Denying Human Nature

Monday, 4 August 2025, 7:37 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scholarship with respect to human history is edifying, but scholarship that arrogantly draws lessons from the past regarding the future of humanity is stultifying.

A new book by Dr. Luke Kemp, “Goliath’s Curse,” which covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write, exemplifies this axiom.

Philosophical assumptions go unexamined, and superficial beliefs about human nature are stated as givens. The present and future are viewed through an outdated, conventional and irrelevant worldview. And the remedy proposed is progressive boilerplate, unworkable in a global society.

On one hand, Kemp correctly points out that “collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all.”

“Today, we don’t have regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,” he rightly states.

On the other hand, after citing human history’s ad nauseum pattern of power, violence, domination and collapse, Kemp pronounces: “The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all the risks up.”

To Kemp’s broad but pond-deep analysis, the source of our trajectory towards global collapse is “the large, psychopathic groups which produce global catastrophic risk.”

That is extraordinarily shallow thinking, utterly lacking philosophical examination. In the parlance of the day, it begs many questions: How have small groups had the ability to repeat the widespread and persistent pattern of power and domination, if not from a deeper psychological source in Homo sapiens generally?

And is only some small minority of humanity prone, as Kemp suggests, to “narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism?” How are they somehow able to continually “amplify the worst of [and in] us?”

With all due respect to Kemp’s scholarship, the roots of our culminating human crisis lie within all of us, in the human mind and consciousness per se.

The inadequacy of Kemp’s diagnosis is attested to by the insufficiency of his prescription.

“First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. “That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales.”

Even if people in every nation were to embrace such a one-dimensional solution, who would impose it? The intractable problem of power remains unaddressed, whitewashed by a halcyon notion of the goodness and justice inherent in “the people.”

Additionally, the crisis is global, and democracies are local. To seriously suggest that “citizen assemblies and juries” will suddenly spring up in every country in the world is a fantasy.

And even if this dream could be realized, how much time would it take to produce basically just and equal societies, and how much time do we have to change course before ecological and civilizational collapse occurs? And if collapse is inevitable, to pour the foundation to change course afterward?

Kemp’s answer to such questions is to derisively deflect them with a false analogy: “Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we’re built for.”

Now that’s the complete bullshit. Maintaining such a juvenile view of human nature, the best Kemp can counsel on the individual level do is “don’t be a dick.” And even then he comes off sounding like one.

Kemp concludes, “Even if you don’t have hope, it doesn’t really matter. This is about defiance. 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.”

In truth, this mentality contributes to the human crisis, because it denies its depth within us, externalizes its source in elites, insists that “fighting” is a virtue, and promotes the empty hope of global democracy when the crisis isn’t essentially political at all.

Not surprisingly, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects of avoiding collapse and “self-termination.” “We’re dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and elite capture of our politics.”

There you have it -- the problem isn’t us good people, or the masses of asses behind Trump, or scholarly elites, or human nature, or humankind as whole from whom power-addicted elites incessantly emerge. Rather, the problem is “a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.”

This is a philosophy of denial and distancing, another version of the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that underlies conflict, war and inequality. It is the counsel of despair. The only thing worse than a pricky pessimist is an odious optimist.

In reality, we’re not just dealing with a 5000-year process, or even a 50,000 year-process, but a 500,000-year process. However, the very act of fathoming and facing the depth of the mistake of man overshadowing the latent promise of the human being enlarges the mind and heart, and catalyzes our transmutation as individuals and a species.

Though I grapple with despair, one can live one’s life by non-accumulatively learning and transforming with passion and joy. That’s not such a high bar, and it’s immeasurably better than “don’t be a dick.”

Martin LeFevre

Note:

Link – “‘Self-termination’ is most likely: the history and future of societal collapse”: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail