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

4) The panic.

In Men In Black, Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K said one of the truest statements ever about people: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

Brilliant. Nothing I can say could nail people so perfectly.

And, it is because of this, that things, particularly as the zombie outbreak begins, will go so bad.

On the one hand, I can’t entirely blame people. If I were in a building, and realized there were zombies, I’d head for the nearest exit as quickly as I could. It’s a perfectly normal reaction, but, then again, that’s me as a person, and, on a person-to-person basis, I can imagine most of us would do the same thing. The real problem comes when you have people all being presented with a threat, and all having the same reaction at once. This is when you get panic.

What makes panic so bad is that it often overrides a person’s logic, and causes them to do things that, if they stopped and thought about it for a few seconds, would realize is bad, and do something different. Countless times, there have been fires or other incidents inside buildings and it seems like, most often, the casualties aren’t due to the incident itself, but rather, people being trampled to death in a mass panic.

Well, with that in mind, imagine what would happen in a city if everyone suddenly realized there were thousands, maybe even millions, of zombies around. Do you think the crowds of people would think rationally, or, do you think they’d all stampede into buildings, out of buildings, across streets, and to every airport, marina, and train station they could find, crushing underfoot every poor soul who had the misfortune of being tripped up by the herd?

If the past is any indication of how people would react, I’m gonna go with the latter.

The lesson here? Avoid people, not because everyone is necessarily bad, but, by simply being a large group of human beings, they’re almost as dangerous as the dead.