Luke Kemp's Goliath's Curse (July, 2025) positions itself as a sweeping diagnosis of civilisational collapse, claiming to draw lessons from 5,000 years of global history. Its central thesis, that inequality, driven by the pathologies of self-aggrandising elites, is the primary cause of societal fragility and collapse, is both rhetorically powerful and politically timely. However, upon closer inspection, Kemp's argument reveals itself as intellectually reductive, historically selective, and ideologically loaded.
Rather than offering a robust theory of collapse, Goliath's Curse functions as a morality play: elites are cast as villains, equality as salvation, and civilisation as a cautionary tale about hierarchy. It is an argument designed to resonate with contemporary egalitarian Leftist academic sensibilities.
Inequality as Collapse: Causation or Correlation?
Kemp's insistence that inequality is the key driver of civilisational collapse oversimplifies what is, by all accounts, a multicausal and context-dependent phenomenon. While wealth disparities have accompanied many periods of decline, they have just as frequently coexisted with long epochs of prosperity, innovation, and stability.
Consider Imperial China, the Roman Empire, or the British Empire, civilisations with vast inequalities that endured for centuries and produced cultural and technological achievements foundational to the modern world. Their eventual declines were not straightforward consequences of elite greed but complex outcomes of internal stagnation, external pressures, demographic shifts, and, in some cases, overextension. Inequality may have been a feature of these systems, but to claim it as the cause of their collapse is to mistake correlation for causation.
Moreover, Kemp largely ignores the historical record of failed egalitarian experiments. The French Revolution's Jacobin phase, the purges of Maoist China, the economic collapse of Soviet collectivism, each attempted to forcibly equalise society and produced mass violence, repression, and regression. The fantasy that equality ensures stability is contradicted by these precedents, which suggest that the pursuit of equality can be at least as destabilising as the pursuit of power.
Demonising Hierarchy: The Problem with the "Dark Triad" Thesis
Kemp supplements his anti-elite narrative with pop-psychological claims about the "dark triad" personalities, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, that supposedly dominate positions of power. This argument is both empirically dubious and conceptually lazy. Leadership in complex societies often demands traits such as decisiveness, strategic thinking, and emotional detachment, traits which, in their more extreme forms, may overlap with those labelled "dark triad." But to conflate these qualities with pathology is to reduce political authority to a clinical condition.
Kemp's selective list of contemporary figures, Trump, Putin, Xi, suggests that this diagnosis is as much ideological as psychological. It is not clear why, say, Justin Trudeau or Emmanuel Macron are exempt from this pathology despite wielding significant centralised authority, nor why corporate structures in Silicon Valley or Davos-class technocracies escape similar critique.
The underlying implication is that all hierarchy is suspect unless it conforms to progressive norms, a position that is philosophically incoherent and historically naïve.
Romanticising Pre-Civilisational Egalitarianism
One of the more questionable aspects of Kemp's framework is his idealisation of pre-agricultural, egalitarian societies. He appeals to anthropological evidence suggesting that hunter-gatherer groups exhibited flatter social structures, greater sharing, and "anti-dominance instincts." But this interpretation romanticises subsistence-level existence while ignoring the significant violence, instability, and demographic constraints inherent in small-scale tribal life.
Such societies were not peaceful utopias; they were characterised by high levels of inter-group conflict, rigid gender roles, and limited social mobility. More importantly, they were structurally incapable of supporting the population densities, technological complexity, or cultural sophistication that make modern civilisation possible. Hierarchy emerges as a condition of scale, when societies grow, differentiation is not a vice but a necessity.
By idealising small-scale equality, Kemp implicitly denigrates the very processes, urbanisation, surplus production, specialisation, that have underwritten humanity's most significant advancements.
Environmental and Political Complexity: Downplayed or Distorted
While Kemp does acknowledge environmental degradation and political dysfunction as contributing factors in collapse, he frames them as consequences of elite excess rather than independent dynamics. This framing stretches plausibility.
Environmental catastrophes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, plagues, resource depletion, have repeatedly undermined societies regardless of their internal wealth distribution. The Anasazi, for example, collapsed under drought stress, not elite decadence. Similarly, the Bronze Age collapse, disrupted an entire region through trade disruption and ecological strain, not merely social stratification.
Likewise, ethnic conflict and political disintegration, such as in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, cannot be reduced to wealth inequality. They are often driven by identity, memory, and institutional failure, none of which are addressed by redistributive policies. To suggest that inequality is the hidden root of such crises is to impose a reductionist lens on an irreducibly complex reality.
Technological and Economic Fragility: Misattributed to Elites
Kemp's account of modern risk, especially AI, nuclear weapons, and global interdependence, correctly identifies unprecedented vulnerabilities in today's system. But again, he attributes these largely to elite malfeasance or corporate psychopathy. This narrative elides the structural drivers of fragility: increasing complexity, global interconnectivity, and the speed of technological innovation.
The 2008 financial crisis was not simply the result of greed; it was the product of systemic opacity, algorithmic complexity, and regulatory hubris. AI development may be driven by competition between firms and states, but its destabilising potential arises from acceleration and uncertainty, not merely exploitation.
Kemp's diagnosis blames the who at the expense of understanding the what. But modern risk is less about elite pathology than about structural tight-coupling, feedback loops, and non-linear effects, features intrinsic to any highly developed system, regardless of moral valence.
The Illusion of Feasible Egalitarian Reform
Kemp's prescriptions, citizen assemblies, wealth caps, and personal ethical choices, are morally attractive to progressives but practically implausible. The notion of implementing a global $10 million wealth cap ignores not only political resistance but the capital mobility and legal complexity of the global financial system. It also assumes, with little evidence, that redistributing wealth would stabilise global civilisation rather than undermine its productive base, as socialism does.
His idealisation of citizen assemblies as democratic correctives to elite power, overlooks the well-documented vulnerabilities of such mechanisms: group polarisation, manipulation by interest groups, and the absence of institutional accountability. The idea that global governance can be democratised through direct deliberation, while aesthetically appealing, bears little relationship to how complex societies function at scale.
His final appeal to individual ethics — "don't work for psychopathic industries" — is a moral luxury that presumes economic agency most people do not possess.
Conclusion: Hierarchy, Not Equality, Underwrites Civilisation
Luke Kemp's Goliath's Curse is a readable and rhetorically compelling narrative, but it suffers from the very reductionism it accuses elites of practicing. By elevating inequality to the status of singular cause, and by casting hierarchy itself as morally suspect, Kemp risks substituting political ideology for serious historical analysis.
Civilisation requires hierarchy, of competence, responsibility, and function. Inequality, in itself, is not a pathology but a condition of complex life. The challenge is not to abolish hierarchy, but to discipline and channel it through lawful institutions, cultural coherence, and moral seriousness. If collapse is a risk, it is not because we are unequal, but because we have lost the ability to steward power with wisdom.
In the end, Goliath's Curse tells us more about the anxieties of a Leftist progressive age uncomfortable with excellence, leadership, and ambition than it does about the true mechanics of civilisational decline.