Yet another novel I will no longer write
antipope.org
antipope.org
But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse.
The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment.
I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people.
After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.
The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed.
This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.
Yes. And so far the local responses have been better, or at least did less damage, than most of the more centralized actions. Like the FDA banning almost all tests.
Here's an article https://reaction.life/why-is-germany-able-to-test-for-corona... exploring aspects of centralization vs decentralization by way of comparing the German and UK responses to the pandemic so far.
The German system has centralized advice and coordination from the Robert Koch institute, but no centralized institution to ban local initiatives.
> The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.
Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:
> Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes.
I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading.
Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers.
0: https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-t...
There's really no getting around the influence of real-world race and class attitudes in shaping zombie fiction.
IMO, zombie movies symbolize a desire that people have to be free from the usual norms of society. More broadly, there is some part of us that desires chaos, and sees it as freeing. In a post-apocalyptic zombie world, there are no jobs, no rent to pay, no worrying about grooming yourself or fancy clothes, etc. Zombies are irredeemable, unsalvageable enemies. It's kill or be killed. In some ways, you could say that's simpler than modern society, with its many parallel games, hierarchies and rigid structures. In zombieland, there are no rules.
Beyond that, zombie movies are also an outlet for people to channel that pent up rage. They like to fantasize that they would be the badass survivor, shooting zombies in the head with a shotgun and chopping them up with axes, in some kind of ultimate "fuck you" to society. But hey, it's okay to kill people now, in that world, it's completely legit, they're no longer people.
Personally, I don't watch zombie movies because I feel like there's enough real drama in the world that I don't need to worry about gross imaginary drama. I also don't think it's the healthiest thing to cultivate violent fantasies where you kill everyone. Your life, your real life, may have its share of problems, but this definitely isn't how you're going to escape them.
As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.
That's obviously what they want you to think!
I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.
It wasn't a veer. The show was always about the seven kingdoms bickering among themselves instead of facing the actual threat that they could have unified against.
(Or at least it was until the last few seasons were written by someone other than the original author, said author having not even come close to finishing the book series.)
Just look at the first episode. It doesn't start in Winterfell or King's Landing. It starts north of the wall.
> "It can be... traumatic. Because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don't match, and you get the famous creative differences thing — that leads to a lot of conflict," he told Fast Company.
1: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10034023/george-rr-mar...
It's an important story to tell, and I think your dismissals are indicative of the same flaw as the characters: thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species.
It's a flaw of these characters, and also of the contemporary society. There's a kind of distance towards "petty struggles" of everyday life that I'd consider a part of being mature.
Related: this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.
I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. Much of the sci‑fi and fantasy I've enjoyed over the years does both.
Certainly there's more tolerance for flat characters in sci‑fi than in other genres because you can focus on ideas, I agree with that.
But if all the characters in your story are flat, it does impact the quality. You can have good sci‑fi with flat characters, but great sci‑fi requires both interesting ideas and interesting characters. (And that's not quite enough either, but that's a tangent we don't need to get into)
GRRM's novels will deal with the same undead hoard, but I highly doubt they will read like 'just another zombie book'. That's what separates legendary artists from the nameless commercial hacks--the ability to take something that has been done to death and make it feel fresh and exciting.
Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite.
This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.
I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.
This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie horde. So there's a huge selection bias.
This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of society are still working and the infected are not going out of their way to infect more people. And even now we're already seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-themselves attitude around medical equipment.
The simple hypotheses is that the virus wants the host to spread as much as possible.
Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.
Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the rabble.
The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.
The truly elite use that fear. They aren’t afraid themselves.
It traces its roots to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Maoist Revolution, where the rich/elite were slaughtered and imprisoned by mobs of peasants.
By comparison, the middle class didn't exist when these revolutions took place. The "middle class" is a very new construct that is only a few decades old, dating back to the post WWII economic boom.
The US has a peculiar definition which includes workers who would normally be considered working class. The true middle classes are usually professionals with advanced specialisms that require above-average intellect and education, and typically include some element of management and administration. They have some political leverage, but typically less than they think.
This version of the middle classes emerged as the administrative, technical, scientific, medical, and legal support for company owners and speculators during the Industrial Revolution. This is still recognisable today. (It was a huge problem during the Maoist revolution, and Mao went out of his way to destroy and "reeducate" this class - because they were capable of resisting him.)
The upper classes rely on inherited wealth and power, make their money from property, land, share ownership and other forms of rent seeking, have direct personal connections to networks that shape policy and power, and don't need to work unless they choose to.
Sounds to me that the need to move behind walls is a pretty strong indicator of the elite panic concept you are criticizing.
After all, if they didn't panicked then why did they felt the need to coward behind those walls and man them with armed minions?
And by the way, "fear the walking dead" is packed with seasons where the protagonists find themselves in a gated community where armed guards and passive protection measures are extensively used to keep the menacing zombies at Bay while living a pretty comfy life. Sounds a bit like Venezuela, doesn't it?
Sounds to me you're exhibiting "elite panick" while being completely oblivious to it.
Almost no one buckles their seatbelt fully expecting to crash in the next 5 minutes. That doesn't invalidate taking the precautions.
If you mean 'anyone who has exploited the community around them to the point that they themselves come off as a predator and danger to the community', this would very likely explain why they could 'afford' to build a castle, but might also shed some light on WHY they might practically require a castle, or soldiers.
This is the basic trope. Many of the Kulaks were simply peasants who knew how to farm better than their neighbors.
Funny, but the same justification is used against (often non-white) store owners in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where their only "crime" was simply running a store in that neighborhood. Some genuinely good people who create value are genuinely creating value. That also doesn't mean they're exempt from receiving delusional accusations of exploitation. By the same token, there are some exploiters as well. However such judgments can only be just on the basis of individual actions.
As always, we should be on the look out for those who use overly simplistic and reductionist prejudicial assumptions to make accusations. Over time, they often turn out to be history's villains.
Yes. It's a belief based on pseudo-morality, where those who are not privileged are portrayed as being rude uncultured barbarians who, without resorting to extreme violence and oppression, would represent a threat to their pure and pristine existence and social order.
It's the same argument that slave owners used to justify beating slaves to death.
>If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for taking steps to avoid being murdered.
You somehow left out the part where these elites resort to extreme violence and oppression to deprive their neighbors from fulfilling basic needs and instead of helping the community they outright represent a very real and very violent threat to them.
And then, as a feat of cognitive dissonance, these elites cowarding behind their castle walls try to fabricate a moral basis for the violence and oppression they inflict on the very society that permitted their life of privilege.
Looking at say the fall of the USSR it was well connected elites that ended up making vast fortunes.
This is akin to saying "well if some wifes cheat, being a paranoid, jealous husband is perfectly reasonable". It's not that bad things never happen to elites, it's a cognitive disorder because the paranoia is structural, regardless of what actually happens.
It's a disorder because the panic is a function of their social status and their position in society that they know is to a degree unearned (in particular in countries like South Africa or wheverever else the elite is a hereditary class), so in a sense they anticipate the resentment that is rightfully coming their way.
It's like, if you're a habitual liar and thief you also tend to think everyone else is as opportunistic as you are, and sometimes you're right, but that's not why you believe it in the first place.
Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the travel restrictions across countries [0].
> The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.
Makes sense.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/trapped-b...
And to drive the point home even more: many high-status politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19 and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.
Most won't die unless they're in a vulnerable age group. But they will spread the infection to friends, family, and colleagues, some of whom will die.
The median age in the House of Lords is 70.
As for elite panic - armed gangs are already a thing in the UK and US. The suggestion they wouldn't move into a power vacuum left by the police/military when they're already battling for turf with violence, extortion, and intimidation is hard to take seriously.
Yes, there are plenty of people who will help others, especially in nice middle class enclaves. But you only need a small minority of dark triad types willing to use violence to create an immediate problem for everyone.
Also note, that many (though not all) of the "aristos" executed in the French Revolution were people lower down on the hierarchy. These were the people more easily visible and accessible to the mob.
The panic strikes the middle group the most, because the danger is the most real for them!
Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these rules as 'laws'.
This happens because every gang eventually understands that in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.
No crime is better than organized crime is better than widespread disorganized crime.
Hello? It's not 1990. Look at the crime stats. There's plenty wrong with today, but there isn't much organized or disorganized crime.
As such, I highly recommend Weber's "Economy and Society" [2].
In modern times the process is, of course, can go much faster than in 2000BC, because everyone can see a template of a working system before their eyes in the form of existing countries, so they can just copy-paste the basic law / organizational structure instead of slowly inventing them.
Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do.
In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
That's starkly contradicted by the absence of toilet paper and other staples on store shelves at the individual level and the ongoing profiteering on and commandeering of medical protective gear and other medical supplies at the international level.
And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American plantation class was so terrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
FYI, there is at least one book written on the subject based on research of real-world disasters
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built...
Cory Doctorow writes about it as well:
https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-peopl...
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/cor...
It is hardly Mr Stross's own idea, and I would not dismiss it so glibly after a minute's thought and a very shallow understanding.
My father was a high-ranking US diplomat stationed in Taiwan during the early White Terror years. You have no idea how hard the people on the ground were working to stop Taiwan from tipping over in to a full dictatorship. It may seem hard to believe nowadays, but this was the era of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan- US foreign policy was strongly focused on building allies' infrastructure, both civil and legal.
If you consider a zombie story in the vein of The Walking Dead, we're confronted with a world where something like 90-99% of humanity is dead or zombified. Governments are gone, militaries are gone, industry is gone. I expect we'd see a pretty violent world where people try to protect their immediate family and are naturally distrustful of all but small groups of people. I don't think this has anything to do with so-called "elite panic"; if you reduce people to constantly struggling to fulfill basic survival needs, and remove any kind of laws or consequences, people will do whatever they need to do, and resorting to violence will end up quite common.
There's one unsettling fact I keep thinking about in regards to this topic - before everything went to hell, Rwanda and Afghanistan both had higher literacy rates than was typical for their respective regions. I think Stross's very middle class values are out of touch with the reality of the human condition in a way that both the very rich and the poor aren't.
I say this as a fan of the Laundry files, I think he might be having trouble imagining realistic near-future settings because realistic depictions of the near future don't have a middle class, and that is not something Stross can quite envision.
>The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.
Only if the disaster is relatively manageable. History has many examples of elites being killed during political upheaval.
Not all. Read some anthropology and you'll find interesting examples of large non-hierarchical societies.
Georgia Rep. Paul Broun released an ad warning that "in uncertain times like these," it’s important to protect yourself against "looting hordes from Atlanta" along with video of him carrying a rifle.
This really hit home for me. It has always struck me as supremely odd, the civilization-breakdown fantasies that people have when I suggest that everyone in a society, not just the police, have easy and unrestrained access to arms, as advocated by many throughout history. This seems to be their worldview: without the threat of cop (with superior firepower than any random person), that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict.
It’s plainly wrong on its face, even without invoking the reality that there are many peaceful and prosperous places in the US wherein the private arms significantly outnumber those of the state.
I have tried for a long time to understand this view, and Charlie just dropped in the missing puzzle piece. This almost makes up for how wrong he’s been about bitcoin.
To provide context, here is some data on that:
"cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/road-rage-guns.html
That doesn't amount to "civilization-breakdown", but whether it's a level that's worth worrying about is something different people will feel differently about. I suspect it is a higher number of cases (per capita) than many other countries with stricter gun laws.
You can’t really stop road ragers from getting out of their car with the intent to hit someone. You can indeed convince them that attacking armed strangers is a bad idea—without anyone being hurt.
Providing context means, well, providing context, not just tossing out a composite figure without background or breakdown. A good actual context for that would be the not-gun-related road rage assault figures before and after, and what percentage of that increase is brandished (no one injured) vs shot/shot at (violence that should be prevented/reduced).
Also, I wouldn't exactly feel good if someone cut me off for driving a little too slow for them and they waved a gun at me. Somehow these arguments make that OK as if it isn't an escalation or is "oh well gee at least we didn't fist fight."
Coronavirus has only just overtaken the US's normal firearms death toll.
“Our claim is most controversial,and tenuous, regarding the idea of elite panic.We believe that elites panic just as non-elites do. Because the positions they occupy command the power to move resources, elite panic is more consequential than public panic.”
The paper overall references the fact that that historically, people in authority assume the public will panic, and most data suggests that they don’t. And ‘elites’ in this context means those in authority, not “rich and/or privileged people”.
They actually discus three possibilities: that 1) elites fear panic 2) elites cause panic 3) elites themselves panic
However, the paper certainly doesn’t suggest that ‘elites’ are somehow more prone to panic than the rest of society.
“Elites and Panic : more to fear than fear itself” Clarke and Chess
Pdf at https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/2964/7c0b4f9dec1b897ad09a6565ffbfc...
It’s so emotionally compressed into one vibe and hyper stylized visually how anyone can sit down with the intent of making real sense of it is bizarre.
It’s highly customized to satisfy a target audience. Not generalized like so much other media.
Go interact with real people, or create your own.
I’ve been curating a space opera for a decade. 3,000+ typed pages.
I have no desire to give it up to the public and find it almost meditative. Haven’t seen any of the new SW movies, or sci fi in the last decade. I borrow ideas as Lucas, etc did. It all just flows.
I don’t really owe society a financial return on my endeavors either.
Grew up this way though. I honestly don’t care if anyone ever finds value in my efforts.
Putting in work to satisfy others isn’t why I get up in the morning.
Let go of market economics and free yourself to be a multi disciplinarian.
https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor...
It's very ugly, but not what you describe.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/b...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-looters/
The thesis is that a community (euphemistically termed a "subculture") of older African Americans in Philadelphia refuse to participate in the quarantine due to their skepticism of the federal government's public health directives due to previous medical conspiracies, namely the Tuskegee Experiments.
0: https://6abc.com/health/expert-says-subculture-still-thinks-...
A lot of that sounds like projection.
People have too much faith in "normality", rule of law and relative stability and don't realize that stuff like that breaks down and stops working very easily, with even minor disruptions. Power plants are suddenly not supplied with oil, being stopped by a cop can be scarier than being stopped by a robber, and if you confront someone trying to break down a building door in the middle of the day their response is "so what are you going to do? go away before you get in trouble". etc. Or as some guy from Argentina described, if someone steps in front of your car you hit the gas, not the break. Heck, the order broke down in NO after Katrina - and it was a small, short-lived, localized inconvenience by developing world standards.
The "elite panic" is spot on and should not be confined to the elites, especially given the non-existent safety net, and the widespread accessibility of firearms.
But are they wrong?
I'm not saying you and me and all the nice friendly people you know are like this, deep down. I mean, some of us probably are and are just good at hiding it, but many of us aren't. But in a Malthusian scenario where survival is at a premium and the material abundance of modern civilization is no longer here, who do you think is going to survive?
I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?
Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.
Not true for Shaun of the Dead!
For zombies the point (and the plot) should always revolve around the existential dread of relentless, never-ending hordes of beings who want to eat your brains.
It's like the old story about the very best thing superman could do is simply turn a crank powering the world's energy. All that flying around saving people is actually a massive, inefficient, effectively people-killing, waste of time.
Try writing many series of comics about that though!
You could sell cycles on the zombie cloud.
I think it's pretty reasonable that early on in a zombie apocalypse, "enterprising individuals" would be just trying to figure out how to stay alive.
I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority.
I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!
P.S. Local press had an item about an "International Writers Committee" naming Borges for the 2018 prize posthumously: https://www.dn.pt/lusa/comite-internacional-de-escritores-at...
> That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.
> It’s also a fantastic novel.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/the-theory-of-i...
> This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived.
Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun.
You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from:
"A Colder War" http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (not Laundry Files, but in the ballpark)
"Equoid" https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/
For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
He wrote the first book in the 1000+ page "door stop" form common to a lot of "high fantasy" mega-authors like Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, GRRM, Robert Jordan, et al, because Stross wrongly assumed that was the intended form factor of a fantasy novel (because it wasn't his native genre and when you do look at bookshelves they are rather dominated by the mega-books), and the publisher did exactly what JRR Tolkien's publisher did for Lord of the Rings and said it was way too long for a first book in a new series, as that would be expensive if it didn't sell well, and chopped it (somewhat roughly) into three books. (So the combination of the first three books was actually recombination into something more resembling their original manuscript form.)
There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all.
The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part.
Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Rule34
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HaltingSta...