So if collapse is a rapid contraction of power systems, tell us how patriarchy is both implicated in maintaining hierarchies and itself a risk.

Big question.

I think it's worthwhile pausing and thinking about where does patriarchy come from in the first place? The best evidence we have is that for the first 300,000 years of human existence during the Paleolithic, we probably don't have large discrepancies in power between men and women.

The very best modeling suggests that the way we see genetic diversity across communities is probably because men and women were making equal decisions when it came to whose family they moved to.

What changed? I think one of the key things here is that when you start to see these big dominance hierarchies popping up, these Goliaths, a key thing seems to be status competition.

There's a small number of people who really want status.

And technically, all of us want status.

So tell us why you are optimistic about the future of democracy in particular and the prospects of making the world equal again, particularly through the power of collective action and protest, which you are a fan of.

Neurotoxins as opposed to cytotoxins and, and what's it? Hemotoxins, uh, they obviously impact, uh, the, the human differently.

Correct.

Yeah.

So, so neurotoxins are our most toxic or most dangerous toxins.

Um, they're, they're quite common in most of the non-spitting cobras as well as the mambas, and basically it shuts down the nervous system.

So it attacks a lot of the signals from the brain to the rest of the mu- the muscles in the body and starts paralyzing a lot of those muscles, especially the muscles in the chest, so around the lungs.

And that's a big problem because e- eventually people can no longer breathe.

Do you have thirty minutes?

Mm-hmm.

And civilization has always been a term of propaganda.

It comes from the Latin root civilitas, which means people who live in cities, but it also has these connotations of wisdom, moderation, virtue, restraint.

When I looked empirically at what actually happens when people talk about the rise of civilization, it tends to be things like patriarchy, warfare, slavery, and human sacrifice.

To me, Goliath was a much more appropriate term for what we see occurring here, and it's essentially a collection of dominance hierarchies, not just the state, but also the distinction between slave and master, rich and poor, man and woman.

All of those together make up one Goliath.

And Goliaths, in a very simple way, you can think of as being a system in which a small group extract resources from others using violence.

Yes

And then once Goliath is up and walking, it becomes a very difficult monster to slay.

It's a really interesting conundrum, right? In the book, I marshal the case that most people, as far as we can tell, are pretty decent, kind, and altruistic.

And most of us prefer more egalitarian, fair arrangements.

And this is echoed in the Paleolithic.

we can see very few signs of inequality in rules but we can see actually very large-scale signs of cooperation even across vast areas for instance 100 000 years ago all the way from the east coast the west coast of africa we have signs of shared instruments lithic stone tools even things like cave art figurines etc the same is true for siberia through to spain roughly 40 000 years ago On top of that, we also have evidence that people don't usually like violence that much.

So, contrary to Steven Pinker, the very best genetic, archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that during the Paleolithic, we probably had a lethal violence rate of roughly 2%.

So out of every 100 people, a maximum of 2% would die at the hands of a human being, which is roughly the same as a global level today.

And you got to it of like, oh, shit, I don't know if I can escape this one the way someone could have walked away from the Nile River and survived being like, What do I do now? So tell me this Silicon Goliath in as dark or hopeful as a way as you wish on this podcast.

Mm

... for status is universal.

Everyone wants to be admired, loved, respected by their peers.

But some people want it far more than others.

In general, men mu- want it much more, and also people in the dark triad, who rank high on the dark triad, tend to want it more.

It's worthwhile noting the dark triad, while we often talk about this as if it's a particular category, everyone has a certain level of dark triad.

Everyone has a certain level of narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy.

A- and, and by the way, do, do you think that there are signs that it could collapse or could be collapsing, but if it collapses, its collapse could be worse than the, uh, collapse of any historic Goliath, because now it would be on a global scale?

think you're probably still going to end up in a Goliath in the long term.

There are other things, for instance, the stories, the norms, the culture that we inherit.

And this could be a good thing insofar as if you have a collapse where afterwards people have stories of earth-eating stock markets and technological wizards with the restraint of toddlers.

Who knows? That could actually act as a very powerful story to stop people from rebuilding dominance hierarchies.

And interestingly, we do have a precedent for this.

For instance, in North America, roughly a thousand years ago, you had multiple different glides.

I mentioned one, Cahokia, one of the earliest cities in North America.

This is true if you look at things like human

So do tell me a bit about Liam Young and this new immersive exhibition, In Other Worlds, as Liam has been, I think, described as the man designing our futures, as this exhibition asks what if the future could actually be hopeful.

Yes, and I think, you know, now more than ever, I feel like we need to have some hopeful futures, I think.

And to just give you a bit more background on Liam Young himself, so he's a, a speculative architect and producer, artist, a BAFTA-nominated director as well, so he really is a multidisciplinary artist.

And as the Barbican Immersive team here, we have a history of working with people from across the spectrum of creativity.

We've worked with engineers, designers, indigenous groups, video game designers, musicians.

Nobody really is off limits if they've got an exciting and interesting story to tell.

And we really felt for the first time that we were going to work with a singular artist, Liam Young really fit that bill, and he's been working in this area of speculative futures for over 10 years now and has been building his practice about creating this idea of pragmatic hope.

And tell me a little bit about how Marcus is gonna bring the elements of the exhibition to life for blind and partially sighted people through the audio described tour.

Walk us through the term, um, and what that offers that, uh, the kind of category or the, the, the phraseology of civilization doesn't.

Goliath is by and large my replacement term for civilization.

When you look across the world, there are numerous different areas we have the stirrings of civilization, as some would call it.

You know, the Cahokia in North America, Uruk in Mesopotamia, the Xia dynasty in China, and yet in all these places, you don't seem to see a good thing going on necessarily.

Civ- civilization comes from the Latin root civilitas, which has connotations of virtue, moderation, wisdom, restraint.

It's essentially a term of propaganda.

It was a way of the Romans saying, "We are superior to those outside the empire." And when you look at all these places where you have civilizations appearing, you tend to get almost always they're preceded by warfare.

... is this sort of stewardship of the commons even possible at this point?

is,

I think, one of the most interesting questions.

And for me, it's almost more interesting than why do they collapse is why do they always get back up? Why is it when a Goliath, whether it's in China or in Europe, tends to always get resurrected? And why is it they get bigger over time? The story of empire is essentially one of global conquest.

The very first empires, up until roughly, I think it was around about 1000 BCE, so the first 2000 years or so, empires and states only got roughly 1 million square kilometres big.

That was kind of maximum territorial extent.

And then you start to get the Iron Age empires later on, which get to roughly 5 to 7 million square kilometres when you look at, say, for instance, the Han Dynasty as well as the Western Roman Empire.

And then you start to get the big horseback empires, the Mongols, for instance, which go up to roughly 24 million square kilometres.

So what are some of the core principles, approaches you think we could use to shackle or move beyond Goliath? And what might that look like in practice for societies and individuals?

Yeah

...

Hobbes interestingly wasn't talking about the Paleolithic when he talks about theLife of man being nasty, brutish, and short.

He's just thinking in general about- It's about the state of nature, right? Yeah.

Yeah, the state of nature, exactly.

Basically, a situation in which there are no rulers, there's no authorities.

And the Paleolithic is often compared to that because it does seem to be that kind of situation where you don't have social dominance hierarchies, you don't have rulers.

We're doing it now.

And you say that he's actually misreading the data.

Yes, absolutely.

Steven Pinker has popularized the idea that the Paleolithic, so approximately 300,000 years ago, through to roughly 11,000 years ago, once you have an entry into the warmer conditions of the Holocene, that during this period, we were incredibly bloodthirsty.

That on average, for every 100 people born, 15 were dying at the hands of another human, what we call a lethal violence rate of 15%.

And others have said even higher, 25%.

The problem is, And that's fallen and now we are at one in a hundred.

Exactly.

What would that look like?

What do you mean by that?

I want to do quite a restricted study, just looking at collapse to better understand the risks we face in the future.

And I found quite quickly that was essentially impossible by addressing far bigger questions such as why were states even created in the first place? Were they good for the citizens and the subjects who lived within them? And how do people actually act during crises and catastrophes? And what I found was that in almost all those cases, my intuitions and the ideas have been handed down ever since high school were profoundly challenged.

For instance, most of us tend to think of civilization as being essentially both an intentional and benevolent act that people came together in large groups because they started to have grain, for instance.

And as had bigger groups of people needed to basically coordinate them to do bigger projects, and so hence we had kings, etc.

And that just simply isn't really the case.

When you look at what really unites all civilizations throughout history, it tends to be things like slavery, patriarchy, domination, basically.

And what, for you, is the key example of a societal collapse where everything goes bust?

What's your sense of the extent to which we can draw parallels around the moments at which cultures start to decline?

I believe we can.

When we think about collapse or even resilience, we tend to think about risk, and risk is composed of four factors: the hazard, vulnerability, exposure, and response.

Your hazard is essentially the thing that causes damage.

So this could be a tsunami or it could be an invader.

Your vulnerability is the fact that you don't have the infrastructure, for instance, to withstand the tsunami.

You're vulnerable to being hit by the damages incurred by the hazard.

And so that image, that history has evolved and maintained through time in a really similar way.

So as you've studied human history, how do you reconcile those two different poles?

Yeah, it's a tug-of-war of sorts.

As I note, throughout most of the Paleolithic, we're egalitarian, and that seems to be something that gives us an advantage.

Our mobility, our equality, these are things that help us last through these recurrent ice ages.

And it's also our ability to pro-socially organize, the fact that we can actually behave pretty well during disasters, which we see in modern-day disasters, whether it be earthquakes or terrorist attacks.

Which makes a lot of sense if we freaked out and found a mass panic every time there was any kind of large-scale disaster like a volcanic eruption, that would be an evolutionary recipe for extinction.

We wouldn't have lasted long.

What are the kind of like ingredients or conditions that have often led to collapse throughout history?

Um, talk about how that made that, uh, possible and then, uh, then began to contribute to the collapse of the very societies to such a degree that nobody knows what- what Cahokia is even in- in North America anymore.

Mm-hmm.

So across the world, you have ten different areas which independently had agriculture.

And these include areas such as Papua New Guinea, the eastern, uh, woodlands of North America, for instance, areas that never actually had kingdoms or empires arise.

When you look across the world, there's only four areas where you have these cradles of civilization: Mesoamerica, the Near East, China and the Yellow River Valley, and the Andean mountains in South America.

The commonality across all of those is not just they have agriculture, but they have a very certain type of agriculture.

So if you look at Papua New Guinea versus Egypt, both met agriculture roughly 7,000 years ago.

Okay.

So if they're fragile, how is it that we, for the past 10,000 years or so, keep being dominated by this circle of elites?

While individual empires and states can often be fragile, the actual template of Goliath is both contagious and also very resilient.

You see this over the grand scheme of history.

The very first states were often very small.

They 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 2,000 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.

What are some of the most famous examples of human societies mismanaging their ecological resources or nature and then eventually leading to this societal collapse as you're alluding to?

So if they're fragile, how is it that we, for the past 10,000 years or so, keep being dominated by this circle of elites?

While individual empires and states can often be fragile, the actual template of Goliath is both contagious and also very resilient.

You see this over the grand scheme of history.

The very first states were often very small.

They 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 2,000 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.

What are some of the most famous examples of human societies mismanaging their ecological resources or nature and then eventually leading to this societal collapse as you're alluding to?