The erosion of egalitarianism is an inevitable fate of any society as it evolves into a state. When the differences between various groups of people within a population become prominent, it is certain that one or a few groups will become the dominant force and thus be able to impose their will onto the rest that population. This is the natural progress of human civilization but how does it happen? In “Some Psycho-Social Perceptions of Slavery”, the author, Dean Miller, explains that when one group of the population to enslave another, the masters usually associate their slaves’ images with animals or children. In “The Collapse of the Classic Maya: A Case for the Role of Water Control”, Lisa Lucero claims that the rulers of ancient Maya obtain their political powers from controlling and regulating a large water system while conducting religious ceremonies and events which lead the people of Maya into believing that their rulers have an intimate relations with the gods and thus are divine. Both of these articles exemplify the facts that superiority derives from distinctive variance in characteristics of different portions of the same society. In other word, what they are saying is that the elites are able to be elites …show more content…
The slaves are captives from another society that was conquered so right from the beginning, the masters see the slaves as something different than them, more specifically, a foreigner. This is crucial because if the general perception is that slaves and masters are the same and there’s no distinction, slavery would have been impossible. From this perspective, if the masters want to keep this system of shackles and chains going, they have to keep developing new ideas of how to differentiate the slaves from themselves and thus we see from the article that the masters see their slaves as children, animals or anything that is not