To save humanity and nature we must tackle wealth inequality, says Cambridge researcher

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Luke Kemp: I think our problem is never going to be that we lack a technical knowledge of how to fix these problems. It’s very much that there’s existing systems of power which don’t want to change, which unfortunately does still make these things very difficult to implement. But in practice, can we do most of the things that Kim outlined in his book, whether that be the use of things like carbon coins or as you said, having transparent transactions to ensure that we can’t have things like tax dodging. Of course we can. We can put people on the moon, we can use a very, very small set of microchips to basically track whether we are going across the world. There’s no reason we can’t do things like due democracy at scale, or solve arms races, or make our economic systems far more transparent and honest. These are all things we can on a technical level do quite easily. The problem is not the search for solutions. The problem is power.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with. Experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land Today, on the Newscast, we speak with Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge with the Center for the Study of Existential risk. The author of the book, Goliath’s Curse In this conversation, hemp outlines his research, which finds that humans have functioned in a mostly egalitarian fashion for the majority of their existence, and it has only been in the past roughly 12,000 years that this has not been the case. His research shows that when humans allow themselves to be dominated by a small circle of narcissistic and psychopathic dictators, which he has dubbed Goliaths, societies eventually fall, many times, bringing about ecological destruction with them. However, in today’s globally connected economy, the risk of full scale societal collapse is now present. Combating this Kemp says, means addressing wealth inequality from this wealth inequality stems the reasons for breaching key planetary boundaries, such as biodiversity loss and climate change. As the top 10% of income earners in the world and a relatively small number of nations are responsible for perhaps the majority of ecological destruction and carbon emissions. The good news is that this means solving our ecological issues is not intractable or an issue of humanity writ large. Rather, it’s very achievable through truly democratic institutions, citizen juries and global caps on wealth, Kemp explains exactly how these could be achieved. Many of these solutions are quite similar to the ones that you may have already heard. In our conversation with science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, but Kemp urges that they are far from fiction.

Luke, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Having me on. So can you begin by describing something that you’ve asserted in your words to the guardian, which is that humans. Are fundamentally egalitarian and that this is only usurped by a small cadre of elites who mismanage ecological resources in nature that society’s function in. So, what does your research tell us about this?

Luke: When you look at the first roughly 300,000 years of human existence, we appear to have lived in egalitarian, small nomadic groups. There’s no enduring signs of inequality. All of hierarchy of one individual dominating the rest of the group. Instead, it appears that we actually survived through the Ice Age because we both were egalitarian, but we also had very interconnected groups. So while people often think of us as being in these kind of small rag pad groups of families who are all very close related, and often very parochial and violent, when you actually look at the paralytic evidence. Roughly left. Less than 10% of people at a band were actually closely related, and they’re constantly moving and exchanging. That all appears to change once you get to the Holocene, so approximately 12,000 years ago, the world begins to warm and we start to get access to new resources. In particular, we start to get access to grain. Grains such as wheat, rice, barley, and maize corn as well. The key thing here is that these resources all have very similar attributes. All of them can be easily seen, stolen and hoarded. So when you think about, say for instance, wheat, it can last for around about a decade or two once you have it stored, it advertises itself when it’s ready for harvest and it’s very easy to take by a tax collector. What that means is that suddenly you have a resource which can, which is critical to people, but it can also be easily taken by a small elite. And whenever you look at the first big states of the world, the first big kingdoms in empires such as the first dynasty of Egypt or, or in Mesopotamia, or the Shah Dynasty in China, all of them have access to these types of grains. And on top of that, they tend to have caged land. So areas which it’s very difficult to escape from. If you look at Mesopotamia, that literally means in Greek, the land between two rivers, Theis and Euphrates, Egypt is cordoned off between the Nile and the Red Sea. And on top of that, they tend to all occur once you start to get the emergence of monopolized weapons. Weapons that can be easily used by a small group. To basically dominate another group so…the first city in Egypt essentially co-opt bronze metallurgy, and you start to get the emergence of handheld bronze swords and axes. All of this tells us a pretty simple story that while humans are egalitarian, the Holocene created environmental conditions where one small group could start to extract resources from others through the use of violence. We often call this civilization. I think that’s a misnomer, right? When you think about the term civilization in Latin, it has implications of good conduct of political restraint, wisdom, moderation. That’s of course what we give term civilized from. That’s not usually what we see in these early regimes. If you look at the Shang Dynasty, the second big dynasty of China, they sacrificed approximately 13,000 people of the space of two centuries. In almost every case, you get the emergence of slavery, patriarchy, and large-scale warfare occurring either shortly before or directly after the emergence of the first states. For me, these are better described as Goliath, of course, hearkening back to the biblical tale, the huge soldier who relied upon violence, and very similar. These emerged during the bronze age. They rely upon violence, and despite being enormous in stature, they could often be brought down and surprisingly fragile. But it ends up being essentially a story of organized crime.

Mike: So you mentioned though, that while they’re quite authoritarian and, and brutal, they’re surprisingly fragile. So, if they’re fragile, how is it that we, for the past 10,000 years or so, keep being dominated by this, this circle of elites?

Luke: While individual empires and states could often be fragile, the actual template of Goliath is both contagious and also very resilient. You see this over the grand sea of history, the very first states were often very small.

They’re usually covered well under a million square kilometers. Bearing in mind that the modern state of Egypt is roughly a million square kilometers took them. For the first 2000 years or so of states of large-scale Goliaths, they usually didn’t grow much larger than that. And then suddenly, a couple of thousand years later, you have the British Empire covering roughly 34 million square kilometers and well before that you also have the Mongol Empire covering 24 million. So over time, they do have be, they have become both much more resilient but also much larger as well. There’s a couple reasons for this. One is that while they are fragile, relying upon grain does tend to allow you to have much larger denser populations. There’s often a bit of a mystery amongst archeologists nerve po just as to why people even went to grain in the first place. When you rely upon a more kind of agrarian diet, it has a whole bunch of downsides. You start to have a, have more dental caries, weaker bones, for instance. And amongst women, you often start to get these stress signs in their knees and ankles from constantly rolling back and forth kneading grain and crushing it up. In short, moving from hunting and gathering and foraging increasingly towards intensified agriculture tends to be a human health nightmare, and that’s reflected in our height as well. We start to get smaller. The one thing that Grain does provide is it means you can have far more people per square kilometer because grain is just so calorically dense and can be grown so densely, so you can start to support much larger populations. On top of that, the very first states we’re often preoccupied warfare, and frankly, they are quite good at doing it. And one of the things of warfare is whether you want to build an atomic weapon or even just a bronze sword, it requires usually quite a lot of exploitation. It requires people working jobs, whether it be mining, lumberjacks, et cetera, and America egalitarian groups weren’t usually willing to do that kind of extraction exploited practices, while big Goliaths usually were. And top of all that, once you get very large concentrations of people, it tends to be a Petri dish for disease. So, most diseases we. Struggle of today, whether it be the smallpox of the past, new zoonotic infections like COVID, 19, even influenza. Those are all very recent, and they occurred probably somewhere between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago. And once those emerged, they tend to be pretty bad for the populations of these big cities. But of course, the survivors develop an immunity who then often then pass it on to groups who don’t have that immunity, which of course is why. The Columbia Exchange. Basically, the first contact between Europeans and those in the Americas ended up being so brutal, was in large part that it had, that the, the Native Americans had no natural immunity to diseases that were being imported. So, in the book, I’ve phrased this as babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism. States, Goliaths tend to have bigger populations, which meant more disease, which gave them a competitive advantage. And they also tend to focus much more on developing new weaponry, which they did very well. And additionally, they were willing to exploit people and environments in such a way to enable them to have larger military advantages while pneumatic, egalitarian groups didn’t have any of those advantages. So, while individual clients were fragile, the overall approach of having a big dominance hierarchy ended up taking over the entire world, which of course is the world we live today. And one last thing to mention is this is not just a story of kind of Darwinian selective advantage. Mm-hmm. It was also the fact that often these ways of organizing societies into more authoritarian dominance hierarchies, they often end up being contagious. One thing we know from human psychology is when people feel threatened, they become much more likely to adopt authoritarian values. Essentially, people shift towards authoritarianism when they feel threatened. And this has been replicated across numerous studies, this stage. And of course we see in the modern world, whether it be people shifting towards Trump in the midst of economic precarity, or even here of the UK, with the shift towards Nigel Farage. That means that once you start to get one Goliath popping up and one big kingdom or empire threatening others, then suddenly people have an internal psychological response, which makes it more likely they’re going to develop their own Goliaths. And we see this across the world. The right Germans in the frontiers of Rome were initially not organized into big dominant hierarchies. They relied upon things like large scale citizen assemblies, for instance. but they, over time, once they’ve had them with the, the model, the template of Rome to follow, and once they have the fret of Rome, they start to organize into much bigger chains of command and hierarchies. Same with the Xianbei on the borders of China. So end up being, essentially you are either out competed or you tended to adopt the template of Goliaths.

Mike: So that then leads us to the demise of these because you’ve mentioned they are fragile. and kind of building off an earlier conversation I had with Sunil Amrith at Yale University, he echoed similar sentiments to yours here. What are some of the most famous examples of human societies mismanaging their ecological resources or nature? Then eventually leading to this societal collapse as you’re alluding to?

Luke: There are several of people know pretty well. So one is a classical Meyer who the classical period basically last from roughly 550 Cs through to 900 c and two at the terminal period. Essentially the period where they all start to collapse, which is roughly 900 to 1,100 C, and the classical or the May were, were basically in the. Modern day Yucatan. So covering areas of Belize and Guatemala. There’s several others. So there’s the first farmers of the Southwest us, the Palo communities, and of course there’s ones like what people call East Island the Rapanui, which is often right connected to a tale of ecocide. But actually in reality, this is more a case of colonial genocide, which we can get into if you like. One of the things I try to point out in the book is that while environmental mismanagement and things like drought, climate change, depleted soils often played a role in past collapses. It doesn’t seem to be the key driver behind collapse. If you look at the Maya, for instance, there’s certainly a really bad drought that occurs during the terminal period when you have the collapse of all the kind of low link my, my, ties, but. There are numerous areas which experience drought but don’t have a collapse. There’s areas which seem to collapse before a drought occurs, and there were many areas which actually had dealt with droughts, which weren’t quite as bad, but were still pretty bad in the past. So this doesn’t seem to be a really simple story of drought and climate change cause and collapse. And indeed, when you look across the kind of grand sweep of different case studies. There’s many like Tongue Dynasty, which just don’t have any environmental stresses at all, and yet they still fall apart in some way. The key thing here is understanding risk. So when we talk about risk, we usually refer to four different determinants. So a risk is a hazard, something that basically shocks you and hits you. For instance, a tsunami. It’s your vulnerability. In this case, the fact that you don’t have infrastructure to withstand a tsunami, it’s your exposure, the fact that you’re in the wake or in the path of the tsunami. And last but not least, it’s your response. So if you don’t run away, it’s going to be much worse. And we tend to get too assassinated by the big threats that hit these communities, whether it be warfare, disease, environmental change, and not fixated enough on the vulnerabilities. The key thing here is that across every single one of these big case studies collapse, where this first empire, the Han Dynasty in China, or the even the classical L May, what we see is a growing wealth inequality before they collapse. And that seems to have a large number of different impacts, which makes a society much more fragile. So one simple one is we know there’s a correlation between political instability mm-hmm. And high levels of wealth for equality. Which makes sense. If we are a species evolved in egalitarian conditions for 300,000 used, it’s fairly natural that we’re not used to, nor do we enjoy living in lopsided communities where a small cadre dominate everyone else. On top of that, there’s a very famous model called Structural Demographic Theory, pioneer by Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin, which essentially talks about how as you get increasing wealth inequality over time. You tend to get a transfer of wealth and power from the masses towards a small elite class. In short, society becomes more top heavy. What that means is you start to get more and more elites competing for status and power, often for a small number of limited high status positions, such as a throne, and they increasingly become more and more factionalized and competitive. On top of that, you also have any growing class of people who are rated. They often have full life expectancy. They struggle with the cost of living in society where things like land are becoming more and more expensive. This probably sounds silly issue to you today. On top of that, as you start to get more elites and this kind of increasing pressure from a, it often drives the state to over extract from its environment. So you do see signs of soil depletion in places like the West of Empire and the classical of the ma. And it also often, in some cases, pushes towards a more conquest. And this was a big one for Rome. Rome conquered to the extent that it taken over roughly. 5,000 square kilometers from being one, one small city state. But every conquest that when serve and forever have healed cost more and more. You have to extend your supply chains, for instance, and often you start to develop new enemies. And we see over history, time and time again, a really big empire essentially conquers so much and develop such big military that it drains the rest of the economy, making it very fragile that all of these things imperial over expansion. Depleting the natural environment, having a leak competition and popular maceration, or just simply the natural effect of inequality all is driven by growing concentrations of power and wealth inequality. And if that’s not, but not bad enough. I can also briefly mention that we have good signs today that welfare equality tends to increase corruption and vice versa, which tends to drain resources and legitimacy away from the state. On top of that, we just simply know that small groups of homogenous people tend to make worse decisions, particularly if they are the ones invested in the status quo. They’re the ones who are least likely to make changes to respond well in the face of an pending disaster. So essentially wealth inequality creates this kind of combustible cocktail, which makes us society more fragile over time until eventually the hold out shell of an empire estate is hit by things like drought, disease, warfare, invaders, and falls apart.

Mike: Thank you very much for this explanation, and I should note that the difference that you pointed out is that while these societies were…to some extent isolated incidents. The one we’re in now is not, it is a global society. And so you’re positing here that the collapse we are facing could be facing is much, much larger and would be of a global scale.

Luke: Correct. Most likely, depending on how the collapse plays out. So collapse of the past, as you mentioned, tend to be either local or regional as some of the largest ones we have, of course. The hard in Sierra Rome, which at the peak covered somewhere between five to 6 million square kilometers. We now have, I think, a single Go Life system. We like to think of these kind of big individual empires like the US Russia, but realistically we do exist in one highly integrated economic system, and obviously all countries essentially operate in a global capitalist market. And when you think about it, all countries look pretty similar in a whole bunch of ways. You know, all of them have very similar militaries chains of command. They all tend to rely upon the same weapons, and the biggest ones tend to rely upon nuclear weapons. In particular, the reason that capitalism can work across borders is because everyone has very similar rules around private property and things like intellectual property. So most of this is actually based upon both British Commonwealth law and New York State property law. Which is basically exported across the world, but essentially, most of the world looks surprisingly similar and homogenous. And one of the problems we have when you get these really big, complex, homogenous, interconnected systems is they tend to be really good at buffering in small shocks, but they amplify the big ones. We see this, for instance, in coral reefs, but you also see it in financial systems as well. That’s the reason why a small housing bubble in the US in 2008 quickly became a global financial crisis, right? So you can move resources around to basically buffer and against a small shock. And we see this of course when states fail in the modern world. So best evidence suggests that when states start to fall apart, so they lose control of the ability to make rules, to have a certain monopoly of violence, they, and to extract resources through taxation. They tend to have usually a period of maybe six months where they fail before another regime is propped up as a general rule of thumb, which is far quicker than what has happened in the past. And that’s in large part because the global system responds. It tries to prop up new regimes very quickly. The key problem here is that if you have a large enough shock, it potentially perpetuates and amplifies through the entire system. And I think that’s the big threat here is that. We to use a metaphor, rather than having a single ladder or a whole bunch of ladders together, you can push over individually. So it’s pretty easy to push each ladder over, but you have to do each one individually. We basically have a stack of a hundred ladders all tied together, so it’s much harder to push it over, but what you do, they all fall down together in one giant crash. And that’s probably the best metaphor for the system we find ourselves in today.

Mike: That’s a great metaphor. So this is…this is bleak, of course. How do we solve this? You have proposed, some solutions I’m really interested in talking about here. Your first one, which I really love, is Don’t be a Dick. It sounds like a generally good life philosophy, but I would love for you to expand on this. How is this applied exactly? How is this philosophy integrated?

Luke: I think it’s worthwhile taking a brief step back to think through what’s different today and what does Doug be a dick mean in that context. So while in the past it was this, what I call diminishing returns and extraction, the increasing downsides to wealth inequality and concentrations of power, which hunted empires. And I think that is still a problem today. But one of the bigger problems we face is that our global economic systems of inequality and exploitation are creating new threats. So think of, say for instance, climate change. The top 1% of wealth holders emit more than the bottom, 66% of humidity. Alright? When you look at emissions per country, it’s roughly 10 countries. If you count the EU as, as a single one emit approximately 80% emissions. If you look at nuclear weapons, 85%, the stockpile is held by just two countries, the US and Russia. It’s maintained and developed only by a very small number of different companies. Essentially, all the big global threats we face, whether it be climate change, diminishing planetary boundaries in general, nuclear weapons. If you’re scared of new ai, new AI systems, there’s only really three co companies developing them on the frontier. Andro, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, all of whom are headquartered in the us. In short, there’s only a small number of actors who are actually producing these big threats, and they’d usually have to rely upon a large amount of extraction and exploitation and think of our current AI systems they rely upon, essentially stealing everyone’s data. Then having it moderated. So to ensure the content isn’t too bad by underpaid workers in places like Kenya, we’re usually paid roughly somewhere between one to $3 an hour. On top of that, all the data annotation, which allows the algorithm to run, is once again done by highly underpaid people in Uganda, if that makes to make it even worse, the actual model themselves are built on resources like cobalt, which are mined often by children in higher precarious, dangerous conditions. The Democratic Republic of Congo, if you don’t have that global system of extraction, suddenly you can’t build things like nuclear weapons and frontier systems. But in short, I’m more worried about the way our system works is to produce very large scale risk for private profits and power and don’t be a dick is essentially an air force of not to directly contribute to that. Don’t work for weapons manufacturers, don’t work for the fossil fuel companies and don’t work for big tech in general. So these are what I call the agents of doom. They’re very big institutions which are directly both contributing to and profiting from the apocalypse and collapse. I think we often think about as being this deep, inevitable structural condition, and that’s partially true, but I don’t think it’s inevitable. And ultimately it also comes down to people. It comes down to the decisions we make. And even if you can’t make a big change in terms of your, in terms of toning down a job at a fossil fuel company, for instance, at the very least, you know, you’re not contributing to the problem. But this isn’t just about not being a dick by refusing to work at the very kind of worst apocalypse producing companies. And it’s also about an ethos of don’t be dominated and don’t dominate others. When you think about Goliaths. These big systems of dominance, which started roughly 5,000 years ago, they end up being highly fractal. It’s not just simply you have an emperor ruling over everyone else. It’s also you start to have men ruling over woman in the household. You start to have rich and poor, slave and master. And of course, even today, our entire system is based upon usually a small number of managers or CEO CEOs having the ability to hire and fire everyone else. So don’t be a dick as also SNE force returning back to our egalitarian roots. Try to share power where you can. Don’t get corrupted by power and don’t be dominated. I think that’s something we really need to cultivating ourselves is, yeah, kind of a sense of it’s not cool and it’s not okay to simply be in constant positions and relations of domination. I think once we can start to reverse that from the bottom up, that gives us a much better chance at building more democratic societies.

Mike: Hello listeners, and thank you for tuning in. If you like our work and you want to support the Mongabay Newscast, the easiest way to do so. Is by leaving a review and telling a friend about our work and subscribing to the show. Occasionally, we receive feedback personally, which you can send to us at our email address at podcast[at]mongabay.com. A question I’ve received over the years and also one that we’ve received recently. To our email is how we manage to keep going through all of the bleak news. It’s a very good question, and I answer it in a new op-ed just published titled, Don’t Quit. You can read it now at mongabay.com. It’s also linked in the show notes. Back to the conversation with Luke Kemp.

Mike: I mean, I would love to keep going on that thread. I do want to ask you about your next suggestion, which is you have suggested capping wealth and I, and I’m guessing you mean global wealth, anyone on the planet at $10 million, which personally I think is more money than any person needs. How could this be achieved?

Luke: Exactly. First of all, it’s definitely more than anyone needs. There’s a very famous quote from a, an oil tycoon in the 1920s. Harold Hunt, I believe his name was, who remarked that? Anyone who has $200,000 and he had approximately I think 800 million for all intents, was as well as him. He quoted that at this past that point. It’s just about keeping score. Unfortunately, it’s not just keeping score in status competition. It also ends up being about trying to control others and gain more power, which sort of course we see with people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Right. How would you do this? I mean, first of all, it’s worse in so far as I don’t just recommend capping wealth for 10 million, but also having a global minimum wage and additionally having much higher levels of taxation and additionally having wealth taxes. In general, I think we need to find ways to level different forms of power, whether that be economic power, political power, violent power, or information power. If you don’t find ways to level them, then eventually a concentration in one form will spill over into others. If you have billionaires, they will find ways to rig the political system, or of course, to take over the media, which is what we see today. How you implemented book? That is a tricky one. I think you most likely need to have at least a, a critical mass of countries doing so, ideally at least one more powerful country like the us and then both setting a, a norm for that and hopefully creating some kind of international institution arrangement for it. So a similar idea here would be how do you address tax evasion if it’s a global colan? Well, you get a small club of countries who are willing to tax wealth at a high level, and then you basically have them hyper enact a trade embargo or some kind of penalty upon tax havens who aren’t willing to adopt similar levels. So you can now basically offer carrots and sticks to have others adopt the same policy. But in short, I think you need to have a critical mass of countries first to do so, and you probably need to have at least one more powerful country doing so.

Mike: That’s a really good observation. And just so our listeners can connect the dots here, can you tell us how this relates to solving ecological breakdown? I mean, I can surmise, but I would love to hear you spell it out.

Luke: So as mentioned, the top 1% of wealth holders emit more than the bottom six, 6% of humanity. If you’re looking at a, a set of five planetary boundaries, including climate change and biodiversity loss, then the top 10% of income earn across the world they’re responsible for absolutely. Somewhere between 31 to 64% of those planetary boundaries degradation.

Mike: Wow.

Luke: So in short, what we often think about these things as being problems of humanity writ large, they’re not indeed, that was actually a PR myth created by Ogilvy & Mather, which was a PR firm hired by BP back in 2004.

Mike: I’m aware.

Luke: Who essentially, essentially came up with a strategy of—yeah exactly. It’s, it’s well known among some people, but unfortunately not widely enough. But this entire idea of everyone’s to blame for climate change. Was a way for BP to shift the blame from themselves onto everyone else. That’s just not the case. All these problems are highly concentrated and correlated with wealth, and in short, if you can find a way to reverse those huge wealth and inequalities. You both a start to obviously get rid of the impact here. But B, you also start to get rid of the power of a small number of people to veto legislation and policy on environmental problems, which is one of the biggest problems we face today.

Mike: Case in point, just before I recorded this podcast, the Global Plastic Treaty, the UN Binding Agreement, to limit the amount of plastic production and to combat pollution failed yet again, not because there wasn’t widespread agreement among most nations, but rather because a very small number of plastic producing countries, namely the United States and Saudi Arabia strongly objected to it, essentially holding up the legislation because of a consensus rule. This kind of problem isn’t just limited to treaties like this, but also how we regulate oceans. A small number of states, or even sometimes just one can derail environmental policy for everybody.

Luke: If you look at, say, for instance, Yale does a set of surveys on a regular basis and have done so for I think the last 15 years or so, across a very large number of countries on how worried people are about climate change. And in short, the vast majority of people are worried and they’re happy to see far more action and policy on the issue. That’s essentially never reflected in what countries actually do. we have numerous surveys on things like whether we should have a ban on nuclear weapons or a ban on new lethal autonomous weapons systems, often called killer robots. Again, strong majorities across different countries in the world. Even Israel and the US tend to support such things that never comes through in policy. And one of the big reasons as to why is as we see in climate change, the fact that a small number of very rich. Individuals with vest interests can essentially shape environmental policy. Once you start to get rid of their, their power through the sheer number of resources they hold, you suddenly start to break their ability to do so. You start to create more genuinely democratic societies. On top of all that, people often embrace more consumption and much more environmentally destructive lifestyles, in large part because they’re trying to pursue rich role models who have high status. This is something we see across many communities is that. Status competition ends up being a model of simulation. So high status individuals we tend to want to emulate, which is of course why different brands for cosmetics, usually higher celebrities, they are higher average people. There are higher celebrities or varying attractive people to basically market their products. And these status norms are usually once again set by the rich. So you kind of have a three pronged to prong approaches, but if they’re direct. Reductions you have in terms of the pressures of a global e ecological crisis. There’s also the fact that you have better policymaking, most likely and less vetoing of legislation. And additionally, you probably start to have less status competition as well. And altogether, that’s gonna make it much easier for us to handle our global ecological problems. And it’s worthwhile being in mind that these are huge and they’re gonna acquire very big action to stay under roughly two degrees.

You’re looking at kind of…emission cuts have stumbled between five to 7% per year, which is even more rapid than what we had during COVID-19

Mike: Again, I would love to keep going on that. You have suggested a citizen jury to litigate corporations that are currently getting away with rampant exploitation, human rights abuses, and ecological destruction. So right now we have the ICJ, which is the International Court of Justice. This might sound obvious. How would the citizen jury help differently than say the ICJ or, or anything that we have that could be similar? How would the citizen jury work?

Luke: Well, bearing in mind that the ICJ as well as the ICC, one of the problems is they’re only binding upon countries or essentially accept their decisions. And naturally the countries who are usually to blame don’t do so. so by nature of the ICJ and the ICC are fairly limited in terms of what they can actually do. A citizen assembly or jury. First of all, Betty, worthwhile, briefly explaining, these are usually a random selection or lottery system of citizens for a particular country or area. You can do it a global scale if you want to. And you then brief them with experts. It’s not just people kind of walking in, uninformed, they intend, they instead have a very, very thorough education process where the problem is. And then from there they deliberate amongst each other and they make a decision on a particular policy matter. And we have numerous examples across the world that’s working quite well, whether it be solving the abortion debate in Ireland, or actually coming up with a really foreign policy package in France, which was then unfortunately. Rejected by mcc, and we know from numerous studies, he tend to work pretty well. They create less polarization amongst people. They tend to create much better policies, and they even seem to create more legitimacy, particularly amongst the people who are involved in them. How would it work? I mean, think of a particular example here of you’re probably familiar with the Trinity project. The Manhattan Project, which created the Trinity bomb, I should say, right? So the very first atomic weapon created by the us, which was detonating the sands in New Mexico in 1940 fives, that was basically a decision, reached more or less by a small number of individuals in the US military political system. And imagine if instead you had a citizens assembly or jury. So a random selection of people including farmers, cleaners, nurses. They were given the information about the bond, including that the physicist Edward tell her, had calculated that it was a small, a very small but non-zero chance that igniting the bond would actually ignite the entire atmosphere of the earth, thus killing not just every human, but every piece of life on. On top of that, they also knew that by the stage that the Nazis were no longer pursuing their own nuclear weapon. This wasn’t about beating the Nazis to the bond. If you gave that small group people, would it be a jury of nine to 12 or an assembly of a couple of thousand? What decision do you think they come to?

Mike: I mean, I know my decision would be don’t, don’t detonate this bomb if I was on this jury. Yeah.

Luke: I’ve yet to come across anyone who doesn’t respond with just kind of almost a, an obvious laugh. Like of course they’re not going to agree to detonate the bond. Yeah. But I think this also holds for if you had a small jury sitting in when the broad of Shell or BP back in the 1980s decided after doing their own modeling of climate change and knowing that it was gonna be a very big problem in the future. They decide to intentionally destroy and bury that information and run disinformation campaigns against the science of climate change. Again, I think if you had a jury there and that you need to have the approval of both the jury and the board, they wouldn’t have done so. and this is very widespread. The same thing happened with three Emma DuPont when it came to s and other novel entities, which we know today are highly carcinogenic. So you can put these citizen assemblies and juries alongside. The boards of different companies as a additional form of oversight to make sure they are acting in the public interest. And you again, over time find ways to make democracy more compatible with them. You know, so to begin with, you can start by having a democratic system which has both the kind of represented democracy we have today, but also have Susan’s juries and assemblies, which can craft legislation and potentially, eventually can even start to change them out and actually have a greater alliance upon cities, assemblies, and juries rather than representative democracy. I say this because one of the things I point out in the book is this idea that while we’re pretty egalitarian, good by nature, we do have what are called, what I call the darker angels of the nature. So, the fact that we do want status and some of us are willing to take status by dominance, which is what we see happen during the very first state single lives. We have this of authoritarian impulse, we become more authoritarian. Our values where we feel threatened. We do know now from a large number of studies that power tends to corrupt people, placed higher in a hierarchy, tend to have less empathy, less compassion. They’re more willing to take risks. They’re more likely to cheat both in games. They’re more likely end on their spouses, and they tend to, in general, just kind of be worse position for worse people to have musicians of power. On top of all that, people who get into positions of power tend to be overrepresented in terms of the dark triad, which is a set of three anti-social personality traits, which are basically Machiavellianism, the willingness to manipulate personal gain, narcissism and overinflated sense of ego and self, and psychopathy, a certain callousness and lack of empathy. In general, our political systems currently select for people who want status and who want power and are willing to devote their entire lives to achieve it. That’s not necessarily the people we wanna have in power, and you tend to not want to have them in power for a long period of time over the before or eight years. The good thing about a citizen assembly is it kind of irons out all of those darker angels. No one gets corrupted by power because you only have individuals in for a short period of time to make one policy decision. It’s highly unlikely you’re gonna start to select for psychopaths or Machiavellians or narcissists because you’re basically just selecting at random rather than having a selection predator, status seeking. Likewise, you’re not gonna have an overrepresentation of people who want status and who want power. In short, I think citizen assemblies and juries tend to bring out the best in us. Our ability to liberate our ability to kind of connect with one another in a personal sense. And our current representative systems tend off to bring out the worst of us, which when you look across the world, is not hard to see. The three most powerful men in the world right now, I’d say Xi Jinping, Putin, and Trump. It’s very hard to see how they’re the best that humanity has to offer. Instead, they’re kind of like a walking conversion of the dark triad.

Mike: We spoke with science fiction writer. Kim Stanley Robinson on this podcast, he wrote a book in which there is literally, you know, a ministry for the future that regulates what countries can and can’t do. They instituted a global citizenship. They, they make all transactions, public information, which eradicates tax dodging, and they provide incentives for corporations and governments to create biodiversity corridors and also stop emitting carbon. These all are, and he outlines them in the book pretty well. But again, it is a, it is a book. What is your view on these actions? Do you think that these are actual things that could realistically be pursued?

Luke: Realistically pursued? Yeah, of course. I think our problem is never gonna be that we lack a technical knowledge of how to fix these problems. It’s very much that there’s existing systems of power which don’t want to change. Which unfortunately does still make these things very difficult to implement. But in practice, can we do most of the things that Kim outlines in his book, whether it be the use of things like carbon coins, like as you said, having transparent transactions to ensure that we can’t have things like tax dodging. Of course we can. We can put people on the moon. We can use a very, very small set of microchips to basically track where we are going across the world. There’s no reason we can’t do things like do democracy at scale. Or solve arms races or make our economic systems far more transparent and honest. These are all things we can on a technical level do quite easily. The problem is not the search for solutions. The problem is power.

Mike: I do want to get your thoughts on this. Because you pointed out in your conversation with Damian Carrington, you talk about the Khoisan peoples of South Africa, and you cite this as an example of egalitarianism functioning despite dark triad temptations. Can you explain how and can you expand on that?

Luke: Yeah, so the Khoisan people are a group of nomadic egalitarian hunter gatherers, although they’ve become less so in recent years, mainly in the Kalahari Desert. As far as we can tell, they have a distinct genetic lineage from roughly 200,000 years ago and have essentially persisted in their environment for that period of time. And without living unsustainably, without having any huge changes in material culture that we can see of. There’s not to say they’re perfect by any means, but thematic, egalitarian lifestyles, not just like the Khoisan people, but others like in Central Africa, for instance. Most nomadic egalitarians, they have ways of ensuring that a dominance hierarchy doesn’t occur. These are often preferred to as counter dominant strategies. They range all the way from ridicule to ostracism, kick someone out the group, and at the very worst in-group execution. So two examples from the Khoisan. One is they have this practice of insulting the bush meat, which is basically if you have a hunter come back of a kill. Everyone tends to say, oh, look at that scrawny carcas you brought, you brought back. How can that feed anyone? Et cetera, et cetera. And they actually explain. This is a way of ensuring that the hunter doesn’t become too prideful or arrogant. It’s a way of calling his heart. In the very worst cases when you can’t call someone’s heart and they start to become too intent upon dominating the group, they will resort to in-group executions. So there’s a story of a hunter called Trois. He would kill two members of the group, and after speaking to his family and getting their agreement, eventually the entire group comes together, ambushes him with pos and arrows, and then symbolically shares his murder by every person, basically poking a stick to him. These, as far as tell, probably the most likely fate of people who tried to dominate others for the first 300,000 years of humanity. Of course, suddenly something changes dramatically. And most of the people we have who are most well-known, the history books would be Napoleon, Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan. They basically get a huge amount of status and power, rather than getting an early graves. Now, I’m definitely not saying that we should kill people who are status seekers, but we need to find ways to harness those counter Dominos intuitions. you know, whether it be things like ridicule, for instance. A certain kind of ostracism, which once was also practice and the feeding democracy as well, or just having really high penalties for people who try to dominate others. But I think alongside all these big, granted dramatic and radical measures, I’m, advocating for the rebalancing of power across all the different forms of power. We need to also also have a culture shift that people start to see themselves as citizens, rather consumers, and the people start to see it as. You shouldn’t want to be dominated. And this is particularly true of I think people in the far right. I’m always struck by the fact that you have particularly young men who are essentially blaming most things upon the weakest members of society, whether be immigrants or women, but also seem to be quite willing to accept a replacement father figure in the form of someone like Trump. And that’s not an expression of masculinity or strength. That’s an expression of fear. They’re in short being cowards. I think we need to start having a very different culture around that. It’s not cool to be part of a relationship with domination. Instead, the best thing we can do as individuals is to have ones of egalitarians. That’s an expression of confidence in oneself and an expression of respect for everyone else around you.

Mike: There’s so interesting you say that. You have mentioned that democracy at scale is not a purely left wing take. Can you briefly explain why it isn’t?

Luke: Generally speaking, you don’t have even people in the far right saying that they don’t want democracy. You know, supporters of Trump are actually pretty similar to supporters of Bernie, Bernie Sanders. In some ways. They tend to see the problem about political system being one of a small number of corrupt, corrupt elites who are properly representing people or their interests, and they want to have a better representation of the common person. In political systems. In short, they want democracy. And when you think about democracy is it’s basically just a leveling of political power. We tend to make this mistake of seeing democracy as being just representative democracy, a very particular type of political form that the Brits basically exported across the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But that’s just one very particular form of democracy. It’s also not necessarily the best one. When you look at the, the origins of that kind of political form, it was with Alfons of the Knights in, I believe, the 12th century in Spain, where basically to re-con certain areas from the Calafate, he had to get the buy-in of aristocrats warriors and Bishop. So he formed a small parliament of them to basically high cop taxes for the military. And there are other ways of doing democracy. Whether that be in Barcelona, they had a, a form in which a representative was basically given a mandate by an assembly, and if they deviated from the mandate, they could be either kicked out immediately or executed. Again, not advocating for executions here, but just to say there’s, there’s numerous ways of doing this. And you know, even the Khoisan, for instance, they’re highly democratic. Every decision is usually reached either by a large scale agreement or consensus amongst a group. And I think most people genuinely want that. You know, most of us don’t want to be dominated or have no political voice whatsoever, and that includes people on the right.

Mike: Luke, where can people learn more about you? Your work or find a copy of your book? Goliath’s Curse.

Luke: Copy of the book should be through all major book retailers. I usually encourage people to go to their local book stop if possible. And for me, my work, I keep pretty low profile on social media. I do have an account on Macon, which I believe is perhaps Luca Kent. And apart from that, I’ll be setting up a website sometime in the next week or two, but I don’t have one yet. Well, Luke,

Mike: I really appreciate you speaking with me today. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Luke: Pleasure is all mine. Thank you.

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