collapse of the old society

For most of our history, humans lived in relatively egalitarian societies that actively prevented the accumulation of power. Author of Goliath's Curse, Luke Kemp, examines how hierarchical states, 'Goliaths', came to dominate the world. We explore why Goliaths repeatedly collapse, the likely trajectories of today's global Goliath, and what it might take to radically democratize power before history repeats itself. Highlights include:

Why Luke rejects the term 'civilization' in favor of 'Goliath' to describe the large-scale societies that have emerged over the past several thousand years and were built on dominance hierarchies such as ruler and ruled, rich and poor, man and woman, and free and slave;

How archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that for most of human history people lived in relatively egalitarian, democratic, and cooperative societies, challenging long-standing assumptions about humanity's supposedly violent and selfish nature;

How humans historically constrained would-be tyrants through ridicule, ostracism, exile, and if necessary group execution;

How the first Goliaths emerged thousand of years after intensified agriculture, using war and violence and growing their power through the 'Goliath fuel' of 'lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land';

How 'babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism' enabled Goliaths to expand across the globe, conquering and absorbing non-state people into today's global Goliath;

Why the 'darker angels of our nature' - status competition, the 'dark triad' of personality traits, and the authoritarian impulse - also provide fuel to the growth and persistence of Goliaths;

Why Goliaths function as engines of inequality that become increasingly vulnerable to shocks like popular rebellion, environmental stress, disease, and how this makes societal collapse a recurring feature of large-scale societies throughout history;

Why, if we continue with business as usual, the most likely long-term fate of today's global Goliath is collapse, and why in the short term we may be heading toward a 'Silicon Goliath' of increased digital surveillance and potential for autocratic repression;

How we might 'shackle' Goliath through a process of radical democratization in 4 different forms of power - political, economic, violence, and information.

For decades after the discovery of Ebolavirus in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting a few hundred people at most.

Not any more.

The conventional explanation has to do with the larger and more interconnected human populations that pathogens can access. But there’s a more fundamental driver: the transformation of the underlying ecology of Ebola, which is being re-made, in part, by the rising global hunger for minerals to power the hi-tech economy.

Most of the time, viruses such as Ebola live quietly in the bodies of their animal hosts, widely understood to be bats, causing them little or no harm.

But cutting down the trees in which bats live ruptures this delicate balance between Ebola-carrying animals and humans. The bats don’t just vanish when their trees are gone. They squeeze into the fragments of forest that remain, in closer proximity to humans, increasing the likelihood of encounters in which humans are exposed to their viral-laden blood, saliva and excreta. That’s why, with each per cent increase in deforestation in Central Africa, as a 2025 analysis found, the incidence of malaria and Ebola spikes by 20% to 40% .

In 2001 everyone knew what terrorism was; in 2026 everyone's a terrorist. The US regime has broadened the sign "terrorist" to include all opposition, from acts of mild disobedience, to Foreign Leaders, and the entire opposition party. Though the signifier "terrorist" has always been floating, either meaning too much or too little, such that Nelson Mandela was simultaneously a global symbol of social justice and a terrorist. As this year is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it is worth remembering that Jean Baudrillard had already predicted 9/11 and it's aftermath way back in the 1970s when he wrote "Symbolic Exchange and Death." We are only now catching up to his prophecies.

Cited:

Marcel Mauss. The Gift.

Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death.

Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism.

0:00 Terrorist is a Sign

22:28 Everyone's a Terrorist

24:09 Terrorism Doesn't Exist

32:50 Terrorists Blow Sh*t Up

34:05 Everyone's A Terrorist (now)

40:06 What 9/11 Really Meant

1:13:28 The Gift of Terror

1:28:07 Baudrillard was right about Everything

Tldr: an Afghan family fleeing the Taliban, diplomats who had worked with the United States in service of the occupation government, who were fully vetted and had US visas, were banned from the United States and (edit: probably) sent to a refugee camp, because their infant child was on the US terrorism watch list. The author tried to bend the rules to let them through. He failed. An automated computer system refused to "believe" an infant child had been placed on the terrorist watch list by mistake and barred the entire family from coming to the United States. They likely ended up in a refugee camp somewhere. The author doesn't know.

(Jesus fucking Christ, think about that. A family sent to a camp because a computer says their infant child is a terrorist and no human being is allowed to override it? That's Orwellian, Twilight Zone, science fiction dystopia shit. If I wrote that into a novel my editor would say it was too blatantly evil. But that was real life, done by the U.S. Department of State, under Joe fucking Biden.)

The stories we read about heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish bureaucrat who helped thousands of Jewish refugees escape from Germany with fake documents, are no longer possible today.

Every government in the world hates refugees. And thanks to 21st century technology, the loopholes and oversights and acts of individual moral courage that let Jewish and Roma and other refugees flee the Nazis no longer exist. Refugees fleeing collapsing nations and authoritarian states will be turned back at the border by mindless AI algorithms, and the bureaucrats and border guards serving the algorithms, to die at the hands of their enemies without disturbing the peace of wealthy nations or the pocketbooks of our billionaire masters.

Aren't you tired yet?

Invasive fungal infections are increasingly leading to life-threatening diseases worldwide. And in agriculture, fungi pose a massive threat to harvests...

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The climate crisis didn’t begin with factories, smokestacks, or fossil fuels. It began with slave ships.
In this sharp and provocative lecture, Jason W. Moore delivers a devastating answer: the problem isn’t “anthropogenic” — made by humans. The problem is capitalogenic — made by capital.

Moore critiques the most dangerous idea of the modern world — the "Man" versus "Nature" binary — and shows how it was born in the Columbian invasions after 1492. He replaces the comforting myth of Spaceship Earth with the far more accurate metaphor: Slaveship Earth. Signifying a world-ecology of power, profit and life built on the capitalist expulsion of most humans from “humanity,” Cheap Nature, and five centuries of violence, appropriation, and frontier-making, Moore traces the long history of climate change before and during the capitalist era.

This is not another story of hopelessness or population panic. It is an ecology of hope. Moore reveals how every major climate shift in the Holocene has been a moment of civilizational crisis and political possibility — from the fall of Rome and the peasant revolts that ended feudalism, to today’s climate crisis. He shows why the Capitalocene today is propelling a crisis of life-making and profit-making at once, and why only collective democratic action can seize the opportunities hidden inside the capitalogenic threat.

In this wide-ranging talk, Moore explains:

• Why “anthropogenic global warming” is neither innocent nor accurate — Britain and the US alone are responsible for more than a third of historical greenhouse gas emissions.

• How sugar plantations, silver mines, and the slaveship — not the steam engine or the Industrial Revolution — created the organizational template for capitalism as a world-ecology and its Cheap Nature projects.

• Why the Anthropocene is an elitist anti-politics machine that hides five centuries of capitalogenic crisis behind the fiction of “humans did it.”

• How climate shifts have repeatedly destabilized ruling classes and opened paths to greater equality for the vast majority.

• Why today’s state shift demands we move beyond Green Arithmetic to an ethic of care, connection, and democracy in the web of life.

This is not a call for green tech or climate austerity. It is a call to end the cheapening of life and labor once and for all — and to build a different world inside the one that is dying.

From a public lecture by Jason W. Moore, "Climate, Capitalism, and Geohistorical Crises, School of Architecture, ETH-Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), 25 February, 2019.

Jason W. Moore teaches world history at Binghamton University and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author of Capitalism in the Web of Life and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Key ideas for this lecture are drawn from Moore’s books and essays, most freely available on his website jasonwmoore.com, including “The Capitalocene” essays, “Opiates of the Environmentalists," and "Our Capitalogenic World."