Kemp focuses on the common tendency of human societies to generate rule by dominant, greedy, exploitative and nasty elites which increasingly gear things to their own aggrandizement and wealth, and thereby eventually cause their own collapse.
Such societies were not characteristic of the hunter gatherer societies we lived in for 300,000 years, but they began to appear in the Bronze Age. They have been the most common element in “civilization”, which can be summed up as rule through domination. Kemp devotes much space documenting the merits of hunter gatherer societies, including superior health and fitness compared with the effects of the conditions farmers experienced later.
Those societies were mostly basically anarchist, that is, participatory “democracies” of equals without top down rulers. Sharing was a deeply entrenched custom, extending beyond food to the sharing of power. Various mechanisms maintained this situation of remarkable equality and lack of domination, such as “insulting the meat”, that is denigrating the animal the hunter returned with, thereby preventing him from coming to see himself as superior. Another mechanism occasionally resorted to when a big man began to emerge was simply to kill him, with all the tribes members taking turns to stab him. “For most of human history, an attempt to dominate others was more likely to get you an early burial than a place in the history books.”(p. 69.)
“In many modern forager communities, ... there are no permanent chiefs or commanders. ...When leaders do appear ... they are shackled by expectations. They are expected to be modest, generous, and egalitarian, and are kept politically toothless. ... chiefs had no power to impose decisions on others. They were more like unpaid facilitators. ... in the Palaeolithic,... we have no signs of enduring inequality or hierarchy, and modern nomadic-egalitarian groups who have the lifestyles closest to our deep past are especially democratic...” Indeed more so than the Ancient Greeks, who restricted participation to adult men.
“We are a species that survived the ice age by being intensely social, cooperative across groups, and equal, even during times of need and danger.”
This provides the important context for thinking about modern societies where top down domination either benign or vicious is the norm. It contradicts the Hobbesian view of humans and their situation which assumes that humans are basically individualistic competitive, selfish and belligerent, and therefore need powerful government to control things. But that view has been formed within western civilization which for 10,000 years has been driven by Goliaths. Kemp’s first 100 pages align with the account Graeber and Wengrow give in their The Dawn of Everything, documenting many societies that have or still do function as communities of (political) equals. This means we are not condemned to suffer rule by kings, tyrants, patriarchs, muller's, ruling classes or other kinds of Goliaths.
The Transition
With the coming of the warmer post-iceage climate there was a “...shift towards
social relations built on dominance hierarchies.” (p. 61.) This was primarily due to the increased availability of “lootable resources”, such as grain. These “... allowed for individuals and groups to become not just rich but also powerful.” The other two “sources of Goliath fuel were “monopolizable weapons” enabling plunder and hoarding, and “caged land, by which he means resources and/or people that could not move to escape domination. Groups would often simply flee a rising Gorilla, if they could.
Thus, ”Warfare emerges as Goliaths develop. In Europe, there are no signs of war during the Palaeolithic”. (p. 30.)
The “Dark Triad”
Goliaths involve “the ‘dark triad’; psychopathy (callousness, and a lack of empathy and remorse), narcissism (an inflated sense of entitlement and self-importance), and Machiavellianism (manipulating others for personal gain). (p. 72.) Kemp argues that only a very few have these traits, but they can lead whole societies to become Goliath states.
Kemp vigorously condemns the state. “All states are empires and empires are about domination. In the simplest terms, empire is just the quest of one society to control the resources and people of another.” It was a case of evolutionary backsliding: we began to give up the arrangements that had made us uniquely human.
He argues that the state did not emerge because of the need for bureaucracy to manage the complexity of agriculture. It was primarily due to the emergence of Goliath mentality. Various societies developed top down rule with and without agriculture.
Today?
Kemp’s views on the emergence and nature of the state are debatable, but his insistence on the historical significance of the emergence of Goliaths is not. For 10,000 years we have had the rise of Goliaths, their thuggish rule for on average two to three hundred years, and their over-reach and self destruction. Goliath’s curse.
This story is also told by Michael Hudson in Killing the Host. Hudson focuses on the role of debt in enabling the rich to acquire wealth, for instance by taking the land of farmers unable to repay loans for the purchase of seed grain, or taking them as slaves. Before long the king finds he has a depleted workforce, tax base and army. Hudson explains how debt has thereby destroyed whole empires. Often this led rulers to periodically cancel all debts.
Thus Kemp provides a strong case that we are experiencing the playing out of Goliath’s curse, the emergence of a situation in which a super-rich elite is using its wealth to secure political power to increasingly gear society to their interests. He devotes much space to documenting the Poly crisis that is gathering momentum towards collapse, illustrating the way the system producing it is serves the interests of the owners of capital. He deals with the mechanisms whereby they exercise the power their wealth gives them, for instance via campaign contributions that buy the allegiance of politicians who will then pass laws that reduce welfare, outlaw strikes and unions, and keep wages low. In addition they own the media and can fund think tanks, lawyers, campaigns etc. The politicians have passed the laws which for forty years have prevented the incomes of American workers from significant increase while enabling the wealth of the super-rich to skyrocket.
The process is eliminating the structures and procedures which are crucial for the maintenance of society. For instance it suited capital to wind down manufacturing in America and relocate it in low wage Asia. Now they do not have the capacity to produce the quantity of drones and submarines they need to maintain dominance of their empire. This is what inevitably happens in an economy driven by the profit of the capitalist class as distinct from what is needed by individuals, society and the environment.
More important is the effect their greed is having on the destruction of social cohesion. Large numbers suffer poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and mental illness. America is around the bottom of almost all lists of rich world social indicators.
Deprived and angry masses are turning to authoritarian leaders who will further impoverish them while gutting the institutions that used to protect them and their society, especially the judicial, scientific, environmental, green energy, health care and regulatory institutions.
Above all there is the financialization of the economy. As the declining purchasing power of the masses reduces opportunities for capital to be invested in producing more goods to sell, investors have turned to getting hold of assets to rent. For instance students now have to take out large loans to pay enrolment fees. Such investment does not increase production of anything, it only enables pre-existing wealth to be siphoned out. Collins has described this as cannibalism, similar to a hardware store having to sell the corrugated iron from its own roof to make a profit, or the mafia extracting wealth from previously existing productive enterprises.
Many now agree with kemp's diagnosis, especially the conclusion that “...we live in uniquely dangerous times.” Unfortunately his solution is more challengeable.
The Solution
Kemp says “Wealth becoming more unequal may be close to an iron law throughout history, but reversing it is surprisingly easy. The simplest way is through taxation.”
Another option is “...a global minimum wage, which could be half the median wage of a country to take account of local conditions. Another is a comprehensive debt jubilee – in other words, writing off all debts.” Then there is “...break up existing monopolies, specifically in big tech and the media.” And “...We can also slow – or even halt – the production of dangerous new technologies and weapons by placing them back under democratic control.”
Thus the final pages of the book are stunningly naive and useless. They are akin to The Beatles solution; ...”...all we need is love.” Perfectly true, but lacking any suggestions as to how on earth these solutions can be implemented... in a society firmly in the hands of Goliath.
Even if they were achievable kemp's solutions are merely reformist. He barely uses the word “capitalism” and does not realise that it is the basic cause of all our big problems. The capitalist class stole America long ago. As Warren Buffett said, “There is no class war in America ... There was but my class won it”. How does Kemp think we can take it back from Musk et al.
Here is an alternative transition vision. The Poly crisis is massive and insoluble. We are as Kemp details, on a trajectory towards catastrophic global breakdown. There is nothing that can be done about it now. If we are lucky it will be a Goldilocks collapse, not sudden and totally final but sufficient to get rid of capitalism and drive people to develop local communities that are highly self-sufficient and self-governing and committed to The Simpler Way. Many now see that such communities are the only path to sustainability and survival. The Eco-village, Transition Towns and similar movements are attempting to pioneer this kind of path. Our task is to work hard in the time remaining to increase the numbers who realise that some kind of simpler way is the only viable answer, so that sufficient alternative communities can be initiated to survive and become the foundations for a viable new society. The chances of success are obviously not good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. He has taught and written about sustainability and justice issues for many years. He is also developing Pigface Point, an alternative lifestyle educational site near Sydney. Many of his writings are available free at his website, The Simpler Way.
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