The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Follow The Leader
By Liam O'Leary
The Walking Dead final season
Leadership requires trust
How much do you trust your leaders, be they political, social, economic, or cultural? Think about it. Do you take what they say at face value? Do you question their decisions or the things they say? If they said your neighbor was a criminal, would you believe them? Or do you think everything that comes out of their mouths is utter garbage? Seriously, think about it. If you look back on their actions and statements and how you reacted to them, it might reveal to you just how much (Or how little) you trust them, and you may be surprised.
The reason I say this is because whether or not you trust the person leading your group or whether or not your group trusts you is crucial to your group’s success.
If you can’t trust that your leader, and can’t trust that they have your best interests at heart, how can you rely on them to make life-or-death decisions for you, your family, your group, and maybe even your whole community? Similarly, if your group doesn’t trust you (Assuming you are the one doing the leading), you can’t guarantee they’re going to do what you tell them, in fact, you can’t even guarantee that they aren’t working to remove you if trust has broken down severely enough.
And, should that be the case, it won’t take long for that distrust to mushroom into something ugly. At best, it will lead to a coordinated removal of whoever’s in charge, be that you or somebody else; At worst (more likely, the larger of a group/community you’re in), it will be a chaotic mess, with different factions vying to fill the void left behind when the leader gets overthrown.
In order for someone to be a good leader in a zombie apocalypse, the people they’re leading need to know (or at least believe) that they have the group’s best interests in mind and are working towards that. If people don’t know, their imaginations will fill in the gap and begin assuming that their leader(s) not only don’t have their best interests at heart but are actively working against them. Once that happens, that leader is lost.
In order to lead people in a zombie apocalypse, you need trust. Conversely, if you don’t trust the person leading you in a zombie apocalypse, if they’re frequently lying or being shady with what they’re doing they shouldn’t be your leader.