As usual, Marcus Aurelius is prescient:
Evil: the same old thing.
No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all.
Familiar, transient.
Meditations 7.1.
Remember that next time you get riled up.
It’s true even for manufactured bad shit: the panicky messaging designed to make you cower and submit to another’s will. It’s the same old thing.
And it’s like drugs: after a while the populace builds up tolerance to the hysteric messaging. Something more is required to get the same effect. Another panic. Another literally Hitler. It’s the same old thing.
Ignore the messages. Look at what’s happening in the real world. (This is hard because facts are distorted or filtered so you’re not getting the whole picture, so look and listen and ask yourself “What might be there that I’m not seeing?”).
Once you start seeing the mask drop, you cannot unsee it.
You’re being told to believe, to obey. You’re being given a picture to look at: there is danger, here is safety. Be safe by doing what we say, by believing what we tell you to believe, by hating who we tell you to hate.
That’s their world. They would make it yours.
Reality laughs.
Reality just laughed in Afghanistan. It will laugh again and again.
Learn. Learn from the ancients. Learn from your own observation.
One more thought from Meditations:
Discard your misperceptions.
Stop being jerked like a puppet.
Limit yourself to the present.
Understand what happens—to you, to others.
Analyze what exists, break it all down: material and cause.
Anticipate your final hours.
Other people’s mistakes? Leave them to their makers.
Meditations 7.29.