The Myth of the Civilized vs. the Savage

Chapter 4 of My Upcoming Book: The Ten Myths of Progress

Welcome friends to another installment of my upcoming book, The Ten Myths of Progress. Herein you will find a preview for all, and the full chapter for paid subscribers.

Few things irk me quite as much as this myth. Expect a passionate rebuttal. Let’s start by naming and defining the myth.

The Myth Defined

Civilization tells a story of itself. It is a triumphant arc that begins in darkness and rises toward light. It paints a line between “us” and “them,” between those who build cities, write laws, and master nature in contrast to those who live close to land, outside institutions, outside the story.

We are civilized. They are savage.

This line has been redrawn a thousand times across geography, skin, language, and belief. Its purpose, however, remains solely to justify domination.

It says: They are backward. We are advanced. They must be saved, subdued, or assimilated.

The myth does more than degrade. It disappears. It renders whole cultures invisible, obsolete, or quaint. It turns wisdom into superstition, resistance into rebellion, lifeways into liabilities.

We find this myth enshrined in textbooks and museums, but it doesn’t stop there. It lives in development plans. In border walls. In drone strikes. In the language of progress, aid, security, and civilization itself.

The true significance of this myth lies not merely in who we conquer, but in who we become in the process.

It teaches us that violence is virtuous when done in the name of order. That taking is giving when framed as salvation. That superiority is empathy when dressed as reform, aid or “development.”

And it fractures something essential in us.

Because once we believe there is a hierarchy of humanity, we’ve already lost the thread. We’ve made domination not just possible, but noble and inevitable.

This is the story we inherit when we say “civilization.”
But the question that follows is the one that opens everything:

What if the line was never real?

Where the Myth Came From

“The Invention of the Savage”

The myth of the savage didn’t arise from misunderstanding. It was forged with the purpose of legitimizing empire.

When Enlightenment philosophers imagined the “state of nature,” they weren’t describing real people. They were projecting fear. Thomas Hobbes painted life outside state control as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It was a convenient fiction, used to make the Leviathan (centralized power) seem necessary. Without kings or contracts, Hobbes argued, we would devour one another.

But this wasn’t anthropology. It was propaganda. Genocidal language… a language far from dead today.

As European empires expanded, they encountered societies that contradicted their worldview. Communities that lived in reciprocity with the land. That governed without kings. That didn’t accumulate wealth or erect monuments to hierarchy. These cultures didn’t fit the civilizational mold, so they were declared less than human.

The Doctrine of Discovery, papal bulls, and colonial charters institutionalized this view. Lands were “empty” if they weren’t fenced, parceled and sold off. Peoples were “savage” if they didn’t worship, dress, or govern like Europeans.

And then came the sciences. Anthropology, archaeology, even evolutionary biology shaped in the mold of the colonial mind. Terms like “Stone Age” or “tribal” encoded assumptions of backwardness. Primitive! In reality a savage is from the root French simply a forest dweller. Pagan in Latin meant villager. Heathen meant those who lived among the heather. But these words warped into the language of Hobbes’ to mean nasty, brutish, and in need of redemption.

The linear timeline of progress placed Indigenous and land-based cultures at the bottom, with Europe as the apex. What followed was centuries of genocide, assimilation, re-education, and forced modernization, all justified by the claim that civilization was a gift.

Even after formal colonialism receded, the myth endured, shaping contemporary development theory, foreign aid, and economic interventionism. Institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and UN all operate under the underlying assumption that the rest of the world must 'catch up' to the West.

But catch up to what? To ecological collapse? To soul-crushing labor? To alienation and endless consumption?

Far from being grounded in truth, the myth of the civilized vs. the savage arose from empire’s imperative to legitimize its violence as virtue.

And like all myths, it survives because it still serves power.

Challenging the Narrative

The myth persists because it flatters us. It allows industrial civilization to look in the mirror and see virtue staring back. We drive the machines, hold the patents, write the laws… so we must be right. We must be better.

But the deeper truth is harder to face.

What we call “civilized” society is the most ecocidal, militarized, and psychologically fractured system in human history. We pave rivers, mine mountains, colonize genomes, and warehouse our elders. We stockpile nuclear weapons, bomb villages from continents away, and stream the footage over broadband.

And then we dare to look at cultures who live with the land and call them savage.

If we widen our lens, we see the reversal: many of the societies labeled “primitive” were remarkably egalitarian, ecologically embedded, and socially cohesive. Matrilineal inheritance. Consensus-based governance. Traditions of sharing, of ritual, of limits. They understood that freedom is not individual accumulation… it is belonging without domination.

Anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres showed that so-called “hunter-gatherers” often enjoyed more leisure, less inequality, and fewer wars than agricultural or industrial societies. These societies didn’t lack culture. They just chose not to build empires.

No, this isn’t romanticization. This is to acknowledge that the West has no monopoly on wisdom. That skyscrapers and satellites do not prove superiority. That complexity isn’t the same as maturity.

We still have much work to do to end this myth. It hasn’t vanished. It’s shapeshifted.

It still shows up when Indigenous resistance is labeled terrorism, but corporate extraction is called investment.

It’s there when we treat ancestral knowledge as folklore, unless it's appropriated into TED talks and wellness apps.

We still believe, deep down, that civilization is the destiny of all, that those who resist it are behind, that history is a straight road and we are the drivers.

But maybe we’re not ahead.
Maybe we’re just lost… driving faster into a future we can’t survive.

Lived Consequences

I didn’t question the myth at first.