If your history books did not teach you about how fucked up this world is and how fucked up people are, then you read the wrong history books.

The books, I read fully prepared me for this bullshit. None of this is a surprise, nor should it be.

Rarely does history dwell on the individual, especially when you cover hundreds of years in a class. I will say that I was taught about the leading factors of WW2 far more than WW1. A lot of it dwelt on a people suffering from the weight of reparations stacked upon the general weight of losing a war. I don’t say this to justify either timeframes decline to fascism, but to draw a parallel.

In my opinion and personal experience the general population of the US has so much less power (purchasing and otherwise) and they’re mad. They want to be mad at something tangible and fascist direct it toward minorities.

[off topic?]

"The Zoo Station" by David Downing. It's a novel set in pre-WW2 Germany. the hero is an English reporter living in Berlin. The author does a good job of covering both the problems of being a low level spy, and a guy who has to deal with a son and things like getting his clothes cleaned.

When I was in high school I read a play called “Rhinoceros” about a small town where people kept turning into rhinos except the main character, who was kind of a John Nada worker type. He just watched friend after friend transformed into these wild destructive beasts, while the rest of the townspeople told the main character he was over reacting, paranoid, over thinking things. Then that townsperson or friend would turn into a rhino and go on a rampage.

I didn’t understand it in 1996. But in the last 5 years or so I was thinking about it, looked it up to see what it was about and reread it. Apparently, its about people turning into fascists, and I was like ooooohhhhhh yeah that’s dead on.

I also read lots of history but there is something about cultural work, maybe especially fictional, that let’s us explore social and cultural themes within our own hearts and minds in a way that actually affords a better understanding of history. I used to get a little irritated by people quoting Margaret Atwood and George Orwell in political discussion, like engage with actual political history and theory, but now I realize you can read like 3-4 absolute doorstop books about the history of Russia from like 1850-1935, or you can read Animal Farm in a day and get the gist. The gist isn’t good enough for some organizing and political work, but its a good enough principled foundation for the vast majority of people, esp young people. I just wish Orwell got to the part where Napoleon slaughters all the pigs who helped him take control of the farm in the first place.

Sometimes I stop everything I’m doing as a comfortable person with a job and income and food and a home and it hits me that there is a genocide happening in this moment and children being murdered with state-sponsored weapons, and it’s crippling.

I am not a young person, I have seen some shit in my decades. But it still hurts like hell every time I think about the suffering we’re still allowing as a species and that feeling and sensitivity to the knowledge has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Greater awareness leads to greater pain because you start to see the whole picture; what we are as a species, what we can and cannot do, and how much sorrow and misery we put each other through needlessly.

People lived fulfilling lives during the fall of Rome

People fell in love during the Holocaust

People are working office jobs and go to concerts during the Gaza genocide less than 100miles from the battlefield.

I’ve come to the realization that I’m going to live in a society that continues to destabilize for the rest of my life because a high enough percentage of the population is so unrealistically stupid that it can’t do anything other than continue to destabilize. There’s going to be no guarantee that I’ll be comfortable or even safe in my old age and I’ll probably work until I die.

With that in mind, I’m coping by coasting. I’m putting less into my job. I’m taking it less seriously. I’m not doing my best on purpose. Why would I give everything I can to help a failing, idiotic society? I’m locked in. I have to work in a form of wage slavery in order to survive. But I’ll be damned if I give it my all. The system doesn’t deserve my all. I’m slowly learning to let go in all the ways I can so that all this shithole society can get out of me is my bare minimum, which is all it deserves.

How would anyone know prepare you? This period is unprecedented in the entire history of the human race. The rate at which technology is changing is making our monkey brains fly off the handle.

We were not evolved for dealing with this much stimulae and attention grabbing. It is realistically and unfortunately taking a toll of collective empathy, world wide. The only thing to do, for your own sake, is to take a digital brake. Go and do things that makes you happy for a while. I’ve luckily never fallen for the alure of the 140 character brainrot, but it is infuriatingly obvious that others have.

Hypernormalization is the phenomena of people continuing to behave as if society is still functional even though it’s clearly not. It was first observed in the Soviet Union during its deterioration and collapse, but is also seen in the US, such as when people expect they can call local law enforcement to deescalate a local dispute, even though police are now notorious for escalating to violence more quickly than ordinary civilians.

Anyway, it’s a thing.

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.

C.G. Jung, 1934