Goliath's Curse
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Gijsbert KorenGijsbert Koren • 1st1stSteward-ownershipSteward-ownership26m •
People are fundamentally egalitarian, but societies are led to collapse by enriched, status-obsessed elites. After such collapses lives of ordinary citizens often improved, concludes Dr. Luke Kemp, researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge in his book 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.
Today’s global civilisation is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, Kemp states. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. It is those 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.” Strangely enough, their fragility is not recognised by most citizens, who find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of elites.
Kemp ditches 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 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.
Kemp describes how global corporations and algorithms are like ‘agents of doom’ and amplify the worst of us. Can we shift without collapse, or are these agents and our fears and desires too strong? Or are we just lacking imagination and are these agents very fragile as well and can we easily do without them if we want?
Read more in this article in The Guardian about Kemp's book Goliath's Curse: https://lnkd.in/e4dmvTzh
Today’s global civilisation is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, Kemp states. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. It is those 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.” Strangely enough, their fragility is not recognised by most citizens, who find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of elites.
Kemp ditches 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 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.
Kemp describes how global corporations and algorithms are like ‘agents of doom’ and amplify the worst of us. Can we shift without collapse, or are these agents and our fears and desires too strong? Or are we just lacking imagination and are these agents very fragile as well and can we easily do without them if we want?
Read more in this article in The Guardian about Kemp's book Goliath's Curse: https://lnkd.in/e4dmvTzh
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