Anyone interested in the historical context here should read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. He explained this in 1992.

This was a really good read, thank you for posting it. I too find it hard to hold out hope, but i'll be fucked if I go out quietly. Valid messages all around

Interesting how long an article you can write without mentioning overshoot even once.

We’re not going to make, are we? ‘People’, I mean.

I agree. Unfortunately the people who benefit from the current power structure have the most power in order to maintain it. I don’t see these people accepting juries or caps on their assets.

There are also often violent repercussions to protesting, and coups tend to just destabilise a region and set up the next dictatorship.

Humans just can’t seem to stop being dicks

Yeah, the problem is we've been kept powerless over big issues. When we found out about oil companies poisoning the earth, we SHOULD have had the power to put the whole company on trial. Instead they said our elected officials were the only option, and they did nothing. That's an excellent point. We're told we're powerless, and kept that way... So they can be richer.

I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Luke Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

This has always been the answer, and will always continue to be. You have to engrave this in the kind of every generation to avoid it. There lies the problem.

Interesting article. The author of the book is Luke Kemp but he sure looks like a Chad to me.

There is a thing we could do to tackle the existence of billionaires in a world stricken by poverty...

Throughout history society has collapsed over and over again either by mismanagement or by overthrow of the ruling class. It's a natural cycle that we seem to be moving away from- Revolt has been mischaracterized and criminalized in an attempt to maintain the status quo. But things weren't always like this. edit: I'm not advocating for anything, just stating some observations

Years ago - I believe in one of Dostoyevsky's novels, but I haven't been able to run it down - I read a wonderful allegory on this topic.

The basic gist of it, told nowhere near as well as it was originally:

Once upon a time, there was a peaceful village of farmers. They went through their days, tending their fields and caring for their livestock and each other and simply living.

Every few years though, a group of bandits would ride down out of the nearby hills and attack tge village and take all they could carry of the farmers' crops and livestock.

Then one year, an entirely different group of bandits rode down from a different part of the hills, and they attacked the village and took everything.

So when, a few months later, the customary bandits rode down to attack, they found the village already devastated and everything they would've stolen already gone.

The bandits knew they couldn't allow that - they depended on their theft of the villagers' goods for their own livelihood. So they went back to their camp and, over a hard winter, thought about what to do.

The next spring - long before the harvest, so long before their customary attack on the villagers, they rode down and they approached the village elders with a proposal.

Instead of attacking the villagers and taking everything, they would settle for just taking half of everything, and in exchange they would protect the villagers from being attacked by those other bandits and having everything taken.

And the villagers, with no other hope - being allowed to keep hslf of the fruits of their labors was at least better than losing everything - grudgingly agreed.

And thus was government born.

Changing the title of the article isn't helpful

I really like Luke Kemp, I think he's doing great work. His episode on Nate Hagen's podcast was excellent (if a bit depressing)

It's interesting, his whole terminology of "Goliath states" is essentially a re-framing of the emergence of class society from Ur-communism as already theorised in the 19th century. He must have been aware of this after working on a scholarly work like this for seven years.

Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be “seen, stolen and stored”, Kemp says, unlike perishable foods.

[...]

The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel “caged land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants.

[...]

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”

[...]

All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and this is because of inequality.” Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.

[...]

Instead, it is the 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, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

[...]

He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.

I can't help to see this as "I want to expand on basic class conflict theory, but without using the bad 'commie words'" I'd love to see how its framed in the actual source, when not summarised by the article. His demands for a radical transformation are rather modest, when viewed as-is - more democracy and a wealth tax capping wealth at roughly 10 million. But sadly that already needs enormous shifts and global taking of power from the ruling class, and at least in the article itself it leaves open the questions of how production will then be organised, which is one of the main reasons communist theories developed around democratic self-organisation of the working class originally, which could transcend the cycle of accumulation -> reinvestment -> more consolidated accumulation. but I wonder how aware he is of all this, after all, he adds something I can only read as a reference to Mark Fisher, or to Ẑiẑek:

“It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.

“Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we’re built for.”

Even though he quite vehemently tries to say he clearly doesn't have a left-wing model of history:

Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. “There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,” he says. “Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That’s just making our economy more honest.”

Personally, I am pessimistic about any outlook, that wants a world still with corporations but just curtailing them, because I always see the material dynamics of accumulation putting exactly the kind of "Dark Triad" people he is talking about into power. But I think I understand and can definitely see value in his position. Was an interestind read, thank you for sharing!