The Coming Dark Age – A Review

The Coming Dark Age___A Review

By Alan Danesh

The Coming Dark Age

By Roberto Vacca

Panther Books Ltd. Great Britain

1974

____________________________________________________________________________

Introduction:

Roberto Vacca is one of Europe’s foremost computer and electronic systems authorities. He is an Engineering Faculty member of the University of Rome and a former Visiting Fellow at the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard.

The author extensively documents how the extreme complexity of advanced technological societies has created the conditions for the breakdown of the entire system in the near future.  The breakdown, he anticipates, will first begin in the most complex and crowded parts of the United States’ northwest such as New York and later on spread to European countries. Latin American countries will then follow. In the chaos of the complete breakdown of the social order vigilante groups will emerge to provide protection for citizens where the governments and the police have failed their duties. People will form communes in order to provide mutual support as best as they can. Nevertheless despite these efforts life will return to primitive living conditions. The evidence of the beginning of the system breakdown is already before our eyes. Extreme heat in Europe, forest fires everywhere, major rivers drying up worldwide, and so on.     A D

_____________________________________________________________________________

“I read this book in a palsied fascination of horror. I have never read a book that was at one and the same time so convincing and so frightening” ISAAC ASIMOV

“And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.”

The Apocalypse of St John the Divine, 20:1-5

“This passage from the Apocalypse once convinced multitudes of people that the world would come to an end in the year a.d. 1000. Feeling doomed and powerless, they sought refuge and pardon in prayer and penitence. The able-bodied lost innumerable working hours, spending on their knees time that they had formerly given to productive work. Then the year 1000 passed, and the world did not come to an end – a notable fact that nevertheless did not modify the apocalyptic beliefs and superstitions in any way. Indeed, in the centuries that followed there were many other occasions when astrologers and numerologists predicted cataclysm and ruin. While cataclysm and ruin have not been absent during recent centuries, they have turned out to be in actual fact rather different from the improvised anticipations of the prophets.” (Source: The Coming Dark Age, pp.7-8)

“I am writing when the second millennium of our era is less than thirty years from completion and when, for reasons different from those of a thousand years ago, many people expect that before long there will be tragic and total catastrophe. Today’s prophets do not tell us to fear angels, dragons, or the abyss. We have to fear nuclear holocaust, overpopulation, pollution, and ecological disaster.”(Source: Ibid. p. 8)

“It is not necessary for a few kilomegatons of hydrogen bombs to explode for hundreds of millions of people to be killed. The same result may occur by less violent and more intricate means: that is, by virtue of the fact that vast concentrations of human beings are involved in systems that are now so complicated that they are becoming uncontrollable.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 8-9)

“This book is an attempt to analyze one type of catastrophe that could come about through the breakdown of the great systems that are now becoming so extremely complicated. My thesis is that our great technological systems of human organization and association are continuously outgrowing ordered control: they are now reaching critical dimensions of instability. As yet, a crisis in a single system would not be enough to bring a great metropolitan concentration to a halt. But a chance concomitance of stoppages in the same area could start a catastrophic process that would paralyze the most developed societies and lead to the deaths of millions of people.” (Source: Ibid. p. 9)

“One cannot demonstrate a priori, of course, that a chance coincidence of events – decline, congestion, and slow-down -must lead inevitably to disaster: not, at least, in a developing situation such as I describe. It seems very likely, however, that the most developed nations are on the way toward breakdown on a large scale. It seems to me sound procedure to accept certain assumptions and to deduce their logical consequences in detail, in order to show realistically what the imminent dangers are. I have used the term ‘dark age’ – ‘Dark Ages’ was the term often applied to the early medieval era from, say, 500 to 1100-to describe this coming widespread crisis.” (Source: Ibid. p. 9)

“The death of 450 million people in the world’s most developed countries would mean that scientific development, technological research, large undertakings in civil engineering, industrial mass production at low cost, the whole organizing and directive structures that function in modern society, would come to a complete stop. Along with a certain setback that the countries of the third world would suffer, there would be grave secondary consequences: manufactured goods, finished and durable products, medicines, production facilities and managerial know-how previously supplied by the more advanced nations – all would be missing.” (Source: Ibid. p. 10)

REACHING THE KNEE OF THE CURVE

“Imagine driving a big truck on an uphill road. The slope is becoming steeper and your speed is decreasing. You shift down to the lowest gear, the engine is labouring, the slope is getting worse. But with so heavy a vehicle and so powerful an engine there seems to be no danger of losing traction. Still, the bonnet is all the time getting higher in your field of vision and seems almost vertical. The slope steepens more. To turn back now is out of the question. Surely sooner or later the road will have to level off. In a cold sweat you ask yourself whether the truck will overturn.

A simile. It pictures those mathematical curves that represent the time variation in any number that measures some aspect of our civilization. Everything grows: everything is on the increase, and every year the speed of that increase is greater. For example:

The population of the world was 800 million in 1750, 1,200 million in 1850, 2,400 million in 1950, and in 1973 it was well over 3,600 million.

The maximum speed of vehicles was 35 miles per hour in 1850, 100 m.p.h. in 1900, 1000 in 1950, and now astronauts travel at a speed of some 24,840 m.p.h.” (Source: Ibid. p. 12)

“The simile of a truck climbing a road of increasing steepness and running the risk of overturning before getting to the plateau is not overdramatic. In fact, it is not the natural order for things always to run smoothly. Often the effect of the limiting factors is not felt gradually: it may be felt all of a sudden; instead of a rounded shoulder, there may be turbulent oscillations accompanied by disorder and break¬ down. Indeed, the hypothesis that changes are uncomfortable, coming swiftly and violently, is more likely to prove true than the alternative hypothesis that they are tolerable because they come as gradual and slow transitions. Trying to foresee what the first hypothesis in all its grimness may involve is therefore well worthwhile. As Lewinsohn observed, we are all prophets, not so much from choice as from sheer necessity.” (Source: Ibid. p. 13)

“It is a curious fact that an investigation of this kind is not very popular. For, living as we do in advanced societies, we are so familiar with the ever-growing numbers and the ever-denser congestion of people, vehicles, machines, buildings, etc., that we have difficulty even in imagining situations that are different – static rather than progressive, contracting rather than expanding. We inevitably regard a slow¬ down, recession, or crisis as abnormal and transient. And it should be added in passing that this attitude is not unjustified : the past 150 years confirm it. They even allow us to conclude that planners are, if anything, too conservative, timidly underestimating future growth. Traditionally engineers and planners have tended to be out of date in the very fields in which they operate, ignoring the time lag between a project and its actual execution, and designing roads, telephone networks, and housing as though catering to the needs of ten years ago rather than to present and future needs.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 13-14)

“Even if we use one of the more modest and prudent formulas that have been suggested as the law of growth for the population of the world, the conclusion to which it brings us is this: if continuously valid for the next two thousand years, it would give a world population of 150,000 billion people, i.e., one person to every square meter of the Earth’s surface (seas excluded).” (Source: Ibid. pp. 14-15)

IS A HALT TO EXPANSION UNLIKELY?

“My thesis, then, is that we shall soon have an oscillation, with a jump to general levels somewhat higher than at present; then a sharp swing downward to a minimum; and at length a new growth at a moderate slope. I shall try to show that the total range of the swing from the maximum to the subsequent minimum position will be a few times greater than the range of the cycles of prosperity and crisis that have been the experience of the last hundred years.

This last fact gives dramatic quality to the events that I am trying to foresee. To be more explicit, the dramas to which I refer will consist of hecatombs of populations much more momentous than those slaughters, irrelevant by comparison, caused by wars, automobile accidents, and epidemics. The drastic reduction in the density of people on the earth will have profound consequences for every form of human association, and many things that will be new will be hardly bearable.” (Source: Ibid. p. 21)

“In view of this it is curious that there is a current of contemporary thought which regards already as dramatically dangerous some fairly marginal aspects of continuous expansion. As we shall see in Chapter Four, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the increasing dimensions of large systems-but also the more basic facts of population explosion, increasing industrial production, increasing pollution, exhaustion of natural resources – cause instability in the situation of the entire planet. As a consequence serious crises are to be expected within a century. These are the predicaments that require continuous attention and huge efforts of both public and private powers. It is consequently inappropriate to focus attention on secondary consequences of increases in gross national products: yet there are so many voices loudly eloquent in their opposition to and criticism of notorious side effects of growth that we have to consider their point of view carefully.” (Source: Ibid. p. 21)

LARGE SYSTEMS AND THEIR ENGINEERING

“Before describing any actual cases of deterioration and breakdown in large systems, and anticipating others in the future that will be worse, we must define what is meant by ‘large system,’ giving some account of how such systems are designed.

• systems of communication, by telephone, telegraph, or telex, covering a nation or a continent

• railway systems, comprising stations, track, rolling stock, with subsystems for signaling and safety, ticketing and reservation, railway personnel and traveling public – and auxiliary services

• airlines, and systems for the control of air traffic

• systems for the regulation, control, and supervision of vehicular traffic on streets, roads, and highways

® systems generating, transmitting, and distributing electrical energy

• postal systems

• industrial processes of mechanized production

• military defense systems, comprising surveillance, early warning radar systems, electronic counter-measures, interception

This list is far from being exhaustive, and is drawn up in very general terms. Many of these systems were built up without any longterm planning on the part of their designers: they were gradually modified to meet growing demands as problems of increasing magnitude arose. Often such adaptations have had no more than moderate success.” (Source: Ibid. pp.31-32)

LARGE SYSTEMS GETTING OUT OF CONTROL

“For years, however, we have had a tragic problem of congestion in the large systems, centered as they are in the world’s greater urban areas, where they permit the ceaseless flux of people, vehicles, goods, electric power, communications, and waste products. It is a problem that grows continually worse. Even the less informed public complains of daily traffic congestion in city streets, on interurban roads, and in the air; of the inadequacy and unreliability of the networks for transmitting and distributing power; of the untrustworthiness and insufficiency of the communication networks. All this disturbs and disquiets multitudes of people. It is noteworthy too that it destroys wealth.” (Source: Ibid. p. 40)

“During the early months of 1972, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology contributed a study entitled The Limits to Growth under the sponsorship of the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. It gave further currency to the general hypothesis of a corning collapse; and, along with its mathematical analyses based on Forrester’s ideas, it received wide notoriety. This study examines several hypotheses to which present world trends have given rise and gives broad support to their common conclusion that the system of the civilized world as we know it will break down before very long (its population falling tragically to levels lower than those of today) if its unordered development continues without informed planning.” (Source: Ibid. pp.48-49)

THE BEGINNING AND DURATION OF THE DARK AGE

Variations in different countries

“The megalopolitan concentrations of people on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States and in the region of the Great Lakes around Chicago owe their high density and their very existence to the highly advanced technology available to them. The preceding paragraphs suggest that this state of things involves high risks: indeed, it seems probable that the initial manifestations of the coming dark age will be in the United States.

One by one European countries will experience similar regressions to medievalism. To the countries of the American continent (other than the United States) this will happen later – not only because concentrations of people are greater in European countries than in Canada and Latin America, but also because of a reversal in the direction of the brain drain. This phenomenon was already disclosing itself toward the end of the sixties, because of the economic recession in the United States and of the resulting cuts in the grants intended for advanced research there, either from private corporations or from government organizations and, in particular, NASA. Technologists, scientists, engineers, research workers, and managers of European origin who had formerly emigrated to the United States would try to exploit their capabilities anew on returning home to their respective European countries, devoting themselves to activities like those they had pursued in America. Even in difficult economic conditions they would find big corporations ready to welcome them, if for no other reason than that their productive technological know-how – revolutionizing existing systems and creating new ones – might be just the cure for unemployment and difficult economic conditions. All this would contribute to the growth of systemistic concentrations and to the increasing probability that the great systems would reach the state of instability in Europe that had already been responsible for the new medievalism in the United States.

The first phase of the coming dark age, then, would begin in the United States. The second phase would follow a few years later – perhaps five – in the countries of Europe, and in this order: Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Italy, Britain, Spain, the Soviet Union, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey.” (Source: Ibid. pp. 134-135)

“The financial and economic difficulties of most Western countries – balance of payments, inflation, unemployment, productivity – are worsening, and the machineries devised to control them can do nothing to stop the rot. America is not solving its grave problems of individual and group violence nor its impending problems of pollution and of city refuse. In almost every European country deficiencies at the municipal level are much more evident than in America: there are too few doctors, hospitals, schools, streets; there is not enough use of electronic apparatus and not enough servicing. These tendencies are becoming more marked, and they seem to indicate that before very long it will be to the obvious and indisputable economic advantage of private groups to undertake public works at their own expense. The money that private individuals pay in rates and taxes is ill spent, and fails to provide the works and services presupposed by such payments. This is what hap¬ pens in Europe, which is still without the American system of voting bonds. These are communal allocations of funds based on future communal imposts that will be authorized by public vote. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that new communal organizations will arise in Europe, too, taking the place of inactive public authorities and providing the services that no one else will.” (Source: Ibid. p. 146)

“Vigilantes are groups of armed citizens who ensure public order in certain cities of the United States. Their specialty is the night patrol, an emergency service for outbreaks of disturbance or sedition. Sometimes they have extremist right-wing tendencies. A political and moral estimate of vigilantes is not our concern here. We should notice rather that the people belonging to these groups will not be disposed to continue paying taxes and rates for the employment of police who are inefficient (or are presumed to be). They may dispense with such services, replacing them with their own action. (Source: Ibid. p. 146-147)

__________________________________________________________________________

Link for downloading a copy of The Coming Dark Age for personal reading free of charge:

https://archive.org/details/VACCARobertoTheComingDarkAgeRobertoVaccaPredictsTheCollapseOfOurTechnologyAndOfC