The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Deals And Compromises

The Walking Dead

Whatever you do, don’t compromise yourself. 

While we all have to make compromises in life, there are definitely times when one party gives up too much for the sake of the deal. In pursuit of harmony, they sacrifice their own principles and, more often than not, wind up losing out anyway.

This is sort of what befell Max Mercer. As she revealed in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, being Pamela Milton’s secretary, she was very well aware of just how much of a scumbag Pamela’s son, Sebastian, was. She knew he was a greedy, selfish, snobbish, entitled, lazy, callous, worthless bag of skin, but for the sake of maintaining her position in the Governor’s office, maintaining harmony within that office, and just maintaining harmony within the Commonwealth in general, she stayed quiet, despite how repulsed she was by Sebastian.

You can’t let yourself do a similar thing in the zombie apocalypse.

Obviously, deals will, eventually, need to be made, but if they require you to compromise your principles or compromise who you are, then the deal’s not worth it. Imagine if you’re about to form an alliance with another group, but before they agree, they demand you gun down some random survivor they captured. Would you do it? Would you become a straight-up murderer for the sake of a potential alliance with a person who you now realize has no qualms about murdering a stranger?

Is that the kind of person you want to be? Someone who just becomes a little better than a lackey for the sake of appeasing someone else? Someone who compromises their principles because someone else demanded it? What if they want you to do something worse later? Then what? Would you do that, too?

I don’t just say this out of morality but because, hypothetically, this is your morality that you’ll be violating, not mine. If you break your own code, will you be able to live with it? If you can, then it wasn’t much of a code to begin with (Which would say more about you than we can really get into here, but I digress), and if you can’t, then…what happens next? It’s fairly obvious: You don’t live with it. And that can’t happen. This is your code we’re talking about. Whatever deal you make, whatever compromise you agree to, don’t compromise yourself. If you do, you can’t go back.

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! We have to make deals in life, it’s just the way things work: Not everyone’s going to think the same way, and deals are the best we can hope for. We also have to make compromises to make those work. But, in a zombie apocalypse, suddenly, those deals become much more vital, and those compromises can become much more drastic. You may have to make deals to survive, but if you think you’re going to get screwed or you have to compromise everything to get it, those are deals you don’t want to make. If you want more wisdom about how to make it through the apocalypse, why not pick up my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!