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  • Essay / Aspects of human nature in "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

    The dystopian story is a kind of science fiction. It's always a "what if" society where the author takes one or more social issues to the extreme. "The Lottery" was written by Shirley Jackson and was first published in 1948. As World War II had just ended, it revealed the cruelty and violence hidden in humanity 27 years after the Great War. Shirley Jackson highlighted and discussed how humanity dealt with violence in this kind of story. I will point out and argue about three different human natures and why it is important to think about them. Humans are undeniably self-preserved to the extent of our lives. A few billion years ago, our ancestors, Homo sapiens, massacred all other human species and made us the overlord of this planet. As Charles Robert Darwin said, we are “survival of the fittest”. Humans are always ready to sacrifice others to save themselves, because all animals do it to survive. In "The Lottery", after Bill Hutchinson gets the paper with the dot on it, Tessie wishes her daughters, who had married, to draw with their husbands, to increase her chances of living. Tessie was pretty popular in the lottery at first. However, she only stood up to protest, "It's not fair, it's not right" because she is the one being affected. By then it was clearly too late. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay But how could other villagers give up the opportunity to save themselves from sacrifice? So, they reminded Tessie that “we all took the same chance.” Jackson gave him a view on human self-preservation in this text, according to which people would accept violence or other actions as long as they do not directly harm them. It is important to think about our humanity. It helps us know our true selves better, even though sometimes human nature can be cruel and terrible. This dystopian story also warned us about what would happen if we didn't have the right control over our self-preservation, and how terrible that could be. Our society has an unwritten rule that the many oppose the few or we can say that the minority is subordinate to the majority. I think it's human nature to conform to the great flow. We feel safest when we are with as many people as possible. Therefore, people sometimes seem to forget to ask themselves, is the majority always the truth? In "The Lottery", the moment Tessie was "marked" as different, the villagers she had lived with most of her life attacked her. There must be someone who didn't want to destroy Tessie. Because they constitute a minority in this condition, if they stand out, they are likely to be rejected by society. With encouragement from the other villagers, Old Man Warner exhorts them, saying "Go, go, everyone." No one wants to stay away from crime and violence. Jackson suggested that we should pay attention to those traditions that persist only because everyone is afraid to oppose the majority. She also suggested that we not fear nonconformity because it might push people to do immoral things. This is important because when this becomes a unified perception of society, it could become another “Lottery”. In real life, Nazi Germany used conformity to eliminate Jews because it was for the "good" of the majority. These’.