A Critique of Zombification in Political Activity
More than a decade ago, on the eve of Halloween—coinciding with the zombie parade winding through Montreal’s streets—I wrote a piece that still clings to me. Back then, the zombie struck me primarily as an appealing metaphor: playful, mildly terrifying, and laced with dark humour. But today, amid these turbulent times, the metaphor demands a more serious, deeper, and fresher reading. Zombies are no longer confined to horror tales; they have edged disturbingly close to our political and social reality. In a world where the lines between fact and myth have dissolved, zombies now symbolize what unfolds in contemporary politics: beings that appear alive yet have surrendered independent thought, perceiving any trace of divergent intellectual life as a mortal threat. This metaphor—recurrent in modern literature and political discourse, including Henry Giroux’s Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2010), where he casts the zombie as an emblem of social and political collapse—exposes how modern societies drift toward a form of collective intellectual death.
Zombies always provoke reflection in me.
Not because I am enamoured of them or a devoted horror aficionado, but because, among the creatures drawn from ancient myths, forgotten rituals, and shared fears that have permeated popular culture, zombies feel more real than many of their legendary kin.
At times I catch myself wondering whether I, too, might be one—or at least whether I inhabit a world overrun by them. One thing is certain: zombies are close at hand, perhaps strolling right beside us. They manifest not only in films and books but in our routine social and political conduct, where people, unthinkingly, strive to remake others in their own image. As Daniel Drezner observes in his analysis of the “living dead” metaphor’s influence on public policy discourse (circa 2014), the zombie has infiltrated politics as a potent symbol, illustrating how lifeless or “dead” ideas persist, exert influence, and contaminate society.
Scholars trace the zombie myth’s origins to Haitian culture and Vodou practices, where a bokor—a sorcerer—employs a magical curse or a blend of drugs to resurrect someone presumed dead. Yet this resurrection is not truly human: the mind no longer belongs to the individual, the body decays, and independent thought ceases. What emerges is a semblance of life—mobile, compliant, and ensorcelled. These roots, examined in anthropological works such as Sarah Juliet Lauro’s The Transatlantic Zombie (2015), frame the zombie as a symbol of colonialism and slavery in Haiti, reducing humans to instruments devoid of will. This socio-political interpretation of the zombie—as more than mere folklore—echoes through contemporary scholarship, including Sara Molpeceres’s 2017 article “The Zombie: A New Myth in the Making. A Political and Social Metaphor,” which portrays the zombie as an emblem of modern crises like blind consumerism and eroded individual identity.
In the 1980s, anthropologist Wade Davis sought to ground these narratives in reality, citing tetrodotoxin poisoning and psychoactive substances, along with accounts of individuals declared dead, buried, and later “returned.” Whether one accepts this scientific account or not, the enduring image is stark: a human body in motion, yet devoid of thought. This notion recurs in Kyle William Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic (2010), which views the zombie as a reflection of social crises such as terrorism and identity dissolution, particularly in post-9/11 America, where “living” individuals appear intellectually dead and regard difference as existential danger.
Over time, zombies migrated into Western popular culture, shedding their original skin. In contemporary stories, Vodou magic gives way to viruses, contamination, or unspecified catastrophes. The core, however, endures: zombies shamble with rotting flesh, seeking not just flesh but the assimilation of others into their own likeness. From Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead, the pattern repeats relentlessly—a pattern more familiar than frightening. This familiarity arises because zombies mirror our societies: realms where ideologies are embraced without question and difference is eradicated. As explored in the 2022 article “Zombie: A Metaphor of Modern World,” the zombie embodies the soullessness of the contemporary era, where humans devolve into beings stripped of will.
What terrifies most about zombies is their indifference to one another. They are not invariably hungry. So long as you remain a zombie—mind unused, difference unshown—you pose no threat. In many narratives, survival hinges on pretense: shuffling slowly, emptying your gaze, practicing dissimulation, denying your vitality, and mimicking the already-dead who navigate daily existence. This feigned conformity—prevalent in ideologically repressive societies—recalls Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “critical distance” in Liquid Modernity (2000): in a fluid world saturated with fear, individuals merge with the current for survival, suspending thought. Bauman argues that this modern liquidity renders people zombie-like, leaving them to follow the flow without depth or reflection.
Look around: zombies are real and walk among us. In online political exchanges, have you witnessed people launch unthinking assaults on opponents? That is the zombie at work. On social media, where algorithms forge ideological echo chambers, the phenomenon intensifies, transforming users into digital zombies who parrot content reflexively.
Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani’s renowned couplet captures an image that seems drawn from this very reality:
The mourners of you today are all silent
For the mouths of shamelessness are all roaring
If they sit in silent mourning for you, it is fitting
For they are all terrified of the gathering of beasts
These lines offer one of the most piercing descriptions of life under pressure, where silence often becomes the sole means of endurance. Shafiei likely did not have zombies in mind, yet softened their actions slightly—from physical rending to verbal assault, character assassination, social coercion, and enforced alignment—and the “mouths of shamelessness” emerge as the zombies circling us. Composed during the Pahlavi era’s political repression, the poem resonates powerfully today amid Iran’s protests and global polarizations. This enforced silence evokes Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” in which ordinary people, having abandoned thought, abet wrongdoing.
The true horror of zombies lies in their reality.
Daily, across every political arena, fresh zombies arise. Deviate from alignment, and they pursue you relentlessly until you conform or collapse. Social media amplifies this, trapping individuals in ideological silos and muting dissent. As Chris Reitz examines in “The Labouring Undead: Zombification as a Metaphor of Contemporary Crisis-Management” (2022), the zombie symbolizes managerial crises that strip people of agency.
Yet all this serves only as a prelude. Returning to my earlier text lays the foundation for the central question: What transpires on today’s political stage—in the world and in Iran? Is this zombification not part of a broader drift toward totalitarianism?
A close examination of the political and social spheres reveals not an expanding circle of participation but its contraction. No middle ground survives. A third voice, if it emerges, is ignored or swiftly silenced. Dominant discourse reduces everything to binary poles: “us” versus “them.” This binary infects not only high politics but everyday conversations on social platforms, where people join digital tribes thoughtlessly. NPR’s 2020 reporting on the consequences of dehumanizing language in politics illustrates how such rhetoric fuels polarization, compelling individuals to view opponents as animals or non-humans.
This logic is far from novel. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, George W. Bush declared in his address to Congress: “You’re either with us, or against us.” The statement transcended mere positioning; it distilled a perilous logic: erase nuance, eliminate complexity, and recast politics as enemy detection. This echoes Carl Schmitt’s formulation in The Concept of the Political (1932), in which politics rests on the existential distinction between friend and enemy rather than on ethics or dialogue. The enemy must be eradicated, not comprehended. Chantal Mouffe critiques this in On the Political (2005), arguing that the friend-enemy framework polarizes democracies and fosters a “soft fascism” in which opponents are deemed not merely mistaken but inhuman.
The greater peril arises when this distinction devolves into dehumanization. Once “us and the other” dominates discourse, the other sheds human dignity: voice discredited, intent malevolent, existence threatening. The other becomes a monster. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995) describes this as “bare life”—humans stripped of rights and reduced to ideological tools. Modern societies apply this to the “useless” or “enemy,” rendering them rightless.
Following operations against Islamic State in Iraq, a journalist visiting liberated areas later recounted a haunting personal reaction—not to ISIS brutality, but to their own numbness upon seeing mutilated teenage fighters’ bodies: no anger, sorrow, or disgust. They asked where they had lost part of their humanity. This testimony (anonymized for privacy yet documented) exposes dehumanization’s depth in ideological wars, a pattern echoed in Human Rights Watch reports on Iraq violence (2020) and analyses of modern conflicts, including Ukraine since 2022, where Russian media dehumanize opponents as “Nazis” to justify violence.
We might rationalize such deaths as inevitable or necessary to prevent greater harm—arguments defensible in military or political terms. Yet the ethical question persists: Can the human mind not grieve the loss of humanity even while acknowledging violence’s necessity? Can we not pause amid conflict to ask what this violence inflicts on our souls? Analyses like Anna Szilágyi’s “Dangerous Metaphors: How Dehumanizing Rhetoric Works” (2018) demonstrate that dehumanization destroys victims and transforms perpetrators into moral zombies.
This marks the boundary between the human entangled in war and the ideological zombie: the latter acts without sorrow or question. The distinction appears in contemporary populist rhetoric—such as in the U.S., where opponents have been labelled “animals” or “non-humans.”
Pre-modern societies, even those we dismiss as “savage,” often tempered violence with ethical awareness: hunters prayed over animals, expressed gratitude, and vowed not to squander the life given. These rituals, analyzed by René Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972), channelled violence through ceremony to avert unchecked cycles of destruction.
History’s wars contain parallel moments: bitter enemies treating fallen foes’ bodies with respect—not for purification, but for self-preservation. Respecting the enemy safeguards our own moral integrity. Such respect has grown scarce today—evident in Iran’s 2022 protests, where demonstrators are branded “rioters” and opponents “ideological zombies.” Reports like those from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2021) warn that dehumanization threatens democracy by enabling anti-democratic violence.
Hannah Arendt’s insights regain urgency here. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she shows how totalitarian systems annihilate plurality, reducing humans to masses that execute rather than think. The “banality of evil” arises when ordinary people cease questioning, rendering atrocities routine.
Zombies are born in this space. They do not think, read history, compare, or reflect. They fail to notice how they monsterize the other. They are mere limbs—thoughtless, will-less—carrying out orders.
When discourse strips the other of humanity, violence becomes permissible, even obligatory. Severing limbs, mocking corpses, rejoicing in death shift from aberration to duty. This dynamic surfaces in American polarization (2020–2024), where opponents are cast as “internal enemies” and dehumanization mobilizes support. As recent studies note, such polarization escalates to extremism, eroding societies.
Here we slip, unwittingly, from engaged humans into obedient ideological zombies.
The zombie metaphor crystallizes precisely at this juncture: humans deprived of humanity, neither fully dead nor alive, incapable of dialogue or reason, responding only with attack. In “us/enemy” politics, opponents become targets for assault, elimination, or even moral satisfaction in their destruction. Have you felt anger supplant thought in political debates? McKenzie Yuasa’s exploration of zombie manifestations in American culture highlights how zombies reflect repressed societal shadows.
Arendt returns: totalitarian systems destroy plurality and independent thought, producing mass-humans who execute without reflection. The banality of evil persists in modern contexts—from populist politics to institutional failures—turning ordinary people into modern zombies.
In such environments, groups—rulers or opposition, left or right, in Iran or America—reduce society to “the people” and “non-people,” claiming exclusive representation. They demand not alliance but total assimilation: thought, language, and anger aligned precisely with their dictate.
Criticism, questions, and doubts become betrayal. They seek will-less soldiers—obedient, brainless. Exactly the zombie: a moving body with a surrendered mind. This demand echoes in European anti-immigrant campaigns, where dissent is crushed. As 2024 analyses explain, dehumanization often stems from imagining the other as fundamentally alien.
In horror, this is when zombies swarm: any sign of divergent thought triggers assault—not to persuade, but to convert or destroy.
Our era’s tragedy is the multiplicity of zombie tribes attacking from all sides. Independent thought invites multi-front war, intensified by algorithms that reinforce tribes and annihilate plurality. Discussions of zombie rhetoric in political discourse underscore this as a form of political will-lessness.
Zombie politics may yield short-term gains—mobilizing crowds, repelling foes—but no garden flourishes under a zombie gardener. No tree grows where thought is threatened. True flourishing requires the rich soil of intellectual plurality: free questions, celebrated differences. Arendt views this plurality as democracy’s bedrock—the sole genuine antidote to zombification.
Zombifying political life poses the gravest threat to vital politics. The remedy lies in sustaining critical distance, defending thought’s plurality, and resisting dehumanization. In a zombie-filled world, we must guard against becoming too like the dead to survive. Resistance can start practically—fostering critical dialogue in media—or simply with self-inquiry: Have I silenced my own mind today?
Through such vigilance, we might forge a world where zombies remain mythical relics, not rulers. As Arendt reminds us, the banality of evil dwells in ordinary people and yields only to active, vigilant thought.
