Conformity In A Day And The Lottery

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One of the most cruel moments in history, the Holocaust, had a jumpstart to happen because of a simple thing in human nature. Conformity. The. Conformity is the idea of following the crowd, doing “what everyone else is doing” in a group or society. It’s something that brings people together and de-individualizes people, often making their behavior and decisions different than how they would be if they did things on their own, without a form of crowd to judge or impact those actions. This can be a good thing, creating unity and cultural cooperation. However, there are many negative outcomes to conformity as well. “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson are both stories built on this idea of conformity. The “All Summer in a …show more content…
In the story, the children don’t listen to the girl from Earth when she says that the sun will come out, and they bully her because of her refusal to conform like the rest of them. They didn’t like that she was different, so “they surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door” (Bradbury 4). In “The Lottery,” an individual is harmed by a form of conformity. After the lottery was over and the winner was revealed, “Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. ‘It isn’t fair’, she said. A stone hit her on the side of her head” (Jackson 8). An article called “The Dangers of Tradition” by Bakari Bosa helps support this, and states that “the fact remains that we often follow traditions without question, and while there are many worthwhile traditions, there are some that connect us to history and culture at the risk and detriment of others. This is when reverence for tradition can become a dangerous thing” (Bosa
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