Social pressure can be a powerful thing, whether it for what is thought to be for the good of mankind or carrying out a long and depressing journey in humankind’s degeneration into a machine of hate, rage and destruction. In Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" is a powerful piece of writing describing the horrors that can occur when "normal” people are immersed in times of despair. In a world full of tradition, it seemed to be just an ordinary town just beyond the boundaries of the countryside, until the once a year gamble that every member took part in, as everyone waited in anticipation for the papers to be unfolded. Mrs. Hutchinson pledged the idea that it wasn't fair, it wasn't right. When the time came it was indeed Mrs. Hutchinson who the townspeople turned on and stoned as she was the unlucky winner of the lottery. Jackson identifies this story with the events of the holocaust where millions of people were brutally murdered in one of the biggest bloodbaths the world has seen still to this day. This posed the idea that authority such as the mayor and Hitler well succeed in letting these events to unfold. In the Stanford Prison experiment for example: In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo tried to show that prison guards and convicts would tend to slip into predefined roles, behaving in a way that they thought was required, rather than using their own judgment and morals. He wanted show the dehumanization and loosening of social and moral values that can happen to guards immersed in such a situation. Keep in mind these were quote on quote "normal" people. Why makes people perform this revulsion? Elie Wiesel the author of the speech "The Perils of Indifference" believed that people not caring was more dangerous than anger itself such as the lack of a plan of rescue for the victims of the Holocaust or just a fear itself and the pure determination of survival itself in "The Lottery"
