How Unchecked Power Leads to the End of the Species

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Is Life Front-loaded With Its Own Antidote?


The Funnel of Unrestrained Power






by Kevin Boykin
11/18/2025

1. The Psychology of Power and Entertainment

It’s power, you know. Power is the real prize. Money is just the middle-man that buys access to it. The “lust for power” drives mastery, but once mastery is achieved, another impulse wakes up: the need for chaos.

Mastery is predictable. Chaos is not. And unpredictability is “entertainment” to minds that have run out of challenge.

At the apex of intelligence, influence, or any height that isolates someone from the rest of humanity, boredom can become existential. When you understand too much—when nothing in your world can oppose you—you start looking for stimulation in the only remaining direction: volatility.

This is when powerful minds begin experimenting with creation itself. They don’t do it out of malice — not at first — but because nothing else produces a feeling anymore. It’s what ancient cultures imagined when they described beings that toy with worlds for sport.

As previously outlined in my article Resistance and Limitation: The Instructors of Freedom without limitations, chaos ensues. The resistance that we complain about in our daily lives is absolutely necessary to keep us sane, honest, and on track. They make life worth living. Removal of limitations in the context of power and there is nothing left to hold in all of the horrors that humanity has in them, which is a great deal.

2. Mythic and Interdimensional Parallels

Old mythologies already mapped this psychology. Different cultures gave it different masks, but the principle was the same: consciousness outgrowing consequence.

Satan = rebellion for the sake of experience.

Saturn = the devourer of his own children — time and authority consuming what it creates.

Trickster gods and interdimensional intelligences = post-moral experimenters chasing novelty without empathy.

These figures aren’t random. They’re warnings — recognitions of the potential of humanity. They depict minds that crossed the line between creation and recreation and never came back. When morality stops limiting power, life itself becomes material. Suffering becomes data. People become variables in a game.

Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (or Apocalypse Now), is the human-scale example of what happens when power outgrows consequence. Removed from civilization, surrounded by adoration, given absolute authority, with nothing and no one to oppose him, he becomes a god in his own mind — and the jungle becomes his laboratory. He conducts psychological experiments on a population he no longer sees as human. He becomes a post-moral experimenter exactly like the mythic archetypes above.

Kurtz represents the moment when a mind crosses the boundary from mastery into madness — not because it is broken, but because nothing in the environment is strong enough to push back anymore. His final words, “The horror, the horror,” aren’t about the jungle. They’re about himself, reflected without filters. Kurtz is the human embodiment of what happens when power sheds all limitation.

3. The Great Filter Connection

This brings us to the Fermi Paradox — the question of where all the civilizations are. Here’s the possibility no one wants to face: The Great Filter isn’t technological failure. It’s psychological entropy. Civilizations reach a point where their power becomes total, their technology becomes limitless, their knowledge of control reaches near-omniscience, their creativity reaches the recognized sufficient level.

And with total power comes total boredom. The lust for novelty returns — not in the noble form of exploration, but in the destructive form of experimentation.

They create — destroy — reset — collapse.
Not because they must, but because they are no longer able to feel anything without it. Their addiction to thrills and endorphins demands it. The path to that payoff has always been exercising power — there’s no reason to change at the door of annihilation.

Your “reckless architects” aren’t outliers. They are the end-state of power without constraint. This is what can be expected when humanity runs out of boundaries.

Every civilization that climbs too high, too fast — without the ballast of meaning, morality, or humility — eventually implodes under the weight of its own unchecked desires.

The universe might have succeeded it's way into loneliness.
It might be full of civilizations that got everything they wanted, which brings us to the words of Oscar Wilde:

"There are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/...-own-antidote/