A Critique of Zombification in Political Activity<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
More than a decade ago, on the eve of Halloween\u2014coinciding with the zombie parade winding through Montreal\u2019s streets\u2014I 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\u2014recurrent in modern literature and political discourse, including Henry Giroux\u2019s Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2010), where he casts the zombie as an emblem of social and political collapse\u2014exposes how modern societies drift toward a form of collective intellectual death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zombies always provoke reflection in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At times I catch myself wondering whether I, too, might be one\u2014or 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 \u201cliving dead\u201d metaphor\u2019s influence on public policy discourse (circa 2014), the zombie has infiltrated politics as a potent symbol, illustrating how lifeless or \u201cdead\u201d ideas persist, exert influence, and contaminate society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scholars trace the zombie myth\u2019s origins to Haitian culture and Vodou practices, where a bokor\u2014a sorcerer\u2014employs 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\u2014mobile, compliant, and ensorcelled. These roots, examined in anthropological works such as Sarah Juliet Lauro\u2019s 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\u2014as more than mere folklore\u2014echoes through contemporary scholarship, including Sara Molpeceres\u2019s 2017 article \u201cThe Zombie: A New Myth in the Making. A Political and Social Metaphor,\u201d which portrays the zombie as an emblem of modern crises like blind consumerism and eroded individual identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201creturned.\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cliving\u201d individuals appear intellectually dead and regard difference as existential danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014a 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 \u201cZombie: A Metaphor of Modern World,\u201d the zombie embodies the soullessness of the contemporary era, where humans devolve into beings stripped of will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What terrifies most about zombies is their indifference to one another. They are not invariably hungry. So long as you remain a zombie\u2014mind unused, difference unshown\u2014you 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\u2014prevalent in ideologically repressive societies\u2014recalls Zygmunt Bauman\u2019s notion of \u201ccritical distance\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mohammad Reza Shafiei Kadkani\u2019s renowned couplet captures an image that seems drawn from this very reality:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mourners of you today are all silent<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the mouths of shamelessness are all roaring<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If they sit in silent mourning for you, it is fitting<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For they are all terrified of the gathering of beasts<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014from physical rending to verbal assault, character assassination, social coercion, and enforced alignment\u2014and the \u201cmouths of shamelessness\u201d emerge as the zombies circling us. Composed during the Pahlavi era\u2019s political repression, the poem resonates powerfully today amid Iran\u2019s protests and global polarizations. This enforced silence evokes Hannah Arendt\u2019s \u201cbanality of evil,\u201d in which ordinary people, having abandoned thought, abet wrongdoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The true horror of zombies lies in their reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cThe Labouring Undead: Zombification as a Metaphor of Contemporary Crisis-Management\u201d (2022), the zombie symbolizes managerial crises that strip people of agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet all this serves only as a prelude. Returning to my earlier text lays the foundation for the central question: What transpires on today\u2019s political stage\u2014in the world and in Iran? Is this zombification not part of a broader drift toward totalitarianism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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: \u201cus\u201d versus \u201cthem.\u201d This binary infects not only high politics but everyday conversations on social platforms, where people join digital tribes thoughtlessly. NPR\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This logic is far from novel. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, George W. Bush declared in his address to Congress: \u201cYou\u2019re either with us, or against us.\u201d The statement transcended mere positioning; it distilled a perilous logic: erase nuance, eliminate complexity, and recast politics as enemy detection. This echoes Carl Schmitt\u2019s 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 \u201csoft fascism\u201d in which opponents are deemed not merely mistaken but inhuman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The greater peril arises when this distinction devolves into dehumanization. Once \u201cus and the other\u201d dominates discourse, the other sheds human dignity: voice discredited, intent malevolent, existence threatening. The other becomes a monster. Giorgio Agamben\u2019s Homo Sacer (1995) describes this as \u201cbare life\u201d\u2014humans stripped of rights and reduced to ideological tools. Modern societies apply this to the \u201cuseless\u201d or \u201cenemy,\u201d rendering them rightless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Following operations against Islamic State in Iraq, a journalist visiting liberated areas later recounted a haunting personal reaction\u2014not to ISIS brutality, but to their own numbness upon seeing mutilated teenage fighters\u2019 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\u2019s 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 \u201cNazis\u201d to justify violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We might rationalize such deaths as inevitable or necessary to prevent greater harm\u2014arguments 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\u2019s necessity? Can we not pause amid conflict to ask what this violence inflicts on our souls? Analyses like Anna Szil\u00e1gyi\u2019s \u201cDangerous Metaphors: How Dehumanizing Rhetoric Works\u201d (2018) demonstrate that dehumanization destroys victims and transforms perpetrators into moral zombies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014such as in the U.S., where opponents have been labelled \u201canimals\u201d or \u201cnon-humans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pre-modern societies, even those we dismiss as \u201csavage,\u201d often tempered violence with ethical awareness: hunters prayed over animals, expressed gratitude, and vowed not to squander the life given. These rituals, analyzed by Ren\u00e9 Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972), channelled violence through ceremony to avert unchecked cycles of destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
History\u2019s wars contain parallel moments: bitter enemies treating fallen foes\u2019 bodies with respect\u2014not for purification, but for self-preservation. Respecting the enemy safeguards our own moral integrity. Such respect has grown scarce today\u2014evident in Iran\u2019s 2022 protests, where demonstrators are branded \u201crioters\u201d and opponents \u201cideological zombies.\u201d Reports like those from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2021) warn that dehumanization threatens democracy by enabling anti-democratic violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hannah Arendt\u2019s 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 \u201cbanality of evil\u201d arises when ordinary people cease questioning, rendering atrocities routine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014thoughtless, will-less\u2014carrying out orders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u20132024), where opponents are cast as \u201cinternal enemies\u201d and dehumanization mobilizes support. As recent studies note, such polarization escalates to extremism, eroding societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here we slip, unwittingly, from engaged humans into obedient ideological zombies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cus\/enemy\u201d 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\u2019s exploration of zombie manifestations in American culture highlights how zombies reflect repressed societal shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arendt returns: totalitarian systems destroy plurality and independent thought, producing mass-humans who execute without reflection. The banality of evil persists in modern contexts\u2014from populist politics to institutional failures\u2014turning ordinary people into modern zombies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In such environments, groups\u2014rulers or opposition, left or right, in Iran or America\u2014reduce society to \u201cthe people\u201d and \u201cnon-people,\u201d claiming exclusive representation. They demand not alliance but total assimilation: thought, language, and anger aligned precisely with their dictate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Criticism, questions, and doubts become betrayal. They seek will-less soldiers\u2014obedient, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In horror, this is when zombies swarm: any sign of divergent thought triggers assault\u2014not to persuade, but to convert or destroy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our era\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zombie politics may yield short-term gains\u2014mobilizing crowds, repelling foes\u2014but 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\u2019s bedrock\u2014the sole genuine antidote to zombification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zombifying political life poses the gravest threat to vital politics. The remedy lies in sustaining critical distance, defending thought\u2019s plurality, and resisting dehumanization. In a zombie-filled world, we must guard against becoming too like the dead to survive. Resistance can start practically\u2014fostering critical dialogue in media\u2014or simply with self-inquiry: Have I silenced my own mind today?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0Through 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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