Zombies Don’t Know They’re Zombies

Stop Following. Start Thinking.

An unquestioning mind is highly vulnerable. Without the habit of critical scrutiny, a person absorbs the moral blind spots, biases, and systemic cruelties of their specific time and place without even realising it.

​Historically, some of the worst atrocities were not committed by cackling villains, but by ordinary, unquestioning people who were simply “doing their job,” following orders, or conforming to societal norms.

Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust’s logistics, was not a frothing fanatic. He was a bureaucrat. At his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, he insisted, repeatedly, that he had only followed orders — a defence so chillingly mundane that the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined a phrase for what she observed in him: the banality of evil. The horror, she argued, was not that Eichmann was a monster. It was that he wasn’t. He had simply never developed the habit of thinking for himself.

That is the quiet danger of an unexamined life. Evil rarely announces itself. It hides in routine, in deference, in the comfort of belonging — and it finds its easiest home in a mind that has stopped asking questions.

To begin questioning is to claim your autonomy. It is the moment you transition from being a passive product of your environment to an active author of your own character.

​When you ask, “Is this law actually just?”, “Why do I hold this prejudice?”, or “What is the real human cost of my choices?”, you are doing something profoundly uncomfortable but entirely necessary. You are stripping away the comforting fog of ignorance.

This sums up one of Socrates’ popular theories: The unexamined life is not worth living. Fela Kuti’s popular song, “Zombie”, follows the same path. Perhaps if we examine ourselves and what we’re involved in, maybe the outcome will be different for us and the world at large.

PS: A ghastly motor accident in Lagos at the age of five led to the amputation of one of my legs at nine. My memoir, Orchestrated: Living Against the Odds, which chronicles the thirty years that followed and how I navigated systems that were not designed with me in mind, will soon be out. Watch out.