The Benevolence Trap: Power's Paradox at Civilization's Edge

The central tension in global coordination theory is what might be called the power double-bind: effective prevention of catastrophic risk — whether from weaponized exponential technologies, tragedy-of-the-commons dynamics at civilizational scale, or decentralized access to mass-casualty capabilities — requires sufficient concentrated authority to enforce compliance. Yet that same concentration of authority constitutes a primary vector for dystopian capture. The two failure modes, catastrophe and tyranny, are not merely co-present risks; they are structurally coupled. Increasing the power of any coordinating entity to address one failure mode directly amplifies the probability of the other. The singleton solution — world government, hegemon, or superintelligent overseer — is the intuitive escape from multipolar trap dynamics. If defection persists because no actor can credibly enforce cooperation, grant one actor that enforcement capacity. The argument is game-theoretically coherent but institutionally naive. Benevolent dictatorship is not a stable equilibrium. Externally, genuinely constrained benevolent actors are outcompeted by rivals operating without those constraints. Internally, concentrated power functions as an attractor for agents with the highest power-acquisition orientation — precisely those least likely to exercise it benevolently. The benevolent ruler's progressive corruption is not a character failure; it is an incentive-structure inevitability. Each compromise is locally rational; the cumulative trajectory is malevolence. This analysis forecloses the personnel solution to the coordination problem. The question of who holds power is secondary to the question of how power is architecturally structured — what constraints are load-bearing, what feedback mechanisms are self-enforcing, and what institutional designs resist capture by the dynamics they were built to contain.