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Pierce Connell

Professor Shannon Rauwerda

ENC1102

20 November 2013

Fear of Change

We all experience fear. It is an important part of the human condition. It has kept humans

alive for thousands of years by keeping us away from the venomous spider we just came across

or helping us realize it is a really bad idea to crawl into that extremely small space with the easily

collapsed roof. Even with the benefits of fear it has a very dark side. As shown in Jackson's "The

Lottery", the fear of change, a mostly irrational fear, causes people to blindly follow dangerous

traditions and perform atrocious actions that propagate social injustices all in the name of the

status quo.

The fear of change, or Metathesiophobia, is a fear that, like many others, has distinct

rational and useful causes but also highly irrational ones. Sometimes people experience rational

causes for this fear like the fear of quitting a job and not being able to find a new one, or the fear

of moving to a different country and not being able to easily start a new life. Things like these

change the status quo and cause people to leave their comfort zone and make decisions with

unknowable and potentially far reaching consequences. A majority of the time, though, people

imagine consequences that are simply not reasonable for the same causes. This can be shown

through a quote from Old Man Warner when it is brought up that other towns have started

talking about removing their lotteries: "Listening to young folks, nothings good enough for them.

Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves . . .we'd all be eating

chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," ( Jackson 136). He believes that the

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stopping of drawing a lottery would cause society to devolve to the point that people would live

in caves and be hunter-gatherers again. Conclusions like these cause people to become

paralyzed with an irrational fear of change.

In an attempt to maintain the status quo people blindly follow traditions no matter how

absurd or dangerous. Jackson gives a few great examples of this in "The Lottery" for example the

villages refuse to make a new black box for the lottery, even though it is faded, splintering and

almost falling apart, since the one they use now had "always been there" (Jackson 134). The

villagers are so paralyzed by the fear of change and the need to preserve the status quo that the

thought of even giving another blind tradition, the lottery, more appealing supplies produces

general outcry. This is also shown by our society. For example in antebellum America small

farm owning whites kept the vicious cycle of slavery going because they had a fear that is the

status quo was changed the blacks would take over and murder their families. This was not the

case as was shown by many other countries around the world that had abolished slavery by that

time, yet because of what they were told slaves were kept.

Blind tradition is not inherently a bad thing, it has more of a neutral connotation, but

when it leads to people not dealing with social injustices being caused by the traditions it

becomes a problem. This is the main problem presented in the lottery. The villager's fear of

change was propagating a tradition of annually stoning a fellow resident. The reasons behind it

being it has always happened and, in the case of Old Man Warner, superstition "Lottery in June,

corn be heavy soon." (Jackson 136). Again this parallels to our society in relation to the civil

rights movement. People were so afraid of a change in the status quo that when groups like the

KKK started people did nothing to stop the wanton murdering of blacks all across the nation, nor

did they speak out against the many other injustices blacks were suffering at the time. This has

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been shown over the history of human society and has constantly arrested our development as a

species.

The fear of change not only causes people to follow and condone the social injustices that

human society has developed, but also to perform actions that continue the vicious cycle said

injustices cause. In the lottery we are presented with this fact. The people of the village were not

content to simply condone the vicious murders performed by other villagers, they all participated

in the annual stoning of a neighbor in order to keep the lottery. (Jackson 139). This is the point

where it becomes a extreme problem for human society. The vicious cycle has consumed so

much that trying to break it becomes a struggle that almost seems impossible. In relation to our

society this contrasts the indifference shown by the general population's opinions on civil

liberties in the early 20th century. This fact is modeled in the actions of hate groups like the

KKK or the Nazi's, the general members not the leaders who were privy to the actual reasons

behind their actions, in the fact that they were afraid of a change in social power and upheaval by

the Blacks and Jews respectively.

The goal of all of these actions, when caused by the fear of change, is to reduce the

anxiety caused by Metathesiophobia by maintaining the status quo. The status quo comes from

Latin and means the state that things were. This term used to refer to returning to previously

good times like when it was used in the phrase status quo antebellum which loosely translated

means the state of things before the war, but has now come to mean the continuation of the same

dismal state our society is in. It is in this sense where it becomes the goal of people seeking to

alleviate Metathesiophobia. For the people in Jackson's fictional town the status quo is their chief

concern. This is shown not only through their actions in participating in the lottery, for example

how Mr. Summers asks Mrs. Dunbar if they have a son old enough to draw for her husband even

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though he and everyone there knows the answer (Jackson 137), but also in their reaction to

events that are not normal by the town's standards. For example when Tessie arrives late to the

lottery she is met with scorn, albeit playful, but scorn nonetheless, from the villagers (Jackson

136). This is because she is something that does not abide by the status quo, she does not show

up o time for the lottery, but everybody shows up on time that's the way it's always been. In our

society this is shown mainly in the realm of politics where the goal is really not the change of our

society for the better but maintaining the status quo of power in congress for fear of radical

change.

Fear of change in human society has a direct result in the following of poisonous

traditions and the proliferation of social iniquitousness. This should be something that we, as a

society, should be on our guard against. Humans must come to realize that change is okay and a

necessary part of life. That is the only way we can learn from past mistakes and from stories like

Jackson's "The Lottery". Will our society learn from these things and break the vicious cycles we

have created? or will society stay trapped in the past under constant fear of anything unknown?