Colonial officers’ heroic self-image projected European boyhood ideals onto native peoples

Evidence

The point is that these queer quixotic protectors of the weak who played their role behind the scenes of official British rule were not so much the product of a primitive people’s naive imagination as of dreams which contained the best of European and Christian traditions, even when they had already deteriorated into the futility of boyhood ideals. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 544

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds forward into the constructed ‘Other’ and projection mechanisms that Orientalism readings will formalize; also parallels the myth of the noble savage.