The Human Capacity for violence

Mans capacity for violence is illustrated in "The Lottery" and "The Perils of Indifference" in many different ways. They show us that even the smallest or most innocent person or scene can actually be turned inhuman and unleash themselves for no rational reason at all.



This is shown in "The Lottery when it says "the children had stones already, and someone gave little edavie hutchinson a few pebbles." as Tessie Hutchinson was just chosen in the lottery to be stoned, that in this not only do all the children join in but so does her own son in the stoning. While all of this is being done all old man Wagner can do is complain about how weak and wimpy people have gotten and when the idea of stopping the lottery comes up he compains that about the young fools in other villages and totally disregards the notion.



Even a best friend can have totally unmoral or inhuman actions as shown in "The Lottery" when Mrs. Delacroix, Tessie's best friend picks up a rock so big she needs two hands to lift it, just to then go and throw it at tessie in an outragious display of cruelty and violence, when she has done nothing wrong and the only reason for this is because her name was drawn out of a box.

An entire nation can be the cause of some of the worlds biggest inhumanities as shown in "The Perils of Indifference" when the old man tells the President and his council of what happened in aushwitz and how the only hope they had was that the world did not know of what was going on there. But little did they know that the rest of the world did know, they just pushed it away and went on with their lives like nothing had happened, and that that was not the first time they had done this. They had done this to countless others and somthin had to be done about this, for this is the greatest inhumanity on the earth, not to just condem one person for no reason, but to condem an entire group because you don't want to be troubled with others problems.


It is pretty obvious that the human capacity for violence is not limited to physical violence, but to what could be a worse violence of mental ignorance with the disregard for somones need for help or even just a spark of hope that somone is out there. For if man could just pull itself away from its precious standard of living and take a second to really see the world maybe no one would have to live through or with these injustices again.