PART FOUR:  Social-Darwinism, Trickle-down Ideology and Popular Conceptions of (the Impending?) Apocalypse

Not long after Joseph McCarthy whipped Americans into a frenzied fear of communist subversion, Ayn Rand’s works became a sensation. Similarly, Rand once again ascended to the best-seller list in the 2000s as Glenn Beck and the pundits of Fox News began a McCarthyesque revival of anti-communist hysteria.[1] The zombie – as the subject of popular culture – follows a similar sales trajectory and, it is my contention, for the same reasons.

In 2009, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was on an unprecedented sales climb. That same year, 2009, marks the ascent of zombie movies in the box office, which continued to open in more and more theatres and break ticket-sales expectations culminating in Brad Pitt’s World War Z (2013) which reportedly grossed well over $200million. These facts prove Lauro and Embry right when they observe “the living-dead zombie of contemporary film, who seems increasingly to be lurching off the screen and into our real world (as a metaphor, this zombie reveals much about the way we code inferior subjects as unworthy of life)…”[2] But the authors fail to clearly identify the ideological coordinates within which the fear of the zombie has been conceived, who conceived it and how those producers of fear in the media establishment have made their ideology diffuse among media consumers.

The authors Lauro and Embry, however, do provide valuable insights that, when placed in the context with how mass media actually works in the 21^st century, can lead to a better understanding of the ominous, anti-democratic “hidden” ideological concepts and values being spread by zombie culture:

Humanity defines itself by its individual consciousness and its personal agency: to be a body without a mind is to be subhuman, animal; to be a human without agency is to be a prisoner, a slave. The zombi(i)/e is both of these, and the zombi(i)/e (fore)tells our past, present, and future.[3]

With this definition in mind, we can further decode the basis of the elitists’ fears of the zombie horde as an expression of their fundamental apprehension of democracy itself and predict where this fear might lead.

Beginning in the late 19^th century, the revolutionary workers’ movements throughout the world prompted the industrial giants and their political agents to seek new ideological foundations that would justify the disproportionate power of the wealthy over the rest of the working population. To answer this call, Herbert Spencer, a British sociologist, adapted the theories of Charles Darwin to human society. Spencer argued that a person’s social and economic stations were based on evolution. Therefore, those with good genes were more creative and intelligent while those with inferior genetics were only good for labor. This theory later became known as social-Darwinism. (Of course Spencer’s pseudo-scientific hypothesis failed to take into account factors that were exclusively human, such as laws protecting property inheritance, etc. which provide certain families immeasurable advantages when it comes to their economic and political influence.)

From the social-Darwinist perspective, democracy disrupts the “natural order” by allowing those of inferior genetic stock to participate in controlling government with equal influence as, say, industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller – at least theoretically. Appalled by the fact that democracy levels the playing field of governance, the social-Darwinists preferred a socio-economic system which has far more in common with European feudalism than American democracy – hence the “vampire economy”. In America, Spencer’s ideas were embraced by Carnegie, Ford and others who, in turn, supported political movements in Europe, such as Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis who were carrying-out a political program based on social-Darwinist assumptions.

The industrialists and fascists shared the fear that ‘subhumans’ were destroying their society and threatening their lives of luxury and leisure. In this sense, they viewed the common working people as a sort of zombie already – a subhuman which can be individually enslaved and made useful in performing certain mechanical functions, but a creature which is essentially nothing but a mindless being with an insatiable appetite. When gathered in greater numbers, however, these zombie drones become dangerous to the elite. And just as the heroes in zombie culture accept the unfortunate conclusion that they must engage in mass slaughter to save themselves (just as “settlers” did to “savages” in the Western genre), the corporate-financed fascists of Europe applied the same logic to those they believed to be subhuman and those who attempted to organize the subhumans (unions, Communists, etc.). What the industrial elite and the quasi-aristocrats fail to accept is that the zombified condition they see threatening the free-thinking and free-acting individual was created by industrialism. In this sense, the monsters they fear most are the product of their own inventions, i.e., the exploiters of the vampire economy are, like Dr. Frankenstein, creating the monsters that will inevitably return to destroy them. Once again, “The Zombie Manifesto” touches a crucial point:

[T]here is the Haitian zombi, a body raised from the dead to labor in the fields, but with a deep association of having played a role in the Haitian Revolution (thus, simultaneously resonant with the categories of slave and slave rebellion); and there is also the zombie, the American importation of the monster, which in its cinematic incarnation has morphed into a convenient boogeyman representing various social concerns.[4]

In other words, there can be no slave rebellion without someone first enslaving people.

How does the slave assert his or her individuality? The slave is freed, first, by becoming aware of his or her condition and, then, by choosing to submit his or her individuality to collective action. In this way, the zombie is the perfect metaphor for the elite’s fears of democratic reforms and the empowerment of those they view as subhuman. “The Zombie Manifesto” also highlights the key to the final defeat of the “zombie” rebellion:

In most contemporary cinematic versions, to kill a zombie, one must destroy its brain. To successfully undo the position of the liberal humanist subject, which has been tainted by an inhumane history shaped by power relations that were perhaps suggested by the opposition of subject and object, one must forfeit the already illusory sense of the individual.[5]

From the point of view of the corporate elite, the threat posed by the zombie is an existential threat – not simply a physical threat. The zombie represents the way in which the corporate elite view the common man and how they perceive democratic ideology as a disease infecting the working-class as a whole to be far more dangerous than the lone individual liberal democrat acting alone. Citing a piece of popular zombie literature, “The Zombie Manifesto” emphasizes that the struggle against zombies is understood, at its core, to be an existential struggle:

A recent piece of humorous literature, Max Brooks’s The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, is written as an instruction manual for defeating an onslaught of zombie attacks. The book also may come close to revealing what it is about the zombie that captivates the human imagination: “Conventional warfare is useless against these creatures, as is conventional thought. The science of ending life, developed and perfected since the beginning of our existence, cannot protect us from an enemy that has no ‘life’ to end.[6]

Understanding this, we see that the rally against zombification is a rally against the infection – not simply the infected. That is, a single zombie suffering from infection is easy to manage. What must be targeted by the elite, then, are gatherings where one rebellious zombie might infect or influence others.

If we conceive of “infection” as ideology in general and as the ideology of human rights in particular, we can see that the freedom of speech and other similar rights are tolerated by liberal industrialists and corporate elites when speech expresses one person’s private opinion – even if that opinion contradicts the interests of the elite. But when that individual opinion translates to concerted, democratic action – when the infection spreads – there is only one thing left for the bourgeoisie to do: turn their houses into bunkers, build walls, hire mercenaries, stockpile arms and get ready to fire up the chainsaws (or the ovens of Auschwitz) and slaughter the mindless hordes of subhumans threatening their positions of power and privilege.

If we accept that the zombie is the product of the vampires’ own fears injected into popular culture, and if we accept that the “vampire” economy creates more zombies that the vampire class can control, could we not interpret the rise of the zombie craze as a sort of cultural primer for the collapse of liberal capitalist society and a bloody reassertion of a sort of resurgence of feudalism, an anarchic Dark Age ruled by the beneficiaries of the vampire economy? What other conclusion can we deduce?

Could it be, then, that by popularizing Ayn Rand’s contempt for “the masses,” “savages,” democracy, religion and “love” and by transforming this bourgeois contempt into fear of the masses, we laid the foundations for a popular culture that desensitizes the population to what amounts to mass murder of sick people? Could it be that the zombie cultural craze is, at best, priming our society for a reversal of basic democratic principles and, at worst, prepping us for wholesale slaughter?

In a widely distributed magazine titled Zombie Nation, funded largely by small arms manufacturers, we may find additional clues to understanding the zombie craze. The magazine is filled with advertisements marketing various real assault weapons, ammunition and accessories (including blood-filled humanoid targets) designed specifically for refining the killing of zombies. One accessory advertisement features a menacing blood-soaked zombie with a slogan “Be prepared: they won’t kill themselves.” Another advertisement marketing ammunition features a group of zombies and claims to be “Certified zombie ammunition” alongside the slogan “Stay focused: They’re hungry and they’re coming for you!” Aside from the advertisements, the features from the Zombie Nation table of contents make liberal use of hyped-up zombie craze fears with articles titled “Interviews with walkers: AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’”, “Avoid the bite: six tips going unarmed against the undead”, “Apocalypse sniper: Every team that expects to survive is going to need at least one” and “Rover: The EMP-Proof Land Rover will carry you beyond doomsday.” Finally, my personal favorite from the March, 2013 edition of Zombie Nation is the article “Brutal” written by Eric R. Poole from Guns & Ammo which features an AR assault rifle modified to accept an actual working chainsaw in place of a bayonet. The language of the article’s introduction is also telling:

Camera phones flashed for grip-and-grin pics as the gathering hordes jammed up the foot traffic in the isles, mobbing the DoubleStar booth at this year’s SHOT Show. Though it had been defanged of its many blades before display, the Zombie X remained a fully functioning chainsaw. Throw on a sharp chain and fresh battery and you’d be able to cut through a cord of firewood. Or, in a time of need, it’ll easily chew through the rotting flesh of the reanimated dead when you’ve been overrun and all ammunition is exhausted.[7]

The article goes on to note:

Weir [the inventor of the assault rifle’s chainsaw attachment]…[is] now in the act of forming a new company called Pancea X to bring it into production. (“’Pancea’ is defined as ‘a remedy for all disease.’” Said Weir. “‘A cure-all.’ Just like the chainsaw.”).[8]

What is most chilling about all of this zombie marketing, however, is that the weapons being advertised are real. They are designed for killing real people (because in reality, zombies don’t exist). Moreover, they are being mass-marketed by multimillion dollar companies to civilians who either believe that they may actually be facing the potential of a real zombie apocalypse (in which case they are insane and don’t need to be buying assault rifles) or they are marketing to a subculture that has come to use the “zombie” concept as a sort of cultural shorthand, a linguistic signifier for groups of people they see as useless or dangerous and need killing. What could be the outcome of marketing these weapons of mass-murder to a population being steadily desensitized to wanton acts of violence in a global economy teetering on the verge of collapse? Perhaps this is only another example of the senility of America’s increasingly nihilistic culture. Or perhaps there is something far more sinister at work.

[1] See The Guardian, “Look out for number one – America turns to prophet of self-interest as crash hits” by Oliver Burkeman. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/10/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged. Retrieved February 3, 2015.

[2] Lauro and Embry, “The Zombie Manifesto”, p. 87.

[3] Ibid, p. 90.

[4] Ibid, p. 87.

[5] Ibid, p. 95.

[6] Ibid, p. 88.

[7] Eric R. Poole, “Brutal: Panacea X licenses this chainsaw from Doublestar and turns the AR into a power tool,” Zombie Nation, March 25, 2013, p. 97.

[8] Ibid, p. 98.