5 Aug 2025
Change or collapse
As if we needed more bad news about the rocky road to sustainability. Luke Kemp a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge says we are on a path to the “self-termination” of modern industrial society. Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, has studied the rise and fall of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years. He says that although people are fundamentally egalitarian they are led to societal collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites. In a story in The Guardian newspaper he describes history as a story of organized crime, with one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence. We live in a global system of capitalism, growth obsessed, and dominated by extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society. All of us now face a choice: we must move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality.