Yes. The way natural selection works is if a trait more often than not favors survival, it will be selected, regardless of any possible lesser negative attributes. Like sickle cell anemia protecting against malaria. It can totally mess up some individuals, but anemic people can still reproduce, whereas dead people can’t.

Stockholm Syndrome for example, looks from the outside like a terrible moral failing, but it’s not hard to see how, under the given circumstances, it can improve one’s chances of surviving.

An apt illustration is unfolding before our eyes as we speak. As long as djtRUMP had the power to generate votes, a certain demographic, who normally profess allegiance to high moral values, could forget those values in favor of political survival. But the minute the power dynamic shifts, the Stockholm lifts. The rats boldly abandon the sinking ship.

It is part of our nature because it serves survival, at whatever cost necessary.

It helps, and is certainly a lot of it. Then there also may be a complimentary negative side, since we do not always have the courage to make our own choices, so it seems good to have them made for us, and we may be too lazy and distracted to do our own thinking and study, so it is comforting to be told.

The really important thing that I think is worth taking from that last paragraph, is the word "complimentary", because of course few things happen in the world for single simple reasons. But the irony is, that we are always looking for single simple reasons, and for exactly the same reasons we look to leaders, we want to be lazy, and we want a plain easy to understand world because that takes away doubt, which makes us fearful. So that it is not just human leaders we worship even though they are not worthy of worship, sometimes it is very base ideas that we treat as heroes too.

When wishes and fears both drive in the same direction, it is hard to change tracks.