Dehumanization

Yesterday was my first day back on campus. Speaking of rituals and sacrifices, oddly enough the story we read in my literature class was just that. It was The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Long story short, a small town of 300 people gather once a year for an  event they call a lottery. The children gathered stones in their pocket and made a big pile of it, as well. Thinking it was a normal, modern day lottery where someone wins a huge load of cash, it was anything but that. Each family in the town pulled a slip of paper from a black box and one family gets chosen to come up. Each member from the family chosen had to pull a slip of paper from the black box again. Here's the demonic part. The family member that pulled a slip of paper with a mark on it gets stoned to death, even by their own family and friends.

This story reminds me of a topic question one of my previous teachers talked about in the past. Regarding the Holocaust, why did Hitler's followers conform to kill so much people? They are all human, after all. How could Hitler persuade an army of human beings to wipe out an entire human race? Same question applies to Jackson's story. How could a small town, where most probably know each other well, go along with a tradition to violently kill one person per year even if the victim is their own family or friend?


Psychologically, we talked about how people act different in groups. As an individual person, they differentiate between right and wrong; however, studies show that people would do things they would not normally do if they are in a crowd. It's because a person is not alone if everyone else is doing it, kind of like peer pressure. Being in a crowd acts as somewhat of a coverage of a crime because then that crime will be looked at as a whole instead of each person individually. A person hidden in a crowd gets a sense of being able to get away with whatever crime that is done. And it's sad to know that humans in crowds can be dehumanized,