Shinsekai Yori starts with a beautiful Japanese countryside, kids meandering about through green pastures, people using their powers of telekinesis to manipulate objects, and Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” being played as mankind had gotten all its act together. You think about how the title translates into “From the New World.” Oh, it isn’t going to be a nice farmer’s story then.

The show spends a tremendous amount of effort on making its world normal, but tells us that almost everything about it is terrifying. It is a dystopia that doesn’t look like a dystopia at all, and there are no surveillance monitors, oppressive-looking buildings, fascist outfits, or tyrannical governmental speeches. There are gardens, celebrations, classrooms, temples, rivers, and friendly adults. The end of the world studied interior decorating.

Based on Yūsuke Kishi’s 2008 novel, the anime follows Saki Watanabe as she grows up and uncovers her society’s dark history. A thousand years after psychic powers called Cantus ended the old world, society is built around one rule: never let anyone become strong enough to destroy humanity.

In his work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes defines life as one that lacks any power that can keep the peace as being a state of war characterized by competition, suspicion, and the need for security and reputation. Shinsekai Yori explores the Hobbesian nightmare of every 12-year-old having a psychic tactical nuke.

The solution is Kamisu 66: keep everyone afraid enough to prevent violence.

The society’s oppression stems not from corruption, but from a terrifying dilemma. Cantus can control matter, obliterate physical forms, create new environments, and wipe out whole communities. History tells us that early psychic humans did just that. Society collapsed via self-governance.

In Hobbesian terms, common authority exists because without it, everyone risks becoming everyone else’s murderer. The Holy Barrier, the education system, Death Feedback, Attack Inhibition, genetic manipulation, and psychological conditioning are all parts of one enormous social contract machine.

However, the problem is that no one gets to negotiate such a contract. The world for Saki’s generation is formed around those rules as how things are meant to be. They don’t know why children disappear, the outside world is forbidden, queerats are hidden, or their memories have gaps.

Kamisu 66 preserves order by consolidating power and restricting freedom. The darker question posed by the anime, however, is that of legitimacy when the people have been kept ignorant of what they have given up.

Saki is not looking into a dystopia because she wants to join the revolution. She doesn’t understand. Why has Reiko vanished? Why don’t people remember Reiko? Why does everybody act strange when she asks them questions? Why are there stories of children who never graduate? Why does everybody start acting interested in changing the topic?

The opening credits shift from landscape to children, blending beauty and horror through unsettling imagery. It is no secret that director Ishihama loves horror.

There are times when the characters look a little uncharacteristic and backgrounds become unexpectedly stiff. Sometimes it looks held together by prayers and overtime, but the mess suits its unstable perspective.

The show unfolds through Saki’s memories. They distort, leave things out, suppress, and reorder. Things that Saki does not understand, she will not be able to tell us about. It creates unique worldbuilding, with absence as its main character.

Reiko, unable to control Cantus, becomes the team’s weak link. Their impatience reveals a social hierarchy, especially in a society built on the assumption that everyone can control their powers.

Then she vanishes. No one grieves her since no one can remember her, and it is the most vicious little world-building detail ever.

In Hobbesian thinking, when pushed to its furthest logical extreme, it is an attempt to make it impossible for them to become dangerous. Children are observed, evaluated, educated, and removed when they are considered to be potentially threatening.

The summer camp turns a harmless lesson into another screening process. The kids believe they are on a fun adventure while the adults are operating a pre-crime evaluation center, complete with hiking gear.

The death of Manabu helps to clarify the mechanism. He merely bends rules and exploits loopholes in games, but adults see danger and send a Tainted Cat after him. Better to get rid of one potential threat now than risk many lives in the future. The adults are not entirely wrong about the threat, but what becomes of fear as an excuse for unlimited violence?

Girard’s mimetic desire theory argues that we learn our desires by imitating others. Imitation breeds rivalry and collective violence, which society redirects toward a scapegoat to restore order.

Society requires categories. Normal and dangerous kid, human, queerat. Fiend, Karma Demon, pure, impure, safe, and contaminated. These classifications preserve social order by identifying where danger lies.

Tainted Cats are turned into devices through which society externalizes its violence. Direct killing of the children by adults is impossible because Death Feedback could kill the murderer. Therefore, special beings are created for this task.

The bureaucracy has learned about outsourcing. Girard gives us insight into why it matters. Violence is shifted elsewhere. The fear, aggression, and anxiety felt by the community are placed on certain individuals who can be disposed of because it is necessary for the survival of the community. Reiko is such an individual, Manabu is another, and eventually, the queerats become the scapegoats in large numbers.

People in Kamisu 66 regard queerats as an inferior life form, used for laborious tasks, for fighting wars, and as disposable bodies. Children are not allowed to look at queerats because the grownups realize that identifying queerats as intelligent beings would make exploiting them ethically complex.

During her childhood, Saki rescues a queerat after one of them is stuck in a river. Saki doesn’t begin with any political ideology about animal liberation. She feels compassion for the thing and helps it out of suffering, because society has taught her to consider the creature as the Other before she comes face to face with the queerat. Since they are far from being innocent creatures yearning to be liberated, the queerats themselves break down Girard’s paradigm.

An inferior story might claim, “The humans are bad because they subjugate the queerats, and so the queerats are good.” The message in Shinsekai Yori goes, “Not everyone here is horrifying? Well, have fun!”

Squealer rebels against Hobbesian authority, seeking recognition, freedom, and power, only to impose the same logic once he gains it. The victims become the oppressors, the revolutionary becomes an authoritarian, and the victim becomes a butcher.

In Nietzsche’s genealogy approach, for example, in his book On the Genealogy of Morals, the genesis of concepts such as “good,” “bad,” “evil,” guilt, and punishment, questioning the conditions of their emergence and their contribution to human prosperity. What defines a monster? What defines being human? Who was it that decided? More importantly, who benefits from the decision?

Throughout the anime, we learn how fiends and Karma Demons are horrific abnormalities. Children learn their stories in school. As they are morality stories, these stories have an educational purpose. The Karma Demon is arrogant and antisocial, while the fiend is purely destructive. Follow society, be in control of your actions, do not become one of Them, and it becomes clear that these creatures are historically constructed. Oh!

The queerats are the descendants of humans whose genes have been altered to strip away their Cantus and alter their physical form. These beings have been designed to be controlled and killed by humans without setting off any psychic safeguards against murder.

Humans define civilization by not killing “each other,” then redefine who counts as “each other.” The moral code has become historicized, and violence has gained new linguistic currency.

In the confrontation with Squealer, he believes that his people deserve their share of attention. That’s why he rises against the existing structure, which has deprived him of his political identity. However, the means used are extremely terrible. He conducts massacres, blackmails, and utilizes humans as biological weapons.

According to Hobbes, political order is required because men have the capacity to engage in destructive conflict. However, Shinsekai Yori shows us that systems built to stop violence may be responsible for creating situations conducive to violence in the future. Repression leads to hatred, hatred leads to rebellion, and rebellion leads to violence.

According to Girard, violence breeds more violence due to mimicry and revenge. Both sides grow alike as the distinctions justifying violence collapse. Humans are scared of the queerats, the queerats are scared of the humans, humans label the queerats as savage, queerats learn to fight back as humans do, and humans point out that the queerats’ rebellion is evidence that they are dangerous.

Squealer is fascinating because he defies the hero-villain binary. He is a character who is created by violence and becomes the creator of more violence.

As exemplified, Kiroumaru, like Squealer, is a queerat. Kiroumaru fights humans and commands soldiers, yet shows loyalty, wisdom, self-control, and kindness. Simply put, the existence contradicts the simple classification made by humans that queerats are inferior. Squealer and Kiroumaru differ not by biological destiny.

Maria and Mamoru flee Kamisu 66, have a child, and eventually lose control. The offspring grows up among queerats and starts thinking like them. Since the creature does not recognize human beings as part of itself, the system of restrictions that prevents violence through Cantus operates differently. At this point, identity becomes a matter of survival technology. The fiend’s idea of who it is dictates the restrictions of its psychology.

Society embeds morality in biology, erasing the line between nature and culture. If values are historically constructed, can we build better ones?

While every attempt at establishing a moral order leaves behind consequences, humans create their own civilization that is peaceful but sacrifices freedom, queerats establish their rebellion by violence and perpetuate oppression, Saki attempts to uphold her compassion without causing chaos, and no one is left with a solution. The ambiguity is one of Shinsekai Yori‘s best qualities, but also one of its biggest weaknesses.

Sometimes, the series overexplains its philosophy, making the queerat reveal feel blunt. Some viewers find the anime’s treatment of oppression and humanity too obvious. I can see the point.

The anime questions whether humans differ from monsters, but sometimes makes the answer too obvious. There is another problem with the structure. Shinsekai Yori has enough content to fill a long novel, but it only has twenty-five anime episodes to do so. Some information and dialogue had to be compressed for the TV format.

It can feel like three different anime stitched together. First comes supernatural mystery, then psychological coming-of-age horror, and finally political war. The end shifts into metaphysical horror, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it does.

The time skip works so well because they won’t allow us the comfort of normal character development. Saki changes as disappearances, deaths, and shattered innocence reshape her worldview.

Saki herself is not a stereotypical revolutionary hero, and not going to rage on about justice for the whole series. She compromises, deceives, works within an institution she dislikes, gets hardened, and sometimes becomes mad enough at the queerats to become prejudiced herself like before. It makes her more fascinating than a perfect angel. The biggest success of Saki is the ability to exist knowing that Kamisu 66 exists.

She knows what he has done, doesn’t forgive everything, but understands that to kill Squealer as an object of hate would just be replicating the very rationale that made the disaster possible in the first place. Therefore, her solution is radical. Revolutionary? Utopian? No—humane. That’s the victory the anime envisions.

Its desolate visuals mirror post-tech existence. Cantus lets humans mend, reshape, and build their environment, making its pristine surfaces fit the world’s logic.

The village is beautiful like any other model village. There is hardly any trace of natural wear and tear. Civilization has engineered its history out of existence. The scenery lies, and the music adds to the irony. Dvořák’s New World Symphony adds grandeur, while folk tunes make Kamisu 66 feel archaic and false. Audio elements intensify discomfort.

What makes the endings poetic is how they turn Saki’s internal struggle into a visual metaphor. Her boat, lack of friends, and use of the elements such as fire, water, and darkness create a sense that the ending is a dream Saki cannot escape. The real question of the series is whether there can ever be an end to violence in politics.

Hobbes suggests that humans require political sovereignty due to their dangerous conflicts, Girard claims that societies handle violence through the victimization of other people, Nietzsche invites us to look into the creation of these moral concepts that made such practices possible, and Shinsekai Yori combines them all in one cocktail.

Kamisu 66 buys peace through fear, equality through erasure, morality through conditioning, and humanity through exclusion. Its stability depends on forgetting. It, my dear, is what makes the series so haunting.

The adults do not keep yelling at the top of their voices all the time; they don’t have to do that because the kids have been taught the rules before: go home once you hear the music, do not cross the boundary line, don’t question the fate of the missing children, don’t recall the past, and most importantly, don’t get dangerous.

Stories of fiends and Karma Demons are ideological indoctrinations that turn political history into parables of morality. The child is taught that disobedience leads to the creation of monsters before they are taught that the grown-ups created the circumstances for the monsters’ existence.

The show works because it remembers this distinction. Shinsekai Yori is one of peace, because another pays for it. Morality depends on immorality, humanity on inhumanity, and Saki’s final realization offers no easy solution.

After viewing twenty-five episodes of civilization coming up with excuses to kill people, it’s worth having. Perhaps that is Shinsekai Yori‘s “new world”: one honest enough to ask how we created the monsters.

References

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