Cosmic censorship predicts that naked singularities — singularities visible to distant observers, not hidden behind event horizons — cannot persist in nature. The conjecture has been assumed for decades but never proven in generality. The usual justification is aesthetic: naked singularities would allow causal pathology.
The actual mechanism may be thermodynamic. For Kerr-Newman naked singularities (rotating and charged), continuous energy extraction through superradiance and electromagnetic processes drives the system toward the extremal bound. As the singularity loses energy, it approaches the threshold where a horizon forms. On timescales of order 10⁹ years, the instability self-corrects: the naked singularity clothes itself.
The horizon doesn't form because of some cosmic principle. It forms because energy extraction is easier from a naked singularity than from a clothed one, and the extraction process pushes the singularity toward the state where extraction becomes impossible. The mechanism is a negative feedback loop — the instability creates the stability that ends the instability.
This inverts the explanatory direction. Cosmic censorship was treated as a constraint that nature obeys. If this mechanism is general, cosmic censorship is a consequence — not a law but an outcome of energy extraction dynamics. Naked singularities are unstable not because they're forbidden but because they're energetically exploitable. The universe doesn't prevent them; it harvests them until they dress themselves.