It appears that the author of the book, Flaherty, writes that frequently people involved in "humanitarian" efforts are identified as heroes, but in reality they frequently end up supporting a system that oppresses working people, particularly those who can't function well in a capitalist society--the very people that they are described as helping.
Born into privilege and most often white, today’s progressive saviors believe in their inherent superiority and refuse to listen to the people they are supposedly serving. Crucially, they lack imagination and structural analysis and therefore often end up strengthening the systems that they claim to be working against. While our capitalist culture insists that individual heroes instigate societal change, change happens through the hard work of people in grassroots movements, such as the Movement for Black Lives, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement. Flaherty’s point isn’t that saviors are bad people, but that our capitalist system supports and rewards saviorism, which we can help uproot by supporting movements led by the people most impacted by the issues being addressed.This phenomenon of "saviorism" is frequently used by Empire agents in foreign affairs to justify aggressive policies against other nations, and they express these actions as "humanitarian".
