As the course of history attests, civilizations tend to rise and then fall. This process poses two fundamental questions. What causes people
to coalesce into complex societies? And what causes them to fracture
into disorganized populations? Perhaps the most cogent and credible of current explanations to both their formation and collapse is in Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, a remarkably insightful 2025 book by Dr. Luke Kemp, a scholar from the Centre for Studies of Existential Risk at the Cambridge University.