Two Questions About My Setting

I'm reworking a story I'm writing and had two aspects I just wanted to discuss. In my setting, the story's human nation has enslaved an entire race, the justification for this being that, centuries earlier, this race caused a magical disaster that claimed millions of lives in a failed attempt to Take Over the World. However this is a lie perpetuated to justify the actions of the human kingdom, and the true history has been forgotten by nearly everyone.

My questions are:

1. What is the time frame that would cause the population to forget the true circumstances of how the system came to be? Current timing is several hundred years, but would it need to be longer or shorter?

2. The second is a little more tricky (and more important): What would the average citizen's attitude be towards their slaves? Related to the above, the enslavement isn't based on a sense of inferiority as much as it is on the idea that the enemies of the world have been conquered and made servants. I didn't quite think humans would be actively hateful towards them after all these years, but the whole point is that everyone thinks they destroyed the world, so...yeah. Ideas?

The answer to the first one is "it depends". A few hundred years is certainly enough for this to happen, but there are historical examples of people of a given group forgetting their heritage after ... three or four generations, give or take. A lot of it depends on how they are treated and on how well-woven the lie is. If they are treated like shit just for being there then, right or no right, the younger generations will naturally flock to whatever remnants of their past spoken by the older generations there are, because those remnants will be confirmed by the horrible treatment they are getting; likewise, if the lie told to everyone simply doesn't make sense on the surface, well ... that.

But if the lie is constructed in a way that makes it make sense, that makes the people who hear both the lie and the claims of the older generations of now slaves and reject those claims, if the lie says that they were made subservient out of caution so as to not allow what they were planning to happen and the treatment they are getting supports this; if those who are not rebellious are simply let live, closer to live-in workers than slaves, and it's only those who rebel or start to spread propaganda that are dealt with and not in cruel ways ... yes, I could see it being just a few generations in such a case. Though, of course, this depends on how great the disaster they were claiming to have happened actually was ... assuming it did not happen; if it did then that's not as much of a problem.

As for how they would be treated, that's completely up to you really. There certainly is going to be some variance in this unless the country that enslaved them is, as a whole, to the last citizen, irredeemably and moustache-twirlingly evil. The key thing is to have this fit the history of it that you've decided to have, and to make the results of whatever treatment they get plausible.

Personally, I feel that unless the people of the kingdom have experience with owning slaves of the "usual" kind they aren't going to treat the new people as slaves really. Inferior, sure, subservient, sure, but not outright slaves as it is presented in media usually.

edited 28th Jan '18 3:47:24 AM by Kazeto

Thank you so much for the long and well thought-out response. I'm currently keeping the timeline at a little more than five hundred years, so there's plenty of time for people to forget what really happened. That was a great analysis about the two ways the false story could be perpetrated and how it could result in rebellion or "peace".

(It's all kind of funny actually, because you gave a perfect formula to eliminate much of conflict that drives the plot).

As for how they're treated: the disaster that they are claimed to have caused really did happen, and it caused destruction like nothing seen before (think whole nations physically annihilated in the span of days) and rendered a great deal of the land uninhabitable. As things currently stand, the treatment they receive isn't always hateful, but there is a strong sense of punishment for the crimes of their ancestors, and it is made clear that they are separate from the humans of the country (i.e. they live in what are basically ghettos, and it is actually illegal for them not to have an "owner" of some kind).

Bumped because I’m interested in other opinions on these questions.

You need to ask yourself where on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism your story stands and how progressive your society is.

Slavery as a legitimate institution has been present in some form or the other throughout the whole human history. The abolition is a relatively recent event. We only started prohibiting slavery and slave trade in the last hundred years or so with the rise of humanist thought in the masses because slavery panders to human being's base desires, to dominate the Other, to achieve more with less effort by the Other's hands, etc. Slavery is still around. Sadly, we didn't get rid of it completely.

The reaction of the kingdom's people and whether they'll forget the history or not is closely tied to this humanist thought level of development in the society. But whatever your choice of the tone of the setting would be, an average person of average age and average sex and average income etc., who simply does not exist, would be too busy being caught up in his own problems to seriously care about these things.

And generally, it is really hard to break down an institution. People would cling to it (both masters and slaves) simply because they're used to it and don't know any better. And if slavery is institutionalized, the thought of the average citizen about the matter probably would be "Well, things are the way they are because they were".

The trick to maintaining any institution, especially a dehumanizing one, is to get people invested in it either for their prosperity or their psychology. Let me elaborate.

• Prosperity: There will be a class of people who benefit economically from the system. Most ordinary people either won't own slaves or will have at best a family servant whom they don't make any real profit from. But the slave sellers, the larger slave owners, the governmental bureaucracies that oversee the system — they will be invested and they will have an inherent incentive to perpetuate it. This would include maintaining the propaganda that the slave race is deserving of its fate and suppressing any counter-propaganda, often brutally.
• Psychology: Humans are empathetic animals, and we come to identify with people that we live in close proximity to. This naturally causes us to regard them as "like us", and this would apply equally to a slave race/class. The inherent injustice of slavery therefore would create a sense of cognitive dissonance for most people. This dissonance roughly takes the form of, "They're like us, but we're treating them badly. We can't be evil, so they must deserve it somehow." Thus, over generations, the axiomatic inferiority of the slaves would become psychologically ingrained in the culture. Racism/speciesism, if not present originally, would certainly be present after a few generations at most. It's much easier to arrive at this state if you have a prima facie justification for the slavery, such as the aforementioned catastrophe.

Put these two together and it's all but inconceivable that a system of slavery could continue to exist in an otherwise egalitarian society without becoming authoritarian, oppressive, and eventually brutal. This is regardless of any ostensible original justification for the practice.

These are all very good, thanks for the ideas and explanations. Anyone else?