The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Rebuilding ain’t easy

This world the brand new season of The Walking Dead showed us also revealed something else: Rebuilding society in a zombie apocalypse WON’T be easy.

If humanity is lucky, there will eventually be a group of people who will attempt to rebuild what the zombie apocalypse took from us: Civilization. In time, people will try to build communities, communities of communities, rules for these communities, and a means to govern them.

Well, let me say this: If you think watching civilization crumble in the apocalypse will be tough, just wait until you have to try to put it back together; It will make the crumbling look like a picnic, by comparison.

It’s something never truly addressed in history classes, but, you know why it took so long for the first “civilizations” to emerge? Because creating a civilization, especially after it was destroyed (By a zombie apocalypse, in our case) is tough.

To look into why, we need to start with what we’ll lose in the first place.

As great as our technology is, it’s also kind of fragile. For example, with our electrical grids being connected to one another, when one fails, the others have to strain to compensate. In the outbreak, one zombie walking into a power station could lead to rolling blackouts, with no one coming to fix them.

Another example? Our vehicles, nearly all of them, require fuel. This isn’t too big of a problem right now, where we have relatively ready access to it, but, who’s going to be drilling for or refining oil when civilization crumbles? This means that, once things go down, our vehicles will be running on borrowed time. Without them (Or our electrical devices, for that matter), we’ll have to fall back on older, more labor-intensive methods to get things done.

Our relative lack of technology won’t be the only problem trying to rebuild society, though; As with all societies, the problems with creating a new one will often begin, and end, with people.

In this case, I speak of the people you will lose in the building of this new society.

Now, you might think “Well, duh. It’s a zombie apocalypse, you’re going to lose people!” and, you’d be right, except, as we saw in Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead, it’s one thing to lose someone in the defense of your group, but, people in your group might see such a loss as something entirely different if it occurs in pursuit of something that doesn’t affect them.

How well do you think your group will take it if you told them their friend or loved one died, not helping the group per se, but for “The Greater Good”?

Not well at all. Tell them that enough times, it might just sow discontent.

You see, that kind of discontent can become a real problem once you get to the whole “Rebuilding society” phase of the apocalypse. When the threat of destruction is immediate, it’s comparatively easy to get people to go along with an idea so long as it doesn’t seem suicidal.

However, once that threat isn’t so immediate, people start having their own ideas about how things should be run and who should do the running; It becomes much more difficult to convince people to take a course of action if they don’t think they need to or that it isn’t the right course to take.

This is where the “That Guy”s come in…

I’ve spoken before about “That Guy”s — The ultimate self-serving jerks of the world — but, once you start trying to rebuild society in the zombie apocalypse, this is where they can truly become insidious.

If you start having discontent in your group, the “That Guy” will likely seek to capitalize on it, hoping to use that discontent as a weapon for their own ends, pointing angry people at others in the group they don’t like to get rid of them, possibly even to usurp authority, like Gregory.

With people like this potentially being around, it becomes extremely important to lay down some kind of code for how your society will be: How it will be run, who will run it, and how to administer justice under that society. In short, a set of rules.

Without some idea of how your society will run, especially where threats might not be so immediate, things may break down into anarchy, with different groups bickering over how to run things. This could mean that, when an immediate threat arises, things may be so chaotic that you can’t come together to mount a proper defense…which would render your society, ultimately, moot.

It will take a lot to rebuild society after the dead have destroyed it. Much of our technology will be unavailable to us, meaning we’ll have to do a lot of heavy work. People may die in attempting to do that work, and unlike when people were dying trying to escape or defend others from the dead, dying trying to build society may not be quite so easy for people to accept.

Like with any society, there will be people unhappy with how things are, and, in order to effectively run that society, you need to be aware of this and learn how to prevent such discontent from boiling over, or being utilized by a “That Guy” in service their own selfish aspirations.

Lastly, you need to lay down, so everybody knows, how your society will be run. Without law and order, we only have chaos. People can’t survive in abject chaos.

Suffice it to say, rebuilding society ain’t going to be easy…

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it’ll help you give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!