Is the Family the First Empire to Fall?

Monday, December 1, 2025.

Historians are warning us—again—that collapse is fashionable this season. They tend to do this whenever the world looks tired around the eyes, which lately is all the time.

Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, helpfully dissected in The Atlantic, reminds us that civilizations rarely explode; they dissolve. Their undoing is almost never cinematic. It’s incremental, maddeningly slow, like listening to someone insist they’re “fine” for twenty-seven consecutive years.

The real engine of collapse, Kemp writes, is the silent accumulation of unfairness—burdens that drift upward, voices that drift downward, until ordinary people have nothing left to contribute except resignation.

Anyone raised inside a family recognizes this immediately.

Families collapse for the same reasons empires do: too much weight on too few shoulders, too much pretending, and far too little honest conversation. Empires have ruins; families have Thanksgiving.

Hierarchy: The First Rumbling Beneath the Floorboards

Kemp’s “Goliath” is a towering system held together by obedience, deference, and the unspoken rule that whoever suffers the least gets to make the rules.

You don’t need archaeology to understand this. You just need two parents, three siblings, and one person whose mood quietly dictates the climate of the entire house.

Families don’t grant titles, but they do enforce them. Someone becomes the person whose emotional weather everyone checks before decisions are made. Someone else becomes the one who absorbs the chaos with heroic flexibility. Bowen would call this pseudo-self versus solid-self development; parents call it “just how our family works.”

Civilizations call it centralized authority. Families call it keeping the peace. The results remain indistinguishable.

The Quiet Exodus

One of Kemp’s most unsettling findings is that when ancient cities fell, the inhabitants did not riot—folks just drifted away. No grand rebellion. Just a gradual vote of no confidence.

Families perfected this maneuver generations ago.

Teenagers retreat behind headphones.
Adult children shave a monthly visit down to a holiday, then down to nothing at all.
Siblings fall silent in group chats.
Parents linger at work rather than return to an atmosphere thick with unsaid things.

In family systems language, this is emotional cutoff. In practice, it is the simplest exit strategy humans have ever invented.

Roles: The Family’s Most Durable Fiction

People do not leave families because of melodrama; they leave because the assigned roles have grown too tight to breathe in.

Empires invented castes; families invented roles. Both are astonishingly durable.

Every family has its archetypes: the Responsible One, the Difficult One, the Quiet One, the One Who Will Be Fine, the One We Secretly Worry About.

These casting choices are made early—pre-verbal, sometimes pre-memory—and they stick long after someone has grown, evolved, or left the country entirely.

Try returning home after graduating, recovering, or becoming a person with boundaries. The system will try to stuff you back into your original costume like an understudy arriving late to rehearsal.

Families are far less threatened by conflict than by someone insisting on becoming a truer version of themselves.

Silence: The True Engine of Collapse

Kemp argues that civilizations collapse not from dramatic disasters but from neglected tensions. The structural rot comes from everything people refuse to name.

Families have turned this into a performance art.

Every household knows its forbidden topics. They form the load-bearing walls.

Dad’s drinking is “stress.”
Mom’s pettiness and spite are “just how she is.”
The estranged sibling is just “too busy.”
Grandfather’s cruelty is “his no-nonsense personality.”
The child holding everything together is “so mature.”

Families don’t die from conflict. They die from the cumulative weight of everything that cannot be spoken aloud.

Collapse feels dramatic from the outside. From the inside, silence is the quiet undertow that pulls the structure apart.

When Collapse Is the Only Honest Thing That Happens

Kemp suggests that many collapses ultimately leave survivors better off—taller, healthier, freer. Systems dissolve, and suddenly people can breathe again.

Families experience the same paradox.

A confrontation that was avoided for years finally erupts.
A meltdown shatters the mythology.
A child refuses the emotional labor their elders called “love.”
A divorce brings relief rather than ruin.

These moments feel like destruction. In reality, they are tiny revolutions. They are differentiation in real time: the system reorganizing itself around greater truth.

Collapse is not the failure. The failure was the long, compliant silence that preceded it.

Families Get Something Empires Don’t: A Second Chance

Empires don’t rebuild themselves. Families can. Systems, unlike monuments, adapt when people decide to tell the truth.

Families can:

Redistribute labor.
Stop asking one person to be the psychic backbone.
Let children outgrow their early roles.
Allow parents to be human rather than heroic.
Tell the truth without burning the house down.

What makes a family different from a falling empire is the possibility of repair.

Someone only has to say, “This isn’t working,” and mean it.

Collapse is not destiny. Denial, on the other hand, reliably is.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.

Feldman, R. (2012). Bio-behavioral synchrony: A model for integrating biology and microsocial behavior in parenting. Parenting, 12(2–3), 154–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295192.2012.683342

Kemp, L. (2024). Goliath’s curse: The history and future of societal collapse. Cambridge University Press.

Lahiri, S. (2025). Lessons from 5,000 years of civilizational collapse [Review of the book Goliath’s Curse, by L. Kemp]. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.