In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, we see a town using a lottery as the basis of an execution. This means, any person chosen by random from a random family would be stoned to death. This has been a long tradition during the time of the story. This cruel tradition reflects the ignorance and the frequent capability of us human beings to turn against each other in today’s day and age. Therefore, Shirley Jackson’s comment on our modern society is that the viciousness of the human race has increased where people ruthlessly put people under the bus in order for them to go forward. People, nowadays, follow traditions blindly, believing something is the right thing to do, when it is really not.
In “The Lottery”, at first, everyone is hoping and praying that their family does not get chosen. This means that they are hoping and praying someone else’s family gets chosen instead. In this instance, any form of community is gone. If they were friendly neighbors yesterday, today they are people wishing death sentences upon each other. This is what Shirley Jackson has portrayed the modern society to have become. While it may not be on such extremes, personal gain has become a big motive in today’s society, especially in the world of business. Sabotage has been one of the key instruments in this pursuit for personal gain. In this story, no one is physically sabotaging anyone, but the hope to have the other persons family chosen is bad enough.
Another factor that adds on to the ignorance of the people is how they blindly follow this tradition without seeing any flaw in it. Randomly picking a person and killing them does not accomplish anything, and the people of this town fail to see that. While other towns are ending this tradition, the ones who still practice it believe that the end to such a tradition will only bring chaos. This form of ignorance can be seen through the modern nationalism, where ones nation may be corrupt, but a person would be too engrossed in the way things are and their nationality, that they would look over all the flaws. Modern society has its way of prolonging traditions, good ones and bad. This is what Jackson attempts to comment on as far as the ignorance of the towns people goes.
