the.com/noble savage

means A romanticized figure, imagined as living outside 'civilized' society, who is supposed to embody a natural goodness and dignity that modern life has corrupted or lost.

from The phrase appears in 17th-century English writing (including Dryden's work), but it became attached, somewhat unfairly, to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau — who never actually used the words 'noble savage' and whose real argument was subtler: that humans in a 'state of nature' were neither noble nor savage but simply pre-social, and that society itself creates much of what we call corruption. The popular story paints Rousseau as the idea's champion; really, the Enlightenment-era image of pure, uncorrupted 'primitive' peoples was built up around him by others, then handed down as a tidy myth he didn't quite author.