It is pointless to spend too long making the connection I want to make between the subject of what will be written here and the old anime film Akira - the movie's plot and themes are not difficult to grasp, nor is my reading of it sophisticated. If you have seen it, then what is written here - about the film, at least - will seem self-evident. That is what makes it such a good muse for the subject - the film drives the point home quite readily all by itself. I'd almost just tell anyone reading this to go watch the movie and think on it instead (much more engaging), but I can't find anyone else who's seen the film that wrote precisely what I want to write about it, so maybe it bears a written explication at least once.
Superhuman power lies at the core of Akira's story. It opens with a thermonuclear blast, detailing the recovery of civilization in the aftermath of yet another world war - this time, presumably a nuclear one. The streets of an immense metropolis are full of political discontent, poverty, and ultraviolent crime - as the official American trailer from 1988 intones: "Neo-Tokyo is about to Explode." Despite the clearly-evident heights of technological achievement in this imaginary 2019, this is a civilization that no one controls - and that theme of chaos and lack of control is on display repeatedly throughout the film. From Tetsuo's desire for a bike his friend Kaneda says "he can't handle," up through the echelons of severity, through Tetsuo's own tenuous grip on sanity to the final battle against his own body's cancerous rebellion.
As that final battle makes clear, Tetsuo's superhuman powers, much like the thermonuclear device at the start of the film, are dangerous - even to those who wield them - if not controlled. Unable to trust anyone who might want to help him - even his girlfriend, who is inadvertently crushed to death by his amorphous body's relentless expansion - Tetsuo is left to keep himself under control without assistance - a doomed task. Eventually the literally disembodied Akira, who viewers know was part of the same childhood psychokinesis program that Tetsuo was, provides a (convenient, plot-wise) assist, rendering Tetsuo's uncontrollable super-cancer harmless to the rest of Neo-Tokyo's denizens, and the film epilogues.
Inevitably for a plot in need of conflict with a superhero unable to meet his match anywhere else, the conflict is internal. More specifically, it's the desire to keep internal what is growing beyond ones' own self which drives the conflict for Tetsuo at the very end - it is his own body which metastasizes and grows into something other. This is a problem of integrity - "the state of being whole and undivided." Because that which you do not control is, in a sense, not you - it is a separate thing, with separate causes and effects of which you are not necessarily aware, which for that reason you treat as something other than yourself, regardless of the particular physical associations it may possess to your own self/body.
I think this tension between the super-powered self and self-control is not only inevitable in the plots of fiction, but represents a very real concern for super-powered beings In Real Life. The thrill of this kind of plot comes not from its clever inversion of conflict types, but from a very real worry that humans possess, perhaps best realized in that fiery event horizon of the atom bomb, beyond which we cannot be aware of anything. But even for us, the inability to control our technologies is an external conflict - man vs. machine. The means of their control is therefore also external, and something we are accustomed not to being fully in control of (external circumstances in general not being under our control). There is a fascinating sense in which we tend to incorporate these external forms into our own, identifying with them and incorporating them into our cognitive processes, yet most people would agree that they still recognize a definitive line between, say, their computers and themselves.
Whether cybernetically or psychically (Akira has both!), the superhuman has to contend with the powers that he has identified as his own self, physically and mentally. This is something of which the individual was previously aware and in control of, but which now is beyond their awareness and/or control - and something which, by the very nature of their exceptional qualities, they must contend with alone. In fact, logically there is no benefit even to creating or seeking out other superhumans to help you, because that is tantamount to the same problem you are facing - a superhuman adversary in the form of a portion of yourself which you are no longer in control of, unaware of motives, causes, and effects.
One answer to this problem is the answer at the end of Akira - one must let go of the idea of control; it is possible that systems not under your own control will still help you. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, this is possibly the motivation behind cooperating strategies, and given either the lack of desire for continued survival (Akira) or the expectation that getting it wrong will not completely end you, this makes sense. But in the rarefied air where superhumans play, the price for defection is high - super powers might quickly render one super-extinct.
What will superhuman entities be concerned with, then? Constrained by the physics of our universe, they could find it too difficult to maintain awareness and control over parts of themselves which are too distant or hidden from the rest of themselves - these backup copies could themselves become a threat, or be sabotaged by other superhuman agents without detection. Therefore, control and integrity would indeed be primary concerns - the need to keep all of the system which comprises a super-self under your its own control and observation; to keep it "whole" - this would be of paramount concern. Yet it also makes such a being quite finite - vulnerable to powerful opponents capable of potentially wiping out planets, or even star systems. In such a situation, interaction with other superhumans is downright dangerous, and to be avoided. A universe full of transhuman entities is silent, patient, full of solitary entities avoiding contact with each other and ruthlessly maintaining their own integrity - all for survival's sake. Friendship is a psychological need in gregarious animals; it can be engineered away.
Call this property the Tetsuo Solitude: the need of hyper-powerful systems to maintain control and awareness through isolation and concentration.
At the same time, this seems like a problem which life has solved many times before. It is why we have multicellular organisms, and symbiotic relationships, and social animals, like humans - each of us contending for our own individual survival, but predicating our cooperative behavior on the intrinsic belief that we will be met with the same from across the immense divide which separates one intellect from another. The only difference seems to lie in an individual's power - never before have there been players in the great game of life whose capability to inflict catastrophic damage on others so far outstripped that individual's own ability to survive.
In the end, Akira transports Tetsuo away from everyone else, into a singularity that saves Neo-Tokyo while segregating him and his new superhuman companion from us forever. The little humans scramble about in the ruins of their city, unable to control enough of the system they live in to make themselves truly dangerous. Below the threshold of the Tetsuo Solitude individually, and safe so long as their civilization does not overstep that threshold itself.
