When Europeans first encountered the New World, they could not fathom the lifestyle of the inhabitants. Having rapidly developed their science and technology in part due to the need to constantly compete militarily in such close quarters, the simplicity of the lifestyle of indigenous North Americans was seen as "savage". Thus, they now had three terms to describe human beings: "civilized", "barbarian", and "savage". Moreover, within the European paradigm of monotheism, mercantilism, enlightenment, and infrastructure development on the one hand and their historical familiarity with Arabs and Asians whom they traded with (and Africans who for the most part they traded for), they had no means to place such peoples. The thought was that God had put past versions of themselves on Earth to educated them about who they once were. Based on this premise, the New World indigenous were infantilized and conquered for their land and resources.
In part due to the massive amount of land and reasons "bequeathed by God" to the Europeans (or so a Lockean would argue), Europe made substantial gains in wealth, power, and influence, and spurred the age of colonialism wherein peoples who were deemed inferior to Europeans were occupied and "developed" for their own good. Essentially from this point on, hegemony and infantilization became central to rapid development of the European continent through the use and exchange of resources and land plundered from the New World. For example, Belgium's largesse was in large part due to Leopold's occupation and "holocaust" of the Congolese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In A History of Civilizations, Fernand Braudel notes that what we now know as Latin America was essentially a bank of resources where a sparsely populated continent was developed strategically with mining towns and ports in order to evacuate resources as quickly as possible, and to this day the wealth of Latin America is still largely concentrated in the hands of descendants of the early Europeans who first occupied and accumulated the primitive resources and land of the continent. The argument from the beginning was that these "savages" needed to be told how to become like Europeans because they were a primitive form of humanity.
However, an interesting dichotomy can be established wherein Europeans and their dependents are cerebrally spatial thinkers while the indigenous and those following Eastern philosophies are cerebrally temporal thinkers. Mario Blaser suggests conceiving of these two interpretations of the timespace of reality as "horizontal" (spatial / planar) and "vertical" (extending through time). Indeed, the present unsustainable reality of development by these "horizontal" thinkers and the advent of ultra-capitalism where only short term gains are important implies that ignoring this "imbalance" in space and time could be catastrophic for the future of our species. One may consider the adages of the tortoise and the hare or the ant and the grasshopper. Slow and steady must win this race, as it is well-established that Earth cannot replenish itself at the rate in which we are exhausting her resources.
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