The End of Pretending: Leadership in an Unraveling World

Part 2. “The Quiet Machinery of Collapse”
A Response to Luke Kemp’s Warning on Civilizational Decline

We often imagine collapse as a singular, cataclysmic event, something loud and final. A market crash. A wildfire. A war. But collapse rarely announces itself with such clarity. More often, it arrives in whispers. In meeting rooms where truth is softened to the point of distortion. In communities that grow quiet because confrontation feels too risky. In leaders who once burned with integrity but now traffic in performance.

Collapse, in this sense, is not an event. It’s a pattern. It’s a rehearsal.

We don’t collapse all at once.
We collapse in pieces.
And we practice it long before the system does.

Luke Kemp’s analysis of civilizational decline highlights the role of inequality and elite extraction in the fall of over 400 societies. He describes how the “Goliaths” of history, empires built on hierarchy, domination, and control, were not only violent, but surprisingly fragile. Their power came at the cost of resilience. Their grandeur masked rot.

His argument is clear: inequality makes systems brittle. But what makes inequality so persistent? What allows it to go unchallenged for generations?

Pretending.

Pretending that everything is fine.
Pretending that the way things are is the way they must be.
Pretending that we’re not complicit.

This is the quiet machinery of collapse: the normalization of disconnect, the subtle betrayals of truth, and the daily rituals of self-abandonment that become culture.

Kemp draws attention to the “dark triad” of leadership traits, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, as prevalent in the world’s most powerful figures. But these traits do not thrive in a vacuum. They thrive in environments where people are rewarded for suppressing dissent, where charisma is valued over character, and where performance is mistaken for leadership.

And they don’t only show up in political leaders or corporate executives. They show up in how we speak to each other. How we silence ourselves. How we weaponize competence to avoid vulnerability. They show up in the leadership retreats where everyone nods but no one really tells the truth. In the well-meaning nonprofits that burn their staff out in the name of impact. In the boardrooms where metrics matter more than meaning.

They show up, in short, whenever we lead from ego rather than essence.

What Kemp calls “Goliath fuel”, surplus, weapons monopolies, and caged land, also has internal equivalents. The surplus of unprocessed emotion. The monopolization of voice by a few “experts” in the room. The psychological cages we build when we prioritize control over creativity, loyalty over lived experience, systems over souls.

We’ve been taught to manage appearances. To protect the institution. To keep things moving. But in doing so, we often move past what matters. We learn to polish the surface while the foundation cracks beneath us.

And the tragedy is that many of us know this.
We feel the split.
We feel the pressure to perform.
We notice the moments when we say yes, even when our body says no.

But we stay silent. Because change might cost us. Because we might be seen as “difficult.” Because we’ve grown attached to the version of ourselves that succeeds in a broken system.

This is one of the central insights of Full Spectrum Leadership: that the outer collapse is mirrored by an inner one. That the erosion of ecosystems often follows the erosion of integrity. That before a society becomes unjust, its leaders become unwhole.

So if we want to interrupt collapse, not just survive it, but transform through it, we must begin where the pattern begins: in ourselves.

Where am I still pretending?
Where have I made peace with distortion?
Where have I confused compliance with wisdom?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are necessary ones. Because collapse doesn’t only destroy, it reveals. It strips away illusion. It surfaces what we’ve ignored. Kemp reminds us that past collapses often improved life for the average person, because they were freed from oppressive hierarchies. The system fell, and in its ashes, something more human emerged.

The tragedy, then, is not collapse itself. The tragedy is waiting until collapse is the only thing left powerful enough to make us change.

If we want to avoid that, we must stop waiting. We must stop hoping someone else will fix it. We must stop outsourcing our integrity to systems that were never designed for wholeness.

We must begin again.

We must become the kind of leaders who tell the truth when it’s inconvenient. Who prioritize coherence over compliance. Who stop measuring success by growth alone and start asking: Are we well? Are we honest? Are we still human in the way we relate to one another?

This doesn’t mean abandoning structure. It means reimagining it. It means shifting from pyramids to circles. From extraction to reciprocity. From domination to presence.

It means leading not from fear of collapse, but from love of what could rise in its place.

Kemp writes, “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths.” I believe that’s true. But I also believe we are capable of choosing otherwise. Not through grand gestures, but through daily decisions. Through how we listen. Through how we show up. Through how we reconnect what has been divided.

The systems are not separate from us. They are us. They reflect our values, our fears, our defaults. And so the work is not just to critique them, it is to transform the ways we participate in them.

Collapse may be coming. But so is something else.
Something quieter. Something slower.
Something that begins in a conversation where someone finally tells the truth.
In a meeting where someone says, “I don’t know, but I’m here.”
In a leader who chooses to put down the script and pick up their presence.

If collapse is a kind of forgetting, then leadership is an act of remembering, who we are beneath the roles, what matters beyond the metrics, and how to live in ways that make wholeness possible again.

Let’s Keep Talking!

Peter Comrie
Co-Founder and Human Capital Specialist at Full Spectrum Leadership Inc.
Reach out to me at peter@fullspectrumleadership.com
Or connect with me here to book a call!

Reach me on Linkedin; https://www.linkedin.com/in/petercomrie/

TAGS: leadership in crisis, transformational leadership, systems change, regenerative leadership, post-collapse leadership, future of leadership