit, but I would like to ask you now about what do you mean by collapse exactly? I mean, because I would imagine that regular people, when they hear or read the term collapse, they would imagine that it's just the entire society going under. I mean, everyone who lives there just disappearing out of existence or all single social institution that operated there just getting completely destroyed, collapsing, but is it really? Like that, or is it, or perhaps should we understand it more as a form of transformation, and there are certain things that are maintained and perhaps it's good even for some people but not so much for others.

07:24 Luke Kemp: To start with, collapse is definitely not an ancient apocalypse, and this has always been one of the biggest misunderstandings around collapse, is people think everyone dies, everything falls apart. And then you have these weird discussions and debates amongst archaeologists, with some saying, well, look, the Maya still carry forward their culture, their cuisine practices, their language is still several million speakers of Mayan today. But it's quite clear that the cities do fall apart, at least most of them, many still do persevere. And it's quite clear the overarching kind of political fabric in many ways it starts to also fall apart. I also don't think it's just simply a transformation. Transformation is way too broad a term for what's happening here. One could very easily argue that Rome was transforming in some way every single day, and if you start to lump in collapses with globalization, world wars, etc. YOU start to end up with a term which is essentially useless, so I don't think it's simply a transformation either. The way I think of collapse is the contraction and fragmentation of power networks. When a state falls apart, we call it a state failure or a state collapse. When the economy does a, does a dives down, we tend to talk about bit of an economic collapse or a recession. When there's a large drop in population, we call it a population bust or a population collapse. When multiple different power structures begin to deteriorate together, we call that a societal collapse. And it's worth noting here that it can have bad outcomes, people can die, but overall it's a process with winners and losers, costs and benefits. It's no apocalypse.

08:58 Ricardo Lopes: Um, AND I mean, is there that certain, uh, types of people tend to end up as losers and others, others as winners, are there patterns to that or not?

09:11 Luke Kemp: There is. Importantly, in general, roughly the average person often ends up being better off. It varies across case studies and there's very few hard, fast laws across history. But in general, this tended to be a process that was much worse for those who held power for the elites, and much better for the average person. Again, there's variation, there are cases where elites simply migrate from one regime to another quite seamlessly, for instance, during the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine, essentially most of the Byzantine elites just end up adopting Arabic names thereafter. So, There's certainly variation, but the kind of general rule is if you're an elite, you're gonna have a bad time. If you're an average person, it actually won't be too bad.

09:54 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Um, AND I mean, uh, I know that you, you've worked on data sets like the mortality of states or morals data set. Uh, WHAT have you learned from, uh, those kinds of data sets? I mean, there's also CHT out there, and I've interviewed both Daniel. Hoyer and Dr. Peter Turchin, and we talked about that, but uh what have you learned as researchers from those kinds of data sets? I mean, are there commonalities in terms of the factors that lead to collapse societal collapse?

10:36 Luke Kemp: Indeed, both Dan and Peter are good friends of mine, fantastic work, and I draw heavily upon the Sacha database throughout the book. In order to do any kind of large scale historical analysis, you need this kind of databases. One thing we did previously back in 2023 was we had an article published in PNAS which looks at both Moros, which is this database of over 300 states, in this case I think it's 324 to be precise, over the period 2000 BC through to 1800. And we compared that to data in SAA as well, to look at, do states age? Do states become more likely to collapse or terminate over time. And what we found was that over the first two centuries in general's pattern, states become more likely to terminate, and then they reach a very high level of risk and that becomes stable thereafter. So there's some evidence that there is a kind of aging effect at the very least early on for states. And one thing you find that's common both across, Seshat, but also across other large historical works such as The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, is that states also tend to grow more unequal, and of course the work of Seshat also points towards this being a key factor in crisis, that as you get greater inequality, you tend to have things like more intra-elite competition. And that is part of the story, but the bigger picture I've had to put forward in Goliath's curse is that inequality has numerous other effects, which leads to this pattern of states appearing, seemingly growing more fragile over time.

12:07 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but inequality definitely seems to be, and of course Daniel Hoyer and Peter Turchin also put a lot of focus on that, seems to be a very common factor, right? And I mean looking at how inequality tends to evolve across. Across time in the and across different Goliaths, do you think that it is just inevitable that inequality grows over time until it goes beyond a threshold where society just becomes too unstable?

12:50 Luke Kemp: Inevitable, no. As a general pattern, yes. So I'm drawing upon the work of Walter Scheidel, a historian at Stanford, in his book The Great Leveler, where he points out that once you have a Goliath, once you have a state, you tend to have wealth inequality rising inexorably, until you have one of four great levelers. Mass mobilization warfare like the World Wars, a pandemic such as the Black Death. A bloody revolution, such as the Bolshevik revolution or societal collapse, those level the playing field. But there are some exceptions in some cases where you have peaceful leveling occur. For instance, in the case of ancient Athens, you seem to have a small scale revolution, not a very large scale bloody one, that leads to a change towards genuine deep democracy. This form of democracy which involved both assemblies, the ecclesia, but also random selection of citizens to serve what was called the boulet. And granted, this was confined to just 15% of the population, landholding males. Yet it does seem to result in both a stagnation and even a decline in wealth inequality within Athens, and also a surprisingly high median wage for the average person in Athens. Mhm. So there are these exceptions where wealth inequality can be reversed. It's not very common, but nonetheless it's not inevitable. Unfortunately, the general pattern across history is the one you've mentioned of wealth inequality tends to increase over time, that makes the state more fragile, until it's essentially a hollow, hollow husk that falls apart due to other shocks, things like warfare, invaders, disease, climatic change.

14:28 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, uh, let's put a pin on that and we'll come back to that toward the end of our conversation to talk a little bit about, uh, solutions to inequality and other kinds of issues that we have to deal with, particularly in modern states. Uh, SO, uh, let, let's talk a little bit about certain aspects of human, human nature that you explore in your book. So, uh, one of the topics you explore there has to do with. Violence in prehistoric societies because they're sort of this obedient view of human nature, right, that we before civilization our lives were short, brutish, extremely violent, and all of that. But I mean if I understand it correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, this is also a view that has been endorsed by people like Stephen. Pinker in the better angels of our nature and enlightenment now, but anthropologists like Brian Ferguson, Douglas Fry, but particularly Brian Ferguson because he really broke down the different sources of evidence that Pinker used in his book. I mean, there's, there seems to be very, very little evidence or evidence of not, not good enough quality. To really support the idea that prehistoric societies were incredibly more violent than our modern industrialized societies are, right?

16:05 Luke Kemp: Precisely. So there's been a very common narrative that humans are innately violent and bloodthirsty, and often it's said that during the Paleolithic, during the ice ages, before we get the Holocene, this warmer period of climatic stability, and you start to see things like Agrarianism. We had lethal violence rates of roughly 15 to 25%. In other words, for every 100 people, roughly 15 to 25% of them would die at the hands of another human being. Yeah, Steven Pinker, of course, is one of the most vociferous proponents of this idea, and he puts forward historically more 15%. And in general, you have three different forms of evidence you can rely upon for this claim. One is anthropological, looking at existing hunter-gatherers. The second is archaeological, looking at skeletons from the record, particularly from the Paleolithic, and the third is genetic. When we look at anthropological, it's really unclear how much we can take from that, because there's such a huge variation here. We go all the way from 0% to 55%, so there's 0% for I think the Bakari to 0%, sorry, to 55% for the Aceh. The problem is that most of these cases also involve colonizers, warfare of farmers, etc. THINGS like alcohol as well. They're really not a good insight to what happens in the deep past. For instance, almost all the war deaths attributed in the Ace are actually from colonizers, they're from people who wouldn't have existed during the Paleolithic.

17:30 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, ALSO, I, I'm sorry for interrupting, but I think that even there are many, many anthropologists out there and perhaps a very good name to refer to here is Robert Kelly and his book The Lifeways of Hunter-gatherers, that they argue that we have to be extremely careful when studying modern day hunter-gatherer societies. Societies and making conclusions about how well they represent prehistoric hunter gatherer societies because particularly the ecological conditions they live in tend to be very specific to the kind of geography that they inhabit and also the kind. Of, uh, modern day conditions they find themselves in.

18:21 Luke Kemp: Exactly, no archaeologist and anthropologist would say that nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers or any hunter-gatherers today are completely archaic emblems of what happened during the Paleolithic. That being said, there are cases we made that certain groups like the Hatza in Tanzania or the Khoisan people in Kadahari Desert are probably closer. Windows into what the Paleolithic was like, for a few reasons. One is we know they had continued genetic presence in that area, all the way back to the Paleolithic, with no large scale changes in material culture that are visible, and the second one being that when you look at the archaeology of the Paleolithic, it looks very similar to how we see people live in these areas today. Mhm. Putting that aside, so anthropology is something we can't heavily rely upon here. The archaeological evidence paints a very clear picture. And as you mentioned, Steven Pinker here is worth noting has been torn apart by Brian Ferguson. His large scale database he uses has multiple duplicates, and only one site, just one comes from the Paleolithic. Instead, there's been a much better study done by two archaeologists from the Field Museum in Chicago, where they looked across over 4000 skeletons and 3000 sites, and found essentially no clear, Equivocal evidence of violence, except for one which is very well-known, what's called Jabelsa Harbor, where roughly, I think it was roughly 50 skeletons were found with signs of violence and trauma on them. Notably this occurred right at the end of the Paleolithic, essentially during the transition towards the Holocene, in an area that was undergoing immense environmental change, so not exactly emblematic of the wider Paleolithic. And When we look at genetic evidence, it also points out a picture of us being relatively peaceful, that the very maximum ceiling from the genetic evidence was roughly 2% lethal violence rate. And it's worthwhile even taking that with a grain of salt, this is a study where essentially you look at other species, you get an estimate of how often they kill within their own groups, and then you're more likely to extrapolate that to humans based upon which one is most closely genetically related to humans, for instance, chimps are obviously much closer to us than fruit flies. But all the evidence we have points, paints a pretty clear picture that humans simply aren't super violent, and one of the most compelling points I find is that when you look across the archae archaeological record, even when you start to get signs of violence, you don't have signs of large scale warfare. Instead, warfare emerges as you get people becoming more sedentary, but also getting access to certain resources. What I call lootable resources, resources that are easily seen, stolen and stored, things like grain. And that makes sense as well. There wasn't much point in going to war and risking your life with no material benefit, which for nomadic egalitarians, hunter-gatherers who carry no surplus on them, there just really wasn't a strong reason to go to war.

21:09 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, to put it in very simple terms, I mean really for people to understand in a very straightforward manner what we're talking about here, it seems to me, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that warfare and conflict between different human societies really scales up when people are able to accumulate resources, right, that can that other people. And fight over.

21:41 Luke Kemp: Yeah, I think it's in particular the accumulation of certain types of resources, resources that can be easily stored and can be easily transported, what I call lootable resources. Notably, the very first example of warfare we have is in northern Mesopotamia, with a group called the Halafians trying to monopolize the trade on obsidian. Obsidian is a valuable resource which can be stockpiled and can also be transported over vast distances. And this is also the key to why Goliath got created. You don't see goliaths just popping up when you have a surplus necessarily. There are numerous hunter-gatherer groups who have surpluses, but don't seem to create goliaths. And similarly there's numerous areas across the world which have agriculture, they have surpluses, but again, don't create Goliath, Papua New Guinea being a great example. It had agriculture at the same time as Egypt. The key difference here is Papua New Guinea has yams, taro, and banana. Banana you can store for roughly 1 month, yam and tara roughly 6 months, yaminara you grow underground and you can keep it underground even when it's ready to be harvested. Wheat, rice, barley, corn, the staple crops that we used in the very first go lives, the very first civilisations, they all can be stored for decades on end. They're very easily seen, and hence they're very easily looted, what I call lootable resources, easily seen, stolen and stored.

23:01 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, WHEN it comes to violence, uh, what do you make of the work by people like Dr. Richard Wrangham, who wrote the very fascinating book The Goodness Paradox? I've interviewed, I interviewed him back in 2019. Where through his own research, research of his collaborators and other people, he suggests that actually when it comes to what he, what he, what he calls in the book self- domestication, I mean we as humans self domesticating violence. PLAYED an important role in traditional societies and throughout our evolution in the, in this very specific way of turning against anti-social individuals that tried to rise to power in those kinds of societies and. Maybe we can even talk about other kinds of societies where anti-social individuals rise to power. I mean, what do you make of his claims and potentially the role that that specific kind of violence played in our evolution?

24:18 Luke Kemp: We certainly do still see some violence, it's usually interpersonal violence, other acts of passion, for instance, in hunter-gatherer groups, or what are called counter dominant strategies. This is mainly the work of Christopher Bow in particular, where he essentially documented that in nomadic egalitarian groups, when one individual tried to dominate the rest of the group, they were usually handled in 3 different ways. One was ridicule, another was ostracism, being kicked out of the group, and the third was in-group executions. And there is certainly evidence of this, and one really powerful, strange bit of evidence actually is that when you look at humans, it's quite clear you get a reproductive advantage, particularly for men with higher status. Men with higher status tend to have a larger number of children, and those children more likely to live dadhood. There's a reproductive evolutionary story here. And that's one of the reasons why you try and dominate a group, right, is you want status, you want that reproductive advantage deep down inside. And yet we have far less of an advantage compared to chimpanzees and other primates. They're roughly 4 times the reproductive benefit of status compared to humans, which suggests an evolutionary story of humans relative to our to our primate, primate ancestors, we found a way to select against those who were seeking status through dominance. Hence these counter dominant skills. So it's quite clear that in many ways we weren't just egalitarian because we didn't have a surplus, we didn't have little resources, it was also a social choice.

25:49 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, mhm. Uh, SO in terms of our history, we tend to have this very linear view of history in the sense that we tend to think that we just, uh, up to a certain point were hunter gatherers, foragers, and then we moved into agricultural societies, and now we have industrialized societies and so on. Is that really how we should think about or look? Back at history, I mean, it was there really a linear progression where let's say 10 to 13,000 years ago around the advent of the Holocene, uh, people who were living in hunter gatherer societies just progressively moved into agricultural societies and there was never any turn back for them. Uh, I mean, is that really the case?

26:47 Luke Kemp: Certainly not in the short-term. When we look at the transition from intensified agriculture towards adopting states, that on average took roughly 3000 years, in some cases far longer. This was a, a very staccato, slow, messy process over the space of centuries, often millennia. Likewise we were living in more sedentary conditions, often hunter-gatherers started living in more sedentary conditions, sometimes they became more mobile, a great example here being the early groups during the initial um transition to the, into the Holocene in Mesopotamia, they start to to settle down and eventually when you have the Juanga driest period, essentially a period of cooling, they go back to being nomadic egalitarians. There's also numerous cases where people seem to pick up farming and then they lose it. A great example here being Neolithic Europe, where essentially farmers spread all the way from modern day Turkey and Anatolia, up across Europe all the way to the British Isles, and they go through these boom bust cycles where you see them grow in numbers, but they also grow in inequality. And then you start to see the first signs of warfare, they collapse dramatically in population, but they also give up most of their farming. They start to move toward things like eating chestnuts, for instance, in the British Isles. And for a long period of time thereafter, they rely more upon hunting and gathering and pastoralism rather than farming. So these were not clear, unavoidable points of no return. People often shifted between different kinds of subsistence patterns. All that being said, there is also a really clear pattern across history, that once you get a Goliath, once you get an empire, they tend to always come back, and they eventually grow bigger and bigger. Whether you look at Europe, China, the Near East, South America, Mesoamerica, in every single case, once you get a Goliath, even if it collapses, it eventually comes back, and they grow bigger over time until eventually it cover the entire territory. The only exception we have here is North America, where you have a whole set of early Goliaths, places like Cahokia, and early city in modern day Saint Louis, and roughly 10,000 to 15,000 people where they practiced large scale human sacrifice. All the Pabloan communities, the very first farmers of the US Southwest who built these large sandstone houses and group in, in small villages. And once they fall apart, roughly 1000 years ago, they don't seem to come back. But it's an open question because Europeans arrived roughly 2 centuries there, a couple of centuries thereafter. And if Europeans don't arrive, would you eventually see another Goliath occur and essentially spread over North America? Most likely in the long run, yes.

29:24 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, BUT are there historic examples of people abandoning a Goliath?

29:32 Luke Kemp: There are, there are numerous ones I mentioned in the book, both Jenna Jenna, for instance, in East Africa, Tiwaku in South America, the very earliest state, someone saved South America, San Lorenzo Ernesto America, there's at least a dozen or more examples I cover in the book of these, we can think of them as the B to Goliaths, they're experiments of doing dominance in the hierarchy, but they fail in some kind of way. Often it is, A situation in which you start to build a city, you start to have most of the trimmings of civilization, but without having a big dominance hierarchy, and then elites, and rulers start to pop up, like in the case of Tiwaku for instance, and then it becomes unstable thereafter. And to me, what these often look like are kind of scaled up versions of counter dominance strategies. You either see sometimes revolt, where you actually see elites preferentially killed, as well as elite infrastructure destroyed. Or sometimes you see in the case of Cochia for instance, people just seemingly walk away. The collapse was basically just migration out of the city until it had only a few small elite families and it crumbled apart from there. And both of those in some ways look like ostracism and in-group executions of would-be dominators. In some strange way, they are scaled up counter dominant strategies.

30:49 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, SO let me just ask you a question about early agricultural societies because sometimes people discuss this. Uh, IN your understanding, what were the positive and negative aspects? Of early agricultural societies because I've talked with anthropologists about this and there seems to be the case that at least in the early stages of uh agricultural societies, um, people had uh uh uh some disadvantages compared to people who lived in hunter-gatherer societies, correct?

31:32 Luke Kemp: Yeah, so there's been a wronggoing idea that the movement towards agrarian societies, towards agriculture, was a physiological nightmare. This was a wrecking ball to human health, and you do see this in some ways, for instance, the, Evidence of dental caries and weaker bones, bone lesions both increase, you also have a drop in human height. Across most areas, you have a drop of a few inches, and human height is a good overall biophysical indicator of your health. People tend to be taller when they have access to more calories, more protein, more varied diets, and less exposure to starvation or disease. And you see, even when you look at modern day thematic egalitarian hunter-gatherers versus business farmers, they tend to be taller and healthier in a whole bunch of ways. There's actually some interesting evidence to go in the book that even compared to industrial counterparts, there seem to be some strange phenomena like very low incidence of cardiovascular disease and actually slower atrophy of the brain. But putting that aside, it seems like agriculture was something that was not good for our health at all. But there are some benefits to that culture. One is that you can support a larger density of population in a given area. And this seems to be quite important later on once you start to get much denser, bigger groups. And the second is that, it's something you can rely upon even when, say for instance, animals start to die off, and this is one leading theory for why you get agriculture intensification in certain areas like Mesopotamia, is you also start to see the die-off of very large, Animals such as aurochs for instance, and instead people start to rely more upon agriculture, and then all it takes is a couple of bad seasons, people have to rely more upon agriculture and they get stuck in this trap where the population is so large, they can't be sustained by hunting and gathering, they have to rely at least in part on agriculture. And I think there's, and the second wrinkle to this is agriculture is also potentially more useful for status competition. This is. Largely based upon a big body of work on feasting, which essentially finds that feasting is often practiced in a number of different societies as a way of one individual or group gaining more status, and often feasting items were items used and produced in agriculture, both exotic ones like avocados and peppers, but also even basic ones such as wheat.

33:50 Ricardo Lopes: Um, LET me ask you this, uh, I mean, it's not that I take, uh, someone like Yuval Noah Harari, very seriously. I mean, I don't, I don't, particularly when it comes to particularly when it comes to anthropology, not at all, but, um, I, I want to address particular claims that he and other people make, like, for example, when they say that. It was, um, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was a mistake for people to make the move to agricultural societies, and they point to things like rising inequality, warfare, the origins of patriarchy, slavery, hierarchical societies. I mean, all of those kinds of things. Do you think that we can really say scientifically? THAT it that moving to agricultural societies or establishing agricultural societies was a mistake that we are worse off uh through uh now that we've gone through that process than we would have been if we just kept living in hunter gatherer societies. I mean, is that uh some question that we can answer scientifically?

35:11 Luke Kemp: Scientifically we can detail what happened, we can describe the pros and cons of the transition towards agriculture and how these changed over time. For the 1st 5000 years, it seems to have been a real wrecking ball to human health, but also even just to in general our way of life. Once you start to get both the industrial revolution, but also importantly in the industrial revolution, plus progressive movements like unionists, suffragettes, etc. Then you start to see a change, you start to see a rise in literacy, declines in infant maternal mortality, increases in longevity, life expectancy, etc. ALL the kind of good things that are usually shown in our world in data, life in short, gets better. But was it worthwhile? Was this a mistake? That's something of a, of a value judgment, and it really depends upon what you value in many ways. Some people could of course look back on those thousands of years of warfare, slavery, patriarchy, suffering and say, well, it was tough, but now we managed to get to the moon. We know what stars are, and all the achievements in the modern world, they make that worthwhile. Others would look at genocides today, they'd look at the genocides of the past. And they look at the, the fact, and this is the most surprising fact I found in the book, that when you look at nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers today using happiness surveys, they seem to be on average happier than their counterparts in Spain and the US and other industrialized countries. You could look at that kind of evidence and say, well no, this was not worthwhile, this was a tragic mistake. It all depends upon what you value. I think when it comes to health, at least for the 1st 5000 years, it's pretty clear cut that this was a mistake.

36:51 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. No, it's very interesting because back in 2021, if I remember correctly, I interviewed Doctor Kim Hill. I mean, one of the leading anthropologists who've studied the wider number of uh traditional societies, and I, I asked him more or less the same question. I asked him, look, is, uh, do you think it's possible for us to really uh tell scientifically whether It's better to live in a modern industrialized society or in a traditional hunter-gatherer society, and he told me the same. He said, Look, it's for me it's more of a value judgment. I can tell you about negative things that I saw, uh, living in, uh, living together with hunter-gatherers and negative things that we have in modern industrialized. Society and they gave the example of um hunter gatherer societies where we lived that at night children would be crying because there would be no food and that's something that we, I mean, virtually do not see. I mean, we, we can debate that, but we virtually do not see in modern industrialized societies and, but, and the example of a negative thing that he gave. IN modern industrialized societies has to do with loneliness, for example. I mean, there's apparently an increasing number of people who suffer from loneliness, and that's just not something that you really see in hunter gatherer societies, and those are just two examples.

38:28 Luke Kemp: So yeah, there's also just a very simple point of it, it depends upon who you are. There's a wonderful book, I think it's called Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, which examines how much of our philosophy we rely upon today. It involves a judgment of having civilization, having cities, having a state, having a Goliath, is worthwhile if it makes both the average person or at the very least, the very worst off person better, if they have a better life overall. And the thing they point out is, it's hard to determine this on average because as you mentioned, it depends upon a whole bunch of things you're measuring. But when it comes to the very worst off, they actually make a pretty compelling case that, The very worst off in industrialized societies are probably much worse off than people in hunter-gatherer groups, at least the people in hunter-gatherer groups, there's a level of certain equality, but importantly, they still have social connections usually. While you can have people who are incredibly destitute, marginalized, and often on terrible, terrible drugs in industrialized societies, so, the very depth of human suffering can reach, that can also vary depending upon your type of society. So, I think it's a tricky question, but there's still a really important overarching, Piece here, which is this idea that collapse is often a dark age after an ascension into a golden age of an empire, is clearly incorrect, um, instead often you do find a situation where empires meant people were shorter and less healthy. For instance, after the collapse of Rome, people seem to grow taller and healthier, they have those taller skeletons but also less dental cavities and bone lesions and, The obvious of talk there is so many people die, that the survivors have many leftover resources and hence grow healthier. That doesn't seem to be the case. First of all, we have very unclear estimates of how many people actually died in different areas, but secondly and more importantly, people outside the empire were taller and healthier than those inside the empire. Hence the old trope of the muscle-bound genetic barbarian. So it's a much more complicated picture of history, one where sometimes collapse could in certain cases be good for the average person.

40:31 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, uh, let me ask you now, uh, about, uh, certain, uh, specific, uh, states because I, I'm very interesting to hear, uh, very interested to hear your thoughts about them. So, um, What is the deal with China, for example, because it seems throughout history that it has gone through its stages where there was apparent collapse and it and then it came back again. I mean, of course there were periods where China, or what we now call China, it was several different states and There were periods of unification and in more recent history, of course it was torn apart by the English and the Opium Wars and all of that which eventually led arguably to the communist revolution and now we have a state that I'm mean, I'm not even sure if there's a definite answer as to whether it is a form of socialism or state capitalism. I mean people debate that a lot. I don't know if you have a particular opinion on that, but what do you make of China? Has it ever really gone through real collapse and then came back, or what's the deal with it?

41:57 Luke Kemp: I think it has. If you had, for instance, the Warring States period or The spring and autumn period in Europe, they would have called that a collapse rather than what they're called in China, which is they give it a very particular chronological imperialization name. I think there's a couple of reasons, one of those is just simple historical convention, but another is you do see a continuity throughout China, even during these periods of disunity, during these periods of fragmentation, and part of this is, That China has a consistent language throughout most of these periods and a consistent form of writing, particularly after the Qin dynasty, who tried to essentially standardize both weights, measurements, but also things like writing a script and language. But also bureaucracy, the bureaucracy often, more or less seamlessly moves between different regimes, and we can talk about the fall of different dynasties, but the bureaucracy and the kind of underlying culture, many of the institutions still persist and continue across different dynasties. So there are certain, Collapses throughout Chinese history, but I think you do find a strange level of continuity, which you often don't find in other areas, and it's notable in general that China, once you get large standing empire over China, it doesn't tend to fall apart. Well when you look at say for instance, Europe, you only have one period where there's an empire which essentially encompasses all of Europe for a prolonged period of time, which is Rome, Rome is exceptional. Thereafter, it doesn't really happen again. France gets closed, but it holds the entirety of Europe for less than a decade before it falls apart. China has been almost having large scale unified empire, despite these periods of fragmentation, which there were still many. Why is that, um, part of it seems to be cultural, that China did have a much bigger focus upon building things like bureaucracy, a common script, the efforts of the Chin to really standardize things seems to be crucial here. And part of it seems to be geographic as well, it was just simply, there were less large scale mountain ranges and other areas to essentially break up imperial conquest, which led to a larger unified imperial cultural zone. And also China just also gets a Goliath much earlier, and you find across history that areas which developed Goliath's earliest tend to stay autocratic even in later times, Egypt, China being great examples. Those who developed states much later where you already have stronger norms and practices of larger scale democracy, they tend to have more of a democratic flavor later on, like in Europe.

44:22 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so I really have to ask you about this idea that you explore in your book. I'm not sure if you were trying to be a little bit provocative here or not, but tell us about this idea of states as organized crime. I mean, what do you mean by that?

44:41 Luke Kemp: So I mentioned that when you try to look at the origin of Goliaths, one of the key things here is lootable resources. You get a little resources in in Egypt, but not in Papua New Guinea, and that helps to explain why you get a Goliath in Egypt, but you never get pharaohs in Papua New Guinea. Lootable resources seem to be critical, but there's another two factors. One is monopolized weapons, weapons that can be monopolized by a single group. So for instance, in both Egypt, China, as well as Mesopotamia, you don't get Goliaths occurring until you have the introduction of handheld bronze axes and swords. Even later on in places like the Kingdom of Hawaii, that doesn't occur until you have the introduction of essentially musket-based guns. Frequently we see when the hunter-gatherer groups get introduced to monopolized weapons, they start to become more hierarchical, more Goliath-like. And the third is, in many cases, these early Goliaths were in areas where people had very few exit options, where they couldn't easily disperse. For instance, Egypt is locked between the Red Sea and the Nile. Mesopotamia, it means the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, that is in Greek of course. So it's these three ingredients which I call Goliath fuel, lootable resources, monopolized weapons, and caged land, which seem to explain the emergence of Goliaths across history. And that paints a pretty clear picture of what's happening. A small number of people are getting access to weapons which they can use to take the resources that others depend upon, and the others can't escape and have to accept the new arrangement. In almost every case, we'd call that a story of organized crime, not a story of civilization occurring. And it's noticeable that when you actually look into definitions of warlord, organized crime and state, they're actually kind of similar. They all basically involve taking an unorganized market and making it more hierarchically organized, using violence. I think it seems strange to us, and it seems unnerving and uncomfortable because we're used to states today providing public services, but we have to remember that that wasn't true of the states of the past. Most states of the past were much more predatory, much more unequal, and frankly much more like organized crime rackets than they were like Denmark.

47:02 Ricardo Lopes: You know, I, I'm really curious because, uh, and now I'm talking about my own personal experience, and this is of course not a strictly scientific approach. It also has to do with my personal values, but I've, I've been pretty much a socialist since I was 18. I'm now 35, but as I read more and more and more anthropology, uh, I mean, little by little, it seems that I'm leaning more and more toward anarchism. I mean, do, do you have that same sort of experience or not?

47:37 Luke Kemp: Yes, in short, it's worthwhile already quickly defining what we mean by when we say anarchism, because most people, when they hear anarchism for the first time, they think of someone in a black hoodie, throwing a Molotov cocktail or a brick through a window. They think of chaos. And that's largely the outcome of a very well coordinated, successful propaganda campaign, where states and elites have essentially sought to discredit the idea. But anarchism, when you look at the philosophy from people like Praudun, Bakunin, etc. IT tends to be essentially trying to find ways to do large scale cooperation, which does not rely upon violent hierarchy. To me, that is essentially just taking democracy seriously. How do we ensure political equality and that we can essentially coordinate without recourse to violence? When you actually talk about it that way, most people agree that's something that's worth pursuing, that is the ideal political arrangement. And it's quite clear that's also what we had most of the time as well. For the 1st 300,000 years or so of human society, we appear to have live in nomadic egalitarian arrangements with no clear rules and no persistent levels of inequality. But we are still capable of quite clearly of large scale coordination cooperation. I talk about in the book, for instance, that you have evidence of shared musical instruments, lithic tools, so stone tools, genes in culture, sometimes even figurine and cave art all the way from the east coast to the west coast of Africa 100,000 years ago. You have similar big cultural zones all the way from Siberia to Spain. To me it's pretty clear we can cooperate and we can coordinate without necessarily having one person take most of the surplus and threaten everyone else using weapons. So I've certainly found that my politics and my values have changed in the course of writing this book, which took 7 years, and I always find it funny that I get the critique as you'd expect of this book is just you, Reflecting and projecting your values onto the past, I'm like, no, I, my values were very different prior to writing this book, this is actually the opposite, it's learning from history and using that evidence to change how I think. So yeah, I think like you, I've actually experienced more of a drift towards anarchism or one could even just say simply, a drift towards taking democracy and doing democracy seriously.

49:59 Ricardo Lopes: So earlier we've already touched a little bit on this topic, but I want to address it in a more direct manner. I mean earlier when we talked about people in traditional societies getting greed in one form or another of anti-social individuals. Uh, TELL us about, uh, individuals with dark triad traits. I mean, narcissism. Berlinism and psychopathy. Why is it that they seem to be overrepresented in leadership roles, um, and I mean, do, do you think that, uh, that there would be mechanisms for us in modern industrialized and post-industrial societies, uh, to deal with them in some way?

50:46 Luke Kemp: Hm. The key here appears to be, A, these people want status much, much more than others. So the desire for status is universal, everyone wants to be admired, loved, respected by their peers. But some people want it far more than others. In general, men want, want it much more, and also people in the dark triad who rank high in the dark triad tend to want it more. It's worthwhile noting the dark triad, While we often talk about this as if it's a particular category, everyone has a certain level of dark triad, everyone has a certain level of narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy. What we're really talking about people who rank highly enough in these traits that they usually, it's sufficient for a clinical diagnosis as a psychopath or a narcissist, etc. The second issue here is not only do they want status much more, but they're usually more capable of getting it. They're usually more capable of doing politics, coalition building, and often resorting to violence. For instance, people who are psychopaths are much more capable of doing violence and a much lower in risk aversion, for instance. So they've have both the means, and they also have the motivation as well, and this helps to explain why you do see an overrepresentation of the dark triad in both parliaments, as well as in boardrooms. So across the average population, at least amongst men, roughly 1% of people would pass the clinical threshold for psychopathy. In boardrooms and in parliaments, it's roughly 3 to 21%. The numbers vary quite a lot because it depends upon how you measure it and the sample size, etc. BUT there's no dispute whatsoever that it's much, much larger than the average population. And obviously that's not a great thing, because while these people want status, they're usually not the best kinds of leaders, and I think this actually helps to explain why when you look at the history textbooks, they're essentially a roll call of mass murderers. Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Chinghis Khan, these are not people renowned for their virtue or even necessarily for being particularly good leaders, they're usually renowned for their military strategy and their ability to kill or starve large numbers of people. And I think it also helps to explain why, When you look at the average person, they're often not that bad. When you look at the average state or kingdom, they're usually quite horrible. The key thing here is that we're not selecting for the best of us, instead we're often doing the worst, and again, status I think is the best explanation for this, and when you look across history, it's, we have a clear genetic image that roughly 8000 to 4000 years ago, you start to have a bottleneck in the Y chromosome, and that appears to be because a small number of men start to monopolize reproduction. Essentially, the rulers, emperors of harems, etc. ALL start to use their status to monopolize reproduction. So, This is pretty clear that we're not being represented by the best of us, and this is I think one of the underlying problems we face in society today, is how to build up new counter dominance strategies and build up new political systems that don't essentially select for the worst of us. And part of this is quite simple, and I mentioned before an example of this, which was the use of sortition in ancient Athens. So rather than having people compete in elections, they would randomly select people across the population. And even for ancient ancient Athenians, ancient Greeks today, they would look at us and say, you're not a democracy, you're an oligarchy. Because for them elections were oligarchic. It even comes down to the actual Latin root of the term elite and elect all come from the same root of to be chosen. And it makes sense, in order to actually compete in an election, you need to have influence, you need to have money, you have a lot of spare time to actually go and compete in an election. Most people don't have those three things. Instead, sortition randomly selects across the population, which means you're no longer selecting people who want power, and you're no longer just selecting people who are particularly good at violence or particularly good at politicking, you're just selecting at random. And what we've strangely see is that when you select at random, people often make pretty good decisions. We have this very big body of evidence from what's called deliberate democracy, where essentially you have these citizens' juries and assemblies, where you select people at random, you have them briefed by experts, they deliberate, they exchange information, they talk, and they come to a policy decision. In general, these decisions are usually seen as more trustworthy, legitimate, and also just seem to be better as well. So I do think there are quite clear ways to start to avoid the selection processes we have for people who are high in the dark triad. And it's also a way of avoiding the other what I call darker angellar nature. So in the book I don't just talk about the dark tribe, the status competition, I also talk about power corrupting. There's very strong social psychology evidence that when people are placed in positions of power, they usually tend to be changed in their personalities, they become less risk averse, less compassionate and empathetic, more likely to cheat both in games and in their spouses, and their brains change, less capable of doing things like mirroring. And if you only have people in power for a short period of time, you're also avoiding that issue of power corrupting as well.

55:54 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, I mean, by the way, there's also a very fascinating edited book by Dr. Philip Dwyer, The Darker Angels of Our Nature, but that's more of a critique of Steven Pinker's approach to historic trends in violence, but I also To have an interview with him is really fascinating. It's really fascinating. So I, I mean, in the interest of time because I'm, I'm seeing that we have less than 10 minutes left here, um, I mean talking about our modern global Goliath, so to speak. Um, DO you think that if it collapses, and, and by the way, do you, do you think that there are signs that it could collapse or could be collapsing, but if it collapses, its collapse could be worse than the collapse of any historic Goliath because now it would be on a global scale.

56:50 Luke Kemp: In the book I put forward the case that Goliath is no longer regional, instead it is a global dominance hierarchy or a set of dominance hierarchies. Every state in the world essentially operates in a global capitalist economy, even China, I would say. Every state looks pretty similar actually, they're all incredibly hierarchical and they have a head of state who reports to the United Nations. Every single state, particularly great powers, have similarities in terms of the military as well. All the great powers have nuclear weapons, they all have really clear, strong chains of command in how they operate their navies, their militaries in general, and all of us seem to have very similar ways of organizing information. I mean, surveillance capitalist firms, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. THEY all organize information flows across the entire world. Always has intelligence agencies that look pretty similar. The world in many ways is much more. Similar and homogenized than it's ever been throughout history, and I think this is large part because we now live under this single Goliath system. In the past, what was a real precursor to collapse, the key indicator, was essentially rising wealth inequality. As I mentioned earlier, wealth inequality tends to correlate to a whole bunch of different woes. Things like we already mentioned before, the works of Peter Turcheon on intra-elite competition. You have a larger elite class competing for a small number of high status positions, and that tends to lead to things like coups, rebellions. Civil wars, etc. You also tend to get a, what are what's often called immiseration of the masses. Basically people start to get poorer because assets become so expensive, things like land. Today we call it a cost of living crisis. You also have other effects, we also see that in general, wealth inequality tends to correlate with higher levels of corruption, it also correlates with higher levels of socio-political violence. And in general, it seems to result in situations where you have more of an oligarchy. Having a lot of powerful people with a lot of money tends to influence the political system, it doesn't just stay in bank accounts, and that often leads to worse decision making, because elites, particularly those who are benefiting immensely in terms of their finances from the existing status quo, don't have a big interest in changing things, even if there are oncoming impending disasters. So all these different effects stack up and hollow out the state until it falls apart. When we look across the world, there's very clear signs of rising wealth inequality. The general trend here is that we have a, Leveling, what's called the Great Compression during the World Wars, the world wars have this great combination of both destroying all the world money, and also the introduction of different kinds of concessions and policies from elites to, to the commoners, essentially because the commoners were armed and more economically valuable now. So you have the rise of democratic welfare states. But then wealth inequality starts to rise again roughly in the 1980s, and with a time lag of roughly a decade or two, you start to see all the telltale signs, rising polarization, the rise of the far right, declining trust in public institutions, democratic backsliding, etc. Now, I don't think collapse would be quite the same in the past as it was, as it collapse won't be quite the same today as it was in the past. One is that even if you do have intra-elite competition and popularmiseration, today we have police forces, intelligence agencies, and mass surveillance. There's much more effective ways for states to maintain control than they had in the past. Even police forces didn't happen in most pre-modern states. What I'm more worried about is what is often referred to as existential risk. Things like nuclear weapons, climate change, advanced AI systems. These also are products of the global Goliath. When you look at any of these, they're usually produced by a very small number of concentrated powerful actors. In the case of climate change, the fossil fuel industry, in the case of AI, just 3 big companies, Microsoft, Inward OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Annthropic. If you want nuclear weapons, only really two states have a vast majority, 86% of the stock stockpiles held by the US and Russia, and roughly 2 dozen companies are responsible for maintaining and upgrade the weapons. But in short, Goliath at a global scale is producing threats that could destroy essentially the entire world, not just result in short-term, small, small scale collapse. So while collapse has a bright past, I think it has a surprisingly dark future. And that's for a few reasons, as I mentioned, these threats we face are just a much larger magnitude. But also weapons today are much worse than they were in the past. Before, if you had a, a collapse, yes, you'd have small groups of men trying to rebuild a state, rebuild a Goliath, but if you're using things like iron, swords and axes or muskets, today we have nuclear weapons. And additionally on top of that is states today are much better than they were previously. You know, Denmark actually is good for its citizens, it does provide important public services and and public goods. Previous states, pre-modern states, not so much, and last but not least, most of us can't easily switch our subsistence base back towards hunting and gathering or farming, we're entirely reliant upon industrialized, globalized food and supply chains. And last but not least is if it's a GL system at a global level, it means if GLAF collapses, it'll be global, no longer regional. So for all those reasons, unfortunately collapse going forward is likely be much worse rather than being a much more benevolent feature like it was in the past.

1:02:20 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so Doctor Kemp, I'm getting really mindful of your time. So, uh, do you think that it's better for us to just wrap up our conversation here and if you're open to it, we could have another conversation in the near future to talk a little bit more about existential threats and modern states and, and so on, if you're open to it. Yeah,

1:02:40 Luke Kemp: I'd be happy to do part 21 day.

1:02:42 Ricardo Lopes: OK, OK, thank you so much for, so the book is again Goliath's Curse, The History and Future of Societal collapse, and I'm I'm of course leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Doctor Kemp, apart from your book, where can people find you and your work on the internet?

1:03:00 Luke Kemp: Oh, unfortunately, not many places. I'm not very active in social media. I do technically have a mastodon and Blue Sky account. I think it's at Luke Kemp or Luca Kemp, I think I haven't used it in quite some time. And I'm on the sub stack, I've yet to write a post, but I will, and it's at Elle Kemp, I'm gonna be calling the sub-stack the final word.

1:03:20 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really loved the book and I was very much looking forward to this conversation and it's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

1:03:31 Luke Kemp: Thanks, Ricardo, I've always been a big fan of the podcast and I've really enjoyed being on.

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