LUKE KEMP Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Human history has seen many civilisations rise and fall. Luke Kemp contemplates the fate of ours in Goliath’s Curse.

This is a monumental work of scholarship that raises fundamental questions about who we are, where we are going, and whether or not the next few centuries will witness our destruction as a species.  Luke Kemp is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and an honorary lecturer in environmental policy at the Australian National University. In Goliath’s Curse he provides an in-depth overview of the creation and destruction of different civilisations and proposals to overcome current threats to our own. In examining the ways humans have evolved since the Ice Age, Kemp provides an enthralling account of world history.

Goliath’s Curse relies heavily on archeological research, the Seshat Global History Databank, and the Mortality of States dataset of 324 states spanning the past 5000 years. Kemp draws on this empirical data in developing his broader theoretical insights. The extent of his research is breathtaking. He has 99 pages of notes, a large proportion of them being further discussions of his thinking on many a complicated issue.

The key metaphor underlying Kemp’s work is the battle between Goliath and David, the attempts by the powerful to control the rest of us.

A Goliath is a collection of dominance hierarchies organized primarily through authority and violence … in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour.

Kemp employs the notion of ‘Goliath fuel’ – the ecological and technological conditions, including ‘lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land’, that enable the establishment of a Goliath. A caged land is a ‘territory with few exit options’ that prevents people escaping the control exercised by a Goliath. Monopolizable weapons are the means by which Goliaths maintain control over their subjects and confiscate lootable resources which increase their wealth and power. Lootable resources include anything that can be stolen – land, food, animals, metals, fossil fuels, people (slaves), drugs such as opium (think: the opium wars in China), produce from colonial possessions, unfair trade, and data about ourselves obtained by internet companies at no cost. Stealing makes others rich and powerful.

Changes in Goliath fuel explain changes in the operation of Goliaths over time. Access to more lootable resources, and enhancements in the brutality of monopolizable weapons, help to explain the geographical growth of Goliaths. The use of horses, provision of roads and developments in shipping enabled Goliaths to spread their tentacles far and wide. Shipping was integral to European nations colonising most of the rest of the world from the sixteenth century.

Goliath fuel is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the creation of a Goliath. The sufficient condition is ‘status competition’. Kemp says status ‘comes in two flavours: prestige and domination’. Some may be asked to be leaders because of their perceived skills and wisdom. Prestige has always existed, but is limited and cannot be passed down through generations.

Domination is a different, darker strategy for achieving status. It is the ability to gain status through violence, intimidation, or control of resources. Dictators throughout the ages have built a towering social standing because they could threaten to murder or starve much of the populace.

Kemp refers to the ‘darker angels of our nature’ in seeking to unpack Goliath behaviour.

A combination of psychological traits that have led to Goliaths: status competition through domination; the dark triad (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism); embracing strong authority structures when threatened (the authoritarian impulse); and being corrupted by power.

Goliaths have invariably been established by strongmen and warlords who have employed violence to obtain power.

Warlordism, statehood, and organized crime all have similar ingredients: a hierarchy that coercively extracts resources from a territory and population.

Goliaths develop ideologies seeking to justify the role of their leaders. Kemp quotes archaeologist Ian Morris who defined ideology as ‘a pack of lies that benefits someone’.

… every society has stories to justify their inequalities. Such stories … justify … hierarchies as a matter of equity, fairness, or simply sheer superiority … Gods who constantly watch people and punish or reward moral behaviour are a highly effective force for controlling large groups.

Goliath elites flaunt their wealth and power to demonstrate their superiority and allocate increasing amounts of labour and energy to conspicuous consumption to satisfy their status needs. This is the ultimate source of the inequality that occurs within a Goliath.

Going back to ancient times, examples of conspicuous consumption would include feasts and sacrifices to gods. Human sacrifice is the ultimate marker that a Goliath leader is more important than their subjects. The ancient Egyptians built giant pyramids filled with treasures for a pharaoh in the afterlife. Monuments and palaces have been built through the ages to honour Goliaths and their elites. Today’s Goliaths – the ultrarich – demonstrate their status by purchasing giga yachts, private jets and trips into outer space.

Goliath wealth and power is enhanced by corruption.

Corruption … has been rife throughout history … politicians lowering taxes and regulations to benefit their rich donors … Corruption tends to increase over time, alongside wealth inequality …The greater the discrepancy in power, the more opportunity there is to abuse it … corruption can help the rich get richer.

Kemp identifies the ‘revolving doors’ that exist between government and industry as a form of ‘legalised bribery’, and draws on the Australian experience to show how it works.

In Australia, there is the well-documented case of how oil, coal, and aluminum lobby groups – a coalition who call themselves ‘the Greenhouse Mafia’ – have shaped the country’s energy and environment policies … Every resources minister in the Australian government since 2001 who has retired from parliament has taken a position in the mining, consultancy, or fossil fuel industries after finishing their time in office. Since 1990 more than a quarter of federal or assistant federal ministers have taken jobs with special interest groups after their political careers ended.

Kemp devotes several chapters to the different ways in which Goliaths have collapsed, including fights among rival elites, increased inequality bringing mass immiseration and revolt, and internal collapse as the cost of obtaining lootable resources becomes prohibitive.

Violence and mass killings are a constant of Goliath behaviour, particularly when a Goliath is created or expands. The birth of a Goliath, let’s call it a nation, is often associated with bloodbaths as opponents are eliminated. High levels of bloodshed also occurred when Goliaths embarked on colonisation, killing and enslaving indigenous peoples.

[Many] cultures and groups across Australia, Southeast Asia and the Americas … were hunted, enslaved, and dispossessed. Millions of lives, thousands of cultures, and hundreds of languages were sacrificed for millions of tonnes of gold, silver, sugar, cotton, cardamom, and slaves … Indigenous groups were frequently starved, brutally overworked, and forced into crowded camps and settlements with poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water. Weakened people died more easily and the camps were superspreaders for imported germs.

Kemp reports that between 55 and 95 per cent of the population of the Aztec empire perished under the Spanish. Indigenous populations in Hawaii and Australia experienced a premature death rate of up to 90 per cent over a century ago. India experienced somewhere between 50 million and 165 million premature deaths between 1881 and 1920 under British rule. We could also add what happened in Africa, such as the killing of six million people in the Belgian Congo.

In the final third of Goliath’s Curse Kemp argues that we are all now living under a Global Goliath. This he explains in terms of technology enhancing interconnectedness and the rise of global capitalism and international trade. His major concern is threats to the continuing operation of this Global Goliath. These are global warming, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence as a form of surveillance, the use of machines and robots to potentially replace and kill humans, and pandemics.

Kemp sees all of these as existential threats to our continued existence. In an Epilogue he provides a number of recommendations to avert such a possibility. They include ceasing to support fossil fuels, giving up the elite dream of endless economic growth, controlling and closely monitoring AI, making internet companies pay for the data they steal from us, banning the ‘revolving doors’ between government and industry, taxing the wealthy, breaking up monopolies, making corporations pay for the ecological damage they cause, refusing to allow yourself to be dominated, and making societies more democratic.

What we ordinarily call democracy – systems in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by political marketers and billionaire-owned media companies) vote every four to five years [three in Australia] for a tiny number of (usually rich) representatives who are funded and lobbied by corporations (for whom they frequently work afterwards) who then enact policies which usually better represent elite interests than popular opinion – is better described as an oligarchy with democratic furnishings.

Luke Kemp has produced a work of the highest order. He has examined a myriad of complex aspects of the human condition, including whether or not we are heading towards extinction. His writing is clear and concise, able to combine broad themes with a close eye for detail. This is a book that should be read by everyone.

Luke Kemp Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse Viking 2025 PB 592pp $36.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

You can buy Goliath’s Curse from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Australian politics, civilisations, climate change, colonialism, Luke | Kemp, oligarchy, rise and fall of civilisations, societal collapse, ultrarich, warlordism, world history