At the heart of savage developmentalism is structured otherness. By savage developmentalism I am referring to a type of developmentality that centers on expansionism, order, and antidemocracy. The daily worldwide death toll as a result of malnutrition, disease, state-organized violence, and environmental degradation are, by and large, displaced by stories about technological and financial innovations, and other fantastic tales of modern progress. This is a symptom of a savage mind and a civilization that can neither control itself nor define its destiny. Yet, our dominant discourse of development persists in its epistemological certainty that *development is destiny*. As Debal Deb observes, 'No sane person is opposed to development…[and] in fact, everybody, every society, every nation *ought* to develop' (2009, 15). I argue that the great promise of and faith in progress is part of a process of dissociative anesthesia against savagery, and the normality with which we accept development as *telos* (or as our collective destiny) is only possible if we, in fact, are sufficiently anesthetized to dehumanize the human consequences of economic development. The habitual exoticization and marginalization of otherness allows us to disown rhetorically the world we inhabit so that we may define it as *other* (Taussig 1986, 1993). We define savagery, in our codified hallmark of civilization—*the Oxford English Dictionary*—as cruel, ungovernable, and uncontrollable. Under the guise of civility and civilization, late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalism *is* cruel, ungovernable, and uncontrollable (Bello 2009; Greenberg, Dratel, and Lewis 2005; Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009; Mbembe 2003; Patel 2008). That unfettered speculative financialism brought the global economy to the brink of total meltdown, with legislative overseers having nary a sense of how to prevent similar future crises, suggests that this latest apparition of capitalism is indeed ungovernable (Phillips 2008). Moreover, and as Walden Bello (2009), Raj Patel (2008), and others have pointed out, amidst plenty, food prices have rendered dozens of countries in total chaos as displacement and starvation confronts millions. Such calamities demonstrate not only economic disorder, but also the brutal and disastrous nature of neoliberal food and other economic regimes. *The end of history is liberalism triumphant, and everyone wants to come to America!*
H. L. T. Quan, Growth Against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World (Lexington Books, 2012), 4.