Previous posts have tried to do justice to the idea of collapse.
Luke Kemp, of Cambridge University, has just published a voluminous (almost 700
pages) book on the subject Goliath’s Curse – the history and future of societal collapse
(2025) which I find rather disappointing since, despite its subtitle, it doesn’t try to
summarise the previous work in the field.
I’ve extracted the following text from his Epilogue
OUR
FRAGILE FUTURE
We
live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a
pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality,
dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of
around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads. Since the invention of the
atom bomb the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear war at
least a dozen times.
The
climate change we face is an order
of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the
world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying,
which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years
ago. Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer
viruses at the speed of an internet connection.
The
better-known and more deeply studied threats
of nuclear war and climate change
are joined by new, more hypothetical technological terrors.
In
2023, hundreds of AI scientists and other luminaries (strangely
including the CEOs of the main companies building these new AI
systems, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google
DeepMind) released a statement warning against the risk of human
extinction from AI. They fear that an uncontrolled,
ultra-intelligent machine whose interests are not aligned with those
of humanity (or at least most of us) will either destroy or
enslave us. Other scholars, including biological scientists, have
warned of advances in bioengineering that could create doomsday
diseases – far more contagious and deadly than anything that has
ever existed. And those are just the present threats. Who knows what
new hazards rapid technological change could conjure in the coming
decades. The confluence of these different threats has led some to
call our current predicament the ‘metacrisis’, ‘the precipice’,
or a ‘global polycrisis’.
Decreasing
nuclear stockpiles, slashing carbon emissions, and making our
societies more democratic are all completely feasible, and doing so
in the long term will mean escaping these traps and digging up the
root causes of existential risk. We’ll need to do what few
societies have successfully done: kill Goliath.
Collapse
may seem inescapable. This is an illusion. Most of the challenges we
face are entirely solvable. If our
world falls apart in the cold of a nuclear winter or the unending
blaze of climate change, it won’t be because there was nothing we
could have done. There are many ways to reduce the risk of global
collapse, to defeat Goliath, and even actions that individuals can
take.
We
need to introduce open democracy, with deliberative
juries and assemblies creating national policies for governments
and providing oversight of corporations. If decision-makers are
randomly selected from society, we will no longer be selecting for
those who crave status and power or who rank higher in the dark
triad. The constant cycling through new citizens to make decisions
will also help ensure no one is in authority long enough (or holds
enough power) to be corrupted.
There
are many other options, such as banning the revolving door between
regulators and industry. Corporations
such as Exxon or the East India Company have been just as destructive
as empires, and firms today are less accountable and less democratic
than most states. Corporations
could similarly be democratized by reforming them into large-scale
worker cooperatives governed by workers alongside deliberative
juries, and with an overriding legal goal of providing social and
environmental benefits, not short-term returns to investors.
Levelling
political power won’t be enough. Even a deep democracy that
uses citizens’ assemblies and juries, as well as digital technology
to carry out regular direct votes, will eventually be undermined if
some people have billions of dollars with which to rig any system we
come up with. One could argue that we have democracy and massive
inequality in the world today, and that the two are not in tension.
It’s a mistaken idea. What we ordinarily call democracy – systems
in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by
political marketers and billionaire-owned media empires) vote every
four to five years 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.
It
is far more inclusive than most governments throughout history, but
that is a low bar compared to what is possible. Even this threadbare
democracy is being frayed by increasing wealth inequality. It is no
coincidence that (with a slight time lag) democracy started
backsliding after inequality began rising across the world in the
1970s. Inequality
in one form of power or another will eventually spill into others:
the rich buy elections, overly powerful generals launch coups, and
autocrats amass fortunes.
Wealth
becoming more unequal may be close to an iron law throughout history,
but reversing it is surprisingly easy. The simplest way is through
taxation. The
US had an income tax of above 90 per cent on the highest earners from
1944 through to 1963 (the highest rate in the US is now 37 per cent).
It didn’t lead to an economic bust. It actually helped to usher in
an economic golden age for the US. A highly progressive taxation
system should be combined with an even higher tax on wealth such as
land and stocks.
Other
measures include placing a cap on wealth, $10 million for example (a
level that is well beyond what any individual needs), or capping the
income of the highest earners within companies at five times that of
the lowest-paid worker.
Democratic
Control of Information and the Military; One
of the best ways to distribute the control of information is to break
up existing monopolies, specifically in big tech and the media. This
could mean creating new legislation as well as rigorously
implementing existing anti-trust tools, such as the Sherman Act and
Clayton Act in the US, which have already been used to block big
mergers.
Rebalancing
power will inevitably require increased protest and activism in the
coming decades. Yet governments have made a concerted recent effort
to curtail the right to protest, such as through the UK’s Police,
Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022, or the 323 different bills
that have been introduced in the US since 2017 that restrict the
right to protest, and even encourage violence against peaceful
protesters. Finding
ways to roll these back and unshackle concerned citizens will be
critical to levelling power and holding the Agents of Doom to
account.
This
is not a complete blueprint for solving our problems. Trying to foist
a vision of utopia on the world has never ended well. Instead, we
should democratize the world, level power, reduce Goliath fuel,
reduce existential risk, and see what world blossoms from this new
civilization.
Other
recommedations include
Don’t
Be a Dick; First, I propose a
simple pledge to not be a dick. This is a pledge to not work for,
invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that
significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work
for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel
company, or an arms manufacturer. No institution should be financing
our global descent, and no one should support one which does.
Be
a Democrat; Second, practise democracy. Democracy is not just a
form of government; it is a culture and a way of life. One that all
of us need to recapture. Be a democrat: don’t just vote every few
years, but join a union, join an activist group (while there is no
group fighting against all the sources of catastrophic risk, there
hopefully will be one soon), advocate for workplace democracy, and
discuss political matters in a productive way – whether it be
nuclear weapons or mass surveillance or climate collapse – with
friends and family members.
Vote
Against the Apocalypse; Third is voting. You are first and
foremost a citizen, not a consumer. While democracy is more than
voting, voting is a fundamental part of democratic practice in the
modern world. If you know about climate change, a nuclear winter,
and the other real risks to the survival of our species but base
your vote on who promises to cut your taxes, then you are culpable
for our current path towards self-destruction. It is a travesty that
no election to date has been decided by the candidates’ positions
on nuclear weapons and climate change. There is no reason to
contribute to that trend in the future.
Don’t
Be Dominated; Fourth is to
re-cultivate the counter-dominance intuitions that guided us through
the Palaeolithic. Oppose domination in all your relationships,
whether they be personal, family, or workplace. Whenever you come
across a hierarchy, whether it is based on wealth, gender, or age,
ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If
it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.
See also Collapse, you say?
Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Collapse You Say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022