Slow decay of these new Dark Ages will return to the west to a state akin to the Middle Ages.
The differences will be due to technological advancements, and knowledge gained in the interim.
All is patterns and non-patterned energies (inter)acting, therefore history repeats - but slightly modified by the forces of randomness.
The shift will be slight, because we are talking of small differences relative to human lifespans.
We gauge historical time using human lifespans, and judge them to be greater than they are.
Relative to cosmological space/time spans, all of human history - codified, recorded past - is but a insignificant fraction.
We then judge the effect of chaos to be slim, and appreciate human history as something, relatively stable in its predictability - repeating in near-perfect consistency.
Yet, we can also appreciate how small divergence can produce large effects, in time/space, only counteracted by a living organism's desire to retain order, producing the conflict man experiences as stress - need/suffering.
In short, this coming New Dark Age will be the same as the previous ones, but modified.
The same superstitions will return to the forefront, only changed by socioeconomic and cultural, effects - given new monikers, new symbols, new narratives, incorporating what has been gained in science and philosophy.
Corruption will integrate them into a new degradation.
The same psychologies will emerge from where they slept in times of superfluity and comfort.
The same parasites, vermin....the same diseases will be triggered from latency.
We can study the rise and fall of Rome to begin predicting what states this Global empire will pass through.
A slow but relentless decline, until fragmentation and dissolution completes the process.
The parts will then be absorbed into emerging new unities, or settle, for a brief period, as independent, but weak, entities.
Technology will reshape plagues - physical diseases and mental diseases will flourish and spread.
It has already begun, and I've tried to describe some of the many strains - tracing the pathogen back to a naturally emerging byproduct of self-consciousness awakening to its own consciousness.
Consciousness is the experience of Flux, and is experienced as need/suffering - the ordering organism resisting change, or the challenge of constant (inter)activity demanding attention, neccasitating a response.
'Awakening', becoming conscious of this state, is the trauma that becomes nihilism - the meme/gene contradiction, siding with the meme to contradict the experienced, the physical; distress of mind perceiving itself, as mind/body, relative to other.
In the past this condition, still unknown and misunderstood, sought refuge and expression in what came to be known as Abrahamic spirituality.
Previous superstitions, also used to cope, were absorbed and given form, symbols, through these new advanced cults.
We've 'progressed' since then.
Abrahamism has been discredited, and exposed, necessitating a repackaging of the same, this time absorbing the ideologies and insights that brought it down - furbishing and upgrading of the same.
We re currently in the state of reinventing what has worked in the past.
Marxism was also a repackaging of Abrahamism.
We will witness, in our age, the emergence of a new Christianity, or neo-Marxism - only it will not be called so, and it will go to great efforts to hide its pedigree.
The masses will flock to it, themselves belonging to the same types that fell for the comforting leis of Abrahamism and Marxism...
Human nature has changes less than human environments and technologies. The same psychological weaknesses are present today, as they were thousands of years ago.; dressed-up and renamed they are only different in expression, not in essence.
The same anxieties, producing the same reactions, leading to the same outcomes.
This historical storm will not be stopped. Only a fool would stand in its way. It has built-up over the years, like storms do over warm oceans.
Large bodies of water, agitating the atmosphere, inundating it with humidity, that begins to spiral, and grow into a hurricane.
Water rises, on hot air-streams, and is cooled by external space, that has no interest in the turmoil of the world it encompasses.
Heat meets cold space/time, and falls...in tidal waves of tears, blood, and sweat.
Cities are torn asunder, forests uprooted, geography rearranged. The earth is cleansed. What had been built on clouds is dashed to the ground'; what had been built on shifting sand, will crumble; what had lost its foundations will be destroyed....only the deepest roots have a hope of surviving....but not a certainty.
Then peace returns, for a while...new seedlings burst from the soil, and the process repeats.
Those who survive will stand in the sunlight....lost, standing on what has been, once more, buried....calling to be rediscovered, revealed, uncovered; added to, in preparation for the next storm.