Society Is Closer To Collapse Than We Think - Luke Kemp

0:00Luke Kemp:When you want your spring break to feel like... And your kid's pool day to feel like... And your hotel bed to feel like... Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

0:19Anthony Scaramucci:Your cabana's ready. Would you like fresh towels?

0:21Luke Kemp:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton. For this day.

0:30Anthony Scaramucci:An all-new season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

0:35Luke Kemp:Mom talk has just been blowing up. Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette. Saying that out loud is crazy. Like, that is huge.

0:43Anthony Scaramucci:But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart. It's causing issues in everyone's marriage.

0:48Luke Kemp:My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos.

0:52Anthony Scaramucci:Watch the Hulu original series, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. For bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

1:00Luke Kemp:This episode is brought to you by Trace Minerals. Most people aren't getting the minerals they need to support optimal movement, and your body doesn't make them on its own. That's why Trace Mineral Drops delivers over 70 essential minerals to help restore what your body is missing. So if you're choosing just one supplement, make it minerals. Trace Minerals. Minerals keep you moving. Save 20 % on traceminerals.com with code podcast.

1:26Anthony Scaramucci:Lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land. When you look at the very first states across the world, they're not united by agriculture. There's 10 places in the world that independently produce agriculture. Barely five of them actually create states. Wheat, you can store for decades. It advertises itself through really high stalks. It's the perfect tax crop. And that's the same for China with rice and essentially every other state across the world. They had either corn, rice, wheat, or a similar, what I call, lootable resource. A resource that is easily seen, stolen, and stored.

1:58Anthony Scaramucci:But that often wasn't enough. To make a Goliath, you also needed to have the weapons to take the resources and people. And if you wanted to take the resources by force, you had to make sure people couldn't escape. What I call caged land. So Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers in Greek. In Egypt, you basically buff between the Red Sea and the Nile. And in general, when people become more dependent upon crops and fields, they have to stay in one place. So that picture of monopolizable weapons, lootable resources, and caged land is essentially one of not glorious civilizations rising up, but instead of organized crime.

2:32Luke Kemp:Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is a Cambridge scholar, Luke Kemp, but he's also a bestselling author, and he's written a book called Goliath's Curse, The History and Future of Societal Collapse. man luke kemp what a title but before we get to the book i want to talk a little bit about you

2:56Anthony Scaramucci:and tell us a little bit about your background thanks for having me anthony as you mentioned i'm originally from australia as you can probably tell from the accent and i was a lecturer in climate change science and policy in the course of teaching that course i realized that there many other global threats that we faced apart from climate change and we had to address them more. If we decarbonize the economy by 2050 but we had a nuclear war in 2051 we're unfortunately still doomed and that took me to the University of Cambridge to join the Center for the Study of Existential Risk and existential risk is essentially anything that could cause either global cytocollapse or human extinction and this book took around about seven years to write and it was my attempt to grapple with both what are the root causes with the greatest challenges we face today and how have societies dealt with and persisted through catastrophes in the past and what can they tell us about our future you're doing something here that i love but i'm also

3:59Luke Kemp:afraid of so let me tell you what you're doing okay you're saying something which i think categorically is true and one of the things about human nature is we don't like the truth luke you You know, Homer told us that through the rhetorical device of the character Cassandra, right? She was trying to warn people about the destruction of Troy. Aaron Sorkin did that and a few good men. We don't like the truth, right? So one of the things you say in the book is that you don't like the word civilization and that you see these things more as a political hierarchies. And it's a little bit of a punch in the gut.

4:39Luke Kemp:So tell us why you say that. Why do you reject the word civilization, to use your own words, as too flattering? Civilization is too flattering for us, slightly more intelligent than the apes. So go ahead. Tell me what you mean.

4:53Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah. So one of the things I struggled with in the book is trying to use more precise, accurate definitions. We often forget that history is written by the 1 % who wrote the records. And that has some pretty big ramifications. for how we think about history. And civilization, to me, has always been a terror propaganda. When you go to write a book on collapse, you have to ask what's collapsing? And the natural answer here is civilization. Yet, when you look at the definitions, they're all pretty bad. They tend to be things like an advanced culture, which doesn't really help much, and is pretty biased against indigenous people.

5:29Or it's something like a checklist of different factors.

5:33Anthony Scaramucci:Things like long-distance trade, which technically all hunter-gatherers have, or writing, which some of the biggest empires, like the Incan Empire, which stretched all the way from Chile to Ecuador, did not have. Hence, when I actually looked at the very first states, Uruk and Mesopotamia or Egypt, what was uniting them was not something like big cities, for instance. What was uniting them instead was they had a big change from living in a more egalitarian social setting to living in dominance hierarchies, in which a small group essentially dominated everyone else for the use of violence extracted resources from him and ruled through force and when you look across history that's the defining characteristics of what we call

6:17Luke Kemp:civilization yeah listen i'm i'm a big thomas hobbs fan uh you would say well how is that possible there's just something about that book when i read that book it resonated with me and also you know they do teach the book at west point uh there's a there's a paragraph in that book about hegemonic behavior that they do teach at West Point. And Hobbes basically says we're at, from a civilization perspective, or to use your terms, political hierarchy, we're at our most peaceful and most prosperous when there's one super powerful hegemon using their military might, generally benevolently suppressing the internecine conflicts.

6:56Luke Kemp:And so we can debate whether or not that that's happening right now, but the Hobbes delusion is something I had not thought of. And you basically say prior to civilization, we seem to be doing pretty well. We were less likely to die violent deaths. And so this notion that prior to civilization, life was solitary and poor and nasty and brutish and short, not what you think. And I want you to clarify this stuff for us if you don't mind.

7:28Anthony Scaramucci:So as humans, we've been around for roughly 300 ,000 years since what's called the middle Paralympic, which was a period of ice ages where the world was roughly negative five degrees Celsius. And on top of that, roughly a third of it was covered by ice sheets. It was not an easy time to live. And yet when people like Hobbes talk about the state of nature, when we evolved with no kings or emperors, that's the period they're really empirically talking about. That lasted all the way into roughly 11 ,000 years ago. And when you look at it, we don't appear to live lives sort of nasty, brutish, and short.

8:07Anthony Scaramucci:So first of all, in terms of violence, the best genetic and archaeological evidence all suggests that we had a violence rate of roughly 1-2%. So for every 100 people born, maybe one would die from lethal causes, which is pretty much the same as the modern world at a global scale today. On top of that, we seem to be pretty good at cooperating and trading. So all the way from the east coast to west coast of Africa, 120 ,000 years ago, we have evidence of trade in things like lithic stone tools, musical instruments, as well as just basic genes and culture. And people weren't living in really small ragtag groups.

8:45Anthony Scaramucci:Yes, pneumatic egalitarian and hunter-gatherers often do live in groups of roughly 20 to 40 people, sometimes ranging up to 200. but what we forget is those groups are often quite multicultural. So amongst the modern day pneumatic egalitarians, only roughly 10 % of their groups tend to be closely blood related, and often have people who speak different tongues in the same group. And apart from that, one forager will often learn thousands of people across their entire life, because they're constantly moving across groups, which is why you get these huge cultural zones of shared culture, genes instruments.

9:22Anthony Scaramucci:And on top of all that, as far as we can tell, our default mode of governing during that period was democracy. That's what we see with most Nomenic egalitarians, is they don't have kings, they don't have hierarchies, they don't have any large levels of inequality, they tend to make decisions communally as a group, and often by consensus. This wasn't a period, infant mortality was still high for instance, but we didn't have many infectious diseases and if you lived to the age of 18 you'll probably likely live a pretty good decent long life and one last thing is to remember that the way thomas hobbs described us as living nasty brutish and short lives would be an evolutionary recipe for disaster we as a species wouldn't have

10:05Luke Kemp:survived the ice age let's talk about this now right because we we go from this to rising hierarchies, you call it Goliath fuel. Okay, so what's Goliath fuel? Go ahead, Luke.

10:20Anthony Scaramucci:Goliath fuel is lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land. When you look at the very first states across the world, they're not united by agriculture. There's 10 places in the world independently produce agriculture, but only five of them actually create states. Compare Papua new guinea to egypt both have agriculture roughly the same time 7 000 years ago yet in new guinea they never have pharaohs they would build pyramids the difference is what they're growing in new guinea they have yams taro and banana yams and taro you grow underground they're basically invisible and when you dig them up they only last a couple months bananas last usually less than a month by contrast wheat you can store for decades it advertises itself for really high stalks.

11:08Anthony Scaramucci:It's the perfect tax crop. And that's the same for China with rice and essentially every other state across the world. They had either corn, rice, wheat, or a similar what I call lootable resource. A resource that is easily seen, stolen, and stored. But that often wasn't enough. To make a goliath, you also needed to have the weapons to take the resources and people. So in both the Near East and China, you see the first states appearing after you get the introduction of handheld bronze axes and swords. And if you wanted to take the resources by force, you had to make sure people couldn't escape what I call caged land.

11:47Anthony Scaramucci:So Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers in Greek. In Egypt, you basically buff between the Red Sea and the Nile. In general, when people become more dependent upon crops and fields, they have to stay in one place. So that picture of Goliath fuel, of monopolizing weapons, lovable resources, and caged land, is essentially one of not glorious civilizations rising up, but instead of organized crime, where you have protection rackets arising and then slowly expanding into larger and larger empires. So history is best told as a story of organized crime.

12:22Luke Kemp:It's a Hobbesian, though, a little, right? I mean, it's like... A little bit, a little bit. A little bit, right? I mean, but, you know...

12:30Anthony Scaramucci:I think Hobbes was wrong about our lives being nasty, brutish, and short. He's wrong with the average individual, but he's right in a weird way that when you look at the rise of states, it ends up being kind of gang warfare.

12:42Luke Kemp:I brought you on for a reason. We are tough on each other. I mean, your book has become a bestseller. Your book, I mean, I think the New York Times compared it and said that it's like Piketty filtered through Mad Max and Fury Road, right? I mean, it's basically you're being named the best book of the year by the Sunday Times or by Kirkus. i should say because of the uh strength of the messaging um there's some good things that have happened in civilization though or yeah or i would call civilization what are the good things

13:17Anthony Scaramucci:yeah there's still a lot of good things that can arise up here so first of all you do eventually start to get lower rates of violence so for instance when you look at the first states appearing there's a huge spike of violence but once the empire is established they start to quell internal resistance. You do, of course, get really cool new objects, palaces, ziggurats, great monuments. You also do eventually get big advances in science and technology. Now, it's worth noting it's questionable whether you need to have these civilizations or Goliaths to do so. We had big advances in things like sailing, for instance, well before the first states popped up.

13:57Anthony Scaramucci:And we even, for instance, had often cities and farms before you had elites, inequality, and goliaths. It's worth noting that many of the things we tend to associate with states, say, for instance, settling disputes, providing basic goods and services, providing basic infrastructure, they're things that criminal rackets also often provide to the people they're watching over. So saying that something is an organized crime racket isn't necessarily a bad thing. They often do provide a whole bunch of goods and services. And if you're extracting resources from population, you have an incentive to take care of that population in a basic way.

14:35Luke Kemp:Again, I agree with all of this. You're saying something else in this book, which really resonates with me as an American. You've analyzed over 300 collapses, and you find that the average state lasts about 326 years. And the biggest ones are most fragile at the 150th year, right? And that's interesting because that's roughly the Great Depression for us, right? And that was a fragile period of time which we had to dig ourselves out of and obviously led to the Second World War. U.S. is at 250 right now. It is. Should Americans be reading that as an actuarial table? Are we in trouble here in America?

15:20Anthony Scaramucci:I wouldn't read it as an actuarial table. The range here is quite large. It goes all the way from the 14-year reign of the Qin dynasty all the way through to the Byzantine Empire, which lasted over a thousand years. On top of that, I think states today are quite different in some regards. For instance, most states throughout history haven't had things like a specialized police force, let alone intelligence agencies. The US has both. And, of course, on top of that, things like mass surveillance systems. So I think modern states have a whole bunch of mechanisms that should in many ways make them more resilient.

15:55Anthony Scaramucci:The catch is that we're facing much more severe, pervasive threats than we could happen before. And on top of that, I think we're facing a whole bunch of new technological realities, which also make collapse potentially more likely and more likely to be global this time.

16:11Luke Kemp:But I am worried, by the way, because I will also say this about America. We seem to be moving in 80-year cycles. We go from the Revolutionary War 80 years later to the Civil War. We have to redeem ourselves. And then we go from there to the Great Depression, which leads to the Second World War. And now we're 80 years out from the Second World War. We seem to have had roughly three 83-year epics. And I think we're in a period now where we have to reflect again and see if we can find some level of renewal. But, I mean, let's go to one of your most provocative findings. at least this is my opinion, okay, that the states more aggressively subjugate women, the ones that do that, are more prone to failure.

16:57Luke Kemp:Walk me through the casual mechanisms of that and why patriarchy is a cause for fragility and is a symptom of decline.

17:09Anthony Scaramucci:Yes, this is based upon the work of several other scholars who looked much more closely at the gendered aspects of collapse. There's potentially several different reasons for this. I think one of the most intense ones is simply when you have regimes that oppress women far more stringently, that tends to also be representative of regimes that are in general much more oppressive and much more extractive. Overall, my big theory on collapse is what's called diminishing returns and extraction. Essentially, you get growing wealth inequality over time, both because in general capital increases more quickly in value than labor does and on top of that once you have power it's easier to get more power and as you get increasing levels of wealth inequality you start to get more and more power concentration so one of the best of the best predictors of democratic backsliding today is wealth inequality and as you get that you basically get more extractive institutions they're taking more from the average person and that has a whole bunch of knock-on effects including things like high levels of socio-political violence more infighting between a growing group of elites competing for a small number of thrones and high levels of corruption oligarchies that are less likely to address oncoming threats a whole suite of different problems but i see the gendered component as being in many ways more or less just a correlation for the deeper problem of extractive institutions

18:30Luke Kemp:i think that uh it's about egalitarianism to me when i read the book i'm like if you're treating people more equally, you have a longer duration that would include men and women. It would include different ethnic people. It would include in having some rights for slaves in the city of Athens, even as an example, you know. But the other striking idea in the book, if you don't mind, is that the collapse can be invisible until after it happened, meaning that we may already be living through phases of the collapse, that these things have a tendency to be slow and they creep up on us. And so give us some examples from the book and from your research.