#luke kemp

[wordshaveteeth]

Fifty years of sociological, psychological, and documentary evidence has converged on this simple yet profound finding. It has been reported in study after study, including earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks such as 9/11, and the mass bombing of cities. The world crumbles away, often revealing the best in us — our cooperative, civil side.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

[apesoformythoughts]

"To be fair, [Luke] Kemp is rightly concerned about habitat destruction, plastics and chemicals. But then he turns round and calls for the same “renewable” crusade that often creates those very problems: industrial wind and solar farms that tear up landscapes, destroying the land under them forever, mining for “green tech” that poisons water and uses child labour (something to be fair to him, Kemp does mention in this regard) “net zero” schemes that offshore emissions so Western politicians can preen on television while someone else breathes the fumes. The Irish state bans Irish turf, while importing it from abroad. Little old ladies assiduously washing out yoghurt pots and jam jars, just so they can be shipped off shore, and dumped in some foreign ocean [...]

Meanwhile the middle classes sit in cafés, feeling virtuous over avocado on toast and oat-milk lattes, while villagers in places like Peru watch their natural water sources vanish to feed those ugly little green monsters (the avocados not the middle classes). But the packaging has leaves on it, and it’s isn’t nasty old meat or dairy, so it’s all good. And of course they come for meat and dairy. The most nutritionally dense foods on the planet are treated as filth, while populations are nudged towards soy products and lab-grown slop. Strip people of animal fats, and the essential fatty acids from them, and you don’t get a healthier world. You get a weaker one, physically, mentally, emotionally, much easier to medicate, much easier to manage.

Kemp even promotes solar geoengineering on a worldwide scale, in particular solar radiation management, the bright idea that we should pump reflective particles into the upper atmosphere (what’s politely called stratospheric aerosol injection) to dim the sun and “cool” the planet. This isn’t fringe stuff in his world, it’s discussed as a serious, sensible option. Just pause on that for a moment: the same class of people who can’t run hospitals, schools, or even railways without chaos now want to start tinkering with the sky. They’ve already mismanaged energy policy, housing, food supply and public health, but somehow they’re qualified to adjust the planetary thermostat from a UN conference room. And Kemp nods along as if this were grown-up, responsible governance rather than the plot of a third–rate dystopian novel."

-- "Goliath’s Curse: Prophetic, Pathetic – or a Bit of Both?"

[collapseofindustrialcivilization]

Homo Sapiens Are Working Overtime to Join 'The Great Silence'

And if it does affect the economy, we’ll find a way to                      extract a profit from it…. Driven mostly by rising global temperatures from the continued burning of fossil fuels, extreme weather events such as typhoons, hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and drought are becoming more frequent, increasing 83% worldwide in the past 20 years (as of 2020), and the costs have increased by 800%…

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[wordshaveteeth]

When a change takes centuries, it is almost imperceptible to the people living through it. Individuals rarely recognize that they are living through a collapse. Instead, they sensibly perceive the discrete disasters unfolding in front of them.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

[wordshaveteeth]

Most of the key technological breakthroughs of the Bronze Age, such as the alphabet and ironworking, occurred on the peripheries of empire, and/or after the Bronze Age collapse. Other technologies and practices such as animal husbandry, the plough, irrigation through canals and ditches, the sailing boat, and pottery all preceded the first states of the Bronze Age and were often developed by stateless hunter-gatherers. The idea of golden ages of empire leading to technological and cultural progress, and the fall of empires leading to regressions, is at best mistaken.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

[wordshaveteeth]

Conquerors like Narmer and Sargon had to rely on vulgar displays of brute force and punishment — whether that be public monuments showing them smashing people’s heads in or hanging flayed skin from city walls — not because they were powerful, but because they were weak.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

[wordshaveteeth]

[I]nequality does not occur automatically. It is fought for and often resisted.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

[wordshaveteeth]

What we see in the first Goliaths is a slow fusing of the different forms of social power. All the first states had some form of authoritative hierarchy (political power), backed by force (violent power), with rituals and a story that bequeathed a right to rule (information power), and took resources (economic power) from a community of people (demographic power). There was no single path to statehood, yet they all looked remarkably similar: elite taking wealth and labour from a mass of commoners. They all converged on a similar evolutionary pathway: a pathway that placed men on top.

- Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse