Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.
He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.
For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. 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."
Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.
Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall
New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
31 Comments
If a society is stagnant and then it gets destroyed the society that comes after it may do better since it is starting over.
But that doesn’t benefit 99% of the people who are alive today. Most people who are alive today would die of starvation or violence.
can they fuck right off, please? I don’t have the lifetime to wait 300 years until modern dark ages end. yes there’s always a shining light at the end of the tunnel, but we pay with our dwindling existence … finish school and you’ll have a great career, toil your health away in a shitty job and you’ll have a comfortable retirement, get fired at 60 and be told you’re out of touch
Uh, is that the 99% of the people that were alive before the collapse, or the 99% that SURVIVED the collapse?
It’s a bit of a cheat to ignore decades and generation between the collapse and the declaration that now it’s better. It is much worse for a lot of people for a fairly long time. They say roughly the same thing about the Black Death but you can’t say the millions that died are better off.
This is the most hilarious Survivorship bias study I’ve seen in awhile. 99% of peasant farmers in Europe had better prices for the food they produced and were in high demand too when 2/3rds of them died during the plague.
I also doubt the entire premise of the study. Better off in what metric? No electricity, no modern convenience (they dont magically maintain themselves), less access to Healthcare, less access to modern sewage systems (pairs great with lack of Healthcare). There is a million holes in this because i feel that even a person living just above the poverty line would be worse off becoming a medieval level surf
I cant even fathom recovering from a total societal collapse on a global scale.
Like are we talking new world order meteorite type of shit or are we talking about overthrown of govenrment.
We’ve had and experience multiple societal collapses within bubbles of country regime changes. More often than not, it doesn’t turn out for the better.
Sorry, but I’d have to disagree. There’s no way societal collapse will benefit the whole as I believe we’re already past the point of no return thanks to technology (speaking in terms of medical and infrastructure).
The collapses we’ve seen were on a local scale. This will be on a planetary scale. 👍
This is stupid because it ignores all the death caused by collapse.
Yeah, even if maybe the middle age people were better fed (doubtful, and I feel like height is just due to Germanic genes naturally being taller.), their population was tiny compared with the huge Roman cities.
What happened? 75% of the people died.
What utter nonsense.
The western Roman empire had a population of about 75 million people.
After the collapse of the empire, the population of Western Europe shrank to less than 25 million over just a century of brutality and barbarism.
This study, while interesting in the context of studying ancient history, is completely unsuited to being applied to modern day life.
If modern society with its advanced industrial and agricultural technology collapsed more than half the population of the world, some 4+ billion people, would die within a year as food supplies stopped coming and anarchy took over.
So yeah, Mad Max and the wastelanders would be very egalitarian, but they would be walking on the bones of billions of children.
Ancient Rome was an extraction based empire, where the economy was basically agrarian, and labour and agricultural products were just funneled toward the center of the empire.
We live in a global industrial society, where most output arises from long fragile supply chains and extreme specialization of labour.
These are not the same. If Rome collapses, and you’re out in the provinces, you stop having Roman armies kidnap people and tax crops. If the global economy collapses, we stop getting fertilizer, tractor parts, and antibiotics.
Edit: his claim about post-Roman populations is also at best contested. For example, the roman province of Britain dropped from around 4 million to just 1 million people, with apparently completely depopulated cities. It had multiple causes, including climate, disorganization, pandemics, and more random warfare. But isn’t that what we would expect to face?
Jesus Christ, I haven’t read anything so stupid in a long time. Some examples of the really deep thought process involved:
>The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of the solutions proposed
>His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,”
(apparently, civilization is countries that never conduct wars, which I don’t think have existed on this planet yet)
>“First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says.
And that is the jewel on the crown that showcases the extreme ignorance of the author. History shows the exact opposite – monarchies are the most resilient societies, while democracies have barely ever existed for prolonged periods of time. Especially direct democracies at large scales are usually the fastest way to collapse any society.
>We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species
I don’t think this even requires a comment
If we collapse, who will be working on fixing the plastic/chemical pollution and climate change? Those problems don’t need us to grow anymore. The amount of plastic we’ve already produced plus fragmentation cascade means lots more microplastics. The loss of ice sheets is mechanical in many instances now. If we collapse we’re just going to lose response time on those events no? I guess microplastics in the brain are already pretty egalitarian though.
OP is actually stupid and outed themselves as a neo-feudalism supporter, the fall of the Roman Empire led to nearly a thousand years of technological stagnation and feudalism, also widely known as the medieval ages. Also an accelerationist too advocating for the fall of western civilization. Millions of people will die and it won’t be a nice thing for us or our children to experience or survive. Don’t let yourself be gaslit. Cheers.
And how many people did not live past the collapse? How many years, decades or generations did the collapse take? How much knowledge was lost in the collapse?
I mean yeah, phoenix rising out of the ashes and all that, but aren’t we forgetting a pretty important bit where a bunch of people are killed between the point of collapse and the point of things getting better? Personally I am not much a fan of the way things are but I’d like to find a way to change them without endangering literally everyone who doesn’t have the money to build a private doomsday megabunker complex
Wait we’re now entering the era where “Society has fallen — Billions must die” is entering mainstream public consciousness?
That’s one hell of a shift.
The trains will run on time for the survivors… This is why pure logic reasoning is dangerous.
I don’t find this a particularly good argument. It would be akin to arguing that the improvement in social mobility post the 2 world wars means that we should advocate for conflagrations to ‘thin the herd’. This ignores of course the fact that A) The wars themselves take place over a long period of time and lock everybody into the war effort. B) It ignores that the wars are immensely destructive and traumatising for those going through them. C) Most importantly the benefits are only available to those not killed or maimed in the process.
To respond more specifically to the claims made here, most collapses I am aware of (ie the Bronze Age Collapse and the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire), took a great deal longer than one lifetime to occur. The people may have been more equal after the collapse but they were still experiencing a considerable amount of turmoil and suffering. Furthermore, things as simple as writing may have totally disappeared. Imagine losing access to modern medicine or a functioning justice system? I’m not certain how much fun it would be to have to return to settling our own grudges with reprisals or if very lucky being able to plead for the local ‘Hetman’ or ‘Basileus’ to intervene and stop the local psychopath from torching your crops. Equality is important but it’s not the only metric that you’d use to decide what the quality of life in a society is.
>For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility.
yes, because the total number of humans on the planet was measured in the very low millions, possibly even low 100’s of thousands.
we aren’t going to be living a peaceful, nomadic post collapse existence with 8 billion people on the planet.
want to know how is likely to do well under those circumstances? the people who can afford the most guns and best stocked bunkers. spoiler alert: this probably doesn’t include you …
Can we just choose policies that benefit all of us and skip the whole collapsed society part???
Yes, those who survived the fall of Rome were taller and heavier. But before that, half of them starved to death.
All other things being equal, a collapse of nitrogen fertilizer production will starve about 3 to 4 billion people. This is without counting other farming inputs missing, and the collapse of agricultural machinery and trade networks.
And this time living standards have grown far above substitence for far more than 1% of the population, so even those who survive stand to lose immensely.
Well in that case the MIT prediction that societal collapse will happen by 2042 can’t come soon enough
This is along the lines of war can be an economic good via depopulation. That’s been shown to be true but it’s obviously borderline taboo. Equity and prices are freed up. I think a soft measure of that will happen over a few decades in lieu of conventional war and alternative to nuclear.
Seems like a reach to me. The transaction costs of societal collapse have to be pretty high. The only metrics mentioned here are that people were taller and healthier. They were also arguably less free and less educated; isn’t that why we call post Roman Europe the dark ages? Also, Is their selection/survivor bias in that? If lots of people die in a societal collapse, then you get a resource windfall for the survivors, kind of like how the Black Death raised living standards in the long term – but you’d be hard pressed to argue that the Black Death itself was good.
Accelerationism is particularly hazardous copium consumed by blithering idiots.
What do you know.. another study that’s not repeatable and confirms already set beliefs.
How many people died during those collapses? Does the gain really outweigh that? I’m not sure accelerationist theory like this is really healthy.
Really poor timing to fall into authoritarianism given how much we could be doing to prepare for the coming changes in global food and water supply.
Just imagine if Gore had won….
We’d be eating sustainably sourced manbearpig burgers
When everyone is dead, the 1 survivor has his benefits increased by 1000 times, Horay!
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea has never lived off the grid before.