The Lottery And Milgram's The Perils Of Obedience

Obedience - a person’s excuse for an otherwise inexcusable act. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience” attempt to illustrate how civilized, moral, upstanding people will commit heinous acts in order to conform with tradition or comply with an authoritative figure. Both of these writings bring into question how far should conformity and obedience to authority be complied with before it is wrong. Although complying with rules and authority maintains social order, I claim that people should not adhere to authority once they begin to compromise what they feel is morally right and/or are blindly obeying authority. A person's ethics and values provide a unique self-identity, which help to distinguishing one person from another; therefore, a person's values should take precedence over obeying authority. When one is faced with the challenge of going against one’s morals, one must do what one believes is right. From a very young age, children are taught to obey authority, whether it be parental figures, teachers, institutions, doctors, or police officers. People, like myself, are conditioned to accept authorities' words as right and not to question them. Moreover, when a person defies authority, there are …show more content…
As a result, when suppressed, many people tend are forced to act in blind obedience and may commit unimaginable atrocities. Atrocities such as the actions of the German Nazis who were blindly forced by authoritative figures, like Adolf Eichmann, to gas millions of Jewish people. As seen repeatedly throughout history, this only leads people to incite rebellion in accordance with their values. Therefore, rules must not be conformed to, and authority must not be complied with, if people cannot stand by their moral principles of what is right and