Technocracy, Collapse, and the Missing Thread of Inheritance
The Technocrat’s answer for any problem is technology, ie, “there is an app for that.” When their technocratic solution fails, they will say they didn’t have enough data in the first place, so the answer is obviously more technology and collecting more data. There is never an analog solution to any problem. The mechanistic worldview of Technocracy traps the technocrats in a closed-circuit loop.
I’ve been reading Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse with care because it comes from people who study systemic fragility professionally. Kemp sees elite failure, institutional overreach, and inequality in ways that matter; his research is serious and sobering. That gives the book real weight even where I disagree with its implications.
Where the book falls short is its altitude. Kemp’s collapse framework is managerial. Collapse becomes a problem for better coordination, governance, and institutional reform rather than a failure of social transmission and everyday competence.
This framing produces a blind spot: continuity is assumed, not explained. The book treats sustainability as system stability, not as generational renewal carried by families, trades, and local norms. That omission reshapes the remedies it proposes.
The book speaks well about inequality and long-term risk, but it rarely addresses inheritance as transmission of skills, family structure, responsibility, and cultural competence. When institutions wobble, what matters is whether anything capable of being inherited remains. Stabilizing a top-heavy system does not guarantee what passes to the next generation.
Collapse is not the absence of order; it is the failure of particular scales of organization. When big institutions fail, life reorganizes around households, informal economies, and local know-how. Expecting centralized systems to heal themselves ignores the quieter patterns of endurance.
Where this matters most is in Kemp’s prescriptions. The remedies are more coordination, stronger governance, and smarter global frameworks. In short: ask the scale that failed to save itself.
That is the core problem. Centralization is offered as the cure for overextension. Governance is offered as the cure for institutional fragility. Coordination is offered as the cure for complexity.
The mechanisms meant to prevent collapse amplify its consequences when they fail. The financial collapse of 2008 rescued banks while households absorbed the loss. Large institutions were recapitalized; families lost homes, savings, and years of effort.
The pandemic showed the same pattern. Big firms were treated as essential while small businesses were shuttered. Compliance and capital favored scale; independent capacity quietly disappeared.
A third example is unfolding now as private equity and big financiers consolidate trades and local services like plumbing, HVAC, and small manufacturing. Businesses are bought, debt-loaded, stripped, and optimized for extraction until stewardship vanishes. Ownership thins and there is less left to inherit when failure comes.
These are not accidents; they are the predictable results of scale-first solutions. Systems are stabilized at a macro level while households shoulder the disruption. Continuity pays the real cost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb named a related failure mode: the intellectual yet idiot—an expert insulated from consequence. Collapse expertise that cannot be lived becomes abstract, advocating institutional fixes without grounding in lived obligation. Moral urgency then risks slipping into power plays without a clear moral foundation.
The real threat is not collapse itself but the erosion of inheritance that sustains competence across generations. Institutions can be recapitalized; families are harder to replace. When family structures fail to transmit competence, what comes after is not true renewal but vacancy.
Goliath dies not because collapse occurs, but because scale mistakes itself for life. What survives was never his. The book diagnoses fragility well; it does not yet explain endurance, the practical web of skills and responsibilities that outlast institutions.
Endurance is shaped in kitchens, workshops, and neighborhood networks, not only in boardrooms and international panels. If policy aims to prevent systemic collapse, it must reckon with what societies actually pass on to their children and neighbors.