When I read both of these short stories, I initially didn’t see the connection to leadership. Both had twist endings where the happy reality of their lives is only maintained by an underlying evil – in the case of “The Lottery” an annual randomized stoning and in the case of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Both were sad and forced the reader to confront the lengths humans are willing to go to in order to maintain the status quo. But I still wasn’t sure how leadership played into things.
Then I thought about the concept of sacrificing a “lesser evil” for a greater good. A common concept in leadership, particularly when thinking about war casualties, it’s easy enough to think about and accept in the abstract. The life of a couple hundred civilians to preserve order and prevent thousands more from dying. But when you’re confronted with examples like in these stories, especially of the child in Omelas, the lesser evils get faces. It makes me question if the ends really do justify the means and why we have become so desensitized to certain practices like the characters in the stories do. It also raises the question of what we can do when we’re put in situations that are so ingrained in our society and feel so much larger than us – maybe all we can do is walk away like some chose to do from Omelas.
I completely agree, I think that a lot of times people do not think about what society is doing because it is “how it was always done” and they do not want to question the status quo. These readings made me think about the trolley problem, do you risk one life to save more? When reading both of these stories, I was confronted with the same feeling when contemplating the trolley problem, and I think this should be a warning to people who blindly follow the status quo.