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The essence of Western political culture is revealed in the photo of the Leviathan directly below. The "state" consists of many human beings--bound to a single, larger human being: the sovereign. "National unity" is a psychosomatic fantasy: each person in the nation bound together as a single body politic.
The term body politic conveys the fantasy that defines our experience of the nation-state. Those who participate (at the present moment) are dreaming the same dream: everyone united with the body of Donald Trump. One cannot escape this body. To separate from the body of the sovereign means becoming a man without a country.
Attachment is angry and obsessive and hysterical--but inescapable.
However evil or corrupt or incompetent the sovereign, he holds everything together. No escape. "Obedience" conveys the idea of being unable to escape (separate from) the body of the sovereign.
To separate from the body of the sovereign means you are a single, unitary, small human being--no longer bound to the omnipotent fantasy.
But nearly everyone feels that they are bound to the body of the sovereign: "I am he as you are he as you are me. And we are all together."
Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan
The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts the head and torso of a long-haired, mustachioed man. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes evident that the man’s torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons, crowded closely together and each looking toward the head of the composite Leviathan.
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