And that’s where the rest of us come in. Abetted and amplified by the profit-driven media machine, political culture plays on our deepest longings for surety, security, and even supremacy, targeting our damaged “inner children” with force and precision. In fact, much of politics is a lot more coherent if we see how people, many millions of them at once, unconsciously look to their leaders to fulfill their own unmet childhood needs. As the cognitive scientist George Lakoff puts it, “We all think with a largely unconscious metaphor: the Nation as Family.”[15]
