Blinded Reason in "The Lottery" and in Nazi Germany

In the world we live in, we constantly have to be prepared to make moral judgments through our ability to reason. We need the ability to take an active role, asking ourselves whether something is right or wrong. The short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson is meant to shock and surprise readers by presenting an entire town’s inability to reason with a moral issue due to its traditions. It takes an unusually quiet approach to presenting a moral issue. The story leads the reader into a false sense of security through depicting an ordinary scene; nothing would make the reader put up his defenses or question the characters. However, the story ends with the execution of an innocent woman who was picked through the lottery, leaving reader wondering the reason for the killing.
Humans in history have often made moral decisions while thoroughly lacking reason, and sometimes tradition can blind even the strongest moral character. Just as in the story, moral issues can be quietly ignored in such a way that people do not see the brutal and sometimes inhumane acts committed through the lack of reason. History can teach us that anytime we are presented with a moral issue, we should step back and ask, "Is this truly the right thing, or am I being deceived? Am I acting blindly?” Thinking in a moral way, using our mind to decide what is wrong and what is right, is something we continuously learn throughout our lives. We have to decide what we will label as immoral and what is moral. Religion can shape our viewpoints, helping us decide what we believe is wrong or right. Our parents, friends, and daily life all influence how we look at morality. Human beings have a natural ability to see something as right or wrong; however, much of it depends on what has influenced them in their life. When a person is confronted with a moral issue, how does one go about going through the process of discovering the correct response? In the story “The Lottery,” we discover how the people of the town acted in regards to an old tradition of a yearly lottery in which one person from the town is chosen to be killed by stoning. Throughout the story, the people act nonchalantly, going about their day as if nothing usual is about to happen. Children are playing, men are discussing topics of the day, and the women are gossiping amongst themselves. It seems like an altogether ordinary day from the reader’s perspective. The characters prepare for lottery throughout the day, and the town seems almost abuzz with excitement for it to occur. The actions and language used by everyone in the town leads the reader to think that the lottery leads to some type of grand prize. However, as the story progresses and Tessie Hutchinson is selected, an unsettling sense of horror grips the reader as she claims the injustice of the drawing. The reality of the situation quickly unfolds: instead of a special prize for the drawing, Tessie is stoned to death by the people of the town. Even her children participate in the rock throwing, a final twist to the gruesome and shocking ending. The ending of the story forces the question, “why?” It seems so unnatural for people to kill each other in such a fashion. However, stepping back and looking at the story objectively reveals what low levels of reason the human mind can be brought to. Any person in their right mind would not allow such a tradition to be carried on: the brutal killing of a human, completely defenseless and innocent of any charge that would be worthy of death. What made the people in this town different? They had been deceived into thinking that they needed to have a lottery because of the history it held. They grew up with this tradition occurring every year; it was an accepted fact of the community. With enough deception most people can be misled into believing anything they are told. History is full of deception, but one of the greatest deceptive acts of the modern era occurred in World War II in the Nazi occupied Germany. Hitler, the leader of the Nazi regime, passed laws and created programs in order to exterminate the Jewish people off of the planet. This massive program of extermination is called the “Holocaust,” and it will go down in history as one of the most organized mass murdering schemes the world has ever seen. Approximately six million Jews were exterminated during this time, which was almost seventy percent of the entire Jewish population in Europe. While history does not know what percentage of German citizens knew about Jewish extermination, it was a known fact throughout the German military. Those in power in Nazi Germany vehemently believed that the Jews were such a national threat that they convinced the good part of a nation that action had to be taken in order to keep the Nazi state solidly in power. The lack of reason in “The Lottery” is the same that we see by many Germans in World War II. Sadly, they allowed their minds to be filled with lies from their leaders, propaganda, news stories, and countless other sources that claimed the Jews to be “inferior.” Because Nazi Germany was striving to create the ultimate race of people, the citizens saw this action as fitting. Remove an inferior race, and you will become a stronger people. Their ability to reason beyond this was completely removed through direct and intentional actions by the Nazi regime via propaganda and an overly devoted sense of national pride. They actively went out looking for Jews, making it almost a game sometimes. In “The Lottery,” the casual killing of a person to parallels the actions of the Nazis. Both were done without question and with no remorse for the death of another human being. Life continued on as if nothing happened after a person is killed in both instances, even if the blood was on their hands. History is bound to repeat itself, and “The Lottery” was written in an effort to make others aware of the damning effects passive reasoning can have on our world. Many events in history can be understood through a lack of morality in a person, group, city, or nation. When a person stops thinking for himself, he becomes a tool, a machine that will do whatever it is told and will not question those who are in charge. In the Nazi regime, there was no questioning of the actions led against the Jews. In the town in “The Lottery” there was indifference to what was happening that day. Not a single question asked about why a person was being killed. It didn’t matter who it was, it had to be done because tradition dictated their minds. Therefore, each of us must be constantly aware of the moral hazards that come about from not going about a situation with reason. If we do not have reason, we cannot discover Truth, and if we do not pursue Truth, we have lost a fundamental part of being a human being.