The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Society Sucks

3) Society is fragile.

“Society” as we think of it — This notion of strangers coexisting and living amongst one another peaceably in perpetuity — is, if we’re being honest, a fragile thing, and, when a zombie apocalypse hits, we’ll all see just how fragile it is.

If you want an example, look at how things break down just when there’s a power outage, as people use the cover of darkness and overall chaos to perform all manner of crimes. What do think will happen when the people who do that realize that the power isn’t coming back?

You see, what makes “society” fragile is that, to some extent, it goes against our instincts. People are tribal by nature, and living in society, to some degree, suppresses that instinct, but, it never eliminates it. All it takes is for cracks to start to become visible within the facade of “society” for people to start to abandon it in favor of that tribal instinct.

This isn’t to say that people will automatically become evil, but, what it does mean is that their concern for whoever their “tribe” is — Whether it be their family, their circle of friends, both of those, their neighborhood, their community, etc. — will override their concern for the larger society they’re part of. Basically, it becomes “every man for himself”. Think of the videos you might have seen about people fighting for toilet paper, only multiplied by a thousand, with no one in sight to restore order (And none coming), and with thousands of zombies around to break up the fights by eating half of the people in them.

The worst part about it is that, once the cracks in “society” become fissures, it’s tough, perhaps even impossible to repair them. If people do, it probably won’t be for some time after the zombie outbreak has already happened, and, by then, the zombie population will likely be in the millions.

Take a good look at “society”…while it lasts.