Digital propaganda and the concept of “hopium” exploit herd mentality to monetize cognitive dissonance, turning geopolitical analysis into a comforting narrative that shields the masses from physical reality.
The 90% Herd: How “Hopium” and Digital Propagandists Control the Modern Mass
Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, established a cold, mathematical reality in his 1928 book Propaganda: the vast majority of human society operates strictly on herd mentality. Ninety percent of the population does not think; they react. They do not analyze data; they consume emotions. They do not want the unvarnished truth; they crave a narrative that makes them feel safe.
Only a tiny ten percent possess the critical capacity to look past the official headlines, read between the lines, and contrast political rhetoric with physical facts on the ground.
Today, this 90/10 rule is the foundation of a multi-million-dollar digital economy on platforms like YouTube, Rumble, and Substack. A highly coordinated network of “independent,” “so-called” “analysts,” ex-military talking heads, and geopolitical commentators has built a lucrative industry around selling a highly addictive psychological drug: “hopium.” People like Andrey Martianov, Scott Ritter (working for RT.com), Judge Andrew Napolitano, Liu Sivaya, Alexander Mercouris, Glenn Diesen (working for RT.com), Pepe Escobar (working for RT.com), Ruben Gisbert, and Alberto Iturralde, among many others.
The Lever of Survival (The Case of Liu Sivaya): The critique must not confuse Western corporate opportunism with raw human necessity. Operating inside Russia under a security apparatus that criminalizes the slightest audit of the real ledger, true dissent is a death sentence. I understand Liu’s position and situation; I probably would have done the same. It truly breaks my heart that she faced that situation when the Spanish state pushed her out because of her political opinion while she was pregnant.
When you compound that threat with the recent birth of a child, the space for rebellion shrinks to zero. Total compliance becomes a mother’s only viable shield for family survival. She knows the truth, but she is forced to navigate the muddy waters. My best wishes for her and her family. Liu, you do what you have to do to protect your baby. You are a mother above all else, and you have a responsibility toward your baby. I have been more or less in your situation; I am an exile too.
The Anatomy of the Herd Mind
To understand how this deception works, one must look at the psychological mechanisms defined by Gustave Le Bon in his seminal work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon proved that when individuals submerge themselves into a crowd—including a digital crowd of thousands of users in a YouTube comment section—their individual intellect vanishes. The collective mind takes over, and it operates at the lowest common denominator: blind faith, repetition of catchphrases, and total immunity to logic.
When a crowd enters a state of collective hypnosis, they develop what can be described as a “double-ledger” brain:
The Fictional Ledger (The Myth of the Leader): This is the ledger the herd desperately wants to believe in. In this ledger, every catastrophic blunder is rebranded as “meticulous caution”. Every logistical failure is a “masterful trap”. The leader is transformed into an untouchable, flawless deity who is playing four-dimensional chess.
The Real Ledger (The Physical Facts): This is the ledger of hard geography, engineering, and mathematics. It tracks the physical realities on the map—like strategic river bridges left completely intact for over four years to feed the enemy’s front lines or domestic oil refineries left completely unshielded from predictable air attacks.
When the 10% enters the comment section and drops a single, irrefutable fact from the Real Ledger, the herd experiences a severe psychological shock. They cannot process the data because it threatens to destroy their comfortable illusion of safety.
The Reaction of the Sheep
Because the herd cannot refute a physical fact with logic, they resort to the classic tactics of cognitive defence. They change the definitions of words. In their minds, tactical paralysis becomes “patience”. Severe economic negligence becomes “humility”. The fear of escalation becomes “wisdom”.
They actively defend their own manipulation. They line up in the comments to write thousands of identical, carbon-copied messages praising the “master plan”, acting exactly like sheep applauding the slaughterhouse manager. They need the “hopium” because it relieves them of the heavy, painful burden of realisation: that they are being sacrificed by an elite class that views them merely as numbers on a spreadsheet.
The digital propagandists understand this business model perfectly. They are not in the business of journalism; they are the highly paid press secretaries of the Lie Department. They feed the herd the exact brand of comforting deception they are looking for, and in return, the platforms’ algorithms reward them with views, subscriptions, and advertisement revenue. The system monetises the fanatical blindness of the 90%.
The Burden of the 10%
Resisting this psychological conditioning requires an immense amount of intellectual discipline. It means refusing to hand over your judgement to an algorithm or a charismatic talking head. It means standing entirely alone in a sea of a thousand voices, holding nothing but a single, unvarnished fact, and having the courage to call out the treason for what it is.
The herd will always choose the comforting lie over the liberating truth. They will continue to watch the videos, click the buttons, and repeat the script. But for those who have the eyes to see and the mind to calculate, the facade has already cracked. The numbers do not lie, the maps do not lie, and the real ledger cannot be hidden forever.