Over 25 years of research on the history of social formations and culture change has inevitably led me to several conclusions about the nature of what is often called “societal collapse”. Below is a provisional synthesis of this learning, with opportunity for expansion and clarification as this line of inquiry continues.

Comments, questions, and dialogue always welcome.

“Collapse is the shadow of resilience, consequently studying collapse is indirectly the study of what makes a system resilient.” – Garry Peterson

THESIS 1: COLLAPSE IS A SYSTEMIC PHASE SHIFT, NOT A SINGLE EVENT.

We habitually imagine collapse as a sudden cataclysm—a single season of ruin when everything falls apart, vividly marked on a calendar. The archaeological and historical records tell a different, stranger story. Collapse is a process, a critical transition in which a complex system crosses a threshold and reorganizes into something new. It unfolds unevenly across regions, propagates through coupled subsystems, and only becomes legible as “collapse” in retrospect, when the architecture of the previous order has given way and we can see, looking back, that something fundamental has changed.¹ Servigne and Stevens capture this essential quality when they warn that collapse will arrive not as a single event but as “waves of overlapping crises which our society has blinded itself to and is incapable of preventing.”² The accelerating timeline of the Anthropocene means that the intervals between crises shrink, resilience erodes bit by bit, and what might once have been manageable in isolation now arrives all at once.³

A deep dive into the study of critical transitions reveals why collapse so often appears sudden when it does finally occur. A system can accumulate vulnerability over a relatively long period of time, with each small degradation invisible in isolation, until a seemingly insignificant event pushes it past a threshold.⁴ This explains the puzzling pattern observed throughout history: societies that appeared stable for centuries unraveling in decades, their citizens experiencing collapse as a bewildering surprise even as scholars later identify the long-festering pressures that made it inevitable. The “Omega phase” of the adaptive cycle describes this dynamic precisely.⁵ During the long conservation phase, systems become increasingly interconnected, efficient, and rigid—they optimize for the problems they have already solved, sacrificing flexibility for performance. Connectedness increases, but so does rigidity. When disturbance finally arrives, the system cannot bend; it breaks. Accumulated potential—capital, energy, organizational complexity—is released in a rush.⁶

This release does not propagate randomly. In tightly coupled systems, collapse cascades. Regime shifts can hop across subsystems, skipping intermediate nodes entirely, a phenomenon invisible to simpler models of contagion.⁷ Significant amount of empirical studies show how collapse can be detected through early warning signals in the relationship between ‘carrying capacity’ and actual population, but the precise timing remains unpredictable due to non-linear dynamics.⁸ Across twenty-three Neolithic cases, Shennan and colleagues found population declines of thirty to sixty percent following predictable boom-bust patterns, with cycles averaging three to five hundred years—this is collapse as a recurrent systemic feature, not an exception requiring special explanation.⁹ The societies that vanished did not simply make different choices; they were caught in rhythms larger than themselves, patterns that precede and outlast any particular social system/network.

Conversely, within the world-systems framework, collapse is never uniform across the planet. The ‘core’ societies experiences crisis differently than the ‘periphery’ societies, and the ‘semi-periphery’ are different still. What looks like collapse from the vantage of a hegemonic core power may appear as opportunity or merely inconvenience from the periphery, while the destruction of peripheral societies often goes unremarked in core histories. The fall of Rome meant something entirely different for Italian landowners than for Egyptian peasants or Germanic tribes on the edges of the empire. Collapse, in other words, is always experienced through the lens of one’s position in the world-system, and its burdens are never equally distributed.¹⁰

Thesis 2: Diminishing Returns on Complexity Create Brittle Systems.

Complexity is a problem-solving strategy, and it has served human societies remarkably well. When faced with challenges—resource scarcity, external threats, coordination demands—societies typically respond by adding layers: more specialized institutions, more elaborate hierarchies, more extensive infrastructure, more sophisticated technology. For a time, this works. The marginal benefits of added complexity exceed its marginal costs, and the society flourishes. But this trajectory contains the seeds of its own reversal. Tainter and Taylor articulate the mechanism with precision:

“Complexity is a powerful problem-solving tool, but increased complexity requires resources and carries a metabolic cost. Increasing complexity, effective at first, seems inexorably to accumulate and to evolve to diminishing returns, undermining the ability to solve future problems.”¹¹

The evidence for this pattern appears across scales and eras. Luke Kemp’s analysis of state longevity provides striking empirical confirmation: the average lifespan of a state is 326 years, but the largest states—the “Goliaths” (large complex societies)—are more fragile, lasting on average just 155 years.¹² Size and complexity, once sources of strength, become liabilities. The metabolic costs of maintaining vast bureaucracies, extensive trade networks, and elaborate military establishments eventually outpace the energy available to sustain them. Each new problem requires more complex solutions, which generate new problems that require still more complex solutions—a ratchet that tightens until it breaks. The Roman Empire did not collapse because it was decadent; it fragmented and disintegrated because it had become too complex for its own energy base, too interconnected to bend without breaking.

This dynamic operates differently across the historical world-system. Core states bear the greatest burden of complexity—they maintain the global financial architecture, the military apparatus, the elaborate institutional structures that manage the system as a whole. Peripheral regions, by contrast, often experience a different kind of complexity: the complexity of extraction, of labor exploitation, of producing for markets they do not control. When the core’s complexity becomes unsustainable, the periphery feels the effects not through the collapse of its own institutions—it may have few to collapse—but through the severing of the relationships that bound it to the global economy. The austerity imposed on peripheral nations during core crises is a form of collapse exported, a redistribution of pain upward through the system.¹³

As systems transition from the growth phase to the conservation phase of the adaptive cycle, they sacrifice general adaptive capacity—the ability to cope with unexpected disruptions—for short-term efficiency. Woods’ theory of “graceful extensibility” identifies the result: highly optimized systems become brittle, unable to extend their adaptive range when surprised.¹⁴ Simms illustrates this through the Maya and Mesopotamian collapses: both civilizations intensified production systems on marginal lands, achieving short-term gains while creating a more vulnerable system. The response to emerging stress? Further intensification—applying more complexity to problems created by complexity, until the whole structure became unsustainable.¹⁵ Tainter’s foundational insight remains central here: collapse often represents a rational reversion to lower-complexity, lower-cost equilibria when the marginal returns on complexity turn negative.¹⁶ This is not failure in any moral sense, but systems dynamics playing out. And as such effective responses must consider how sometimes the most adaptive response to overreach is to let go.

Thesis 3: Inequality is the Primary Social Mechanism that Erodes SOCIAL Resilience.

Economic stratification is not merely correlated with collapse—it is a structural driver that actively degrades a system’s capacity to absorb shocks and adapt. For Kemp, this is the central argument of Goliath’s Curse: inequality is the most important and consistent trigger of collapse in human history.¹⁷ The causal chain operates through multiple pathways simultaneously. As elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, declining public health, over-expansion, environmental degradation, and systematically distorted decision-making by a small oligarchy insulated from consequences. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war, or climate change—shocks that a more equitable society might have weathered.¹⁸ This pattern is visible from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire.¹⁹ In each case, the societies did not fail because they were poor; they failed because their wealth was grotesquely misdistributed.

The HANDY model demonstrates this with formal rigor. Through systematic simulation, Motesharrei and colleagues show that economic stratification or ecological strain can independently lead to collapse, but collapse can be avoided and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably.²⁰ Extreme inequality alone—even with abundant resources—drives collapse by concentrating surplus in elite hands while the productive majority cannot maintain the system. Contemporary analysis confirms this mechanism operates today. Socio-economic heterogeneity functions as a structural feature of human organization that dictates differential exposure to environmental risk and unequal capacity for adaptation.²¹ When adaptive capacity is concentrated in a small fraction of the population, systemic resilience collapses. The load-bearing capacity is determined not by the average strength of its components, but by the strength of its weakest, most stressed cable.

Class and race collapse into each other in ways that compound this fragility. Intersectional analysis reveals that multiply marginalized individuals—those occupying positions of both racial and economic subordination—face distinct vulnerabilities that cannot be understood by examining either dimension alone.²² In the contemporary United States, the interaction of race and class produces dramatically different outcomes than either factor in isolation: lower-class Black families earn an average of $9,300 annually while upper-class Hispanic families earn $97,000, a gap amplified nearly fourfold when class differences within racial groups are accounted for.²³ The distribution of symbolic resources like occupational status and emotional resources like family structure follows similarly complex patterns. There is no single class effect on health outcomes, for example—smoking declines with rising class standing among whites but increases among Hispanics, while showing no class gradient among Asians and Blacks.²⁴ These intersecting inequalities mean that when crisis comes, it lands on terrain already fractured by centuries of accumulated injustice.

Multiple pathways link inequality to fragility. Elites insulated from consequences fail to perceive or respond to ecological signals. Trust and cooperation—essential for collective action—degrade under perceived unfairness. Unequal societies create homogeneous exposure patterns, eliminating diverse responses to shock. Wealth concentration translates into regulatory capture, blocking adaptive policy. Kemp provocatively frames civilizations themselves as organized crime syndicates hoarding wealth for an elite who sets up a system to extract wealth from everybody else.²⁵ This bullying system always sets up the seeds of its own destruction. The irony is exquisite: the very concentration of power intended to secure elite dominance ensures that when crisis comes, there is no one left with both the capacity and the motivation to respond.

Within the world-system, inequality operates at multiple scales simultaneously. The core-periphery structure itself is a mechanism of global inequality, extracting surplus from peripheral regions to sustain core consumption. This external extraction interacts with internal inequality in complex ways: peripheral elites often serve as compradors, benefiting from their position in the global system while their populations bear the costs.²⁶ When collapse comes to the core, it ripples outward through these extraction networks; when it comes to the periphery, it is often invisible to core observers, merely another crisis in a region defined by crisis.

Thesis 4: Ecological Overshoot and Energetic Constraints ALWAYS RESULT IN Biophysical Boundaries.

Human societies are metabolically embedded in the biosphere. They are not separate from nature, contemplating it from outside, but subsystems within it, dependent on its flows of energy and materials. When extraction exceeds regeneration, the material basis of complexity erodes. Kemp’s concept of “Goliath fuel” identifies the material enablers of hierarchy: lootable resources, geographic barriers to exit, and monopolistic access to weapons.²⁷ Agriculture produced grain that could be looted; when thieves had weapons and farmers could not escape, then the looting could happen repeatedly, developing into a long-term state of subjugation. The concentration of lootable surplus made hierarchy possible; hierarchy then demanded more surplus, intensifying extraction. This is the original sin of civilization: the surplus that enables complexity also enables domination, and the two have been entangled ever since.

Resource overexploitation represents the sustained extraction or degradation of a natural capital stock beyond the rate at which it can naturally replenish, eroding the ecological basis for future human activity.²⁸ The Planetary Boundaries framework quantifies this at the global scale: nine Earth System processes regulate Holocene stability, and transgressing these boundaries risks a less predictable, potentially hostile state.²⁹ The Great Acceleration shows post-1950 surges in all human activity indicators, pushing multiple boundaries simultaneously.³⁰ The HANDY model operationalizes this through carrying capacity: when depletion rates exceed regeneration, the system enters overshoot—a condition where current consumption can only be sustained by liquidating natural capital.³¹ Meadows and colleagues first modeled this dynamic globally; subsequent research confirms that crossing one boundary can trigger cascading failures across others.³² We are, in this moment, spending our planet’s principal while pretending it is interest.

The burdens of ecological overshoot are not evenly distributed. The core consumes resources extracted from the periphery, exporting both material and pollution. The concept of “ecologically unequal exchange” captures this dynamic: peripheral nations bear the environmental costs of extracting resources for core consumption while receiving a fraction of the value.³³ When mines poison rivers in the Global South, when forests are cleared for export agriculture, when fossil fuels are burned to manufacture goods for wealthy consumers, the ecological footprint of the core is inscribed on peripheral landscapes. Climate change itself operates through this unequal logic: those who contributed least to atmospheric carbon concentrations suffer its most severe effects. The rich world’s overshoot becomes the poor world’s crisis.

Servigne and Stevens emphasize that we now face a confluence of exponentially increasing risks and hard barriers beyond which society cannot progress.³⁴ These biophysical limits are not negotiable; they set the stage upon which social dynamics play out. Historical cases abound. Simms describes Mesopotamia’s soil salinization from intensive irrigation: the fragile ecology caused output to vary wildly, a kind of reverse ecological leverage kicked in.³⁵ The Maya collapsed following high-density, stressed population practicing intensive agriculture and competing for scarce resources. In both cases, in around a century, things fell apart—ecological overshoot translated directly into civilizational decline. The lesson could not be clearer: the laws of thermodynamics and ecology do not suspend themselves for empires.

Thesis 5: Interacting Drivers Accelerate Systemic Failure.

While inequality and ecological strain can independently cause collapse, their interaction is synergistic and far more dangerous. Servigne and Stevens emphasize that we face not isolated problems but a confluence of exponentially increasing risks—a mob of crises arriving together.³⁶ The HANDY model explicitly tests this interaction, showing that mechanisms leading to two types of collapses operate, and the new dynamics of this model can also reproduce the irreversible collapses found in history.³⁷ When inequality concentrates resources among elites insulated from consequences, while ecological strain degrades the resource base for commoners, feedback loops accelerate in ways that models can simulate but history has already enacted.

Elite extraction continues regardless of ecological signals because elites do not feel the consequences first. Commoners lack buffers to absorb shocks because surplus has been siphoned away. Legitimacy collapses as the social contract visibly fails—why sacrifice for a system that has already abandoned you? Collective action becomes impossible when trust is gone and each group must fend for itself. This aligns with Panarchy theory: systems with high internal rigidity—structured by inequality rather than functional diversity—introduce rigidity and reduce the system’s capacity to absorb shocks.³⁸ The system appears stable until a threshold is crossed, at which point the rigid, unequal structure leads to catastrophic failure rather than graceful adaptation. It is the difference between a forest that bends in the wind and one that snaps.

The distributional crisis framing makes this explicit: today’s climate and broader ecological crises are, at their core, distributional crises, where excess and deprivation, overshoot and shortfall are interconnected.³⁹ The richest one percent caused twenty-three percent of emissions growth since 1990; elites’ excessive water use exacerbates urban crises as much as climate change; maintaining current inequality doubles the energy required for decent living standards for all.⁴⁰ Kemp’s analysis of our current global Goliath suggests these interactions now operate at planetary scale: we face multiple converging threats, including climate change, inequality, the rise of artificial intelligence, and nuclear war.⁴¹ This confluence makes the contemporary predicament historically unprecedented. Previous civilizations collapsed into something else that persisted; we may be facing the possibility of collapse into something else that cannot.

Race and class intersect with these interacting drivers in ways that compound vulnerability. Communities of color and working-class populations face higher exposure to environmental hazards, less access to adaptive resources, and greater likelihood of being blamed for crises they did not create.⁴² The concept of “racial capitalism” captures how these dynamics are not merely parallel but intertwined: racialized exploitation has been central to capital accumulation from the beginning, from slavery and colonialism to contemporary mass incarceration and environmental injustice.⁴³ When crisis comes, these communities are simultaneously the most exposed and the least protected. The same dynamics that produce collapse also determine who collapses first and hardest.

Thesis 6: Pathological Leadership Suppresses Adaptive Feedbacks.

The capacity to perceive and respond to feedback depends on agents—especially powerful ones—correctly interpreting signals and adjusting rules. Leadership with certain characteristics actively blocks this process. Kemp provides the most detailed treatment of this mechanism, drawing on Dark Triad research. Collapse is driven by a minority of status seekers scoring high in psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.⁴⁴ This represents a behavioral regression—a move away from humanity’s core evolutionary advantage of egalitarian cooperation. The tragedy is that we evolved precisely those capacities for empathy and fairness that could save us, only to elevate those who lack them to positions of greatest power.

These leaders surround themselves with those who agree, comply, and admire. Over time, this distorts decision-making. Not because leaders don’t want to know the truth, but because they’ve engineered an environment where they never have to hear it.⁴⁵ This creates the Emperor’s Echo Chamber: a culture that doesn’t just tolerate delusion but actively sustains it. The mechanisms are well-documented: psychological safety collapses, making speaking up too risky; pluralistic ignorance sets in as people privately disagree but assume consensus; self-verification traps lead leaders to seek feedback confirming existing self-views, even distorted ones; narcissistic supply replaces truth-seeking as applause becomes oxygen and challenge becomes betrayal.⁴⁶ The result is a leadership class systematically incapable of perceiving the very dangers it most needs to address.

At the systems level, this represents the disconnect in information feedback. Scientific understanding of planetary limits often fails to translate into effective policy when the actors who control resource allocation are insulated from the direct consequences of inaction. High inequality acts as a filter, dampening the signal of ecological distress before it reaches the decision-makers who possess the agency to enact large-scale change.⁴⁷ Diamond’s “failure to perceive” is not random—it is systematically produced by specific leadership configurations combined with inequality structures that insulate elites from consequences. Kemp notes that in palaeolithic times, violence was addressed to individuals, mostly to stop them from becoming dominant. Communities despised hierarchy and used violence to stop it from emerging.⁴⁸ Modern Goliaths invert this: they reward and elevate those with status-seeking psychopathy. We have selected, through our own political and economic structures, for the very traits that make adaptive response impossible.

The leadership pathologies of the core have global consequences. Decisions made in corporate boardrooms and government ministries in New York, London, and Beijing shape the lives of people thousands of miles away who have no voice in those decisions. Structural adjustment programs imposed on peripheral nations by core-dominated institutions like the IMF and World Bank represent a form of pathological leadership at the global scale—elites insulated from consequences imposing policies that enrich core investors while immiserating peripheral populations.⁴⁹ When those policies fail, it is not the policymakers who suffer but the people they were supposedly helping.

Thesis 7: Global Interdependence Creates a Planetary-Scale Panarchy.

Contemporary civilization is not a collection of separate societies but a single, tightly coupled global system structured by core-periphery relations. This transforms the dynamics of collapse fundamentally. Kemp’s central metaphor—Goliath—captures this: large, centralized systems are structurally fragile. The largest states are more fragile, lasting on average just 155 years.⁵⁰ Today, we don’t have regional empires anymore, but one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies operate within a single global economic system shaped by fossil fuel industries, big tech, and military-industrial complexes.⁵¹ There is no outside to retreat to, no neighboring civilization to absorb refugees or trade with when things go wrong. We have, for the first time, made the entire human world a single system.

Unlike historical societies nested in local and regional Panarchies, today’s world features tight supply-chain, financial, and informational interdependencies that transform local disturbances into global cascades. The modern global system has become “intricate, interconnected, unwieldy and unpredictable,” unstable due to the way it is currently structured.⁵² Guillén, drawing on Wallerstein’s foundational world-systems analysis, examines how “interactive complexity” and “tight coupling” create a situation in which the system cannot easily return to equilibrium if something throws it off balance.⁵³ Interactive complexity refers to many parts moving in intricate arrangement, interacting in non-linear ways. Tight coupling refers to the degree to which parts are tightly related, reducing buffers, degrees of freedom, and margin for error. A complex network can be either shock-absorbing or shock-diffusing—shock-absorbing when relationships are complex but impervious to isomorphic forces, shock-diffusing when nodes are both complex and tightly coupled.⁵⁴

Network complexity arises from factors like foreign direct investment, information flows, trade, tourism, and migration. Node complexity arises from democracy, state capacity, industrial diversification, and state failure. Network coupling emerges from current account imbalances, portfolio investment, cross-border banking, and trade in intermediates. Node coupling stems from population aging, public debt, wealth inequality, income inequality, and urbanization.⁵⁵ The Eurozone exemplifies tight coupling: tightly integrated but dependent on Germany, and Germany dependent on it in turn. The coupling has grown tighter over time, ensuring persistent instability. The United States-China relationship combines interactive complexity through trade and investment with tight coupling through portfolio holdings—a configuration with profound implications for the entire global system.⁵⁶

This coupling reduces the buffering capacity that slower, larger scales traditionally provided in Panarchy. The 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated this: abrupt declines in an asset price triggered sharp declines in confidence and fire sales of other assets.⁵⁷ Future collapses could propagate through food systems, energy networks, information infrastructure, and political instability simultaneously. As Kemp argues, our Goliath is uniquely vulnerable because its very size and interconnection—once sources of strength—now generate overwhelming systemic risk. The pandemic demonstrated this fragility; future shocks will likely be more severe.⁵⁸ We have built a world where everything is connected, and therefore everything is at risk.

Within this planetary-scale system, position matters enormously. Core nations are tightly coupled to each other through finance and trade, meaning crisis propagates rapidly among them. Peripheral nations are coupled to the core through extraction and debt, meaning they experience core crises as sudden withdrawals of capital and markets. Semi-peripheral nations occupy an intermediate position, sometimes buffered, sometimes exposed.⁵⁹ The architecture of the world-system thus shapes not only who benefits from the current arrangement but who will suffer when it unravels.

Thesis 8: Navigating Collapse Requires CULTIVATING Capacity for Just TransformationS.

The goal is not preventing all change—that is impossible—but avoiding brittle, catastrophic failure and fostering capacity for renewal. Both Kemp and Servigne and Stevens offer concrete guidance for this task. Servigne and Stevens reframe the entire enterprise: today, utopia has changed sides. It is the utopians who believe that everything can continue as before, while realists put their energy into making a transition and building local resilience.⁶⁰ Their recommendation is the creation of small scale networks of local sustainability, which stand a better chance of weathering the coming breakdown of functional civil society. Communities on the margins—ironically those currently facing the worst threats—also have the best chance of surviving the coming storms. They emphasize that collapse is not the end—it is the beginning of our future. We will reinvent new ways of living in the world and being attentive to ourselves, to other human beings and to all our fellow creatures.⁶¹

The sufficiency corridors framework provides an operational pathway. This represents the space between a floor of meeting needs and a ceiling of ungeneralisable excess. Within the sufficiency corridor, everyone has enough to satisfy needs while no one has too much to endanger planetary boundaries and need satisfaction.⁶² This framework shifts focus from means—efficiency, prices—to ends: the purpose of resource use and the distribution of well-being. Three guiding principles emerge: establish floors guaranteeing access to resources for human needs; cap ceilings preventing excess that transgresses planetary boundaries; and converge over time, continuously narrowing the gap through deliberate policy.⁶³

However, a just transformation requires more than sufficiency—it requires repair. Recent scholarship on “reparative transformations” argues that just transitions must grapple with the long afterlives of colonial genocide, slavery, and racial capitalism.⁶⁴ Four principles are critical to this more reparative approach. First, just transformations must draw on broader temporalities that foreground these histories, recognizing that the present configuration of wealth and poverty is not accidental but produced through centuries of violence and expropriation.⁶⁵ Second, they must recognize geographical interconnectedness across nation-state boundaries, including the powerful persistence of neo-colonial relationships of exploitation.⁶⁶ The wealth of the core was built on extraction from the periphery; a just transformation must reckon with this fact.

Third, just transformations must redirect processes of highly racialized global maldistribution.⁶⁷ This means attending not only to inequality within nations but to inequality between them, and to the mechanisms—terms of trade, debt regimes, intellectual property rules—that perpetuate core dominance. Fourth, they must attend to more “pluriversal” possibilities for rectifying these inequalities, recognizing that different communities may envision just futures differently and that transformation must be shaped by those most affected.⁶⁸

Documents like the Cochabamba People’s Declaration and the Black Climate Mandate exemplify this repairative approach. The Cochabamba Declaration, primarily Indigenous-led and focused on Global South communities, calls for rights of nature, climate debt repayment, and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.⁶⁹ The Black Climate Mandate, emerging from the Movement for Black Lives, demands that climate policy explicitly address the historic and ongoing harms inflicted on Black communities through redlining, industrial siting, and environmental racism.⁷⁰ Both insist that transformation cannot simply build a new world on old injustices; it must repair what has been broken.

Kemp offers four policy prescriptions for slaying “Goliath”: stay within planetary boundaries and respect biophysical limits; control technology, particularly artificial intelligence, to prevent it from escaping human oversight; free the world from nuclear weapons, eliminating this existential threat; and democratize political power through genuine citizen participation.⁷¹ More specifically, he identifies mechanisms to reduce Goliath fuel. Make resources less lootable: imagine if the data of today could be gathered only with the full and informed consent of citizens and was fairly remunerated. Increase exit options: creating more open borders and, importantly, more ways for people to escape mass surveillance would mean that states would have to negotiate more with their citizens. Use technology for democracy to enable larger-scale democratic participation and oversight of the powerful. Spread knowledge: no society in history understood the darker angels of our nature, or Goliath fuel. Understanding this can help us to create interventions and institutions able to stop history from repeating.⁷²

For individual behavior, Kemp offers four prescriptions: avoid investing in activities that harm people and environment; actively participate in policy and political struggle; let major issues guide your votes, including climate, nuclear weapons, and power concentration; and oppose domination in all relationships. Whenever you come across a hierarchy, ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.⁷³

Transformative just transitions require coalitions capable of wielding strategic power while maintaining embedded relations with affected communities. Drawing on Gramsci and Polanyi, scholars distinguish between status quo transitions that reinforce existing inequalities and transformative transitions that shift underlying political economic structures.⁷⁴ Transformative coalitions build power across class and race lines, connecting labor, environmental justice, and Indigenous movements in shared struggle. They recognize that the fight against climate change is inseparable from the fight against racial capitalism, and that neither can succeed without the other.

Critically, collapse can be liberating for those at the bottom. Kemp notes that after the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier.⁷⁵ Collapse often frees commoners from extractive domination—a point often lost in dystopian narratives. The right-sizing of complexity means deliberately building diversity, redundancy, and modularity into critical systems—energy, food, finance—to enhance general adaptive capacity, even at the cost of some short-term efficiency.⁷⁶ Agro-ecological farming and multi-scale renewable energy exemplify technologies that carry with them a different model for the economy and society that surrounds them. A system with these properties is not immune to stress, but possesses “graceful extensibility”—the capacity to learn, adapt, and transform through crises rather than simply collapsing. It is poised for what Panarchy theory calls the alpha phase: a renewal, not ruin. As Servigne and Stevens conclude, collapse is not the end—it is the beginning of our future.⁷⁷

A just transformation must be built by and for those who have borne the heaviest burdens of the old order. It must repair what has been broken while creating something new. It must recognize that we are all in this together—but that we arrive at this moment from vastly different starting points, carrying vastly different histories. The path forward requires both humility and ambition: humility about what we can know and control, ambition about what we can create together. Collapse is coming, one way or another. The question is whether we will meet it as victims or as co-creators of what comes next.

NOTES:

¹ Complexity Science Hub, “When Systems Suddenly Tip: New Insights into Hard-to-Predict Transitions,” Nature Communications, 2025.

² Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Polity Press, 2020).

³ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.

⁴ Complexity Science Hub, “When Systems Suddenly Tip.”

⁵ C.S. Holling and L.H. Gunderson, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Island Press, 2002).

⁶ Holling and Gunderson, Panarchy.

⁷ C.D. Brummitt, G. Barnett, and R.M. D’Souza, “Coupled catastrophes: sudden shifts cascade and hop among interdependent systems,” arXiv, 2024.

⁸ Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, and Eugenia Kalnay, “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies,” Ecological Economics 101 (2014): 90-102.

⁹ Stephen Shennan et al., “Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe,” Nature Communications 4 (2013): 2486.

¹⁰ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Academic Press, 1974).

¹¹ Joseph A. Tainter and T.G. Taylor, “Complexity, problem-solving, sustainability and resilience,” Building Research & Information 42, no. 2 (2014): 168-181.

¹² Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (Viking, 2025).

¹³ Rose Brewer, “Interrogating Racism and Class in the Capitalist World System: Historical Formations and Contemporary Realities,” ISA Conference Paper, 2014. 

¹⁴ David D. Woods, “The theory of graceful extensibility: basic rules that govern adaptive systems,” Environment Systems and Decisions 38 (2018): 433-457.

¹⁵ Andrew Simms, “Farming and energy: lessons from collapsed civilisations,” The Guardian, 2012.

¹⁶ Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

¹⁷ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

¹⁸ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

¹⁹ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

²⁰ Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay, “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY).”

²¹ Sustainability Directory, “Socio-Economic Heterogeneity,” 2025.

²² David Shuang Song, Anthony Lising Antonio, and Pearl Lo, “When Class and Race Collapse: Theoretically Distinguishing between College Students’ Intersectional Positions and Their Status Groups,” International Studies in Sociology of Education 34, no. 1 (2025): 51-75. 

²³ Douglas S. Massey and Stefanie Brodmann, Spheres of Influence: The Social Ecology of Racial and Class Inequality (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025). 

²⁴ Massey and Brodmann, Spheres of Influence.

²⁵ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

²⁶ Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I.

²⁷ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

²⁸ Sustainability Directory, “Resource Overexploitation,” 2025.

²⁹ Johan Rockström et al., “A safe operating space for humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472-475.

³⁰ Will Steffen et al., “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81-98.

³¹ Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay, “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY).”

³² Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (Universe Books, 1972).

³³ Alf Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World (Routledge, 2011).

³⁴ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.

³⁵ Simms, “Farming and energy.”

³⁶ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.

³⁷ Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay, “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY).”

³⁸ Holling and Gunderson, Panarchy.

³⁹ Richard Bärnthaler and Ian Gough, “When enough is enough: Introducing sufficiency corridors to put techno-economism in its place,” Ambio 53 (2024): 960-969.

⁴⁰ Bärnthaler and Gough, “When enough is enough.”

⁴¹ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁴² Brewer, “Interrogating Racism and Class.”

⁴³ Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

⁴⁴ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁴⁵ D. Wareham, “The Emperor’s Echo Chamber: When narcissistic leadership silences truth,” LinkedIn, 2025.

⁴⁶ Wareham, “The Emperor’s Echo Chamber.”

⁴⁷ Sustainability Directory, “Socio-Economic Heterogeneity.”

⁴⁸ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁴⁹ Brewer, “Interrogating Racism and Class.”

⁵⁰ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁵¹ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁵² Mauro F. Guillén, The Architecture of Collapse: The Global System in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2015), reviewed in Reserve Bank of India database. 

⁵³ Guillén, The Architecture of Collapse.

⁵⁴ Guillén, The Architecture of Collapse.

⁵⁵ Guillén, The Architecture of Collapse.

⁵⁶ Guillén, The Architecture of Collapse.

⁵⁷ Brummitt, Barnett, and D’Souza, “Coupled catastrophes.”

⁵⁸ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁵⁹ Edward Friedman, ed., Ascent and Decline in the World-System (Sage Publications, 1982). 

⁶⁰ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.

⁶¹ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.

⁶² Bärnthaler and Gough, “When enough is enough.”

⁶³ Bärnthaler and Gough, “When enough is enough.”

⁶4 Krithika Srinivasan and colleagues, “From just transitions to reparative transformations,” Political Geography 108 (2024): 103004. 

⁶5 Srinivasan et al., “From just transitions to reparative transformations.”

⁶6 Srinivasan et al., “From just transitions to reparative transformations.”

⁶7 Srinivasan et al., “From just transitions to reparative transformations.”

⁶8 Srinivasan et al., “From just transitions to reparative transformations.”

⁶9 Cochabamba People’s Declaration, 2010, cited in Srinivasan et al. 

⁷⁰ Black Hive, “Black Climate Mandate,” 2022, cited in Srinivasan et al. 

⁷¹ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁷² Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁷³ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁷⁴ David Ciplet, “Transition coalitions: toward a theory of transformative just transitions,” 2022. 

⁷⁵ Kemp, Goliath’s Curse.

⁷⁶ Tainter and Taylor, “Complexity, problem-solving, sustainability and resilience.”

⁷⁷ Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse.