There's a Black Mirror episode where soldiers are fighting against monsters, but one of the monsters stabs a soldier with an electric prod that turns out to be a device to disable the soldiers' brain implants, implants which are there to turn scared refugees into aggressive insect-like monsters, that the soldiers don't hesitate to shoot.
But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...
ST:Voyager had a similar episode. The Commander gets captured and subjected to brainwashing to hate a specific group in effort to make him a foot soldier in a war. After being rescued and treated, the Commander still felt immense hatred at sight of the group he was told to hate, even though they helped rescue him. It closed with him making a remark about wishing it were as easy to stop hating as it is to start.
Unfortunately, we are where we are today. “Modern media” (whatever that is) and amplification from social media has allowed hate/outrage evolve from being a sledge hammer (e.g. “USSR is evil!”) into being a scalpel for daily governance and policy setting. Just look at how many people suddenly advocated for jailing (or executing, as I overheard at my kid’s baseball game) a specific former immunologist and presidential advisor. We’re tribal by nature and all too eager to treat the out-group as “less” than we are.
But we've learned the last 1.75 years that we don't actually need such implants, our brains are still very very capable of seeing our fellow humans as cockroaches. Actually even longer than that...