Who is the Better Savage: The Civilized or the Primitive?

Civilized people are more violent, tyrannical, and rapacious than primitive people because they believe that their civilization grants them the privilege to invade any land, take control of the natural resources, destroy the local way of life, and enslave the local population. The so-called civilized people are responsible for a vast chunk of the killing and enslaving that has taken place during the civilizational clashes of the last 1000 years.

Civilization is supposed to make people compassionate, wise, and erudite. It is supposed to make people capable of empathizing with cultures different from their own. This is what the books on philosophy teach us. Instead, we find that throughout history most advanced nations have acted as merciless invaders, killers, destroyers, and slavers. More brutality, immorality, and sinful acts have been committed in the name of civilization than on anything that the primitive folks could conceive. This is the paradox of civilization.

On October 12, 1492, when Columbus made a landfall in San Salvador, he was greeted with respect by the locals. They gave his men their food and traditional gifts. Columbus took the niceness of the locals as a sign of their weakness and savagery. He kidnapped ten of his local hosts and transported them to Spain, where he displayed them before the Spanish elite as savages who lived in a remote land which he had discovered. Within a decade of Columbus’s voyage, the Conquistadors arrived in the Americas.

History is written by civilized people. The civilized depict themselves as the epitome of culture, compassion, and progress. They portray the primitive as savages, killers, and philistines. Such one-sided accounts of history have brainwashed the people in our time into believing that the civilized man is compassionate, wise, and peaceful.

Who pays the highest price for progress: the civilized people who conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered, or the primitive who lost their land, wealth, and freedom? Being civilized means being focused solely on the territorial, technological, and economic progress of one’s own ethnic group. It means being violent, tyrannical, and rapacious. It means being unconcerned about the life and propriety of all those who are deemed primitive.