[This is Part 3 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 2 here.]
What zombies do not symbolize, in the present view, is the dehumanization or the objectifying “Othering” of fellow humans for not being human enough. The risk of that misinterpretation accompanies these others we’ve discussed, so it is best to get ahead of it.
Anthony Judge: “Also evident is the sense in which people may be effectively framed as ‘dead’—or potentially so—whether by those who consider them to be of no consequence, or by those who are initiating their elimination. Variants are evident in the framing of some as effectively sub-human. Examples include descriptions of clients, voters and spectators as ‘sheep’ or ‘cattle’—potentially to be targeted, possibly in order to ‘make a killing’… Especially problematic, given the variety of beliefs, is the sense in which everyone is potentially to be considered ‘moronic’ (or a ‘zombie’) in the eyes of some other—and therefore presumably worthy of eradication from the perspective of the latter. Caricature may go as far as defining those who fail to comprehend an argument as ‘brain dead’.”
Zombies are indeed a flexible symbol with a number of potential meanings. Indeed, all symbols are “fuzzy” in their boundaries and contain a subjective, experiential dimension. But zombies are not, despite this, a symbol primarily representing an external Other. On the contrary, zombies are our Shadows: the worst, least human version of ourselves and our culture—in contrast, for example, to the symbolism of Christ or a mythological hero. Zombies symbolize an inner decay which spreads mythologically through their bites, and literally through our mirror-like reflection of each other.
C.S. Lewis: “Men are mirrors, or ‘carriers’ of Christ to other men. Sometimes unconscious carriers. This [is a] ‘good infection’.”
René Girard: “Satan, or the devil...is a kind of personification of ‘bad contagion’... Like Jesus, Satan seeks to have others imitate him but not in the same fashion and not for the same reasons.”
Humans, to a degree, choose who to reflect—sometimes it is a literal person and sometimes it is a mythological person, but both are real enough to radically change an individual.
Zombies are the symbol of an inner possibility, not an external enemy. And in this way, the zombie apocalypse symbolizes our collective inability to kill our way to resolution of this crisis: Because there is no external Other; because we all “carry the infection”; because we may at any time be wolf or sheep, angelic or demonic. Thus, there is no violent revolution which could possibly resolve this crisis, for violence-to-self is the very root of the crisis. Nihilism is a power-ontology, and the way out is optimism, which we shall soon discover is deeper than “hoping for the best” and is, in fact, the value-ontology which provides the only metaphysical rebuttal to meaninglessness.
The basis of our meaning crisis is ourselves—as centers of action and vessels of meaning—as well as value per se; thus its resolution will have to involve our own transformation and a rediscovery of a true metaphysical optimism. We can’t devour our way out of this, because we are the substrate of the meaning crisis. The key, we will see later, is standing “in the middle”, with an awareness of our full range of potentials as bearers of consciousness.
Carl Jung: “To confront a person with his Shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the Self. Anyone who perceives his Shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”
So, despite the potential to interpret zombies as the Other who must be destroyed to save humanity, they truly represent a part of us which we must remain in contact with if we are to avoid psychological repression and neuroses on either the individual or cultural level. Every optimist must remember that he may have once been, and could still become, a nihilist.
Iris Murdoch: “[This is coming into view] in our age with the incorporation of Satan into the Trinity, or into the Quaternity if we count the Virgin Mary as having been already incorporated. This inclusion of the ‘dark opposite’ as an essential part of the religious ideal, of course no novelty, is a Gnostic, Taoist, pre-socratic conception.”
Edward Edinger: “At the same time that Christ the good son of Yahweh was born, however, Satan the evil son was cast out of heaven, so that a decisive separatio took place in the God-image, with the dark evil aspect being split off and repressed. However, the Book of Revelation predicts that at the end of the aeon there will be a return of the repressed through enantiodromia.”
And it is just this psychic integration of “the dark opposite” which is made apparent by zombie mythology and its eclipse of the cultural “fear of the outsider” depicted, for example, by alien invasion stories. We are experiencing a transition from fear of external Other to acceptance of internal Other—a point that is made by the authors of “Zombies in Western Culture”.
Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic: “Extra-terrestrial invasions gained tremendous popularity in American cinema, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century with the onset of the Cold War. As the West drew its cultural boundaries more guardedly, the alien seemed to be an effective mask for the prevailing wind of wariness and paranoia, and the fear of outsiders and espionage. Stories of alien invasion struck compelling affinities with real-life suspicions: adversaries from the outside were trying to infiltrate our society in order to advance theirs, to dissolve our systems and propagate their own, and to estrange us from one another by diluting our fellowship.”
Similarly, they note, mythological villains like vampires provided a proxy for distrusting a specific out-group, and alien invasions conveyed the progressions towards the fear of total existential extinction—the kind evoked by the possibility of physical annihilation by nuclear war, or cultural annihilation as feared in a “Red Scare”.
But zombies are uniquely a symbol of a decay originating from within. They symbolize a loss of meaning and a collective exhaustion in what seems like a fruitless search for a viable and optimistic worldview. They symbolize the feeling that we have become everything we hate—a feeling worse than death. As zombies, it’s not just that we are gone, buried, and unable to help make a better world. As a symbolic occurrence, they reveal an even greater horror—the recognition that we are all beginning to resemble a twisted, lifeless, meaning-starved version of humanity. We see this widespread loss of meaning and yet, despite our drive to self-actualize, self-transcend, and become more perfect versions of ourselves, we find ourselves creating a world of which we are ashamed.
Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic: “By almost all accounts, zombies are the fictionally distorted, self-reflected image of modern humanity. Most zombie interpretations begin with this premise, that in some pivotal way, ‘zombies are us’.”
They are flexible and yet consistent representations of a self-perpetuating evil or moral ugliness, the kind that we internally fight so that it does not become embedded in all of our external creations. The rotting faces of zombies are used to depict a variety of planet-wide catastrophes, but it is the meaning crisis, the tilting of the scales away from optimism and towards nihilism, which is their most important symbolic meaning.
Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic: “[The zombie’s] features remain remarkably consistent from one story to the next, and it has represented many varieties of apocalypse without altering its basic nature: consumerism, poverty, hunger, political dystopia and environmental degradation. Zombies have assumed a heterogeneity of ugliness… The interpretations most favored by academics—mortality, consumerism and environmental degradation among them—are plausible without being sufficient. The mere fact that each seems to apply invalidates the proposition that any one of them can apply exclusively… More specifically, they represent the ruin of all that is meaningful within us.”
Instead of embodying any specific external fear, the zombie apocalypse is the mythological cry for help which expresses our crisis of meaning. While, for example, zombies can symbolize an environmental crisis, in a deeper sense they point to a place within our metacrisis from which these other crises stem. This justifies our choice to focus on this crisis within our metacrisis—every other crisis in this complex system is connected to (and deeply influenced by) the dueling orientations of optimism and nihilism. The emptiness of zombies, their state of living-death, conveys the unfulfilled human potential to discover and actualize value. A world of zombies is a world in which nothing valuable is valued.
Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic: “As a symbol of the loss of meaning, the zombie embodies a plethora of vacancies, empty placeholders for the building blocks of meaning.”
So, as opposed to calling a person a “zombie” or an institution “brain dead” in order to create an Other, there is deep insight in the fact that a zombie’s mindlessness is, in the symbolic view, the contagion which zombies spread. Zombies challenge us to live a life of continual self-reflection, rather than self-deception through the act of externally projecting our Shadows. If it is true that an optimistic, beautiful, life-affirming worldview requires the attention and energy of all, it is our own zombie-potential which lurks beneath the surface, waiting to subvert that energy, and can always spread if we let it. Any action can be moral or antimoral.
TWD explains that the zombies in that universe have brainstem activity, but “nobody home” in the uniquely human parts of the brain like the prefrontal cortex—i.e. the zombies use only the “reptilian” portion of the human brain. This sets them up for an all-too-literal search for human brains.
Vervaeke, Mastropietro & Miscevic: “Zombies are a brain-oriented monster, in operation, appetite and vulnerability… We can find a strange twist tucked into this pattern: that the mindlessness evinced by the zombie is begotten by its brain. Zombies are a perversion of mind precisely because they notably lack the properties of mind we think fundamentally human, yet they visibly want to acquire mind in the most literal sense of acquisition. Only by destroying their brains do you destroy the threat to your brains posed by their mindlessness… The fact that brain is driving the consumption of brain is a deeply complex symbolic occurrence; culture is devouring culture, mind is devouring mind, humanness is devouring humanness.”
In the same vein, zombies superficially resemble human community—a dark reflection of a pathologically individualistic society.
Jonathan Pageau: “The zombie typifies the mob, yes, but not only. The zombie also typifies the absolute individualism, the absolute isolation of contemporary life… They’re a mob but not a whole, not a community.”
Coretta Scott King: “[This is because] the greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.”
Jonathan Pageau: “[So zombies symbolize] the extreme perversion of our desire for communion with each other.”
A human community on the descent into meaninglessness negates itself as a community. A good community is humanizing. A great community is passionately humanizing.
Insofar as the zombie apocalypse is a mythological-symbolic account of a crisis in metaphysics, loss of meaning, and loss of community, then in a complementary sense it also closely parallels what René Girard called a “mimetic crisis”. Mimesis (as in mimicry) can be “directed” but not shut off—perception and appetite are two of the most fundamental characteristics of individuals and other centers of action. We will return to this topic throughout the book.
Robert Latta: “The [individual], then, has perception, but not necessarily in the sense of consciousness. For consciousness is not the essence of perception, but merely an additional determination belonging to certain kinds or degrees of perception… Similarly, [individuals have] appetition, but not necessarily in the sense of conscious desire or Will.”
Gottfried Leibniz: “Thus it is well to make a distinction between perception, which is the inner state of the [individual] representing outer things, and apperception, which is consciousness or the reflective knowledge of this inner state.”
This book deals with Action and action-centers—both can (and always do) represent nihilism, optimism, or anything in-between. All action is an expression of value, and a confession of the kind of value we are able to perceive and desire. As humans, or zombies, every action is also part of a landscape of desires which others perceive and contemplate, and thus come to imitate. Therefore, it may go without saying, that the more like zombies we become, the more others will take on the trait of emptiness. We will return to this in more detail. For now, we may say that if we are surrounded by zombies, we shall surely come to resemble them, in the way we perceive and in the particularities of our appetites, in ever-greater proportion.
The core ideas of Girard’s theory also involve these basic attributes of perception and appetition, informing the concept of “mimetic desire”. In this theory, part of the formative experience of our sense of what is valuable, meaningful, or desirable are based on those aspects of the humans around us. In other words, one’s neighbor has some kind of love-object, the thing or person or symbol or abstract concept to which his appetite is directed; and, by perceiving one’s neighbor, desire mimetically spreads through individuals and communities.
René Girard: “Our neighbor is the model for our desires. This is what I call mimetic desire… The rivalries of desires tend to become exasperated, and as they do, they tend to contaminate third parties who are just as addicted as we are to the entanglements of mimetic rivalries. The principal source of violence between human beings is mimetic rivalry, the rivalry resulting from imitation of a model who becomes a rival or of a rival who becomes a model.”
Girard further believed that mimetic desire always leads towards rivalry, escalation of violence, and an all-out mimetic crisis which threatens the very existence of society. Additionally, Girard says, it was the act of human sacrifice, and later organized religion (which incorporated literal or symbolic sacrifices), that developed as answers to this potentially fatal escalation of mimetic desire. The common thread of it all is what he called the “scapegoat mechanism” or “single victim mechanism”.
René Girard: “These rivalries, as they multiply, create a mimetic crisis, the war of all against all. The resulting violence of all against all would finally annihilate the community if it were not transformed, in the end, into a war of all against one, thanks to which the unity of the community is reestablished.”
In its general form, then, we can imagine a community being consumed by some kind of destructive crisis, leading to violence of “all against all”. If this is not resolved, the community collapses. Therefore, the sacrificial ritual of scapegoating places blame for the entire crisis within a single symbolic victim—killing the scapegoat in this context means that the community perceives a resolution to the crisis.
René Girard: “Mimetic theory is, among other things, the origins of the great cultural institutions starting from sacrificial ritual… Religion protects men and societies from mimetic escalation. Religion has an adaptive value… Based on the presuppositions of the mimetic theory, one can argue that many groups and societies perished and were destroyed by lethal infighting, by the explosion of mimetic rivalry being unable to find any form of resolution. The scapegoat mechanism provided a fundamental contribution to the fitness of the group. This is the reason why such a practice is found throughout the world. This is the result of a form of systemic selection, which lasted thousands of years. It was the scapegoat mechanism, and subsequently religion, which provided that fundamental instrument of protection.”
The scapegoat, thus, becomes “sacred”. They become part of the new founding mythology of the society, carrying the dual-symbolism of demonic crisis-causer and angelic crisis-resolver.
Wolfgang Palaver: “Girard attempts in this work to explain the nature of the ‘sacred’…based on what he terms the scapegoat mechanism: the mimetic snowballing of all against one in order to resolve a crisis brought about by the social consequences of mimetic desire, which creates within the group a war of all against all. After its death, the victim is experienced by the community as good and evil at once (=sacred) because the victim is perceived as both responsible for the crisis and as that which rescues the community from being completely engulfed by it.”
René Girard: “[The] sacred is generated by mimetic snowballing and the single victim mechanism… The peoples of the world…deify their victims.”
The problem, in our present context, is therefore mimetic escalation of violence in a culture which has rejected the metaphysical and institutional protections once provided by religion. This doesn’t mean we need to return to religious solutions, but it does mean we need to account for mimesis and the ongoing potential for mimetic crises.
Zombies, to repeat, are a symbol of nihilism and the loss of the objective foundations of meaning. And we are in a zombie apocalypse, which means this nihilism has effectively covered our world. Adding the perspective of mimetic desire, we can see how the revolt against optimism is contagious—symbolically spreading by the bite of a zombie, literally spreading by our radical permeability to each other.
Wolfgang Palaver: “This revolt, as has been shown, is essentially man’s attempt to take the place of God. Camus claims in his analysis that modern history is shaped by this metaphysical revolt and the resulting tendency of humans to worship one another. Similar to Girard, Camus sees in Feuerbach’s ‘homo homini deus’ not an indication of human progression, but rather ‘the birth of a terrible form of optimism.’ Of the various philosophical and historical manifestations of human divinization that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Camus finds most emblematic Nietzsche’s Übermensch, which he views as the ‘sordid god’ at the heart of Nazi ideology.”
This “terrible form of optimism” is actually nihilism, which, as we understand it, is characterized by this trajectory of decreasing metaphysical “distance” between what might be called the domains of the absolute and relative, or transcendent and immanent; the negation of “distance” (a spatial metaphor referring to something non-spatial) creates a “Flatland” of dimensional regression. Nihilism is, in fact, the collapse of the absolute into the relative (which is what makes it a power-ontology—where there are no objective moral imperatives, and instead only subjective preferences). The metaphysical “revolt” flattens the absolute and relative into a single two-dimensional plane: The attempt to divinize and superhumanize concludes in an ironic self-annihilation. Nihilism’s shrinking “distance” between perceiving subject, mimetic model of desire, and love object—which form a triangle in Girard’s theory—is part of the meaning we see in the symbol of zombies.
Wolfgang Palaver: “Girard’s model of desire takes the shape of a triangle; the apex represents the mediator and the two base vertices the imitating subject and the object… As the metaphysical distance between desiring subject and model diminishes—the key component of internal mediation—the potential for rivalry and violence increases. The more negligible this distance becomes, the more probable it is that mimesis will end in rivalry and violence. The ancient proverbial truth found in mythical texts, primitive practices, and even the Bible, that brothers or sisters are much more prone to rivalry and conflict than others, can be easily understood with the help of Girard’s insight… No other phenomenon displays the workings of mimetic desire more clearly than modern advertising. In television commercials, the advertised object only rarely appears directly on the screen; most often what is shown are the people in possession of the object—or those who desire it—in order to activate the viewer’s imitation. This is a clear illustration of the triangular structure of mimetic desire.”
Christianity, Girard believed, did not conform to the usual scapegoating pattern, but was rather a fundamentally different kind of myth from what had preceded it. He justifies this belief by arguing that the Bible leads us to side with, empathize with, the persecuted Christ, rather than with the violent, persecutory mob. Although scapegoating was unavoidable from the beginnings of human history, the myths which were both its products and source material tend to create group cohesion through identification with the sacrificer, not the sacrificed. Christ, then, was this One Scapegoat to Rule them All, becoming a symbol of the undeserving victim. In a sense, it “breaks the fourth wall” of the mimetic process.
René Girard: “The Resurrection is…the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion. By contrast to the latter it is a power not at all hallucinatory or deceptive. Far from deceiving the disciples, it enables them to recognize what they had not recognized before and to reproach themselves for their pathetic flight in the preceding days. They acknowledge the guilt of their participation in the violent contagion that murdered their master.”
Wolfgang Palaver: “[Girard] argues that the biblical uncovering of the scapegoat mechanism made all archaic strategies of channeling violence obsolete, leading to the development of the modern world.”
But, as the religious (and specifically Christian) worldview declines, we are faced with that shrinking metaphysical distance which portends a world in which the smallest spark can ignite a planetary fire.
Wolfgang Palaver: “Mimesis in the more intensified stages of desire (metaphysical desire) carries with it an extreme potential for contagious proliferation. The spatial, social, and above all mental proximity of humans to one another in situations of internal mediation transforms mimetic rivalry into a sickness that can spread through the community like a plague.”
Stories like The Walking Dead, then, would be rather silly and shallow if the characters just hacked away at zombies. Instead, TWD presents a world eerily parallel to our own, one in which the power of the self-sacrificing scapegoat (Christ) has failed, and society therefore reverts to the condition of violent contagion which escalates towards a crisis of all against all. And now that we simultaneously see literal human sacrifices as horrendous, and the scapegoating of Christ as anachronistic and meaningless, we can better understand why a crisis of meaning has been spreading like a wildfire.
The zombie apocalypse is not only symbolic of a poverty of meaning, a loss of personhood, and the living-death of worldviews-past, but the mimetically contagious spread of these conditions. Our meaning crisis, mimetic crisis, and the collapse of the metaphysical conditions which support the discovery and actualization of meaning, seem to touch all other crises. And our metacrisis will certainly continue to get worse if it contains within it a zombie apocalypse—that’s just common sense. In response, we need to begin the hard work of ending our meaning crisis, which includes developing a new metaphysics directly opposite to all that is symbolized by zombies: The meaningless, nihilistic, hopeless, vacant, mindless, or depersonalized world.
As much as the zombie-potential remains within us, it is in our power to move towards a world which reflects all that is most human, which includes but is not limited to ever-deepening meaningfulness, overwhelming beauty, and love. Our metaphysics, and the practical actions which follow from it, must reach and strive in opposition to our darker potential, our zombie-side. Our metarevolution must be directed at complete personhood, wholeness, and continually transcending our limitations. It must move us beyond.
We need this to be part of our metarevolution because we care about each other, and personhood is a group project. We must protect and nurture and love the minds of others, or we will surely lose our minds instead.
Douglas Hofstadter: “Being a strong believer in the noncentralizedness of consciousness, in its distributedness, I tend to think that although any individual’s consciousness is primarily resident in one particular brain, it is also somewhat present in other brains as well.”
This inclines us to say that our metacrisis is deeply influenced by not understanding or caring about the nature of consciousness, by our cold indifference towards non-human consciousness, and by not giving due attention to the ways in which we affect each other’s minds. The way out, by contrast, involves love—which demands: that we treat the entirety of reality as being composed of ends-in-themselves; that we disavow the mentality of “Us vs. Them”; and that we never seek the dubious gains which come from stepping on the backs of others.
We truly are, at least in degrees, the people closest to us, and similarly they are us. Our search for meaning depends on understanding ourselves and the complex system of minds in which we coexist. Knowing who we are is a prerequisite of knowing who we wish to be. A starting point is to understand that fighting each other is like fighting ourselves. What better reason is there to show love towards all living beings than knowing that our minds are co-created in a grand dialogue?
Ervin Laszlo: “According to Plato, two people, by challenging and responding to each other, can come closer to the truth than either one could himself… The outcome of such a dialectic is not merely the knowledge of the one added to the knowledge of the other. It is something which neither of them knew before, and which neither of them would have been capable of knowing by himself. Such a twosome constitutes a whole which has properties irreducible to those of each individual by him- or herself.”
Thomas Jefferson: “[And so,] it behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others.”
Heinrich A. Rommen: “[Humans] achieve their happiness and their destiny not as separated individuals but as coordinated members bound by solidaric responsibility for one another as mutual usufructuaries.”
For now, this concludes our symbolic-mythic look at our meaning crisis. In the second half of the book, we will explore transformation and transformational experiences, which can move us either deeper into our meaning crisis (as in the foul transformation from human to zombie), or lead us beyond it. If the zombie apocalypse depicts the loss of ourselves, the optimistic reorientation is the way back to humanity. But for optimism and transformation to move us in the direction of all that is most good, we must continue to explore the nihilism of our meaning crisis. For that, we will take a look at the state of meaningfulness in our current era—to see where we have come from, and where we might go.
[Read Part 4 here.]
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