What can zombies teach us about Leadership?

We create monsters that represent and reflect our culture’s prevailing fears. We then vilify those monsters by celebrating their inhumanity (even though those monsters often are or were considered human) and destruction in order to repair the perceived or potential transgression away from “normal” society.  Edward Ingebretsen in his book, “At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture,” claims that “monsters serve as convenient tokens whose narratives contain trauma as well as solution; they provide easy answers to intractable problems.”

We use monsters to declare our problems by using extreme caricatures that violate the boundaries of normal society. In fact, we use those monsters—those extremes—to clearly mark out the restrictions of what a society will accept as normal. These monsters can be the stuff of horror movies, or they can be men, women, and children who have done something monstrous and so transcended society’s levels of acceptance. We are terrified of these culturally agreed to and created monsters because they are the antithesis of our society. We also need them, however, because they remind us of the limits we have implicitly agreed to abide by in order to be a part of that society. Without monsters, we literally do not know what to fear nor do we know what the acceptable social limits are within our culture and society.

Zombies are not a new cultural phenomenon. Stories of formerly dead persons living again, either under the control of someone else or otherwise completely devoid of reason, are present in histories and even some religious beliefs throughout the world.  The specifics of each type of zombie, including how to become one and what happens after transforming into one, are relevant to those cultures and those time periods. Why, then, have zombies come “back to life” and reemerged into the pop culture limelight within the United States (US) and other western cultures—if not the entire world?

Modern, pop-culture zombies as seen in popular movies and television shows are driven by their basest instinct—food. Entering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (as published in “A Theory of Human Motivation”) at the bottom of the physiological rung within a typical human’s pyramid of needs, they have no other motivation other than to feed. Zombies do not possess a need for safety, belonging, or esteem; and, with the possible exception of the movie “Warm Bodies”, no zombie shows any reflection of self-actualization.

Zombies are what our parents warned us we’d become if we watched too much television, fell prey to peer pressure, or simply subscribed to a dangerous status quo. Today, are we actually worried about the dead rising and eating the brains of the living? Most of us are not, but what we are worried about is mindless homogeny. We are worried about the loss of drive and creativity, of self-actualization, and of the ability to actively participate in life as either a leader or an active and engaged follower. We are worried about the collapse of our society through the loss of our individuality, as well as the loss of our own culturally defined humanity which has significantly more layers, needs, and complex relationships then the zombie’s which is simply “to eat.”

As a global community united by mostly westernized pop culture, we are concerned about a generation of mindlessness—or perhaps the lack of mindfulness. 

We are worried about people standing by while atrocities happen, or as corporations and governments choose greed and self-interest while the multitudes suffer the negative repercussions. The fact that we currently see so many references to zombies in pop culture—often intricately related to the collapse of modern life, including the breakdown of communication, loss of safety, and scarcity of resources—means that we are very concerned about this issue. We need to wake up and shake off our zombie-like nature and be actively engaged in our lives, our businesses, and our communities.

We can no longer allow ourselves to be marginalized by our own willful ignorance, a contagion that is sweeping the world faster than any zombie-inducing virus. 

What zombies teach us about leadership is that we are in desperate need of leaders and of actively engaged followers. By their nature, zombies lack the self-actualization and creativity to lead, as well as the drive to be actively devoted to following a person, movement, or idea. These monsters point out our problems, but they also describe our solutions; and it is our current cultural fascination with them that is also our call to action. We must eradicate this “virus” of mindlessness, of zombification, and become leaders in our own lives whether that is from forging our own path or becoming an adherent, a follower, of a cause we believe in. Only then can we be free of this particular monster.

 We create monsters that represent and reflect our culture’s prevailing fears. ~Colleen Jolly Tweet this