Politics & Power Quote by George H. Mead

Wartime doesn’t just ask for sacrifice; it rewires identity. Mead’s line is clinical and unsettling on purpose: when the nation goes to war, people don’t merely support “the national interest” as an abstract policy preference. They fuse with it. The “we” expands until it swallows the “I,” and the state’s goals start to feel like the most intimate kind of self-preservation.

Mead, a pragmatist and a key figure in social psychology, is writing in the shadow of modern mass warfare and the rise of propaganda-driven nationalism. His larger project was to show that the self is social, built through interaction and shared symbols. That’s the context that makes the claim sting: if the self is partly manufactured in public, then wartime becomes a high-intensity factory. Flags, slogans, uniforms, enemy images, and collective rituals don’t just persuade; they reorganize the emotional map of who counts as “us” and what threats feel existential.

The phrase “primal selves” carries the subtext. Mead isn’t romanticizing national unity; he’s pointing to regression, to an older repertoire of tribal reflexes: loyalty, aggression, fear of outsiders, the comfort of moral simplification. War legitimizes these impulses by laundering them through the nobility of “country.” Personal anxieties become patriotic duty; private rage becomes public virtue.

The intent is diagnostic, not motivational: a warning that wartime patriotism is powerful precisely because it feels natural. It turns political decisions into identity commitments, making dissent feel like self-betrayal rather than disagreement.