Goliath’s Curse: Why Civilizations Collapse and What It Means for Our Future

A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB’S MUST-READ BOOK - A radical retelling of human history through the cycle of societal collapse--＂a Cassandra-like warning about the path today’s oligarchs have set [and] a sweeping and dire vision of a world on the brink.＂ (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

＂Deeply sobering and strangely inspiring. . . . Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins.＂ --Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus

＂Anyone who doubts the importance of this conversation hasn’t been paying attention.＂ --Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

12,000 years ago, human history changed forever when the egalitarian groups of hunter-gathering humans began to settle down and organize themselves into hierarchies. The few dominated the many, seizing control through violence. What emerged were ＂Goliaths＂ large societies built on a collection of hierarchies that are also terrifyingly fragile, collapsing time after time across the world. Today, we live in a single, global Goliath--one that is precariously interdependent--under threat from nuclear war, climate change, and the existential risks of AI. The next collapse may be our last.

In Goliath’s Curse, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy on our species, from the earliest cities to the collapse of modern states like Somalia. Drawing on historical databases and the latest discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, he uncovers groundbreaking revelations:

• More democratic societies tend to be more resilient.
• A modern collapse is likely to be global, long-lasting, and more dire than ever before.
• Collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred. It’s possible we’re living through one now.
• Collapse has often had a more positive outcome for the general population than for the 1%.
• All Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise.

As useful for finding a way forward as it is for diagnosing our precarious present, Goliath’s Curse is a stark reminder that there are both bright and dark sides to societal collapse--that it is not necessarily a reversion to chaos or a dark age--and that making a more resilient world may well mean making a more just one.

LUKE KEMP is a senior research associate at the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study, and a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and Darwin College at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on understanding the deep history and future of extreme global risks. Kemp has advised the World Health Organization and multiple international institutions, and his work has been covered by media outlets such as the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.