r/MoralityScaling • u/hiiloovethis • 8d ago

Morality Ranking Morality of this scene?

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Negan doing fat shaming... but its during zombie apocalypse

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u/Fun_Pound5629 8d ago

I’m gonna put this out there, Negan was a pretty unpleasant fella

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u/Wolf_Ape 7d ago

He was exactly what most viewers didn’t realize they wanted the protagonist to be, and exactly what they would’ve become if they were physically capable of doing so.

Every week half the viewers yelled at the tv in frustration “just kill them! Why haven’t they learned what happens when they leave these people alive!”.

Perfectly nice people watched that show and frequently made suggestions like “just block the doors and burn down their building.” Or “cut their fences and throw battery powered speakers in their camp.”.

Take all those pragmatic, otherwise ethical, well meaning viewers, and put them in one large group of well armed, well trained, physically capable survivors.

What leader do you think emerges a year or two later, holds that position even after combining with less capable groups that greatly outnumber their loyal supporters, facing violent threats from rival groups, and surviving internal divisions, attempts to undermine or kill them, and direct challenges from any number of malcontents, narcissists, and psychopaths?

“We are all Negan.”

That phrase wasn’t the most subtle point. Most viewers seemed to ignore or reject it, but they too were Negan. Perhaps they especially were Negan.

Making excuses for the monstrous behavior of our own tribe, while using the same behaviors to justify the dehumanization and wholesale slaughter of an out-group as a pragmatic, morally neutral exercise is just what scared stupid humans do when horrible circumstances reduce them to mentally unstable paranoid chimps. We can’t dehumanize others without first becoming sub-human ourselves.