Whenever we hear the word “development” used by international economists, politicians and experts, we should immediately be on our guard. Development is supposed to represent what everyone in the world wants, and what the privileged of earth have already achieved. But the word itself is treacherous: it suggests a natural process, an unfolding, evolution and progress—the growth of a living entity, natural and effortless. That what develops must also age, decay and die cannot be expected to disturb the eager proponents of development, concerned as they are only with its early stages.

Indeed, even “developed” countries defy the logic inherent in the idea of development as a flowering, since they are spoken of as if they had reached a point of maturity and stasis—an object for the less developed to attain in due course. What happens to the “developed” as the developing catch up is not a concern—do they become over-developed, excessively developed? On this there is no discussion.

One thing is clear: Wherever “development” is scheduled to occur, one can always be reasonably certain that it must be preceded by some kind of eviction or other. For development usually refers to some material construction (schools rather than education, hospitals rather than health, shopping malls rather than human needs). More often than not, the space is already being used by others, who are required to vacate the site, to be displaced, removed, ousted or cleared from the place on which the monuments to development are to be erected.

Often “development” is planned for “waste land,” that terrain vague on which nomads and herders, forest-dwellers or self-reliant farmers make a living. Alternatively, it is in land which shows up as blank spaces on city maps, but which has been occupied (and made valuable) by the urban poor who have built their own shelters and created their own livelihood.

Sometimes, ancestral lands are required for infrastructure projects—dams, airports, resorts—to which the market economy now has prior claim over those who have tended the environment that has sustained them for millennia. These impediments to development are often described as illegals, encroachers, trespassers; or they are simply invisible to the naked eye of power—the unseen servicers of privilege.

The police and officials, who arrive out of the blue with trucks to wreck the fragile tenements of the urban poor, leaving no trace but a few rags, odd sandals and splinters of wood or metal, are simply the more obvious agents of eviction. But the ground must also be prepared so that people accept their removal as vital to progress, or even as improvements in lives which may have been far from satisfactory, but which this version of development can only make worse. People who have achieved some modest security will be dumped on the far periphery of the city, without amenity or livelihood, and will have to start afresh, from nothing. This is how inequality is made worse by development: land required for development goes, by virtue of their superior spending-power, to those who can afford to oust squatters or the inhabitants of slum settlements.

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In order to ensure people accept these injustices, other removals and clearances are required: demolitions of the internal landscapes, the counterpart of brutal physical evictions, and no less painful. They must be made to believe in the better world for which “development” is a necessary prerequisite. They must unlearn old skills, forget how to make their own homes, unlearn livelihoods fashioned by the small demands for necessities, abandon habits of making and mending, of learning to make do with little. They must disencumber their minds and heads of practices of slender resource-use, of contriving and inventing. Instead, they must take instruction in how to be poor in the culture of the market, as opposed to a culture of scarcity.

The shifting of people from their homeplace, rural or urban, is perhaps less traumatic than then re-education they undergo, the development of the inner spaces, where the demolition of self-reliance leaves nothing but a tangle of broken memories, a faint trace of how to do things freely for oneself and others, a distant afterglow of the human gifts and offerings, transactions which took place outside of the market; and which, since they are without price, are deprived thereby of value. These are the evictions of the psyche and the self: Forget the wisdom of the ages, in order to make way for the unwisdom of permanent consumption, living in a perspectiveless present, like there is no tomorrow—that ideology of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Development demands the dismantling of networks of kin, consanguinity and neighborhood, evictions of the heart, just as all traditional cultural forms—the good with the harmful—must be swept away, so that people may become dependent, not on the locality, not on what the immediate environment can support, but upon a global market-system.

It goes without saying that ideological clearances are also characteristic of the new paradigm. Nothing could be more pathetic than the displacement of intellectuals, those who believed that history was on their side and had thrown in their lot with the oppressed and wanting people of the world. They, too, have been evicted from faith in the future, forfeited their land rights to terrain that has been alienated, taken over by the colonists and developers as sites ripe for takeover by the land-grabbers and raiders of the universal market.

The police and officials, who arrive out of the blue with trucks to wreck the fragile tenements of the urban poor, leaving no trace but a few rags, odd sandals and splinters of wood or metal, are simply the more obvious agents of eviction. But the ground must also be prepared so that people accept their removal as vital to progress, or even as improvements in lives which may have been far from satisfactory, but which this version of development can only make worse. People who have achieved some modest security will be dumped on the far periphery of the city, without amenity or livelihood, and will have to start afresh, from nothing. This is how inequality is made worse by development: land required for development goes, by virtue of their superior spending-power, to those who can afford to oust squatters or the inhabitants of slum settlements.

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In recent years, we have heard much about “human development.” The UN Human Development Index is supposed to offer a more ample account of what being developed means. There have been further efforts to refine its meaning—discussions of what constitutes happiness, wellbeing, contentment—but this has so far not been sufficiently separated from economic growth.

But “development” is the word of the hour. The UN has declared four “development decades” in the past half century, and most recently a “sustainable development decade.” The present WTO trade talks were to have been a “development round.” Politicians offer “development” as an electoral promise; transnational companies compete for contracts to implement it; investors flock to place their money in it. “Development” plans, projects, schemes and blueprints pour from multilateral agencies, governments, charities and NGOs.

Development has become yet another euphemism for economic growth. If the word is to have any substance, this needs to be retrieved from the empty cliché it has become. Development means a different interaction between human resourcefulness and the resource-base of earth. It implies the kind of delicate balance between humanity and the resource-base achieved by indigenous and aboriginal peoples—those currently being evicted in order that they might enjoy the benefits of development.

The richness and wealth of human creativity has to be imagined in another relationship with the material treasures of the earth. The former should take precedence over the current ransacking of the planet, which seeks more and more marketed commodities to fill the aching absences and unmet wants of human lives, and to answer the artificially induced resourcelessness of market-dependent people; for this is an assault upon the spirit, perhaps the most brutal of all the evictions upon which the triumphs of “development” are erected.

JEREMY SEABROOK’s most recent book is Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives.