Fear the Walking Dead: Survival rule of the week, misguidance

Fear the Walking Dead: A bad moral compass can take you down a dark road

Throughout this season of Fear The Walking Dead, Victor Strand has struggled with who he wants to be. He has been the rather selfish, extremely pragmatic man for much of his life or the hero he believes he can be. This struggle has caused him to swing wildly between the two, sometimes striking a balance but more often doing the opposite.

The midseason finale concluded with Strand wanting to be a good, and more importantly, compassionate leader; he simply couldn’t be. He decided that the way to achieve his goal was to seek the aid of Alicia. She is the only real friend he has left in the world and the person he believes best suited to be the compassionate side of his leadership. This would allow him to focus on pragmatism which is his strong suit.

Being the pragmatist that Strand is, this is, actually, a pretty sound strategy on his part. He wants to create a good and lasting civilization (and get credited for it), but he knows that compassion isn’t in his wheelhouse. So, he will get someone to take care of that for him, or at least show him how.

Of course, things in a zombie apocalypse can also go the other way. A person may look to someone else to help them be “tougher” or “stronger” and wind up becoming something wholly worse than the person they started as, losing their way completely.

Why would someone do this? Two simple reasons.

1) By being the “advisor” who steers their group’s leader to go this way, they can kind of get that person to do the things that the “advisor” wants to do, but may not have the authority or respect among the group to get away with it.

2) By having someone else do what they want, the person who did the actions most likely takes the blame and the resulting consequences. This leaves whoever told them to do those things in the first place unscathed or even taking over that leadership role themselves.

It would help if you were careful who you decide to have as your moral compass in an apocalypse because it’s easy for a good person to start listening to the wrong people and end up going the wrong way. Maybe even with no hope of finding their way back.