Goliath’s Curse

A book by Luke Kemp, subtitled “The History and Future of Societal Collapse.”

What is a Goliath?

A large group of people organized into a dominance hierarchy with a monopoly over legitimized violence: city-states, states, empires, and ultimately the current global super-organism.

The Rise of Goliath

Status-seeking behavior marked the rise of the first hereditary ruling classes. Initially, status was achieved through prestige by providing benefits to the group such as being a good hunter or respected shaman. But prestige is not hereditary: a mediocre son would not be respected merely because his father was a good hunter. Status-seekers who wanted their children to inherit their status took an alternative path: domination. By monopolizing resources such as grain, gold, and weapons, using myth to convince the group that the gods chose them (and their descendants) to rule, and reinforcing their power through conquest and human sacrifice, tyrants were able to amass generational power over ever-larger masses of people, at least those who couldn’t escape. Kemp refers to these factors as “Goliath fuel”:

Goliath Fuel

1. Lootable resources: resources that are visible (wheat, not potatoes) so it’s obvious to warlords when and where to take them and durable (corn lasting decades, not bananas that rot in months) so they can be transported from far away, hoarded in a central location, and passed on to future generations.
2. Monopolizable weaponry: humans have a deeply-ingrained desire not to be dominated and historically have exiled or killed would-be tyrants in small, democratic groups (what Christopher Boehm calls “counter-dominance strategies”). So Goliaths require a monopoly on deadly force to keep large populations compliant.
3. Caged land: historically people would flee would-be dominators rather than submit to their rule, so Goliaths required a dearth of exit options for populations in order to hold them under control.

This often leads to a kind of kakistocracy (“rule by the worst” in Greek) where the tiny minority of humans high in the dark triad traits of psychopathy, manipulation, and narcissism self-select into positions of dominance over the rest of us and have their worst qualities reinforced by the ways in which power corrupts. That’s not to suggest a false equivalence between democratic leaders and autocratic tyrants, however.

Why Goliaths Persist

In the span of a few thousand years, Goliaths went from a small number of tenuous city-states to covering nearly every square inch of the earth. Kemp identifies four critical, interrelated advantages Goliaths have over smaller, less centralized social structures that led to their dominance:

1. Babies: Goliaths have larger, denser populations than nomadic hunter-gatherers owing to intensified agriculture and looting grain from neighbors. Note that Goliaths’ larger populations do not mean healthier: nomadic hunter-gatherers are taller (an archaeological measure of getting enough food) than imperial citizens (and see “bacteria” below as well on that point). Nor are Goliaths’ populations happier overall: Goliaths often exploit their populations for conquest, throwing them into the meat-grinder of war, or immiserating labor.
2. Bombs: dominance hierarchies are preoccupied with conquest and expansion driven by the status-seeking of their ruling classes and need for larger populations to sustain wars and exploitative labor.
3. Bacteria: Goliaths’ dense populations are a hothouse for pathogens when compared with disperse hunter-gatherer bands. While this can exact a huge death toll on Goliaths themselves, the survivors are akin to living biological weapons when they come into contact with more disperse, vulnerable groups.
4. Barbarism: Goliaths exploit people (their own and neighbors) as well as the environment in the service of growth and domination.

Why Goliaths Collapse

While Goliaths as a type of social structure have come to dominate the Earth, individual Goliaths have a much shorter lifespan and inevitably collapse. The longest empire was the Byzantine (eastern Roman) lasting roughly 1,000 years, but most last far shorter. This is because Goliaths are fundamentally unsustainable (the “curse” of the book’s title):

1. Growing inequality: power begets more power (a positive feedback loop in systems terms), and the powerful grow increasingly out-of-touch with the immiserated populations they rule, which can lead to bottom-up rebellion.
   • Peter Turchin’s notion of elite overproduction fits in here, where there are more entrants vying for a place in the ruling class than there is room for them. A “wealth pump” effect channels ever-increasing wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes, causing the latter to grow in number and power. But when there are not enough high-status positions for them, elite infighting can lead Goliaths to fracture at the top from high-level coups and rebellions.
   • Corruption plays a role as well: greater inequality leads to greater impunity within the ruling class. Coupled with elite competition, you get a ruling class both incentivized and licensed to take more for themselves at the expense of the empire’s interests and preservation.
   • Elite conservatism: is another factor. Those who clearly benefit from the status-quo, despite signs of its growing instability, lobby against significant changes to avert collapse, whether out of fear of losing their position or a misplaced belief that their power will insulate them from the worse effects of collapse. History almost without exception proves them wrong.
   • Unequal societies make worse decisions: the “wisdom of crowds” is a well-documented phenomenon. As power becomes concentrated in fewer (and especially more self-interested) hands, Goliaths become worse at responding to disaster. Additionally in contemporary times, when ruling classes co-opt the media to secure their power and replace information with propaganda, even the wisdom of crowds is diminished as populations lose touch with reality.
2. Diminishing returns on extraction: larger states require ever-more resources to sustain while those resources get harder to come by over time (since the easily-available ones have already been obtained). This makes Goliaths more fragile even at the height of their apparent power: one drought, war, or disease away from collapse.

Ultimately, “Goliath’s curse” is a balancing feedback loop which halts unchecked growth through collapse.

Slaying Goliath

Given that we all live within Goliaths, how can we avoid their curse?

1. Make resources less lootable.
2. Increase exit options so states have to negotiate more with their citizens.
3. Use technology to support democracy and oversight of the powerful.
4. Knowledge. Only when we understand the oppressiveness of the dominance hierarchies organizing against us can we organize against them.

(Fundamentally this is an instance of the Tragedy of the Commons, right?)

Collapse of Goliaths isn’t universally bad

By the end, many Goliaths become so exploitative of their citizens that the majority who survive the collapse are better off. Along with the Western Roman empire which by the end taxed its citizens exorbitantly and offered little in return, Kemp gives the example of the fall of Somalia’s Barre regime in 1991, a regime characterized by extraction, violence, and elite self-interest. After its fall, those living under more-or-less stateless self-governance saw falling rates of poverty and infant and maternal mortality.

That said, Kemp hedges by suggesting a “Somalia-Denmark rule” whereby the more services a Goliath provides to its people and they more they depend on it, the more catastrophic its collapse. We should not assume that because the Barre state’s collapse was largely beneficial that the collapse of Denmark (or the United States) would be so.

Further Learning

• Nate Hagens’ interview with Kemp on The Great Simplification is a high-signal distillation of this 20-hour audiobook into a 2-hour interview