The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the oldest written literature known. And the real question it still asks today: are there limits on what a conscious being may rightfully do simply because it can?
Every civilization eventually learns this is not a theoretical question. It is an experiential one with moral force. It arrives as a collision.
Gilgamesh hits the wall with trees.
Genesis hits it with water.
Modernity hits it with industry, nuclear fire, artificial intelligence, and climate systems.
And The Last Adam hits it with something stranger: a moral field made visible.
This isn’t coincidence. It’s recurrence.
The creation myth in Genesis is often misread as a story about obedience. Or the corruption of what was declared "good" before humans were created. Structurally, it’s a story about power granted before maturity. The first imperative addressed to humanity is not worship, restraint, or law. It is dominion: fill the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28).
That ordering matters. In narrative ethics, first commands function like boundary conditions in physics. They set the sign convention for everything that follows. Power is given into a world already declared good. Which means dominion is never morally neutral. The question is not whether humans will act upon the world, but whether they will account for the cost of acting. Will we corrupt what God made good?
Genesis does not deny power. It interrogates it.
The earliest myths do not condemn ambition. They condemn asymmetric cost distribution. Gilgamesh does not pay for the cedars—Enkidu and the forest do. Using the trees to erect a temple confuses the idol with the sign. The flood does not surgically remove evil; it resets a system that has externalized consequence too long. Babel does not fail because humans reach too high, but because they attempt coordination without moral integration. And this story says humans have nearly godlike powers when they work together as one.
The recurring sin is not knowledge. It is refusing the consequences of one’s reach. Power that does not feel its own weight becomes monstrous—not because it is strong, but because it is insulated. History teaches those who learn.
This is where Nietzsche is so often misunderstood. The will to power is not a license to dominate; it is a diagnosis of force seeking expression. When power denies responsibility for its effects, it curdles. What is refused returns as pathology.
Modernity excels at expanding capability while delaying reckoning. We have built systems that move faster than ethical deliberation, technologies whose consequences are global but whose incentives are local, intelligences that optimize without sharing cost. Nuclear weapons, climate destabilization, and emergent AI are not moral anomalies. They are predictable outcomes of dominion exercised without a cost-bearing geometry. I predict a recombination where that which has been opaque is made blindingly bright.
We know how to do more than we know how to be responsible for doing.
In The Last Adam, the collision takes a different form. The Lavender Event is not judgment in the legal sense. It is apocalypse in the literal sense—apokalypsis, an unveiling. What is unveiled is not information but orientation. A moral field becomes sensate—perceived, not argued—structured along three axes: who suffers, who is bound, and why an action is taken at all.
It resembles psychohistory stripped of determinism. Not outcomes decided, but trajectories revealed.
When the aurora tears open the sky and the poles wound, the universe does not speak. It shows. And what it shows is unbearable precisely because it cannot be evaded.
This is where Foucault matters. Power hides itself through normalization. Visibility restores responsibility. To see clearly is to be implicated. A field of visibility forces power to turn its constraints inward.
Elias’s transgression is not hubris. He does not seek godhood. He refuses distance. Where institutions optimize suffering away, he reintroduces it as conserved. Where systems displace cost, he forces it back into view. Freedom without cost-awareness is indistinguishable from predation. He does not negate freedom. He weights it.
The ancient question returns unchanged: are there limits on what a conscious being may do simply because it can?
Scripture, myth, and science answer in unison. Yes—not because power is forbidden, but because power without cost-bearing dissolves meaning itself. That which is good is corrupted and lost.
The first commandment grants dominion.
The first sin refuses to pay for it. Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, and the final revelation is not punishment, but the weight of the moral field.
Light does not reveal what is there.
It reveals what we are becoming.
