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.

Over an intensive seven years, Kemp studied about 400 societies that have existed during the last 5,000 years. He concluded that the character constant which has allowed societies to form into civilizations and then recover from their collapse is the human inclination to be egalitarian. We are naturally disposed to trust, share and cooperate. This is what formed the original bond within families, clans and tribes, and was eventually the cohesive force in the larger societies that formed as a consequence of the Agricultural Revolution. Our globally integrated world could not exist without an inherent sense of egalitarianism that supersedes racial, cultural, linguistic and religious differences. This characteristic has been baked into our genes by the sharing of food, tools and resources that took place during the many millennia of our existence as hunter-gatherer societies.

As for the collapse of societies, the perspective provided to Kemp by
carefully examining 5,000 years of human history has convinced him
that the chaos is not the result of the fundamental human character,
but is caused by those leaders who possess one or more of the
attributes of an aberrant personality type that he calls the “dark
triad” of narcissism, psychopathy and manipulation. This is the
Goliath’s Curse of the book’s title, and it is the defective component
in our human psychology that infects civilizations.

But these “civilizations”, according to Kemp, were not what we would
call “civilized”. In keeping with the attributes of the “dark triad”, they were domineering, controlling, exploitative, patriarchal, sadistic and brutal. They were commonly identified by oppression, slavery, massive poverty and ritual sacrifice. These so-called “civilizations” were images of the grandiose personalities of their leaders. In Kemp’s opinion, such Bronze Age kingdoms are best described as stories of “organized crime”. And to survive, these Goliath states needed three conditions: excess food that could be stored, such as grain or maize; sophisticated bronze weapons that were superior to stone and wood; and geographical locations surrounded by mountains, deserts or oceans that kept people confined in a “caged land”.

These Goliath states, like their biblical namesake, contained the attributes of their own undoing. The “dark triad” of the personalities
of their leaders created the selfishness, infighting, corruption, immiseration, greed, resource exploitation, over expansion, and poor
strategic planning that made them vulnerable to the arrival of
unexpected wars, diseases and environmental stresses. Indeed, Goliath
personalities are particularly poor planners because their attention is not on the collective wellbeing of the society and the efficient use of its human resources, but on the protection of their own prestige, authority and power. The end result of this focus is the concentration of wealth and influence that leads to widespread corruption and exploitation. This works to the detriment of the collective whole, contributes to an erosion of both morality and morale, and eventually makes the social structure so precarious that it is unable to survive the shock of any adversity. The rot incapacitates the society from the inside until it collapses essentially what happened to the Roman Empire.

Kemp notices, unfortunately, that signs of this process are active in
the global civilization of today. In this immediate present, he notes in an interview with The Guardian, “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.” And during the last half century, wealth has become more and more concentrated in the control of fewer and fewer people—people, incidentally, who by social selection processes are inclined to possess some or all of the ominous
characteristics of the “dark triad”.

Top image credit: Compilation of White House photographs of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – all in the public domain.