The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: It’s human nature

5) People are liars

Last week, I discussed how people might, without really intending to, create a massive problem within your group by lying about being bitten. As I said then, a person in that circumstance may not do so with malicious intent, but, that doesn’t change the damage they end up causing. The thing is, it isn’t the bite that necessarily leads to that damage, but the lie.

You see, if they simply told people about the bite, their group could simply wait for them to expire, and then put them down before turning, but, by lying, they prevent their group from knowing what they’re in store for, and in so doing, prevent them from being ready.

The reason I’m talking about this is that lying is something pretty unique to the human race. Our intellect allows us to predict a likely outcome to revealing the truth and, reasoning that outcome unfavorable, choose instead to hide that truth. Now, what the lie is, and what it is we’re trying to avoid when we do it, varies from situation to situation, but the fact remains that there’s plenty of reasons for someone to lie in a zombie apocalypse, and…many most of them are not good.

Worse still, lying is something everyone is capable of. This is why you can’t assume in a zombie apocalypse that everyone is good, because, quite simply, if someone has evil intent, chances are good that, not only are they going to hide that from you, they’re also probably very good at hiding it! A lot of the worst kinds of people are masters of deceit and manipulation, and you need to be extremely wary of such people, who will likely come out of the woodwork when law and order breaks down.

On top of worrying about zombies, the last thing you need is to let psychopaths into your midst…