← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
Is Society About to Collapse?
00:41:57
What has led to the collapse of Ancient civilisations in places like Mesoamerica, China, Egypt and across Europe?
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- [00:00]
A
Hello folks. Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London in England on 12th September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it. Get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there.
- [00:27]
B
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- [00:57]
C
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- [01:30]
A
Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. People are getting nervous out there. It feels like there are headwinds, we are facing headwinds. There are wars. There has even been the talk of breaching the nuclear taboo, the taboo against using nuclear weapons which has held, thank goodness, for 80 years. But Putin has talked about using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Just beyond terrifying that we could see those deployed again on battlefields. We have great power rivalry, we have a climate crisis, we have migrant crisis. People are moving around. We have a cost of living, things are expensive. We've got lots of crises. And it's making people think about collapse. It's making people think about those civilizations that have gone before that have collapsed well into that mental space. Galloped Dr. Luke Kemp. He has just written a book called Goliath's Curse and he set the Internet on fire when this book dropped because he spent seven years analyzing the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over five millennia. He is a research associate at the center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. I bet that's a cheery common room. Grabbing a quick coffee and a little break in their research projects. They all come together and have a chat, compare some notes on existential risk. Anyway, so he is a professional analyzer of historic civilizational collapse, and he has got some really interesting and provocative ideas and views on what that history has taught him. And he identifies inequality and as a key driver of collapse. Why do we humans live in these hierarchical societies? Why do we do what the people on top tell us to do? And is it even good for us? Were we taller and more muscly and healthier, living in flatter, more democratic, simpler societies, the kind of societies that many historians have traditionally written off as unsophisticated? Maybe they had it right all along. Anyway, here is a conversation with Dr. Luke Kemp. Enjoy.
- [03:28]
D
T minus 10 atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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A
God save the King.
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B
No black white unity till there is first some black unity.
- [03:37]
D
Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.
- [03:47]
A
Luke, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
- [03:49]
D
Dan, thank you for having me.
- [03:51]
A
Does every civilization eventually collapse? Is that just something we should expect? Is it baked in?
- [03:57]
D
No, I don't think so. There are many civilizations of the past which have merely transformed rather than collapsed. It's important to bear in mind that collapse is a more dramatic occurrence. Here. It's worthwhile taking a step back and actually specifying what we mean when we say societal collapse. When an economy breaks down, we call it economic collapse or a depression. When a population drops dramatically in a short period of time, we call it a bust or a population collapse. When a state falls apart, we call it a state failure or a state collapse. When all of your different systems of power fall apart quickly in an enduring fashion together, we call that a societal collapse. It's rarer, but it has happened quite a few times throughout human history.
- [04:42]
A
Give us a couple of examples that you think obviously we're going to unpack them, but give us some of the ones that you've found it stimulating to work with. Some of the examples of collapse, there.
- [04:51]
D
Are many classic ones. For instance, the collapse of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Triple alliance, shortly after they met the Spanish in 1521. There's the collapse, of course, of the Western Roman Empire. It's apparently the case that most men tend to think about the West Roman Empire at least once a week. So that collapse is pretty well known, I think. And there's also things like the classical lowland Maya, who persisted from roughly 150 CE through their terminal period in roughly 900 to 1,100 cell. And there's so many Other smaller ones that people haven't heard of as well. One of my favorites is Cahokia, which was the first city of the United States. It was a city of around about 15,000 people approximately 1,000 years ago. That's approximately 500 kilometers southwest of modern day Chicago. It's a city built around 200 different mounds, the largest of which is taller than the White House. That too, after space of 100 years or so collapsed. So collapses, despite the fact that every civilization ends, is still a surprisingly frequent phenomenon throughout human history.
- [05:59]
A
Let's break down the reasons for that collapse. And obviously hugely important to talk about environment and geography before we get there. Maybe what are the poison pills? What are the things within that idea of civilization itself that make those collapses so abrupt and dramatic? Is it just something about the artificiality of us? We're a hunter gathering kind of nomadic species. The minute we all get together and try and organ ourselves and build hierarchies and stay in the same place, are we doing something in there which inevitably contains the seeds for its own destruction?
- [06:32]
D
Absolutely. There is a reason the book is called Goliath's Curse. Goliaths are essentially my rebranding, if you will, of civilization. I believe that civilization has always been a term of propaganda. When one talks about collapse, the first thing you have to talk about is what is collapsing. And civilization, of course, is the word that springs to mind. Yet there's never been any good definition of civilization. The definitions range from having a checklist of things like long distance trade, which all hunter gatherers have writing, which some big empires like the Inca for instance, didn't have. They had the quipu instead. So a checklist doesn't quite work. And another definition has been an advanced culture, which is about as biased towards indigenous peoples as it is vague and unuseful. I think the problem is that when we think about civilization, it's very difficult to look it in the eyes and actually acknowledge what changed roughly 5,000 years ago, at least in the near east, in Egypt, and that's the emergence of big dominance hierarchies, ways of organizing society in which a small group or even individual essentially controls and extract resources from everyone else using the threat of violence. As you mentioned, for 300,000 years, we largely evolved as nomadic egalitarian groups and suddenly changing to a system in which we're in great inequality and high levels of violence. That's enormous change and one that would naturally never quite sat well with us. We're not evolved to live in such lopsided, violent communities. And that Growing inequality tends to eventually take a toll. And this is something you see across most cases of collapse historically. So I mentioned the lowland classical Maya. The Maya, their collapse is usually attributed to a big drought. And it's true, roughly during their collapse, a large scale drought did hit deep different regions of the Yucatan. But that environmental stress isn't a full explanation. There's parts of the southwest in the lowlands where there's no signs of environmental stress and yet they still collapse. There's still very high signs of warfare. And there's areas which were hit by the drought but didn't collapse at all. Their cities were more or less remained intact. We need to have a more complete explanation. It's worthwhile taking a step back here and thinking through what is the risk of collapse. And when we talk about risk, it's basically four things. It's the threat. So think about a tsunami and something that's going to do you damage your vulnerability. So in the case of a tsunami, the fact you don't have infrastructure to withstand it, your response, whether you run away or not, and your exposure, the fact that you actually hit by the tsunami in the first place. And what I found across all these cases, including the Maya, is they were growing more unequal before the collapse. And inequality, we know, has a whole bunch of very pernicious knock on effects. It's first of all correlated with higher levels of political instability. It's also correlated with higher levels of corruption. And we see this in many cases, both in the case of the Western empire and the Han dynasty, where it appears that local elites were often shielding and hiding peasants from taxation, often potentially up to millions of peasants, and taxing them locally and privately instead, which is a pretty large scale form of tax evasion. Apart from that, as you get growing levels of inequality, you tend to get this situation in which there's also a very large growing level of elites. Essentially society becomes more top heavy. And as you get more and more elites competing for a small number of high status positions, such as a throne, you, you tend to get more coups, more civil wars, more rebellions. And additionally, as you have a more top heavy society, things like land, et cetera, become more expensive. And that tends to lead to the poorer people becoming increasingly poor and immiserated. In short, growing wealth inequality just tends to make a society innately more fragile and vulnerable until eventually it's knocked off by a series of disasters, different hazards, whether it be a drought, invaders or disease. And we see that in the case of the Maya. We see it in the case of the Western Empire, of the Han Dynasty and many others throughout history.
- [10:57]
A
Do we have to have someone in charge? Do we have to have religions to keep us in some kind of order? Are those essential in civilizations? Are there any civilizations you can point to? And again, we're cautious about using that word, of course. But are there any of these civilizations that you can point to where there has been a flatter structure socially and politically and religiously from the outset?
- [11:17]
D
No, I don't think so. I'd be remarkably surprised if a species that survived the Ice Age because it was egalitarian, highly interconnected and highly cooperative, does not have the capability of organizing itself in a non hierarchical manner. To the contrary, we're evolved to cooperate at a large scale without hierarchy. And there are examples of this. So one I found very fascinating is the Indus Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan, which began roughly the same time as the first states in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. So uruk in the first dynasty, but they look remarkably different. So approximately 5,000 years ago, you had a collection of different cities spanning across the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan. And some of these cities were vast, up to 40,000 people in the case of Mohenjo Daro. Yet we don't see any signs of rulers or even an elite class. There's plumbing. So they actually had incredibly sophisticated infrastructure for their time. They additionally seemed to have big communal bath houses and other big communal structures. They of course had cities. They had trade between the cities and trade all the way through to Mesopotamia. Yet again, we don't see any signs of kings. There was once one small figurine which many archaeologists were referring to as the Priest King because they assume that in order to have such a sophisticated large scale civilization, you must have a king. Yet there's no other signs of inequality or hierarchy. And there are other examples. There's also the case of Teotihuacan, which was a large scale city in the basin of Mexico, and that existed approximately from the kind of turn of millennium through to 550 CE. It began unequal. It began with the usual markers of a Goliath. So things like mass human sacrifice, glorious big temples. But there seems to be some kind of eternal rebellion. And after that you don't see any persistent signs of large scale inequality. You don't see any depictions of rulers. It seems to once again be existing as a fairly egalitarian community. And that's a city of approximately 100,000 people. So I think we're certainly capable of organizing ourselves in a more voluntary flat Manner. And we even see today Wikipedia works very well. And interestingly, Wikipedia, when it first began, had a competitor, which was Encyclopedia Britannica, which Microsoft funded for $1 billion. Yet the crowdsourced, flatter alternative actually won out in the end. Hence, I think there's loads of reasons to believe that we can organize ourselves more democratically and more voluntarily, with less violence. It has unfortunately just been one of the most successful myths passed down from the very first states, is that we need to have rulers in order to organize ourselves. Another point of evidence against this is that originally many archaeologists believed that you essentially needed rulers to do grand projects like large scale monuments or irrigation systems. Yet increasingly we find that irrigation systems and even large scale monuments often preceded the emergence of these very first hierarchies. We see that in Mesopotamia. We see it in the case of Tiwanaku, one of the earliest cities and states in South America. They already had things like irrigation and big cities before the elites emerged. The elites essentially hijacked the accomplishments of everyday people.
- [14:53]
A
Why, for all the examples you've cite, why can we all think of so many examples where the elites have immiserated, enslaved, terrified and amassed astonishing power? Why is the deeply depressing nature of our human story one of young men being dragged away from family homes and fields to go and fight distant enemies they've never met before to the death, and indeed, strangely, often willingly do so? You know, what is it about us that our social relations have been hacked and we are, too many of us, so comfortable living in one of those deeply unequal hierarchical states like, how does that happen?
- [15:30]
D
There are two important sets of root causes. One is psychological, it's hidden deep in our skulls. The second is environmental. It's a question of what changed roughly 12,000 years ago when we exited the Ice Age where we were these nomadic egalitarian groups and we entered the Holocene, where the earth warmed. Let's start with the environmental. Once the earth warmed, it allowed for both the intensification of agriculture, which meant the domestication of both animals, but also many plant species, in particular a set of different grasses. The story for a long period of time was that once you had a big surplus enabled by agriculture, you de facto need to have elites to once again organize everyone. Again, I don't think that's the case. And interestingly, there's lots of evidence which points against that. For instance, we have numerous hunter gatherer groups, such as on the Pacific west coast of North America, in both Canada and California, hunter gatherers who organize themselves hierarchically. They compete through these big feasts, they do slave raids and conduct warfare. They kind of look like a set of kingdoms from the medieval ages. And yet they were hunter gatherers and didn't have really big surpluses. And we also have cases such as Papua New guinea, where you have agriculture, you have surplus for thousands of years, yet they never develop a state. So Papua New guinea had agriculture roughly the same time as Egypt. So approximately 7,000 years ago. The difference was Papua New guinea had agriculture in the form of banana and taro, while Egypt had it primarily in the form of barley and wheat. The difference in crops makes a huge difference in social structure. Papua New guinea develops a pharaoh, a set of pyramids, or any kind of large scale hierarchy. And I think that's because of the crops. When you look at taro and banana, they can't be easily stored. They tend to persist, usually of about six months at best. They can also be hidden. So once Ataro is ripe, you can actually leave in the ground for a prolonged period of time. In contrast, all the different original civilizations or states of the world. So in China, they had the xia dynasty approximately 4,000 years ago. In the case of Egypt, you had the first dynasty 5,000 years ago, Uruk in Mesopotamia, 5,000 years ago, Monta Alban, which is around about 300 BCE in Mesoamerica, and Tiwanaku, which is roughly 700 CE in South America. And the commonality across all of those places is they had access to grains that were easily seen, stolen and stored. So think about wheat. Once you harvest it, you can keep it for decades at a time. It also has to be harvested at a very particular period and advertises that for its high stalks, which makes it very easy for a tax collector to come by and demand it. Additionally, on top of what I call lootable resources, these resources that can be easily seen stolen and stored is the fact that you often had more monopolizable weapons, weapons that can be easily used by one group to dominate others. So in the case of the near east, before the emergence of the first states, you both see the emergence of warfare, but more importantly, you see bronze metallurgy a couple of centuries beforehand, which means the use of bronze held swords and axes. And you see the same thing in China. You don't get the Shah dynasty popping up until the first bronze held swords and axes emerge. And on top of that is what I call caged land, which is essentially land and geography, which restricts the ability for people to exit and to run away from more authoritarian structures. Mesopotamia in Greek means the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. In Egypt, it's cordoned off between the Red Sea and the Nile River. These three different things, lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land, explain why you see Goliaths or civilizations popping up in these different areas, but not in other areas which had agriculture. It also explains why you see these hierarchical hunter gatherers. In the case of the west coast, they had access to salmon, big runs of salmon, which they would then smoke and store. In short, it became a lootable resource that you could kind of build a hierarchy upon. All of this points towards history larger being a story of organized crime. We do tend to think of the collapse of the Western empire as the fall from a golden age and an absolute catastrophe. Yet when you look at things like human height, it actually tells a different story. So in osteoarchaeology, the study of human bones and skeletons, height is often used as a good overall biophysical indicator of someone's health. In short, taller scale tends to mean more calories and more protein and a lack of famine and disease after the fall of the Westmoor Empire. So, I mean, people vary in terms of when they date this, but kind of roughly the late 5th century. Interestingly, you tend to see skeletons actually get taller with less bone lesions and less dental caries. In short, their bones are stronger and they have less holes in their teeth. They're overall healthier. There's a couple of different explanations here. The obvious one people point to is what they call survivor bias or survivor effect, which is so many people died that there was a lot more resources left over for everyone else, and there were far fewer workers. Hence they could bargain for higher wages. That may have played some role. But first of all, it's really difficult to actually know how many people died in the case of the fall of the Western Empire. Often this is more about displacement and human movement. Like in the case of modern day civil wars, where roughly 20 to 30 times more people move than die. And secondly is you see a whole bunch of benefits even when you don't have large scale population collapse. A good example of this is in 1991, the Bahrain regime in Somalia falls apart. And a decade later, basically every single quality of life indicator has improved. Maternal mortality drops by 30%, infant mortality drops by 24%, and extreme poverty drops by approximately 20%. And this isn't just a story of East Africa is getting better as a whole, and Somalia is hence benefiting. Somalia does far better than neighbors around it. And similarly with Rome, it's not just simply the people get taller after the fall of Rome, the Roman Empire seems to have been bad in general for people's health. People outside the empire tended to be taller, hence the trope of the muscle bound big German barbarian. It was kind of true to the Romans. They actually would have seemed remarkably tall and big. And even when you look at growth and heights prior to Rome, it was increasing quite rapidly before the rise of the empire. And that rise of the empire actually causes heights to start to slow down, eventually stagnate. So in general, the Roman Empire just wasn't very good for people's health. And it's worthwhile bearing in mind the sheer savagery of the empire as well. It's easy to look at the aqueducts and the great monuments and think of this as a kind of high point of civilization. Yet Rome was a place where you could see gangs of armed men selling women to slavery and crucifying people. That's something you can see in the modern world, but it's done by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and we tend to view that a little bit differently. But in short, collapse often had numerous benefits. People often got taller afterwards. You see that not just the case of Rome, but also in the case of the late Bronze age collapse, roughly 1177 BCE, people seemed to get taller afterwards. And interestingly, the empires that are least affected actually seem to have increasing rates of poverty, at least when you look at burial remains and burial goods. So in short, the regimes of the past were often so predatory that sometimes having them fall apart was a net benefit for much of the population.
- [24:00]
A
This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this.
- [24:12]
C
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- [26:21]
A
But Luke, who's going to build the Triumphal AR that we're then gonna celebrate? And this is the problem I suppose you have when you're preaching this is you're coming at the end of a unbroken tradition of history tellers who are drawn from those elites. They are sometimes literally the politicians, the leaders themselves, but they're often the cousins and the scholarly second son. The whole of our sort of historical canon in a way celebrates and elevates these so called civilizations, don't they? None of those historians are talking about quality of life for actual everyday people in the societies they're describing precisely.
- [26:57]
D
One of the problems we have is that we have a 1% view of history. As you mentioned, most of history was marked by only a very small class of people who could write, and those writers were almost always in the employ of either the richest or of the kings in Additionally, all the things that tend to last are essentially signs of elite lifestyle and architecture. So whether it be grand monumental buildings, great cities, etc. And yet, even at the peak of Rome, roughly 90 to 95% of people lived rurally, which meant most of their structures would have been biodegradable things like wood. Even though we tend to break up history into the Iron Age and the Bronze Age or the Copper Age, most people weren't using large amounts of copper, bronze or iron. Those were primarily Elite items. Instead, most of history has actually been the wood age, but again, wood is biodegradable. Hence we almost always tend to see both the rise and fall of empires. We tend to see collapse through the eyes of its greatest victims, the elites. One thing I find fascinating is when you actually look at some of the texts, what are called lamentation literature, which is essentially when writers of future regime look on the collapse of a past one and write about it. And this can be incredibly telling. One example is the Admonitions of Ipuwa, which was a collection of poems written at least decades after the First Intermediate Period in Egypt, which is basically their first kind of collapse of the Egyptian dynasties. And what's really striking here is that the poems spend less time talking about how bad things are and more time complaining about how. How the social hierarchy has been inverted. I'll see if I can quickly recall some of the lines here. So I think it goes, the corn of Egypt is common property. The poor man has attained to the state of nine gods. He who could not make a sarcophagus for himself is now the possessor of a tomb. Behold, noble ladies are now on the rafts, while he who could not sleep even on walls is now the possessor of a bed. Servants spoke freely, the nobles lamented and the poor rejoiced. That doesn't sound particularly apocalyptic to me, but it was clearly something which the writers later abhorred and they thought was terrible. And of course, they tended to equate this scenario of collectively produced food being distributed collectively as being an absolute catastrophe, being an unrivaled cosmic blunder of sorts of. And I think that's worthwhile. Always bearing in mind is that because we're not involved to be in lopsided societies and dominance hierarchies, they've always required really strong stories, what I call stories of subjugation, to justify why the dominance hierarchy is there. And of course, we see this in the past, all the way from the idea that the king is either representative of the gods or is a God themselves, through to the idea of the priests control the weather, which is the kind of leading theory for how the original priest class of Cahokia justified their rule. But we don't really have good evidence that the rules that passed were particularly good coordinators or particularly skilled. It's actually a great example of Ramesses ii, who's obviously incredibly well known. He paints himself as being this remarkably astute tactician and Rambo like soldier. And yet, when we actually look at the archaeological evidence of his most famous battle, the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittite Empire. It seems like he totally messed up and was defeated. But he goes back and he carves into the stone so deeply over the top lava murals that you basically can't get rid of it again painting himself as the great conqueror Invicta. So we have to bear in mind that our vision of the past is always manipulated by the most powerful of the time. It is by and large frequently relic of propaganda.
- [31:06]
A
We have a lively little tiny subset of that debate here in the UK about the 1970s in which it's reasonably clear that it wasn't great to be fabulously wealthy in Britain. And it's then often described in literature as sort of drab and going a bit backwards. But as you know, there's some really interesting, you know, economic history going. Actually that was a pretty good time in fact, if you were a little bit lower down in the terms of income brackets. But they're people who don't commission glitzy artwork and have a public platform to talk about those experiences. So the issue I suppose is that civilizations science can happen and engineering can happen in those spaces as well. And we've seen in the last 250 years, particularly some obviously game changing medical science, engineering for good and evil. We've also put a ton of gas in our environment that is seemingly leading us on the road to catastrophic breakdown. But how do we best think about the good things that can come as a result of these hierarchical structures? Universities funded by big endowments and rich patrons supporting artists and thinkers in the 18th century. How can we think about preserving the advantages that we have gained from living in a settled civilization with the sort of stuff that you are learning and helping us understand.
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D
I think it's important to think about when is progress actually genuinely incurred. And there's different ways of thinking about progress here. One is, as I mentioned, human height. And the story there is fairly simple. The uptake of agriculture is an absolute disaster for human health. And heights decrease by up to a few inches in some cases and more or less stay stagnant of roughly 168cm. There's some variation across time. So as mentioned, sometimes collapses can increase height. The Black Death. Interestingly, there's some debate over this into how much. But it does seem to increase human height afterwards. And that in large part seems to be because, as mentioned, workers become richer relative to landlords and have more bargaining power afterwards. But again, there's a relative stagnation until after the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, despite thousands of years of technological progress, it seems like real wages don't really change that much. So, in short, there's not a huge difference between the standard of living of an Egyptian peasant, 7000 BCE versus an English peasant in 1600. That's despite the adoption of things like the iron plow, watermills, windmills, et cetera. And that appears to be both because you have a growing population, but more importantly, because all the surplus it has created is usually taken by elites. And even when you think of the Industrial Revolution, things don't actually get better just with technology. So after the Industrial Revolution in the heartland of empire in England, human height actually decreases and life expectancy drops as well. It's not until you start to have the rise of unions and mass enfranchisement, and additionally the adoption of welfare policies, often in response to World War II and the large amount of leveling and destruction of capital that happened, as well as people demanding more from their states because they were fighting en masse for them, that you start to see human height increasing, you start to see all these vast improvements in human health. And the same goes for many other countries around the world. It's not just simply technology that happens. It's when you start to have the fruits of technology widely shared and dispersed because of mass mobilization and because of shared struggle. Hence, this isn't just about technology, it's about power. And I don't think the technology de facto leads to more prosperity unless you have shared power as well. So if you want to have all the good things of the modern world. I like renewable energy, I like trains, I like vaccines, I love sanitation. It's one of the best things we ever invented. But I'm not really a big fan of nuclear weapons or kill robots or even things like SUVs marketing cigarettes. Those are all pretty socially destructive. And I think one of the best ways forward here is just simply putting our production under democratic control. And we have very good evidence that when you have citizens assemblies and juries, so a random selection of everyday people who are informed by experts and then deliberate until they make a decision, they tend to make pretty good decisions. This was an approach that was used to solve the debate of abortion in Ireland. It also came up with an incredibly sophisticated and progressive climate policy package in France, which unfortunately, President Macron then knocked back. And we have numerous experiments which is this works. And importantly, I think it's also an approach which will probably reduce the risk of collapse going into the future. So I'm guessing most people have heard the Manhattan Project, the Quest to build the first atomic weapon in the US and the Trinity bomb, which was the first atomic weapon ever used in the sands of New Mexico in July 1945. Now, before the Trinity test, there was a calculation by Edward Teller, a physicist in the group, who calculated that there was a very small but non zero chance that detonating the bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere of Earth, killing not just our entire species, but potentially every shred of life on the face of the planet. By that time, we also knew the Nazis were no longer pursuing their own nuclear bomb. So this wasn't about beating the Nazis to the bomb any longer. Yet they still decided to take the gamble and to detonate the Trinity bomb. If you had instead a jury of randomly selected citizens, farmers, cleaners, plumbers, and you asked them whether or not we should detonate the bomb and gave them full information, what do you think they would have said?
- [37:18]
A
You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up.
- [37:30]
C
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- [38:00]
B
Oh, I'm not switching my team to some fancy work platform that somehow knows exactly how we work. And its AI features are literally saving us hours every day. We're big fans. And just like that, teams all around the world are falling for Monday.com within two intuitive design, seamless AI capabilities and custom workflows. It's the work platform your team will instantly click with. Head to Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah, and indeed. And if you'd asked their equivalent in Japan in the 1930s, should we launch a gigantic land war in Asia, I believe, and I hope, and I'm sure you do too, that they would have made a different decision to the military hierarchy at the time.
- [38:54]
D
Yeah, absolutely. And we see this time and time again in surveys, whether it be on climate change, on nuclear weapons, on things like killer robots, people tend to be in favor of bans on things like nuclear weapons and killer robots, and in favor of much stronger action on climate change. So I mentioned that this isn't just about what changed in the environment for the Holocene? But also it's about our psychology. And while I think humans are pretty sociable, pretty good, decent, we don't tend to indulge in things like mass panic. And we're very good at cooperating when we are naturally egalitarian. It's worth noting that we still have certain psychological quirks. In particular, most of us compete for status, and there's numerous studies showing that those with higher status tend to have both more children and their children tend to make it to adulthood, in other words, as an evolutionary argument for acquiring status. But some people want it much more than others, in particular, men, and even more so people who rank high in what's called the dark triad, which is a set of antisocial traits, including psychopathy, a lack of empathy and a certain callousness, narcissism, an overinflated sense of ego and Machiavellianism, a willingness to manipulate others in pursuit of your own self interest. All of those tend to be people who are much more willing to seek status through domination. And for the first 300,000 years of humanity, that probably earned you an early grave. What we see with nomadic egalitarian groups is that when one person tries to dominate others, they tend to be either ridiculed, ostracized, or in the worst cases, executed. While it may have earned you an early grave throughout most of human history, eventually we entered a situation where the most celebrated figures of history are those who dominate others. They're basically mass murderers, like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Genghis Khan and many others. But it doesn't answer the question of why did so many people follow them? And this is where a second psychological quirk comes into play, what I call the authoritarian impulse. We have numerous studies suggesting that when people feel threatened, they're more likely to become authoritarian in their leadings. They're more likely to become obedient to authority structures and to crave leaders who are essentially strongmen. And of course, we see this today in the modern day US and even in places like Russia, where Putin comes into leadership on the back of bombings in Chechnya. So there's a certain set of what I call the darker angels of our nature, psychological features which become amplified once you get conflict and once you get the emergence of the first states. And these Goliaths tended to select for people who were both higher in the dark triad and wanted power and were more likely to use violence to get it. And that violence triggered many people to become more authoritarian. And even when you had Good people get into power. We again have a lot of studies suggesting that people actually do get corrupted by power in general. People who are higher on hierarchy tend to become less empathetic, less compassionate, more willing to take risks, and more likely to cheat, both in games and on their spouses. And these dark ranges of our nature, unfortunately, just get amplified over time. And the beauty of democratizing things, of using things like citizen assemblies and juries, is it kind of mitigates all of those. You suddenly aren't selecting for people who want status and want power and are willing to spend their entire lives getting it. You're cycling through citizens so quickly that you can't allow for individuals to get corrupted by power. And additionally, we find that these experiments of citizen assemblies actually tend to create people who are less polarized and probably less likely to be captured by the authoritarian impulse.
- [42:39]
A
I'm really interested by your talk about citizen assemblies and the fact you haven't mentioned elections, particularly because one thing that seems quite clear after a really big democratic experiment the last hundred years is that rich people have found a way to hack elections. I know this is not the main thrust of your work, but while we're here, it's interesting. In the late 19th century, your equivalent would have been talking relentlessly about electing and sending your representatives to London, to Paris, to Washington, to Beijing to do the people's work. Now you're not. And I think that's very striking.
- [43:10]
D
I agree. One thing I talk about in the book is different forms of power. So the sociologist Michael Mann once had this separation of social power into four different forms. And I adopt a similar schema of we have political power, the control of authority and decision making, economic power, the control of resources, violent power, the control of lethal force, and information power, the control of ideology and information in general. In general, once you have one form of power, it becomes increasingly easy to translate that into other forms of power. And what really changes with the Holocene once you get grain, you get little resources, is you start to get a form of power that can be passed down across generations and can be really easily translated into other forms of power. And we see that today, once you're wealthy, you can start to buy up the media. Of course, Elon Musk owns X or Twitter. Jeff Bezos owns both Twitch as well as the Washington Post. And they also spend huge amounts to both lobby government and in the case of Musk, actually get directly involved with government. And historically, you have other cases where towards the end of both the West Roman Empire and the Eastern Han. You see private elites starting to both amass their own fortunes, increasingly practice more tax evasion, but also build up their own private armies. In short, one form of power inevitably starts to spill over into others. And I think it's no coincidence that in the 1980s and 70s, we start to see wealth inequality rise again. So the top 1% globally captured roughly 25% of wealth in the 1980s, and today it's closer to 40%. And with a lag time of a couple of decades, you start to see a lot of what's called democratic backsliding, essentially countries across the world becoming increasingly less democratic. And to me, it's pretty obvious once you look at places like the US that what's happening is that wealth inequality is spilling into our politics. And it's surprisingly easy to spend, well, less than a billion dollars in order to get your preferred outcome in an election. And until we level each form of power, I don't think we can have true democracy.
- [45:28]
A
Luke, that's an interesting place, a provocative place to end it. Thank you very much indeed. Tell everyone what your book is called.
- [45:35]
D
My book is called Goliath's the History and Future of Societal Collapse. And I should also add it is the outcome of seven years of work, so make sure to enjoy reading it.
- [45:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. Come on. It's a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into that book, sadly. Thank you, Luke. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Dan.
- [45:53]
D
My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [45:57]
A
Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan's Knows History.
- [46:00]
D
Hit.
- [46:01]
A
We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now, you'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get. Your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC. Sounds.
- [46:18]
D
Imagine a world.
- [46:19]
A
Just imagine, you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean, it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.
- [46:39]
C
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E
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