Blind conformities towards customs: The death of all peace? An intelligent being once said "Living in this modern toxic world, we are all slowly being poisoned to death" Carrie Latet The Great Chain of Being, a perception of the universe held by Westerners, touches on this saying by personifying the olden days as a great period in history, but as we move more and more away from the date of Creation we start to get worse and worse. However, society in previous generations are not as great as they are depicted. In the olden times, traditions are often followed by blind obedience; In other words, people follow societal norms without much reasoning. In the short stories "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut and "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, …show more content…
To begin with, both "Harrison Bergeron" and "The Lottery" portray blind conformities through the use of harsh methods to keep order with society. In the story "Harrison Bergeron", the character Harrison, a 14 year old child, was depicted to be better superior than others and for this reason was given hundreds of pounds of extra weight to his body in order to keep him equal to everyone else, " In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds" (Vonnegut 2). Society believed that there should be a law that suppresses Harrison as this would make it fair for everyone. Harrison, like all other members of the society, was not allowed to take off any of the handicaps given or they would pay the consequences of, "Two years in prison and two thousand …show more content…
The old custom was to bring a good "harvest" for future seasons but every year someone from the village gets stoned to which no one questioned the validity of, "Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones." (Jackson 6). The villagers were blindly obeying the old custom and only really remembered the stones which shows the primitiveness of the custom and the violent actions shown because of this as