Hello, my name's David Ransman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it is the second of my conversations with Luke Kemp, author of Goliath's Curse, as part of our

series about the fate of humanity. We are discussing societal collapse. Today we are bringing

the story into the modern age. What makes modern Goliaths different from the states that

existed before them? Does democracy make a difference? And are these

states more or less vulnerable to falling apart? Luke, I want to ask you about something we discussed last

time and see if we can pin it down

a bit more for my own benefit, apart from anything else.

You described a pattern of human social development in the period after humans had settled

down, so let's call it post the agricultural revolution, which is sometimes called, in which

you see a kind of wave

effect or a sequence that repeats itself. Human beings settle, population grows, settlements

grow, buildings get bigger, hierarchies are established, domination takes effect, some of it pretty

brutal. We talked last time about human sacrifice.

That's about as brutal as you can get.

Not all of it in that form, but nonetheless, there's a wave of growth and then it goes into

retreat.

There's a kind of dissolution.

Population shrinks, population scatter. Buildings pulled down, elites are pulled down, and then it repeats itself.

So it's growth, I guess we could call it decline without any moral or other connotations related to that, and then growth again.

One of my questions is this may, for some people, have a faint echo of what is a very different

account of how human societies have developed over time, but also fallen into patterns,

...