Mike Vargo: System Failure, from the Bronze Age to the Age of Trump

Did a long-ago collapse of civilizations portend our future?

The reassuring part is that the systems are working. At least they are working for me and for many others, despite minor glitches. 

For instance, the bridges present a problem. Pittsburgh, where I live, spreads across a landscape of hills and valleys, and two bridges that connect my neighborhood to the heart of the city are closed and barricaded: crumbling infrastructure. The spans aren’t actually falling down but engineers want to be sure they don’t. Especially since another bridge nearby, the Fern Hollow Bridge, collapsed three years ago, with a few cars and a mass-transit bus on it. When rusty supports beneath the bridge gave way, the deck folded down into the hollow at a steep angle, leaving the bus perched there, intact but immobilized. Miraculously, nobody died. And public officials saw that a new span was built promptly.

 

Repairs haven’t begun yet on the two closed bridges, one of them a major conduit.  But there’s good news. Thanks to the instincts of local drivers — aided by prompts from real-time mapping software — people are finding detours that keep traffic jams to a minimum. Everything moves slower than before, along narrow side streets and through busy business districts, but no gob-stopping bottlenecks occur. Yesterday I made it home from an appointment across town in only about 20 minutes longer than usual. And that was counting a stop for a hot dog. 

We have a convenience store that offers succulent all-beef hot dogs, with any trimmings you’d want — I went for mustard, relish, tomato chunks, and ranch dressing (the secret ingredient) — at a price of $2.29. Talk about system efficiency: these people deliver a snack twice as good as a typical fast-food sandwich for half the cost. 

Better yet, when I arrived at home comfortably fed, all systems feeding the house were working, too. Electricity was on. The warmth of the rooms told me that natural gas burned reliably in the furnace. The WiFi lit up my Macbook screen. These services are piped in from places far away, and I take it for granted that they’ll keep coming — that all of the intermediary transformers, refineries, and routers will function 24/7, with outages of any kind being rare and brief. 

Further, I assume that people around me are mostly peaceful and will do what’s right. I expect the woman at the hot dog place to be there behind the counter when I walk in, and to prepare the dog correctly. I trust that kids in the local middle school are learning real history and real science from competent teachers. And I assume that systems beyond my personal sphere will keep working. I trust that the country won’t be hijacked by civil unrest, that public events ranging from pro basketball games to elections will happen as scheduled, and that accurate news reports of these events will be available.

But what if my assumptions are wrong? What if the systems break down?

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Such worries are triggered, in part, by reading about the Bronze Age Collapse. Modern research has been piecing together the story of that long-ago calamity. In brief: 

By the 1200s BCE, city-states and empires around the eastern Mediterranean had formed a crescent of advanced civilization. It stretched from the little kingdoms of Mycenaean Greece, eastward into the Hittite empire of present-day Turkey and Syria, and down through Canaan into Egypt. Those societies were not perfect. As usual throughout history, the upper classes had it best — the finest homes, the fanciest feasts, etc. — and wars were common: wars of royal succession and conquest, of breakaway revolts and re-conquest. 

But even commoners could usually count on living well above subsistence level. Legal systems protected their rights, often including the rights of women. “Palace economies,” managed from above, oversaw the integration of complex divisions of labor. Farmers farmed; women spun yarn and brewed beer. Builders built elaborate structures. Metalworkers and artists earned their keep; scribes kept information flowing, and specialists passed along what they learned. (One archaeological find was a Hittite horse-trainer’s detailed manual on raising war horses.) 

Further, the societies around the sea were deeply interlinked. Networks of trade routes supplied each place with a range of needs and wants, from timber to textiles to copper and tin for making bronze. Various rulers negotiated ever-shifting terms of alliance, tribute-paying, and more. 

Then in a relatively brief time, from about 1200 BCE into the 1100s, much of this civilized world collapsed. Apparently, multiple problems converged to produce cascades of devastation. Although there had long been roving pirates and marauding tribes, it seems their numbers grew when a changing climate induced mega-droughts in many lands. People in famine-stricken areas left their homes and started to move through the region, sometimes entering new land as hopeful immigrants, but often as organized masses of invaders, killing or driving away the residents. As orderly societies faltered, more people went rogue, spreading disorder. The chaos also disrupted trade, squeezing off the imports that everyone had relied on. And inevitably, the dire necessities included food: There are records of kings begging other kings for emergency shipments of grain.

Many kingdoms were reduced to thinned-out wastelands, where bands of scavengers scraped for sustenance among and around the ruins of what had once been bustling metropolises. Some places never revived while others took decades or centuries to recover, as in the so-called Greek Dark Ages. And some may have been destroyed by internal rebellion. Excavation of ancient lost city-states has revealed some where the palace compound was wrecked and burned, while surrounding districts were not. Quite possibly this was the result of distressed citizens lashing out at their government — a government that had failed to keep them satisfied, and ultimately couldn’t keep them together. 

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In the updated (2021) edition of his book 1177 B.C., archaeologist Eric H. Cline did a diligent job of summarizing research and theories on the Bronze Age Collapse. He also addressed a question he is frequently asked: Could something similar happen today, worldwide? 

Cline’s answer was a qualified yes. Many similar conditions are present, such as the interlinked nature of far-flung societies — which, for example, paved the way for Covid to spread rapidly — and the growing threat of climate change. Cline also mentioned a factor that other scholars have highlighted: the immense complexity of our social and technical systems. As the Bronze Age people learned, complexity lets you do sophisticated stuff like managing empires, but downsides creep in. Maintaining the whole edifice grows more burdensome, and more things can go wrong, affecting other things. 

The cyber-systems that enable your phone to do all it can do are complex beyond belief. Compared to these, the computing and telecom systems NASA used to send a man to the Moon in 1969 were like Stonehenge compared to Manhattan. Today’s cyberworld manages our power grids and carries the pulses of financial networks. It supports sophisticated activities from mass inter-communication on social media to the creation of generative AI. But its growing complexity renders both you and the power grid more open to being hacked, as myriad lines of code and their interfaces can’t always mesh precisely right; they leave holes for bad guys to get in. Moreover, sprawling cyber-systems are prone to misuse, and may spawn unintended consequences. Lies travel fast on social platforms. AI can misbehave. 

All such tendencies are system weaknesses. None in itself might lead to a game-ending catastrophe for civilization. The danger, though, lies in cascading ripple effects. Cyber-failures may combine with the shocks that climate change can deliver. Add in the disruptions caused by wars and/or epidemics. Weaknesses would be aggravated by the inability of fractious governments to solve chronic social problems, let alone deal with looming crises. The results could be far worse than rising prices or shortages of toilet paper. 

In his book, Eric Cline expressed hope for the future, despite the ominous parallels to the Bronze Age Collapse. He pointed out that “unlike the Hittites, we are now advanced enough to understand what is happening and can take steps to fix things.” 

Cline went on, however, to report what a skeptic had said about this hopeful line of thinking. The skeptic was a well-known fellow scientist, the physicist and NPR commentator Adam Frank. Frank’s response: “But are we advanced enough to do anything with our understanding?”

**

Here in the United States, recent events suggest the answer to that question is no. Last year’s election reflected a trend toward ignoring the relevant issues, not engaging with them. 

Like many Americans who wish the vote had gone the opposite way, I now dread the damage our new regime may do. This isn’t the place for a comprehensive critique of the regime. Besides, I am writing in its early days, and while it’s alarming to see the initial blitz of high-handed overreach and ideological cruelty, the full story is yet to come. What I want to focus on is the erosion of our capacity to ward off system failures.

Perhaps it is idealistic to think an election cycle should be a time to discuss and debate subjects of great importance to the nation’s future. Complicated issues are bound to get dumbed down. Long-term vision gets clouded in the fog of here and now. And when campaign season becomes a contest to see which side can detect and hit the voters’ hottest hot buttons, subjects that are really important may receive barely any play. In 2024, the list of orphaned subjects included strategies for responding to the climate problem. GOP operatives — in a position of appealing to interests that happen to be part of the problem — pretended (and still pretend) the problem doesn’t exist. Democrats, facing an impatient electorate, saw little competitive advantage in beating the drum for climate action. And we wound up with a government intent on rolling back the measures already taken. 

As for capacity in another crucial area: History shows that epidemics have repeatedly played a deadly role in undermining societies. Yet the new regime has moved in directions such as leaving instead of beefing up the World Health Organization, shackling the CDC, and encouraging resistance to vaccines. Meanwhile, purges of department heads and workers across the government create a sort of wild-card capacity loss: Whatever the next crisis might consist of, it’s liable to land on an agency less ready than before. 

And many observers worry that a capacity vacuum resides in the man at the head of the regime. Though eager to assert control, he seems equally eager to display character flaws which in the past have led to trouble. But he didn’t seize the presidency. A majority of voters voted for him. The key question then is: What does that say about our ability to avoid system failures? 

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I have heard many people explain why they backed Mr. Trump. Their reasons varied. Some were unrealistic in terms of benefits expected (e.g., bringing consumer prices down to pre-pandemic levels), while other people now stand to get exactly what they expected (“Drill baby drill”). For some people, going with Trump seems to have been mainly about a feeling. They resonated with his cultural vibe, the sense of solidarity that’s invoked in all the talk of us-versus-them. In some puzzling cases, the reasoning seemed contradictory. I know people who are good-hearted and caring personally, but voted for a man and regime on the bulldozer end of the spectrum. Then again, we all have mixed motivations, don’t we?

There’s no need to keep rambling in this vein, because analyzing Trumpism has become an intellectual industry and you can read plenty elsewhere. Consider instead a more general phenomenon, which I think contributes to Trumpism, and is worrisome in itself. 

It has been remarked that Americans, overall, have little understanding of public affairs and policies. I can relate to that, since my own understanding is limited — yet it’s probably better than average. From years of investigating public issues as a journalist, and also working with hands-on experts to co-write books and reports, I’ve learned a good bit about a few issue areas (notably economic development, and the science/technology arena). Plus, the learning can sometimes help me see patterns that extend into other areas of concern — probably more so than, say, people who work as sales managers or truck drivers. Their understanding tends to be deeper in areas related to their particular jobs, shallower otherwise. 

Which underscores a big advantage I’ve had in learning what I learned. At every step, I was paid to do it. It literally wasmy job. I didn’t have to try to be a spare-time issues geek. 

We Americans are very busy. We work long hours and do helicopter parenting, without much paid leave. Maybe we’re happy, but behind it we tend to bear a lot of ouchy stress. And on top of this, are people supposed to take on the added stress of developing an intelligent grasp of the vast complexity of our social systems, and policies affecting them, to an extent that they can reason clearly and vote accordingly? 

More often, people make crude analogies from their personal lives to the larger scale. Or, they sense the vast complexity of the large scale, and look for simple solutions to the problems descending from it. And they vote on that basis. They want a Gordian Knot-cutter, a hitter who swings for the home run. 

Enter Mr. Trump, who appears to fit the description. Insiders who’ve been close to him, and have dared to talk about his flaws, have called him a man bored with the details of governing. To many people that’s a cool feature, not a bug. Drain the swamp, bring back manufacturing, take us back to a simpler time. Slash the budget and America first and screw the allies. 

Once in a while, a single bold stroke pays off. But usually, solutions to complex problems are themselves complex. For an example, try episode 34 of the podcast Good on Paper — an episode provocatively titled “Maybe We Do Need DOGE.” The person interviewed is Jennifer Pahlka, author of Recoding America and a woman with experience in trying to make government work better. Pahlka says the federal government is, indeed, inefficient and under-productive. Then she describes how it’s gotten that way, due to a tangled maze of prescribed procedures and checkpoints, each put in for a purpose but together working counter to the purpose of getting things done. A key takeaway — in my view — is that this is a different kind of problem than simply the waste and bloat the GOP regime refers to, and it calls for a different kind of solution than the regime has been promoting. You can’t just wade in swinging an axe. The smarter approach to a complex problem is to unwind it piece by piece, iteratively, trimming and tweaking until you have a system running smoothly to achieve your goals.

The catch is that this is a less glamorous, more laborious approach to problem-solving. Not the kind that a majority of people thus far have shown much interest in voting for. Rather, it is as if we the people stared into the swirling abyss of complexity and shrank back from it: Can’t go there. It’s too much. So we elected a leader who can’t go there, either. 

Which does not bode well for our capacity to ward off system failures. In fact it reminds me of a line from a movie.

**

If you have watched the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, you may recall a certain scene. The cold-blooded outlaw Anton Chigurh has been pursued by a bounty hunter. Chigurh deftly turns the tables, trapping the man who thinks he’s an expert trapper. Before killing him, Chigurh takes a moment to torment his captive. He says “Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” 

Lately I imagine such a question being posed to all of us, by some powerful entity — perhaps Mother Nature, perhaps God — just before the apocalypse. If the rules that we followed brought us to destruction, what on earth were we thinking? 

Of course I am being overly dramatic. Probably. Nothing says that the worst-case outcome is the outcome we are doomed to suffer. The bad omens in the air, at present, do not necessarily augur the end of civilization. Our systems are vulnerable but resilient. They contain backups and stop-losses. When a part of a system shuts down, we are able to find workarounds, like the detours around the closed bridges I mentioned earlier. 

Some years ago I worked with the late Jeffrey Hunker, a former U.S. national-security planner, on a book called Creeping Failure. The point was that cataclysmic doomsday events are fairly rare, and though you need to plan against them — don’t want to be caught napping by World War III — another mode of failure is more common. It’s a creeping, gradual degradation. Technical systems and social contracts may tend to fray and tatter when they grow bigger and more complex, as intrusions and nasty side effects grow, too. The society declines to a state that’s less functional, less humane, less livable than anyone would like. 

In this scenario, the endgame is not extinction. Nor is it the second coming of the Third Reich. Just some slippage, maybe a lot, in what you might call our standards of living. Until enough of us come together to find ways to begin the long climb up. 

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Mike Vargo is an independent writer and editor of nonfiction.

Copyright 2025 Mike Vargo