Advanced Civilisations Don't Intervene. Here Is Why

If the Atlanteans possessed advanced technology and the ability to help, why didn't they simply come forward and offer it? It is a reasonable question - and the answer, Randall suggests, may lie in a principle that advanced civilisations inevitably arrive at through hard experience.

Non-intervention. Not as indifference, but as policy. The reasoning is straightforward and grounded in patterns we can observe in our own behaviour. Whenever a more powerful party intervenes in the affairs of a less developed one, unintended consequences follow. Foreign aid intended for struggling populations is captured by oligarchs and dictators. Military interventions designed to remove pressure valves - like the removal of Saddam Hussein - destabilise entire regions in ways that take generations to resolve.

If a civilisation advanced enough to have solved these problems looked at our world, they would recognise the pattern immediately. Intervention, however well-intentioned, tends to corrupt the very outcome it was designed to produce. Standing back may not be abandonment. It may be wisdom.