The Lottery is a taut, short work about how even (perhaps especially) people who consider themselves normal can quite easily perpetrate atrocities if they consider those atrocities to also be normal. It shows how tradition and repetition - unthinkingly doing the things we have always done - are ways to distance ourselves from responsibility and accountability, from blame. The story's bleak, abrupt finale reminded me very strongly of a phrase in Helen McClory's Bound to Be: "community means all ignoring the same cruelty".

More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/readings-the-lottery-shirley-jackson/