TWD, Survival Rule Of The Week: What you DON’T need from yourself
By Liam O'Leary
2) Selfishness
You know, “selfishness” is one of those negative adjectives that I feel gets thrown around a little too flippantly. I feel like people ascribe it to someone for doing something without actually knowing their reasons for doing it. Just because someone calls someone else “selfish,” it doesn’t mean the person called so wasn’t thinking about the bigger picture. For me, what makes someone truly selfish is when they’re taking actions while clearly doing the antithesis of that.
Care for an example from The Walking Dead? Well, lucky you, because I know the perfect one, right off the top of my head: Gregory.
Seriously, I know I’ve ragged on him half a dozen times by now, but he really is the poster-child for selfishness, not only The Walking Dead but across the entire Walking Dead universe.
What makes him so stand-out in this department is the fact that he is so selfish, so fixated on his wants and his needs at that moment, that he winds up hurting himself in the long run.
Back at the beginning of season eight, we discovered that Gregory, realizing that the communities were banding together to try to get out from under the Saviors’ thumbs, decides to throw in his lot with Negan. He goes so far as to tell Hilltop’s people to stand down and abandon the Alexandrians and the Kingdom. Knowing that they were on-board with Rick’s plan but that they really didn’t like him enough to abandon Rick for him in the first place!
What an idiot!
Not surprisingly, Negan and Simon decided he was of no use to them at that point and literally kicked him out of the Sanctuary to get ripped apart by walkers! Then, when he betrayed Father Gabriel, who went back to save his worthless ass, he (Again, unsurprisingly) wound up getting himself arrested along with some captured Saviors when he returned to Hilltop!
If you plan on surviving more than a month in a zombie apocalypse, you need to think of people other than yourself. Survival is much easier in a group, and if you decide to cut and run on them whenever it seems convenient, you’re either going to wind up without anyone to watch your back or betray them for a group who’ll betray you as soon as you stop being useful to them! Funny how that works.
One thing’s for sure: If you let selfishness rule the day in a zombie apocalypse, at least you’ll know who to blame when everything goes wrong.