What Are The Similarities Between 1984 And The Lottery

George Orwell’s 1984 and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery both take place in two different scenarios of human civilization. George Orwell’s story depicts the distressful life of a rebellious and aware ruling-class member fighting a world of totalitarianism and lies while Jackson tells the story of a dark ritual born from an isolated rustic life. While the plots may differ, the theme of both stories ask the question: how can somebody be capable of this? Both stories show how the indoctrination of children into a malevolent culture enable the inability of individuals to apply logical thought which allows two antipodal civilizations to commit atrocity. One integral role that perpetuates the dark acts in these stories is derived from the indoctrination

When selecting notes, one can notice that the adults all seem spiteful towards people trying to avoid the system that they believe permits them viable harvests (394). This is because their criticism is reinforced by a decreased probability of selection which can then be self-justified as a false belief that they will benefit from their sacrifice (394). And, as the people get older, they accrue resentment toward younger people due to the fact that it was them that took the statistical sacrifice for so many years. Old Man Warner subtly terrorizes the village with threats that civilization will turn back to the caveman era in the absence of the lottery (393). When other village people address the thought that the lottery may actually be useless, he harshly rejects these thoughts either through his own self-reinforced spite against future generations having it better than he did, or through a less likely adamant belief of the tradition (393). Either way, the village is perpetually stuck in a cycle where the older people in the village refuse to allow the tradition to be questioned or removed, and thus enable the stoning to partake and be ingrained in future