This is Nietzsche’s will to power in its most unforgiving form.

The will to power is not mere survival or dominance over others; at its apex it is the drive to impose one’s own meaning on existence, even when that meaning is written in self-destruction.

It is like Empedocles and the volcano.

Empedocles does not leap to escape mortality; he leaps to overreach it, to force the cosmos to acknowledge his claim, even if the price is erasure.

The penguin would rather perish as itself than endure as something lesser.