Goliath's Curse

1. Human Nature: Cooperative, Not Brutish

The picture that is emerging is far more interesting, and hopeful, than a Hobbesian chaos.

Challenging Hobbes. Contrary to Thomas Hobbes's pessimistic view of a "state of nature" as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," human history reveals a deeply cooperative and social species. For 99% of our existence in the Palaeolithic era, humans lived in nomadic, egalitarian bands, forming vast "fluid civilizations" across continents. This era was characterized by low violence, extensive trade, and mutual aid, demonstrating that centralized authority was not necessary for coordination or survival.

Egalitarian origins. Our ancestors actively maintained egalitarianism through "counter-dominance" strategies, such as teasing, shaming, or even executing individuals who sought to dominate. This was reinforced by anatomical changes, like the ability to throw projectiles, which leveled the playing field against aspiring alpha males. Our "cooperative eyes" and relatively small canine teeth, unlike those of more hierarchical primates, further suggest an evolutionary path favoring collaboration over aggression.

Disaster resilience. When faced with crises like extreme weather, Palaeolithic groups responded not with panic, but by migrating to social networks for support, sharing resources, and cooperating. This innate sociability and resilience are still evident today, as modern disaster studies consistently show communities self-organizing with empathy and resourcefulness, rather than devolving into Hobbesian chaos.

2. Goliath's Genesis: Fueling Dominance Hierarchies

It was Goliath, not civilizations, that we saw arise in places such as Egypt, China, and Cahokia thousands of years ago.

The Holocene shift. The warmer, more stable climate of the Holocene (starting 12,000 years ago) enabled the rise of "Goliaths"—dominance hierarchies where some individuals control others through force and resource extraction. This transition was driven by "Goliath fuel":

• Lootable resources: Easily seen, stolen, and stored resources like grain, fish, or livestock.
• Monopolizable weapons: Technologies like bronze swords or horses that gave a few an advantage.
• Caged land: Geographies or conditions that limited people's ability to escape exploitation.

Evolutionary backsliding. The emergence of Goliaths marked an "evolutionary backsliding" from humanity's egalitarian past. Societies began to resemble the dominance hierarchies of chimpanzees and gorillas, with power becoming hereditary. This shift was not a smooth progression but a bloody affair, as organized warfare emerged alongside inequality, transforming violence from personal disputes to indiscriminate massacres for resources and power.

Status competition. The innate human desire for status, particularly through domination, fueled the rise of Goliaths. Individuals with "dark triad" traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) were more likely to pursue power violently. This led to a "growth fetish," where conspicuous consumption and endless accumulation of wealth became central to signaling status, often at the expense of the masses.

3. Early Collapses: Humanity's Rejection of Oppression

People revolted and abandoned urban settlements as they became increasingly unequal and hierarchical.

Abandoned experiments. The transition to agriculture and urbanism was slow and often resisted. Many early settlements and cities, like Çatalhöyük in Turkey or San Lorenzo in Mesoamerica, began as egalitarian communities but became increasingly unequal over time. This rise in hierarchy often triggered abandonment or rebellion, as people "voted with their feet and fire."

Voting with feet and fire. Examples abound of communities rejecting emerging Goliaths:

• Çatalhöyük: After centuries of equality, rising inequality led to the abandonment of its northern segment and a slow decline.
• Taosi, China: A fortified city with segregated burials and elite wealth saw its walls razed, royal tombs destroyed, and palaces occupied by commoners in a clear act of rebellion.
• San Lorenzo, Mesoamerica: Its colossal stone heads were mutilated and buried, signaling a violent rejection of elite rule as residents dispersed.
• North American pyramid cities: Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam, built on corn agriculture, saw populations decline and were eventually abandoned as inequality rose and climate cooled.

Cultural safeguards. In the aftermath of these collapses, many indigenous peoples actively organized to prevent Goliaths from re-emerging. They adopted more mobile lifestyles, relied on "escape crops" (less lootable foods like potatoes), and passed down oral traditions warning against tyrannical rulers. This demonstrated a conscious choice to reject oppressive hierarchies, often aided by climatic shifts that made large-scale agriculture difficult.

4. Goliath's Curse: Extraction Leads to Fragility

Goliath’s Curse is that extractive institutions hold the seeds of their own demise.

Diminishing returns on extraction. As Goliaths grew, they became more extractive, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of elites. This led to "diminishing returns on extraction," where the costs of maintaining the system eventually outweighed the benefits. Key factors included:

• Wealth pump: Capital returns outpaced labor, making the rich richer and impoverishing the masses.
• Elite competition: A swelling class of elites vied for status and power, leading to corruption, tax evasion, coups, and civil wars.
• Environmental degradation: Costly conquests and intensified production depleted resources, making societies vulnerable to climate shocks.

Internal vulnerabilities. This internal hollowing out made Goliaths increasingly fragile. Rome, for instance, suffered from crippling inequality, corruption, and overexpansion, leading to fiscal crises and reliance on mercenaries. China's dynasties were plagued by elite infighting and popular rebellions, often triggered by droughts or floods that undermined the emperor's "Mandate of Heaven."

Triggers and tipping points. When these internal vulnerabilities met external shocks—such as drought, disease, or invaders—societies often reached a "tipping point" and collapsed. More extractive institutions also hindered effective responses to disasters, as elites prioritized their own short-term interests. The "Somalia-Denmark rule" suggests that the more benevolent a state, the costlier its collapse, as citizens are more dependent on its services.

5. Imperial Evolution: From Intimidation to Global Control

Empires drove colonization and drew the current borders of the world.

War as a state-builder. War was the primary driver of state formation and imperial expansion. Early rulers like Narmer and Sargon used brutal conquest and violence to establish control, often depicting themselves maiming enemies. This "gang warfare" dynamic, where armed groups establish protection rackets, explains why violence peaked during state formation. Empires that were effective at war-making and controlling large populations tended to outcompete others, leading to "Goliath evolution."

Convergent evolution. Across different regions, Goliaths independently evolved similar structures:

• Bureaucracy: To manage distant territories and extract resources.
• Ideologies of domination: Myths like the "Mandate of Heaven" or "civilizing missions" justified inequality and expansion.
• Human sacrifice: A political performance to intimidate challengers and legitimate rule.
• Patriarchy: Male-dominated cultures, often reinforced by patrilocal marriage and legal codes, became prevalent.

Anti-fragility of empire. While individual empires collapsed, the project of empire became more robust over time. Empires learned to control larger populations more effectively through administration, communication technologies (like roads and writing), and new forms of "Goliath fuel." This meant that even after a collapse, empires were often "rebooted," as the underlying conditions for hierarchy persisted.

6. Colonization: The Birth of a Global Goliath

Colonization wasn’t just a matter of collapse and genocide; it also marked the global triumph of Goliath.

Guns, germs, and allies. European colonization, exemplified by Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs, was not solely due to superior technology or disease. Indigenous allies, resentful of existing imperial rule, played a crucial role. The Spanish exploited internal divisions within the Aztec and Incan empires, turning local resistance into a powerful force against the ruling elites.

Local apocalypses. Colonization caused unprecedented demographic collapses, particularly in the Americas and Australia, where indigenous populations, lacking immunity to European diseases and subjected to brutal oppression, perished by the millions. These were "global decimations," far more devastating than most historical collapses. In regions like the Mississippi Basin, colonization created "shatterzones" of instability, where indigenous communities were destroyed or transformed into militaristic slavers.

Global Goliath's genesis. European colonization combined with nascent capitalism to create a new "Global Goliath." This system relied on:

• Cash crops and slave labor: Plantations in the Americas and Caribbean fueled European economies.
• Unequal trade: Resources were extracted from colonies at low prices, enriching imperial cores.
• Technological control: Telegraphs and railways enabled control over vast overseas territories.
  This new form of Goliath, while avoiding societal collapse in its European core, inflicted immense suffering and laid the foundation for today's global extractive system.

7. Modern Threats: The Death-Star Syndrome of Global Risk

Our world is incredibly powerful and robust, yet surprisingly fragile if hit hard enough in the right place.

The Death-Star Syndrome. The modern world, a "Global Goliath" of interconnected capitalist states, exhibits a "Death-Star Syndrome." It is immensely powerful but vulnerable to catastrophic failure due to:

• Hyperconnectivity: Global supply chains and digital networks efficiently transmit goods, people, and crises (e.g., Covid-19, Suez Canal blockage).
• Acceleration: Rapid technological change and economic growth create tightly coupled systems, prone to flash-crashes and rapid spread of disruptions.
• Concentration: Monopolization of essential resources (food, semiconductors) and infrastructure creates single points of failure.

Mors ex Machina. Advanced technology, while offering benefits, also creates unprecedented "mors ex machina"—death from the machine. Nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, and AI pose existential risks:

• Nuclear war: A conflict between major powers could trigger a "nuclear winter," killing billions and frying electrical infrastructure with EMPs.
• Engineered pandemics: Gain-of-function research and de-novo synthesis of viruses could create pathogens deadlier than anything seen naturally.
• AI and killer robots: Automated cognition could lead to unaligned AGIs, autonomous weapons, and mass surveillance, accelerating existing threats.

Latent risk. The Global Goliath is accumulating "latent risk"—threats that don't cause harm today but would be catastrophic in a post-collapse world. This includes reliance on complex technological systems, degraded environments, and specialized populations lacking basic survival skills, making future recovery far more difficult.

8. The Anthropocene: Goliath's Environmental Footprint

The Anthropocene is the environmental bootprint of Goliath.

Planetary boundaries. Humanity has entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch where human activity is the dominant force shaping the Earth system. We have transgressed six of nine "planetary boundaries," risking abrupt and irreversible environmental change. "Novel entities" like PFAS ("forever chemicals") are ubiquitous, linked to health issues, and prohibitively expensive to remove, pushing the Earth system into an uncertain danger zone.

Climate chaos. Global heating, driven by fossil fuel consumption, threatens to violently shift humanity's "climate niche." Even 1.5°C warming increases the risk of "multiple breadbasket failures," while higher temperatures could trigger climate "tipping points" like the collapse of the AMOC, plunging Europe into an ice age and causing global mass extinction. This is a "death spiral" where environmental degradation exacerbates other threats.

Growth fetish. This environmental crisis is not due to human numbers alone, but to Goliath's "growth fetish"—the relentless pursuit of economic growth and conspicuous consumption for status. The richest 1% are disproportionately responsible for emissions and planetary degradation. This drive for growth, fueled by lootable resources and status competition, makes it challenging to meet climate and biodiversity targets, as economic expansion often requires increased material extraction.

9. Agents of Doom: The Architects of Catastrophe

The reality is that a mere handful of giant corporations, countries, and militaries are responsible for creating the great majority of catastrophic risk, shrouding their activities in secrecy to avoid scrutiny, and undermining efforts to regulate them.

Concentrated culpability. Global catastrophic risks are not random but are primarily produced by a few "Agents of Doom":

• Fossil fuel industry: A handful of companies are responsible for over half of historical greenhouse gas emissions, despite knowing the dangers for decades.
• Military-industrial complexes: A small group of countries (US, Russia, China) and defense contractors control 85% of nuclear warheads and drive arms races.
• Big Tech: Three companies (OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic) dominate AI development, despite their leaders warning of existential risks.

Secrecy and corruption. These agents operate in secrecy, burying evidence of harm (e.g., ExxonMobil on climate, 3M/DuPont on PFAS) and actively undermining regulation through lobbying and "revolving doors" between industry and government. This legalized corruption ensures that public risks are produced for private profit, despite overwhelming public support for stronger regulation.

The arms-race defense. Agents of Doom often justify their actions with the "arms-race defense"—"if we don't build it, someone else will." This argument, used for AI, nuclear weapons, and environmentally destructive practices, deflects responsibility and fuels competitive "Goliath traps" that lead to collective harm.

10. Evolutionary Suicide: Goliath's Path to Self-Destruction

For the first time, there is the alarmingly high risk that Goliath will destroy itself permanently and may even take our species with it.

The rungless ladder. The Global Goliath is like a "rungless ladder"—the higher we climb in power and technological capability, the more dangerous the fall. This is due to "evolutionary suicide," where short-term evolutionary pressures (like competitive advantage) lock the system into a path of self-destruction. The latent risk of collapse is continuously inflated by:

• Fatter tail risks: Increased likelihood and severity of extreme events (nuclear war, engineered pandemics).
• Technological dependency: Reliance on complex, interconnected systems that are vulnerable to cascading failures.
• Diminishing energy returns: Fossil fuels, the engine of the Global Goliath, are becoming harder and costlier to extract, making re-industrialization post-collapse difficult.

The Silicon Goliath. The world is rapidly transitioning into a "Silicon Goliath," where mass surveillance, AI-powered weapons, and data extraction become the new forms of control and "Goliath fuel." This system, while offering immense power, risks:

• Automated holocaust: AI-controlled nuclear launches or killer robots.
• Locked-in autocracy: Ubiquitous surveillance and AI-driven social control.
• Accelerated ecological crisis: AI used to find more fossil fuels and intensify resource extraction.

The endgame. This trajectory leads to an "endgame" where global societal collapse or human extinction becomes a genuine possibility. The constant layering of technologies and the relentless pursuit of growth, driven by Goliath traps, outstrip society's ability to adapt, pushing the Earth system beyond its limits.

11. Slaying Goliath: The Path to a True Civilization

It is fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus: let justice be done lest the world perish.

Reclaiming our nature. Escaping Goliath's Curse requires a fundamental rebalancing of power, leveraging humanity's "better angels"—our innate sociability, cooperation, and aversion to domination. This means rejecting the myth that subjugation is necessary for large-scale society and recognizing that true progress comes from collective action, not unchecked growth or elite genius.

Open democracy. The solution lies in "open democracy," where citizens have a genuine, direct say in governance and oversight. This includes:

• Deliberative juries and assemblies: Randomly selected citizens making policy decisions, informed by experts.
• Democratic workplaces: Reforming corporations into worker cooperatives.
• Transparency: Ending government and corporate secrecy, protecting whistleblowers.
• Protecting protest: Ensuring citizens can hold power accountable.

Economic equality. Political democracy cannot thrive without economic equality. This requires:

• Progressive taxation: High taxes on wealth and top earners (e.g., 90% income tax on the richest, as in the post-WWII US).
• Wealth caps: Limiting individual fortunes to prevent undue influence.
• Fair compensation: Ensuring workers across global supply chains are paid fairly, and data is not stolen.
• Ending fossil fuel subsidies: Redirecting trillions to eradicate poverty and fund sustainable development.

Democratic control of technology. We must ban dangerous technologies like AGI and killer robots, and democratically control the development and use of all technology. This means:

• Regulating AI: Capping compute, energy use, and holding companies accountable for harms.
• Eliminating nuclear weapons: Joining and enforcing international treaties.
• Prioritizing progress over growth: Focusing on well-being, sustainability, and essential services rather than endless material accumulation.

Last updated: January 8, 2026