Hardwired to obey: Why we keep believing the lie

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

The Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just a political scandal. It was a masterclass in obedience psychology. Americans didn’t believe it because it made sense. They believed it because someone in authority told them to. A man in a suit behind a podium. A woman in a studio with perfect lighting. A blue-check journalist quoting an anonymous intelligence source. The effect wasn’t rational—it was Pavlovian. Authority spoke, and the public nodded.

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to understand how ordinary people could be complicit in atrocities like the Holocaust. What he discovered was even more unsettling than he imagined. In his famous obedience experiment, participants were instructed to administer electric shocks to another person every time they got an answer wrong. The shocks weren’t real. The person screaming behind the wall wasn’t actually being electrocuted. But the participants didn’t know that.

What they did know is that a man in a white lab coat—a supposed scientist—was telling them to keep going.

Sixty-five percent of participants continued all the way to what they believed was a lethal voltage. No threats. No weapons. Just authority. The visual cue of a lab coat. That was enough.

Fast forward to COVID. A doctor appeared on your television and told you to stay inside. Wear a mask. Take the jab. If you hesitated, you were selfish. A threat. An enemy of the people. The same experiment was being run again, but this time, at scale. And just like Milgram’s results, most people obeyed. Not because they understood the science. Not because they evaluated the risks. But because someone in authority said so.

We are hardwired that way. Authority bias is a psychological shortcut: when someone we perceive as powerful or an expert tells us something, we assume it must be true. It doesn’t matter if they’re lying. It doesn’t matter if the facts contradict them. What matters is the lab coat, the title, and the credentials.

That’s why the unvaccinated weren’t just uncooperative—they were dangerous. Not epidemiologically, but ideologically. They disrupted the hypnosis. They didn’t fold to pressure. They were immune to shame. They were—by every authoritarian metric—divergent.

In Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent, society is sorted into factions based on personality and obedience. But some people don’t fit neatly into the system. They think differently. They resist. And because of that, they must be identified and eliminated. Not because they pose a physical threat, but because they can’t be controlled.

That’s what vaccine passports were really about. Identification. The regime needed to know who could be pressured into compliance and who would resist. Who would trust the man in the lab coat, and who would think for themselves? The unvaccinated were framed as Neanderthals and conspiracy theorists, but in reality, they were the control group—the people who refused to trade critical thought for social acceptance.

And now, years later, we see the same mechanisms playing out with the Russia collusion narrative. Despite mountains of evidence—debunked FISA warrants, the collapse of the Steele dossier, exposed media lies, and even contradictions from intelligence leaders themselves—millions still believe Trump was a Russian agent. They believe it not because it holds up to scrutiny, but because someone in authority said so.

It’s easier to cling to the illusion than confront the truth. The truth demands action, accountability, and personal responsibility. It means admitting you were deceived. That the people you trusted betrayed you. That the system you believed in is fundamentally broken.

For many, that’s too much. So they retreat into the lie. They call it democracy. They call it science. They call it national security. But it’s just obedience by another name.

The good news is that Milgram’s experiment didn’t stop at 65 percent. The other 35 percent refused. They questioned the orders. They disobeyed the man in the lab coat. They listened to their conscience. And they didn’t kill the stranger on the other side of the wall.

That 35 percent matters. It always has.

Because obedience might be natural—but so is courage. And every time we resist the narrative, every time we refuse to comply with lies, we grow that 35 percent. We wake people up. We shift the balance.

We don’t have to be prisoners of our programming. We can reject false authority. We can challenge illegitimate power. And we can remember that truth doesn’t come from a press conference—it comes from within.

The Russia hoax was a lie. The vaccine mandates were a lie. The media, the intelligence agencies, the bureaucrats—they’ve lied so often it’s no longer a scandal. It’s a pattern.

But we are not broken. We are not afraid. We are not obedient.

We are Divergent.

And we’re not going anywhere.