Politics in the Zombie Apocalypse

Like a lot of college kids this past Sunday night I found myself tuning in to the new episode of the popular AMC show The Walking Dead.  For those of you that have never watched the show all you really need to know about it is that it’s about a group of people who are trying to survive the Zombie Apocalypse and the many hardships they encounter in such a world.  Having just finished up my Political Science homework I thought that this show brought many questions to political thinking as we see it now.  The show can be seen as a dramatic political experiment of living in a world where organized government has essentially collapsed and what the remaining humans do to keep themselves out of the state of nature.  I realized that though the event of this story seem far-fetched it brings up some plausible questions of politics, morality, and most importantly how to survive a zombie infested world where all the traditional rules seem to not apply any more.

One reoccurring problem the group continues to face is what to do with outsiders they meet along the way.  They can’t just simply let them go in fear that they will return to attack their group and raid their supplies later on.  There is no authority to turn these outsiders into and often Rick, the leader of the group, is left with a tough decision of whether to just kill the person for the sake of the entire group’s survival.  The group often has trouble deciding if this is a morally right decisions and if Rick and the others who are in charge have the authority to make this call.  This brings in a whole other topic of group dynamics and a struggle for power that a could take another blog to write about. As I said though these questions seem to be a reoccurring problem throughout the seasons, and below is a video of the “trial” they had for a young man that they came across that is a part of another group that is holding out in this area during the Zombie Apocalypse. 

The question I would ask is was the group’s decision to kill this young man justified?    Rick is no politician in the pre-apocalyptic world he was a Sheriff.  His job was to enforce the laws already in place not decide if they were necessarily right or wrong.  That being said he does have a good sense of good and bad people and has good instincts about the situation.   Are his hands dirty for doing what he had to do for protecting his family and the rest of the group?  Can the dirty hands concept or any of the political topics we've discussed in class even apply to their situation, since there is no formal system of rules that they are living in. The characters want to play by the same rules they did before the world was ruled by “Walkers”, but since the world has changed so much shouldn't the rules people live by change to go along with it?  Just as in the Prisoners Dilemma Rick and his group don’t want to be playing by the rules while everyone else is cheating, this will only result in them being mindless zombies as well.  So should they dump morality and only worry about their own survival?   I’d like to hear what other people have to say about the political science value of this show.  Whether it’s this particular situation, one of the other times that someone’s life has hung in the balance of another person decision, or even something completely different but relevant to the concept of a world over run by zombies and in completely chaos.