Zombies and the Golden Rule

One of the great misconceptions about love is that it is a synonym for being nice. However, loving people are not necessarily nice people to be with. Loving people live by the golden rule, which means that they may be abrasive, unlikable or even violent in certain circumstances. They are honest and direct, but that's not necessarily nice. Honesty is often uncomfortable because truth sometimes hurt.

Loving people are orderly and predictable when in company with people they love. But there is no way of saying how they will behave in the company of people with sinister motives. They may turn the other cheek when slapped, but they may also blow our brains out. It depends very much on context.

This becomes clear once we analyse the golden rule, which states that we should do to others that which we want them to do onto us. There's no mention of being nice in this statement. It merely states that we should look into our own desires and wishes in order to discover what is reasonable to do to others. We must therefore start by making it clear in our own minds what we want for ourselves, and very few of us will conclude through this kind of introspection that we want nothing but niceness in our lives. I certainly don't want people to be nice to me should I act unprovoked in a selfish, irresponsible or aggressive manner.

If I start nosing around in other people's lives, I expect to be smacked in the face. If I should go mad, please restrain me so that I don't do any harm. This aspect of the golden rule is often brought up in zombie horror movies. Surrounded by zombies, friends agree that if anyone gets infected by the zombie virus, the others blow their heads off. The loving response to a zombie is to blow it to pieces.

We do not turn the other cheek to zombies, nor do we do this to people who put us or our family in danger. We only turn the other cheek when de-escalation is rational. Most squabbles are petty, and deserve no attention, so we turn the other cheek. But that's not because we're nice. We do so because we're rational beings, and there's nothing gained in squabbling endlessly over petty details.

Zombies

By Direction and cinematography both by George A. Romero - Screenshot from timeinc.net, Public Domain, Link