It seems to me that thoughout history, certain segments of society have always been susceptable to mindlessly follow stupid ideas, to promote violence, to support evil policies in the name of something "greater". During peaceful happy times, the rest of society has been able to keep this malignant genie in the bottle. What has changed in the recent world is that a small number of very rich people now control massive amounts of media and social media, and they get richer by feeding this beast. To return to a civil society, we (particularly in the US, since we have currently almost no controls over what people can say or write, whether truthful or not, dangerous or not) will need to find a way to hold these people and companies accountable, through fines, jail, loss of licenses, law suits, etc. Probably 20 wealthy people are responsible for something like 80 percent of the disinformation, propaganda and rabble rousing. It doesn't take much to get certain personality types stirred up, and these media outlets know what buttons to push to get their viewers and readers to go from zero to 100 without any rational consideration.