Blind Obedience To Authority In The Lottery By Shirley Jackson

Throughout history, obedience has played a crucial and important role in countless numbers of peoples’ lives. Obedience is practiced and learned by everyone. As we can observe from Milgram’s studies, it doesn’t take only poor, uneducated people to be blindly obedient. Educated people can be just as prone to become obedient to authority as uneducated individuals. In, “The Lottery”, by Shirley Jackson, there is evidence that suggests a phenomena between being blindly obedient and respecting tradition. Many aspects of the experiment can be used as evidence in “The Lottery”. In “The Lottery”, people can be easily obedient to an authoritative figure.
“The Lottery” is an interesting story that illustrates the same concept of blind obedience to authority.

Throughout the story, traditional beliefs are still practiced. “The Lottery”, in short, is the tradition of killing an innocent person every year. In the story, we don’t know the main motive or reason of the lottery. The first factor that emerges is tradition. All citizens that participated in the lottery were born into the tradition. They were not present during its creation. Being born into it, there is no reason to be in opposition to the practice. All we know is that the lottery has been going on for multiple generations, as said by Old Man Warner, “‘Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,’”(Jackson 4). As Tessie’s name is called, she argued that her husband Bill was not given enough time to pick: “‘I think we ought to start over,’ Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. ‘I tell you it wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that”’(Jackson 6). This is crucial to the story. One can suggest that Tessie was opposing the lottery, yet this evidence suggests otherwise. Tessie wanted a revote. She wanted someone else to get picked. This is an example of blind obedience. She didn’t want to stop the function as a whole.
There are two existential factors that play a large and predominant role in the phenomena of being blindly obedient.

The first factor is responsibility. For example, executioners who conduct the death penalty on inmates feel little or no remorse. The responsibility is on the person who knowingly committed the act and broke the law. To executioners, it is a job. They do their job to get paid and provide for their families. They are not reprimanded for killing the person. The executioner is told by an authoritative figure to perform his duty, which may or may not be morally wrong. Milligram’s experiment mimics the career of an executioner superbly, illustrating obedience to authority in given situations. In “The Lottery”, a reward of good fortune and bountiful crops are given to the people for killing a person. The conflict in this story becomes not what is morally correct, but what must be done to keep the majority of people content. Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery, can be connected to the executioner. He only undertakes the tasks of the annual lottery, but he doesn't explicitly kill the random person. This goes back to the class discussion about responsibility during the Holocaust. We systematically reviewed how people denied explicitly killing the Jews. In “The Lottery”, responsibility is

ambiguous.
The second factor of being blindly obedient is the effect of authority. The reason such educated individuals were prone to hurting innocent people in Milgram’s experiment is because the notion of obedience, in this case towards the experimenter. This experiment provided helpful evidence that identified how the brain reacted to authority “With remarkable similarity, they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experiment…These predictions were unequivocally wrong” (qtd. in Behrens and Rosen 634). The experimenter gave instructions to these educated individuals. Because the experimenter was a doctor, and people habitually obey doctors’ orders, it is supposedly understandable that the individuals were to be obedient. In “The Lottery” we don’t know if people went against their moral behaviors. Besides the fact, they proceeded to stone Tessie who had done nothing to deserve being killed. Those who stoned Tessie were educated people who just were obeying the natural, unwritten rule of the lottery. Comparing “The Lottery” to Milgram’s experiment, both display people habitually obeyed orders.
Social pressure play a huge role in society and is tightly connected to blind obedience. In Solomon Asch’s experiment, a single individual was socially pressured to pick the wrong answer; “Others who acted independently came to believe that the majority was correct in its answers” (qtd. in Behrens and Rosen 657). Subjects in this experiment would pick the wrong answer simply because the majority picked it. Subjects consciously picked the wrong answer to “fit in”. People consider the majority to be authoritative figures. Solomon Asch’s experiment further suggest as the minority grows, the less obedient one becomes to authority, yet if the minority is few, obedience to authority increases. In “The Lottery”, we cant conclude that anybody opposed the practice because others didn’t either. Everyone felt as if it were just another duty, like a job or task. Together, people felt as if it were reasonable to kill somebody for small reasons such as crop growth.
Blind obedience can be witnessed at different extremes in the world. One can witness a drastic social effect of blind obedience in North Korea. In North Korea, citizens revere Kim Jong-un as a god. The people of North Korea are blindly obedient to Kim Jong-un. They feel as if he knows what is best simply because he was born into a position of power. This is an extreme example of obedience. This is parallel with tradition in “The Lottery”. Most adult citizens in contemporary North Korea were born under the presence of Kim Jong-Il as all citizens were born into the tradition of stoning a random person annually. From other articles, we can suggest that “The Lottery” incorporated many different styles of blind obedience. This story helped us identify the process of being blindly obedient. Using evidence from “The Lottery”, Milgram’s study, and Asch’s experiment, it is not entirely surprising that citizens today still obey a powerful figure of authority. Tradition, responsibility, and social pressure all play are part in becoming blindly obedient to an authoritative figure. Through multiple experiments and recurrent historical trends, it is evident that blind obedience is not only prevalent, but is also deceivingly plausible to effect any person in any educated class or social division.