What do you think? After a worldwide disaster, will men and women come together and try to make the world a better place or will we become an anarchy? Will we learn to live and work together or are we destined to become the servants of a man or woman carrying a very lethal baseball bat? Does The Walking Dead have it all wrong?
From Joshua Krause:
(But) for a show depicting ordinary people struggling to cope with extraordinary circumstances, it sure gets everything wrong about human nature. Specifically, when it comes to how humans can and should organize themselves. The biggest mistakes this show makes is failing to portray just how good people are at working together, and completely underestimating our ability and desire to rebuild civilization.
If they tried to portray that, then the last few seasons would have these characters raising crops, rebuilding roads, and discussing who in the group would be the best candidate to teach their kids algebra.
Seriously, the show is almost nihilistic in that regard. It’s almost like nobody in this show’s universe is interested in building a functional society. In our world, history tells us that that’s all we’ve been trying to do for tens of thousands of years. We work together way more often than we fight each other, because it’s beneficial. While there have been brutal and chaotic periods in history, we never linger there for long.
The more pessimistic of us may say that Mr. Krause is living in a sunny day-dream where “the end of days” can be the beginning of something good. However, he does have a point – that nihilistic POV of The Walking Dead – that he lays out over on Ready Nutrition.
On the other hand, we think he might have missed some episodes. Rick and his group have tried to move on. They brought people together in their prison home several seasons back and did the pig farming, hunting, cropping, and teaching thing too. Later they came to Alexandria and found comrades at Hilltop and The Kingdom. The sad part is the more powerful and mean-spirited Saviors, allies with the “Dump People,” are bigger and stronger. Still, when banded together, Rick's group can be a force to be reckoned with, as will be demonstrated in season eight.
While the forces of evil are out there, always knocking on their door, the good (or at least better) people of The Walking Dead will always strive to live and make themselves worthy of a future. To do that, they will all eventually become one and will build on it. This, at least, is our hope!
After all, we do not want to see them – or any prepper and survivor – become “the walking dead.”
Featured Image via The Walking Dead