Expert tips Irish expertise as civilisation's best bet to avoid collapse

Irish Daily Mirror

11-08-2025

Luke Kemp tends to avoid small talk.
It makes him a bit nervous when it turns to the subject of, 'so what do you do?'.
That's a hazard of the job when your life's work is studying the end of the world as we know it.
Kemp works at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University in the UK.
His daily routine is spent researching the end of days, and the risks that could cause today's highly interconnected society to break apart and collapse – taking with it everything we know and love.
When this column previously spoke to him, he had just published a paper titled 'Climate Endgame' which studied the eerie similarities between the collapse of former civilisations and the pathway that our own is speeding along.
His latest project is unlikely to improve his line in small talk. Luke Kemp from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, at Cambridge University in the UK
In a new book - 'Goliath's Curse' - he appears to have grown even less optimistic about the likelihood that humanity will choose to avoid doomsday.
But he does give us one last hope. A throw of the dice with an idea that, as it happens, Ireland has shown itself to be a world leader at.
But first the bad news.
Having spent seven years studying 400 societies from the past 5,000 years, the Australian-born academic found ringing indicators of collapse all around us.
The biggest one? Inequality. It has gone hand in hand with the downfall of all civilised societies in history.
In our case it is being supercharged by what Kemp calls a 'dark triad' of characteristics among our ruling elite: narcissism, psychopathy and manipulation.
"The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator," he outlined in a recent interview with the Guardian.
"Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people. They're basically amplifying the worst of us."
Three other 'tells' in the ruins of previous civilisations have been arms races, landgrabs and ecological disasters.
"As elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change."
All sounding familiar yet?
The biggest problem in today's world is that any collapse will be on global scale with no region spared such is our interconnectedness. Reliance on technology also means there is no fallback Plan B.
Kemp uses the term 'Goliaths' to describe the rise of past societies such as the Roman empire or Chinese dynasties, and refers to our current globalised capitalism system as the 'Global Goliath'.
About now you might be asking, so what about that last hope you mentioned?
Perhaps surprisingly to some it's not a techno fix. The hope lies in an idea. Something called democracy – although not the kind we are used to, one that has been bought and paid for by billionaires and oligarchs.
Kemp identifies citizens' assemblies and juries of the people as perhaps the only hope to save the world as we know it.
It so happens that we in Ireland have been recognised as a world leader in the field.
The citizens' assemblies that repealed the 8th amendment, legalised gay marriage and still form the framework of Ireland's climate action plan are held up around the world as the standard in this exercise of 'deliberative democracy'. Supporters react outside Dublin Castle following the announcement of the result of the same-sex marriage referendum in Dublin on May 23, 2015. (Image: AFP)
Kemp explains: "If you'd had a citizens' jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: 'Yes, go ahead'?"
But of course Goliath is not going to be felled too easily...
"It's always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That's because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years," the researcher says.
"But even if you don't have hope, it doesn't really matter. It's about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn't contribute to the problem."
Maybe that's the conversation we need to be having over the dinner table. A good way to begin is to read this important book from a writer who spends his life in the ruins of other people's civilisations.
Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp is published by Viking Penguin.
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