Is Society About to Collapse?

The climate crisis, the rise of AI and the cost of living - do you feel like our society is on the brink of falling apart? Dan is joined by Dr Luke Kemp, Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, who has spent seven years analysing 400 societies over five millennia to discover what has led to the collapse of Ancient civilisations in places like Mesoamerica, China, Egypt and across Europe. He explains the impact inequality, leaders with traits of 'the dark triad' and environmental factors have on a historic society's survival. He identifies what changes we could make to stop it from happening to us, too. You can learn more in Luke's book 'The History and Future of Societal Collapse' Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday, 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career, as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/. You can also get tickets for the live show of 'The Ancients' here - https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:16Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up!

• 1:17Speaker 02

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• 2:05Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. People are getting nervous out there. It feels like there are headwinds. We are facing headwinds. There are wars. There has even been the talk of breaching the nuclear taboo. The taboo against using nuclear weapons, which has held, thank goodness, for 80 years. But Putin has talked about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Just beyond terrifying that we could see those deployed again on battlefields. We have great power rivalry. We have a climate crisis. We have a migrant crisis. People are moving around. We have a cost of goods. Things are expensive. We've got lots of crises. And it's making people think about collapse. It's making people think about those civilizations that have gone before that have collapsed.

• 2:47Dan Snow?

  Well, into that mental space galloped Dr Luke Kemp. He has just written a book called Goliath's Curse, and he set the internet on fire when this book dropped because he spent seven years analysing the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over five millennia. He is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. I bet that's a cheery common room, grabbing a quick coffee and a little break in their research projects. He'll come together and have a chat, compare some notes on existential risk. Anyway, so he is a professional analyser of historic civilizational collapse, and he's got some really interesting and provocative ideas and views on what that history has taught him.

• 3:31Dan Snow?

  And he identifies inequality as a key driver of collapse. Why do we humans live in these hierarchical societies? Why do we do what the people on top tell us to do? And is it even good for us? Were we taller and more muscly and healthier, living in flatter, more democratic, simpler societies? The kind of societies that many historians traditionally have written off as unsophisticated? Maybe they had it right all along. Anyway, here is a conversation with Dr Luke Kemp. Enjoy.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  ...

• 4:22Dan Snow?

  Luke, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  Dan, thank you for having me.

• 4:26Dan Snow?

  Does every civilization eventually collapse? Is that just something we should expect? Is it baked in?

• 4:32Speaker 06

  No, I don't think so. There are many civilizations of the past which have merely transformed rather than collapsed. It's important to bear in mind that collapse is a more dramatic occurrence here. It's worthwhile taking a step back and actually specifying what we mean when we say societal collapse. When an economy breaks down, we call it economic collapse or a depression. When a population drops dramatically in a short period of time, we call it a bust or a population collapse. When a state falls apart, we call it a state failure or a state collapse. When all of your different systems of power fall apart quickly in an enduring fashion together, we call that a societal collapse. It's rarer, but it has happened quite a few times throughout human history.

• 5:18Dan Snow?

  Give us a couple of examples that you think, obviously, we're going to unpack them, but give us some of the ones that you've found it stimulating to work with. Some of the examples of collapse.

• 5:26Speaker 06

  There are many classic ones. For instance, the collapse of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Triple Alliance, shortly after they met the Spanish in 1521. There's the collapse, of course, of the Western Roman Empire. It's apparently the case that most men tend to think about the Western Roman Empire at least once a week. So that collapse is pretty well known, I think. And there's also things like the classical Lola Meyer, who persisted from roughly 150 C through to the Terminal Period in roughly 900 to 1100 C. And there's so many other smaller ones that people haven't heard of as well. One of my favorites is Cahokia, which was the first city of the United States. It was a city of around about 15,000 people approximately 1,000 years ago.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  It's approximately 500 kilometers southwest of modern day Chicago. It's a city built around 200 different mounds, the largest of which is taller than the White House. That too, after a space of 100 years or so, collapsed. So it collapses, despite the fact that every civilization ends, is still a surprisingly frequent phenomenon throughout human history.

• 6:35Dan Snow?

  But let's break down the reasons for that collapse. And obviously hugely important to talk about environment and geography. Before we get there, maybe, what are the poison pills? What are the things within that idea of civilization itself? That make those collapses so abrupt and dramatic? Is it just something about the artificiality of us? We're a hunter gathering kind of nomadic species. The minute we all get together and try and organize ourselves and build hierarchies and stay in the same place. Are we doing something in there which inevitably contains the seeds for its own destruction?

• 7:08Speaker 06

  Absolutely. There is a reason the book is called Goliath's Curse. Goliaths are essentially my rebranding, if you will, of civilization. I believe that civilization has always been a term of propaganda. When one talks about collapse, the first thing you have to talk about is what is collapsing? And civilization, of course, is the word that springs to mind. Yet, there's never been any good definition of civilization. The definitions range from having a checklist of things like long distance trade, which all hunter gatherers have, writing, which some big empires like the Inca, for instance, didn't have, they had the Quipu instead. So a checklist doesn't quite work. And another definition has been an advanced culture,

• 7:51Speaker 06

  which is about as biased towards indigenous peoples as it is vague and unuseful. I think the problem is that when we think about civilization, it's very difficult to look it in the eyes and actually acknowledge what changed roughly 5,000 years ago, at least in the Near East, in Egypt. And that's the emergence of big dominance hierarchies. Ways of organizing society in which a small group or even individual essentially controls and extracts resources from everyone else using the threat of violence. As you mentioned, for 300,000 years, we largely evolved as nomadic egalitarian groups. And suddenly changing to a system in which we're in great inequality and high levels of violence,

• 8:36Speaker 06

  that's enormous change and one that would naturally never quite sat well with us. We're not evolved to live in such lopsided violent communities. And that growing inequality tends to eventually take a toll. And this is something you see across most cases of collapse historically. So I mentioned the Lowland Classical Maya.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  The Maya, their collapse is usually attributed to a big drought. And it's true, roughly during their collapse, a large scale drought did hit different regions of the Yucatan. But that environmental stress isn't a full explanation. There's parts of the southwest, the lowlands, where there's no signs of environmental stress. And yet, they still collapsed. There's still very high signs of warfare. And there's areas which were hit by the drought, but didn't collapse at all. Their cities were more or less remained intact. We need to have a more complete explanation. It's worthwhile taking a step back here and thinking through, what is the risk of collapse? And when we talk about risk, it's basically four things. It's the threat, so think about a tsunami and something's going to do you damage.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  Your vulnerability, so in the case of a tsunami, the fact you don't have infrastructure to withstand it. Your response, whether you run away or not. And your exposure, the fact that you actually hit by the tsunami in the first place. And what I've found across all these cases, including the Maya, is they were growing more unequal before the collapse. And inequality, we know, has a whole bunch of very pernicious knock on effects. It's first of all correlated with higher levels of political instability. It's also correlated with higher levels of corruption. And we see this in many cases, both in the case of the West of an empire and the Han dynasty, where it appears that local elites were often shielding and hiding peasants from taxation, often potentially up to millions of peasants,

• 10:29Speaker 06

  and taxing them locally and privately instead, which is a pretty large scale form of tax evasion. Apart from that, as you get growing levels of inequality, you tend to get this situation in which there's also a very large growing level of elites. Essentially, society becomes more top heavy. And as you get more and more elites competing for a small number of high status positions, such as a throne, you tend to get more coups, more civil wars, more rebellions. And additionally, as you have a more top heavy society, things like land, et cetera, become more expensive. And that tends to lead to the poor people becoming increasingly poor and immiserated.

• 11:10Speaker 06

  In short, growing wealth inequality just tends to make a society innately more fragile and vulnerable, until eventually it's knocked off by a series of disasters, different hazards, whether it be a drought, invaders, or disease. And we see that in the case of the Maya, we see it in the case of the Western Empire, of the Han Dynasty, and many others throughout history.

• 11:32Dan Snow?

  Do we have to have someone in charge? Do we have to have religions to keep us in some kind of order? Are those essential in civilizations? Are there any civilizations you can point to? And again, we're cautious about using that word, of course, but are there any of these civilizations that you can point to where there has been a flatter structure socially and politically and religiously from the outset?

• 11:53Speaker 06

  No, I don't think so. I'd be remarkably surprised if a species that survived the Ice Age because it was egalitarian, highly interconnected and highly cooperative, does not have the capability of organizing itself in non-hierarchical manner. To the contrary, we evolved to cooperate at a large scale without hierarchy. And there are examples of this. So one I find very fascinating is the Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappan, which began roughly the same time as the first states in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, so Urk and the First Dynasty, but they look remarkably different. So approximately 5,000 years ago, you had a collection of different cities spanning across the Indus

• 12:38Speaker 06

  Valley in modern-day Pakistan. And some of these cities were vast, up to 40,000 people in the case of Mahendadaro. Yet, we don't see any signs of rulers or even an elite class. There's plumbing, so it actually had incredibly sophisticated infrastructure for their time. They additionally seem to have big communal bathhouses and other big communal structures. They, of course, had cities. They had trade between the cities and trade all the way through to Mesopotamia. Yet again, we don't see any signs of kings. There was once one small figurine, which many archaeologists were referring to as the priest king, because they assumed that in order to have such a sophisticated, large-scale

• 13:18Speaker 06

  civilization, you must have a king. Yet, there's no other signs of inequality or hierarchy. And there are other examples. There's also the case of Teotihuacan, which was a large-scale city in the basin of Mexico. And that existed approximately from the kind of turn of millennium through to 500 from 50 CE. It began unequal. It began with the usual markers of a Goliath, so things like mass human sacrifice, glorious big temples. But there seems to be some kind of eternal rebellion. And after that, you don't see any persistent signs of large-scale inequality. You don't see any depictions of rulers. It seems to once again be existing as a fairly egalitarian community.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  And that's a city of approximately 100,000 people. So I think we're certainly capable of organising ourselves in a more voluntary, flat manner. And we even see today, Wikipedia works very well. And interestingly, Wikipedia, when it first began, had a competitor, which was Encyclopedia Britannica, which Microsoft funded for $1 billion. Yet the crowdsourced, flatter alternative actually won out in the end. Hence, I think there's loads of reasons to believe that we can organise ourselves more democratically and more voluntarily with less violence. It has unfortunately just been one of the most successful myths passed down from the

• 14:44Speaker 06

  very first states, is that we need to have rulers in order to organise ourselves. Another point of evidence against this is that originally, many archaeologists believed that you essentially needed rulers to do grand projects like large-scale monuments or irrigation systems. Yet increasingly, we find that irrigation systems and even large-scale monuments often preceded the emergence of these very first hierarchies. We see that in Mesopotamia, we see it in the case of Tiwanaku, one of the earliest cities and states in South America. They already had things like irrigation and big cities before the elites emerged. The elites essentially hijacked the accomplishments of everyday people.

• 15:28Dan Snow?

  Why, for all the examples you've cited, why can we all think of so many examples where the elites have immiserated, enslaved, terrified, and amassed astonishing power? Why is the deeply depressing nature of our human story, one of young men being dragged away from family homes and fields to go and fight distant enemies they've never met before to the death, and indeed strangely, often willingly do so? What is it about us that our social relations have been hacked and we are, too many of us, so comfortable living in one of those deeply unequal hierarchical states? How does that happen?

• 16:04Speaker 06

  There are two important sets of root causes. One is psychological. It's hidden deep in our skulls. The second is environmental. It's a question of what changed roughly 12,000 years ago when we exited the Ice Age, where we were these nomadic egalitarian groups, and we entered the Holocene, where the Earth warmed? Let's start with the environmental. Once the Earth warmed, it allowed for both the intensification of agriculture, which meant the domestication of both animals, but also many plant species, in particular, a set of different grasses. The story for a long period of time was that, once you had a big surplus enabled by agriculture,

• 16:48Speaker 06

  you, de facto, need to have elites to once again organise everyone. Again, I don't think that's the case, and interestingly, there's lots of evidence which points against that. For instance, we have numerous hunter-gatherer groups, such as on the Pacific West Coast of North America, in both Canada and California, hunter-gatherers who organise themselves hierarchically. They compete through these big feasts, they do slave raids and conduct warfare, they kind of look like a set of kingdoms from the medieval ages. And yet, they were hunter gatherers and didn't have really big surpluses. And we also have cases such as Papua New Guinea where you have agriculture, you have surplus for thousands of years, yet they never develop a state.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  So Papua New Guinea had agriculture roughly the same time as Egypt, so approximately 7,000 years ago. The difference was Papua New Guinea had agriculture in the form of banana and taro, while Egypt had it primarily in the form of barley and wheat. The difference in crops makes a huge difference in social structure. Papua New Guinea never develops a pharaoh, a set of pyramids, or any kind of large-scale hierarchy. And I think that's because of the crops. When you look at taro and banana, they can't be easily stored. They tend to persist usually about six months at best. They can also be hidden.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  So once a taro is ripe, you can actually leave in the ground for a prolonged period of time. In contrast, all the different original civilizations or states of the world, so in China, they had the Shang dynasty approximately 4,000 years ago. In the case of Egypt, you had the First Dynasty 5,000 years ago. Uruk in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. Monta Alban, which is around about 300 BCE in Mesoamerica. And Tiwanaku, which is roughly 700 CE in South America. And the commonality across all of those places is they had access to grains that were easily seen, stolen, and stored. So think about wheat.

• 18:57Speaker 06

  Once you harvest it, you can keep it for decades at a time. It also has to be harvested at a very particular period, and it advertises that for its high stalks, which makes it very easily for a tax collector to come by and demand it. Additionally, on top of what I call lootable resources, these resources that can be easily seen, stolen, and stored, is the fact that you often had more monopolized weapons, weapons that can be easily used by one group to dominate others. So in the case of the Near East, before the emergence of the first states, you both see the emergence of warfare. But more importantly, you see bronze metallurgy a couple of centuries beforehand, which means the use of bronze-held swords and axes. And you see the same thing in China.

• 19:41Speaker 06

  You don't get the Shang dynasty popping up until the first bronze-held swords and axes emerge. And on top of that is what I call caged land, which is essentially land and geography which restricts the ability for people to exit and to run away from more authoritarian structures. Mesopotamia in Greek means the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. In Egypt, it's cordoned off between the Red Sea and the Nile River. These three different things, lootable resources, monopolisable weapons and caged land, explain why you see lives or civilizations popping up in these different areas, but not in other areas which had agriculture.

• 20:24Speaker 06

  It also explains why you see these hierarchical hunter-gatherers. In the case of the West Coast, they had access to salmon, big runs of salmon, which they would then smoke and store. In short, it became a lootable resource that you could kind of build a hierarchy upon. All of this points towards history largely being a story of organised crime. We do tend to think of the class, the West Roman Empire, as the fall from a golden age and an absolute catastrophe. Yet, when you look at things like human height, it actually tells a different story. So, in osteoarchaeology, the study of human bones and skeletons, height is often used as a good overall biophysical indicator of someone's health.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  In short, taller skeletal tends to mean more calories and more protein and a lack of thymine and disease. After the fall of the West Roman Empire, so, I mean, people vary in terms of when they date this, but kind of roughly the late 5th century. Interestingly, you tend to see skeletons actually get taller with less bone lesions and less dental caries. In short, their bones are stronger and they have less holes in their teeth. They're overall healthier. There's a couple of different explanations here. The obvious one people point to is what they call survivor bias or survivor effect,

• 21:46Speaker 06

  which is so many people died that there was a lot more resources left over for everyone else and there were far fewer workers, hence they could bargain for higher wages. That may have played some role, but first of all, it's really difficult to actually know how many people died in the case of the fall of the Western Empire. Often, this is more about displacement and human movement, like in the case of modern day civil wars, where roughly 20 to 30 times more people move than die. And secondly, is you see a whole bunch of benefits even when you don't have large scale population collapse. A good example of this is in 1991, the Bahre regime in Somalia falls apart.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  And a decade later, basically, every single quality of life indicator has improved. Maternal mortality drops by 30%. Infant mortality drops by 24%. And extreme poverty drops by approximately 20%. And this isn't just a story of East Africa is getting better as a whole and Somalia is hence benefiting. Somalia does far better than neighbours around it. And similarly with Rome, it's not just simply that people get taller after the fall of Rome. The Roman Empire seems to have been bad in general of people's health. People outside the empire tended to be taller, hence the trope of the muscle-bound big German barbarian. It was kind of true to the Romans, they actually would have seemed remarkably tall

• 23:15Speaker 06

  and big. And even when you look at growth in heights prior to Rome, it was increasing quite rapidly before the rise of the empire. And that rise of the empire actually causes heights to start to slow down and eventually stagnate. So in general, the Roman Empire just wasn't very good for people's health. And it's worthwhile bearing in mind the sheer savagery of the empire as well. It's easy to look at the aqueducts and the great monuments and think of this as a kind of high point of civilisation. Yet Rome was a place where you could see gangs of armed men selling women to slavery and crucifying people. That's something you can see in the modern world, but it's done by ISIS in Syria and Iraq. And we tend to view that a little bit differently.

• 24:00Speaker 06

  But in short, collapse often had numerous benefits. People often got taller afterwards. You see that not just the case of the Rome, but also in the case of the late Bronze Age collapse, roughly 1177 BCE. People seemed to get taller afterwards. And interestingly, the empires that are least affected actually seem to have increasing rates of poverty, at least when you look at burial remains and burial goods. So in short, the regimes of the past were often so predatory that sometimes having them fall apart was a net benefit for much of the population.

• 24:36Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow's History here. More after this.

• 24:46Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 25:27Dan Snow?

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• 26:11Dan Snow?

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• 26:40Speaker 01

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1800 Granger, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Everybody listen up.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 27:49Dan Snow?

  But Luke, who's going to build the triumphal arches that we're then going to celebrate? And this is the problem, I suppose, you have when you're preaching this, is you're coming at the end of an unbroken tradition of history tellers who are drawn from those elites. They are sometimes literally the politicians, the leaders themselves, but they're often the cousins and the scholarly second son. The whole of our sort of historical canon in a way celebrates and elevates these so-called civilizations, don't they? None of those er historians are talking about quality of life for actual everyday people in the societies they're describing.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  Precisely. One of the problems we have is that we have a 1% view of history. As you mentioned, most of history was marked by only a very small class of people who could write. And those writers were almost always in the employ of either the richest or of the kings. And additionally, all the things that tend to last are essentially signs of elite lifestyle and architecture. So whether it be grand monumental buildings, great cities, et cetera. And yet, even at the peak of Rome, roughly 90 to 95% of people lived rurally, which meant most of their structures would have been bi-degradable, things like wood. Even though we tend to break up history into the Iron Age and the Bronze Age or the Copper Age,

• 29:08Speaker 06

  most people weren't using large amounts of copper, bronze, or iron. Those were primarily elite items. Instead, most of history has actually been the Wood Age. But again, wood is bi-degradable. Hence, we almost always tend to see both the rise and fall of empires. We tend to see collapse through the eyes of its greatest victims, the elites. One thing I find fascinating is when you actually look at some of the texts, what are called "levitation literature", which is essentially when writers of future regime look on the collapse of the past one and write about it. And this can be incredibly telling. One example is the "Abominations of Ippua",

• 29:50Speaker 06

  which was a collection of poems written at least decades after the first intermediate period in Egypt, which is basically the first kind of collapse of the Egyptian dynasties. And what's really striking here is that the poems spend less time talking about how bad things are and more time complaining about how the social hierarchy has been inverted.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  I'll see if I can quickly recall some of the lines here. So I think it goes, "The corn of Egypt is common property. The poor man has attained to the state of nine gods. He who could not make a sarcophagus for himself is now the possessor of a tomb. Behold, noble ladies are now in the rafts. While he who could not sleep even on walls is now the possessor of a bed. Servants spoke freely, the nobles lamented, and the poor rejoiced." That doesn't sound particularly apocalyptic to me. But it was clearly something which the writers later abhorred and they thought was terrible. And of course, they tended to equate this scenario of collectively produced food being distributed collectively

• 31:00Speaker 06

  as being an absolute catastrophe, being an unrivaled cosmic blunder of sorts. And I think that's worthwhile always bearing in mind is that because we're not involved to be in lopsided societies and dominance hierarchies, they've always required really strong stories, what I call stories of subjugation, to justify why the dominance hierarchy is there. And of course, we see this in the past, all the way from the idea that the king is either representative of the gods or is a god themselves, through to the idea of the priests control the weather, which is the kind of leading theory for how the original priest class of Cahokia justified their rule.

• 31:42Speaker 06

  But we don't really have good evidence that the rules of the past were particularly good coordinators or particularly skilled. It's actually a great example of Ramses II, who's obviously incredibly well-known. He paints himself as being this remarkably astute tactician and Rambo-like soldier. And yet, when we actually look at the archaeological evidence of his most famous battle, the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittite Empire, it seems like he totally messed up and was defeated. But he goes back and he carves into the stones so deeply over the top of other murals that you basically can't get rid of it, again, painting himself as the great conqueror, invictor.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  So we have to bear in mind that our vision of the past is always manipulated by the most powerful the time. It is by and large frequently relic of propaganda.

• 32:33Dan Snow?

  We have a lively, little, tiny subset of that debate here in the UK about the 1970s, in which it's reasonably clear that it wasn't great to be fabulously wealthy in Britain. And it's then often described in literature as sort of drab and going a bit backwards. But as you know, there's some really interesting economic history going, actually, that was a pretty good time, in fact, if you were a little bit lower down in the terms of income brackets. But there are people who don't commission glitzy artwork and have a public platform to talk about those experiences. So the issue, I suppose, is that civilizations, science can happen and engineering can happen in those spaces as well.

• 33:17Dan Snow?

  And we've seen in the last 250 years, particularly, some, obviously, game-changing medical science, engineering, for good and evil. We've also put a tonne of gas in our environment that is seemingly leading us on the road to catastrophic breakdown. But how do we best think about the good things that can come as a result of these hierarchical structures, universities funded by big endowments and rich patrons supporting artists and thinkers in the 18th century? How can we think about preserving the advantages that we have gained from living in a settled civilization with the sort of stuff that you are learning and helping us understand?

• 34:01Speaker 06

  I think it's important to think about, when is progress actually genuinely incurred? And there's different ways of thinking about progress here. One is, as I mentioned, human height. And the story there is fairly simple. The uptake of agriculture is an absolute disaster for human health and heights decrease by up to a few inches in some cases. And more or less stay stagnant at roughly 168 centimeters, there's some variation across time. So as mentioned, sometimes collapses can increase height. The Black Death, interestingly, there's some debate over this and how much, but it does seem to increase human height afterwards. And that in large part seems to be because, as mentioned, workers become richer relative

• 34:43Speaker 06

  to landlords and have more bargaining power afterwards. But again, there's a relative stagnation until the, after the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, despite thousands of years of technological progress, it seems like real wages don't really change that much. So in short, there's not a huge difference between the standard of living of an Egyptian peasant 7,000 BCE versus an English peasant in 1600. That's despite the adoption of things like the iron plough, watermills, windmills, et cetera. And that appears to be both because you have a growing population, but more importantly, because all the surplus that is created is usually taken by elites.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  And even when we think of the Industrial Revolution, things don't actually get better just with technology. So after the Industrial Revolution, in the heartland of empire in England, human height actually decreases and life expectancy drops as well. It's not until you start to have the rise of unions and mass enfranchisement, and additionally, the adoption of welfare policies, often in response to World War II and the large amount of leveling and destruction of capital that happened, as well as people demanding more from their states because they were fighting en masse for them, that you start to see human height increasing, you start to see all these vast improvements in human health.

• 36:07Speaker 06

  And the same goes for many other countries around the world. It's not just simply technology that happens, it's when you start to have the fruits of technology widely shared and dispersed because of mass mobilization and because of shared struggle. Hence, this isn't just about technology, it's about power. And I don't think that technology de facto leads to more prosperity unless you have shared power as well. So if you want to have all the good things of the modern world, I like renewable energy, I like trains, I like vaccines, I love sanitation, it's one of the best things we ever invented. But I'm not really a big fan of nuclear weapons or killer robots, or even things like SUVs, marketing cigarettes.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Those are all pretty socially destructive. And I think one of the best ways forward here is just simply putting our production under democratic control. And we have very good evidence that when you have citizens, assemblies and juries, so a random selection of everyday people who are informed by experts and then deliberate until they make a decision, they tend to make pretty good decisions. This was an approach that was used to solve the debate of abortion in Ireland. It also came up with an incredibly sophisticated and progressive climate policy package in France, which unfortunately President Macron then knocked back. And we have numerous experiments which has this works. And importantly, I think it's also an approach which will probably reduce the risk of collapse

• 37:37Speaker 06

  going into the future. So I'm guessing most people have heard the Manhattan Project, the quest to build the first atomic weapon in the US, and the Trinity Bomb, which was the first atomic weapon ever used in the sands of New Mexico on July 1945. Now, before the Trinity Test, there was a calculation by Edward Teller, a physicist in the group, who calculated that there was a very small but non-zero chance that detonating the bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere of Earth, killing not just our entire species, but potentially every shred of life on the face of the planet. By that time, we also knew the Nazis were no longer pursuing their own nuclear bomb.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  So this wasn't about beating the Nazis to the bomb any longer. Yet they still decided to take the gamble and to detonate the Trinity Bomb. If you had instead a jury of randomly selected citizens, farmers, cleaners, plumbers, and you asked them whether or not we should detonate the bomb and gave them full information, what do you think they would have said?

• 38:46Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History at There's More Coming Up.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 39:11Speaker 03

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• 39:28Speaker 04

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• 40:08Dan Snow?

  Yeah, and indeed, and if you'd asked their equivalent in Japan in the 1930s, should we launch a gigantic land war in Asia? I believe and I hope and I'm sure you do too, that they would have made a different decision to the military hierarchy at the time.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. We see this time and time again in surveys, whether it be on climate change, on nuclear weapons, on things like killer robots. People tend to be in favor of bans on things like nuclear weapons and killer robots and in favor of much stronger action on climate change. So I mentioned that this isn't just about what changed in the environment for the whole scene, but also it's about our psychology. And while I think humans are pretty sociable, pretty good, decent, we don't tend to indulge in things like mass panic and we're very good at cooperating when we are naturally egalitarian, it's worth noting that we still have certain psychological quirks. In particular, most of us compete for status and there's numerous studies showing that those with higher status

• 41:05Speaker 06

  tend to have both more children and their children tend to make it to adulthood. In other words, there's an evolutionary argument for acquiring status. But some people want it much more than others, in particular men, and even more so, people who rank high in what's called the dark triad, which is a set of antisocial traits, including psychopathy, a lack of empathy and a certain callousness, narcissism, an overinflated sense of ego, and machiavellianism, a willingness to manipulate others in pursuit of your own self-interest. All of those tend to be people who are much more willing to seek status through domination. And for the first 300,000 years of humanity,

• 41:49Speaker 06

  that probably earned you an early grave. What we see with nomadic egalitarian groups is that when one person tries to dominate others, they tend to be either ridiculed, ostracized, or in the worst cases, executed. While it may have earned you an early grave for most of human history, eventually, we entered a situation where the most celebrated figures of history are those who dominate others. They're basically mass murderers like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Chinggis Khan, and many others. But it doesn't answer the question of why did so many people follow them? And this is where a second psychological quote comes into play, what I call the authoritarian impulse. We have numerous studies suggesting that when people feel threatened, they're more likely to become authoritarian in their leadings.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  They're more likely to become obedient to authority structures and to crave leaders who are essentially strong men. And of course, we see this today in the modern day US and even in places like Russia, where Putin comes into leadership on the back of bombings in Chechnya. So there's a certain set of what I call the darker angels of our nature, psychological features which become amplified once you get conflict and once you get the emergence of the first states. And these Goliaths tended to select for people who were both high in the dark triad and wanted power and were more likely to use violence to get it. And that violence triggered many people to become more authoritarian. And even when you had good people get into power, we again have a lot of studies suggesting

• 43:17Speaker 06

  that people actually do get corrupted by power. In general, people who are higher on a hierarchy tend to become less empathetic, less compassionate, more willing to take risks, and more likely to cheat, both in games and on their spouses. And these dark ranges of our nature unfortunately just get amplified over time. And the beauty of democratizing things, of using things like citizen assemblies and juries, is it kind of mitigates all of those. You suddenly aren't selecting for people who want status and want power and are willing to spend their entire lives getting it. You're cycling through citizens so quickly that you can't allow for individuals to get corrupted by power. And additionally, we find that these experiments of citizen assemblies actually tend

• 44:01Speaker 06

  to create people who are less polarized and probably less likely to be captured by the authoritarian impulse.

• 44:07Dan Snow?

  I'm really interested by your talk about citizen assemblies and the fact you haven't mentioned elections particularly because one thing that seems quite clear after a really big democratic experiment in the last hundred years is that rich people have found a way to hack elections. I know this is not the main thrust of your work, but while we're here, it's interesting. In the late 19th century, your equivalent would have been talking relentlessly about electing and sending your representatives to London, to Paris, to Washington, to Beijing, to do the people's work. Now you're not, and I think that's very striking.

• 44:38Speaker 06

  I agree. One thing I talk about in the book is different forms of power. So the sociologist Michael Mann once had this separation of social power into four different forms. And I adopt a similar schema of we have political power, the control of authority and decision making, economic power, the control of resources, violent power, the control of lethal force, and information power, the control of ideology and information in general. In general, once you have one form of power, it becomes increasingly easy to translate that into other forms of power. And what really changes with the Holocene, once you get grain, you get little resources,

• 45:21Speaker 06

  is you start to get a form of power that can be passed down across generations and can be really easily translated into other forms of power. And we see that today. Once you're wealthy, you can start to buy up the media. Of course, Elon Musk owns X or Twitter. Jeff Bezos owns both Twitch as well as The Washington Post. And they also spend huge amounts to both lobby government and in the case of Musk, actually get directly involved with government. And historically, you have other cases where towards the end of both the Western Empire and the Eastern Han, you see private elites starting to both amass their own fortunes increasingly, practice more tax evasion, but also build up their own private armies.

• 46:05Speaker 06

  In short, one form of power inevitably starts to spill over into others. And I think it's no coincidence that in the 1980s and 70s, we start to see wealth inequality rise again. So the top 1% globally captured roughly 25% of wealth in the 1980s. And today it's closer to 40%. And with a lag time of a couple of decades, you start to see a lot of what's called democratic backsliding, essentially countries across the world becoming increasingly less democratic. And to me, it's pretty obvious when you look at places like the US that what's happening is that wealth inequality is spilling into our politics. And it's surprisingly easy to spend well less than a billion dollars in order to get your preferred outcome in an election.

• 46:50Speaker 06

  And until we level each form of power, I don't think we can have true democracy.

• 46:56Dan Snow?

  Luke, that's an interesting place, a provocative place to end it. Thank you very much indeed. Tell everyone what your book is called.

• 47:02Speaker 06

  My book is called Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. And I should also add, it is the outcome of seven years of work. So make sure to enjoy reading it.

• 47:14Dan Snow?

  Yeah, yeah, come on. There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into that book.

• 47:18Speaker 06

  Sadly.

• 47:18Dan Snow?

  Thank you, Luke. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Dan, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 47:25Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure, if you want to keep it going, that is, to hit follow in your podcast player right now, you'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically by the power of tech. You can listen anywhere you get your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. Imagine a world, just imagine, where you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean, it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.

• 48:07Speaker 01

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• 48:37Speaker 02

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Everybody, listen up.

• 48:52Speaker 02

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• 49:09Dan Snow?

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