In the short story The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, it covers an annual tradition in a small isolated village. The villagers would draw a lottery, and whoever wins gets stoned to death. In the story, Tessie Hutchinson wins, and proceeds to protest before getting killed. One of the themes of this story is mob mentality. Nobody in the village disagrees with killing Tessie, even though they all knew her. Even she herself didn’t care until her family got chosen. Everyone just went along with it because that’s what everyone else did, until they’re the one getting stoned, at which point it was already too late.
