“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today — and self-termination is most likely.” That’s the disturbing thesis at the heart of Goliath’s Curse, a sweeping new book by Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Kemp told The Guardian that after analyzing more than 400 societal collapses over the past 5,000 years, he reached a chilling conclusion: our civilization isn’t just a bit vulnerable, it’s on the same trajectory as many failed cultures of the past. Except this time, the stakes are much higher.

The threats are the familiar ones (climate change, nuclear war, AI), but Kemp identifies a particular threat coming from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad”: narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.

The Big Idea: Power Corrupts, Inequality Destroys

Civilizations throughout history have collapsed for many reasons, from plagues and invasions to climate shifts and economic crashes. But beneath the surface, they often follow the same script. As wealth and power concentrate in the hands of a few, inequality deepens, institutions weaken, and the bonds holding society together begin to fray. Elites grow more insulated and self-serving, while ordinary people face rising hardship and declining trust. In many situations, the apparent cause of a civilization’s decline is only the shock that tips a declining system over the edge.

Yet, civilizations don’t collapse because humans are greedy or violent by nature, Kemp argues. In fact, for most of our species’ history, we lived in small, egalitarian communities that shared food, tools, and decisions.

Collapse begins when a small group seizes control of key resources (land, food, weapons, or information) and uses it to dominate the rest. Kemp calls these groups Goliaths, after the biblical giant slain by David. Goliaths are empires, kingdoms, or regimes built not on cooperation, but on control. They’re hierarchical, extractive, and dangerously fragile. It’s a similar thesis to the one put in Why Nations Fail, a Nobel-winning book that described what makes some countries successful and others less so.

Over time, the elites in these Goliath societies hoard more wealth and power. The rest become poorer, sicker, and more dependent. They tear down public institutions and install their own group of loyalists. Eventually, things break. Disease spreads, crops fail, wars erupt. The system cracks under the weight of its own inequality.

Does all that sound a bit familiar?

How We Can Avoid Self-Destruction

The question, of course, is whether (and how) we can avoid this type of cataclysmic ending. Kemp says he’s pessimistic about our prospects.

All Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise. The problem, in our case, is that we’ve let them run the ship for too long. We see rising inequality, we see extreme wealth and groups of oligarchs trying to obtain control, and we definitely see more narcissistic leaders than before.

“We’re dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics.”

Kemp singles out Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping as embodiments of these traits. He points to the corporations and algorithms that dominate our lives more and more, operating under the same extractive logic of profit over people.

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

These are all “agents of doom,” Kemp explains. This isn’t a left-vs-right political argument, it’s about the very survival of our democracy (and civilization). The antidote to collapse isn’t more technology or more growth. Nor is it more innovation. It’s less domination.

That means radically rethinking how we organize power: capping extreme wealth, breaking up monopolies, and creating truly democratic societies. Not just voting every few years, but real participatory governance — like citizen assemblies and juries, scaled with digital tools.

The Lessons of the Fallen

In Cahokia, a society from North America that peaked around the 11th century, decline was brought by a technological innovation. They brought maize and bean farming, which lead to a society dominated by an elite of priests. This led to unsustainable practices that ended up including human sacrifices. Part of the decline of the Roman Empire was brought by cheap labor from slaves. Slaves replaced many of the jobs citizens were doing, leading to vast unemployment and societal frustration.

Kemp’s book is unsettling not because it predicts the end of the world, but because it shows how predictable and preventable that end still is.

Our civilization may be facing a “single gargantuan crash,” but collapse isn’t destiny. It’s a choice.

Kemp’s take isn’t a doomist one.

“Even if you don’t have hope, it doesn’t really matter. This is about defiance. It’s about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn’t contribute to the problem.”