What, you would rather we told people the truth? That it wasn't a new strain of rabies but a mysterious uber-plague that reanimated the dead? Can you imagine the panic that would have happened: the protest, the riots, the billions in damage to private property? Can you imagine all those wet-pants senators who would have brought the government to a standstill. administration is in full, on-message denial. Hence, at the beginning of World War Z, the big plague is on its way but the U.S. Regimes only want "threats" that keep the money coming and the people in check. For ruling establishments especially, the pressure to keep people oblivious can be all the more acute because admitting to big danger directly threatens legitimacy. It allows us, even encourages us, to live in denial of the biggest new threats. New thinking tells us that consciousness itself is an evolutionary adaptation, and it is easy to see how being self-aware helped us survive.īut consciousness also can limit what we see. We survived, so scientists tell, by learning to eat shellfish. There, the last remnants of humanity, a few ragged bands of us, fought off extinction by climate change.
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The worst of these came 150,000 years ago at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. Anthropologists call these events bottlenecks. But it should still try, because zombies do matter.Ĭollective Therapy How did we humans manage to get this far? We have been on the rocks several times. Brad Pitt and Hollywood's movie of the novel may not matter in the end, and it may not sing like the book. As a window into the soul, it offers America two paths: one into darkness and extinction, the other into greatness beyond anything we have yet achieved.
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As worst-case strategic analysis, it reveals the human future that is coming but we still cannot yet bear to face. As collective therapy, it shows how we will find a way to keep hoping, and to celebrate just being alive. World War Z fulfills its literary promise on all three civilizational levels. It is a history with the full sweep of a grand narrative directly addressing every one of life's big questions. Yes, high: like Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Graves's I Claudius, or Orwell's 1984. But only Max Brooks's World War Z elevates zombies to high literature.
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The civilizational significance of zombies is there in all cultural treatments, AMC's The Walking Dead being a revelation among them. A Rare Universal Pattern in Human Languages Rachel Gutman-Wei