Humanity in Shin Sekai Yori: Defined by Emotion, Empathy, and the Subconscious Mind

The central contemplation of Shin Sekai Yori (From the New World) is on the nature of humanity. A thousand years in the future, two sapient races walk the earth: humans and queerats. Both are descended from present-day humanity, yet both are inexorably different from what we know as human. Both races are the result of genetic manipulation. Queerats are grotesque in appearance, live underground in hives, and have an insectoid societal hierarchy. Humans possess cantus, tremendously powerful psychokinetic abilities, and have attack inhibition and death feedback preventing them from harming other humans. This mechanism is not without fault, though, and when it fails, manifests in fiends, who actively seek the destruction of other humans and do not suffer death feedback. Nor does death feedback provide an objective definition of humanity; Maria and Mamoru’s child, despite being able to attack humans with impunity, is killed by death feedback when Kiroumaru sacrifices himself, because she recognizes queerats as possessing humanity, while viewing humans as alien. Moreover, though Yakomaru at his trial insists to his last breath that queerats are the equals of humans, he receives only ridicule. Even Saki and Satoru, who uncover the truth of the queerats’ origination, still deny that the queerats possess humanity. Ultimately, humanity is something that resides only in the mind of the subject, defined by one’s capacity for empathy and emotion, and can be bestowed upon and denied to others.

Consciousness separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom, and thus in part defines it. The human mind is a powerful thing: armed with powers of intellect, human beings in the present day have already subjugated nature and reshaped the earth with the aid of technology. Cantus is the physical manifestation of the human mind into the material world. It enables the individual to achieve nearly anything which he or she can envision, and reduces, if not closes, the gap between thought and action. But while there are no longer predators or external threats which can threaten the human race, there are still perils in the present age that arise from within. The threat of nuclear annihilation has loomed over us for the past decades, requiring only that those vast destructive powers fall into the wrong hands for the world to be doomed. The existence of cantus serves to amplify these dangers, for all people with cantus are thus empowered, and hence, one person lacking compunction or restraint can wreak destruction limited only by their imagination. In Shin Sekai Yori, the emergence of cantus is what causes the collapse of modern society, and afterwards plunges humanity into centuries of violence. Tomiko tells Saki that the only things which humans must fear are karma demons and fiends: other humans, unable or unwilling to restrain their power.

Because of the power of human thought to reshape the world, human societies have sought since ancient times to control the thoughts of their citizenry; with the existence of cantus, thought control becomes a matter of paramount importance, with the life and death of human society at stake. The methods employed by the humans of Shin Sekai Yori are largely familiar: access to information is controlled, as certain sensitive information has the capacity to destabilize society. When Saki, Satoru, Shun, Maria, and Mamoru learn about humanity’s past from the false minoshiro, they are deeply affected by the revelation. Tomiko and the other village authorities have been aware of the truth all along, yet wish to keep this knowledge hidden from the common villagers, for fear of destabilizing them. Citizens are conditioned to comply with authority and obey the Code of Virtue, though for the members of Group 1, this conditioning is lessened. They are able to contemplate breaking the rules on their school trip, which ultimately leads to their encounter with the false minoshiro, are willing to cross the Holy Barrier into the wilderness beyond, and evade the questioning of the Educational Committee. This conditioning, along with the application of hypnotic suggestion, is syncretized with Buddhist and Shinto practices; though a thousand years in the future, human society is largely secular, religion has historically played an important role in shaping societal patterns of thought, and these vestiges of religious imagery and ritual remain embedded into human consciousness.

Consciousness has enabled humans to change at a far greater pace than other species. Evolutionary change in animals is driven by genetic variation, guided by the slow process of natural selection. Human evolution, on the other hand, for the last several thousand years has been largely driven by variation in ideas and knowledge, passed on from one generation to the next. Certain ideas have forever changed the shape of human society, from the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel in prehistoric times, to the development of agriculture, writing, and mathematics. The philosophies of the Enlightenment still shape the ethos of modern society and governance. Yet all this has occurred in a timeframe much faster than change propelled only by Darwinian forces, which ordinarily requires millions of years to produce the emergence of new species. With the appearance of cantus, humans subconsciously altering the environment around them produces an abundance of new species, such as the minoshiro; when the rapid change of the human mind is projected outward into the material world, the pace of change in the natural world speeds up to match the pace of human development.

Just as genetic variation can result in the emergence of new species distinct in form from their predecessors, changes in human thought can also effect a certain distinctness. With the emergence of cantus, the technologies which once served to translate human thought into material change are made obsolete, and thus, human society regresses in development to a more pastoral way of life. The values of human society in Shin Sekai Yori are distinct from that of modern society, also. Romantic bonds are an instrument for preserving peace and harmony, and thus the attitude of humans towards sexuality differ from our modern values; adolescents are encouraged to pair with someone of the same gender in order to mitigate the risk of unwanted pregnancies. Children, ordinarily regarded as a sign of hope and innocence, a thousand years in the future are a source of fear and distrust. Though it is partly out of necessity for the preservation of society, children under the age of 17 have no rights as individuals and can be executed for having poor control over their cantus, committing misdeeds indicative of an underlying darker nature, or simply failing psychological screenings designed to prevent the emergence of karma demons and fiends.

Certain ideas, then, perhaps embody some essential aspect of what we regard as human, and in discarding them, the humans of Shin Sekai Yori discard some aspect of their humanity. Queerats, lacking cantus, under Squealer/Yakomaru, claim for themselves the material society and technological progress that humans renounced, and in doing so, seek to reclaim some aspect of humanity which the humans have left behind. Under the likely guidance of a false minoshiro, they rediscover concrete, establish a representative government, and overthrow their sovereign. Yet the queerats do not merely adopt the ways which humans have given up, but inherently possess human qualities. Kiroumaru chides Saki and Satoru for believing that all is lost when they fail in their first attempt to dispatch Yakomaru’s fiend; unlike the humans, he is accustomed to struggle, and thus demonstrates his determination. Yakomaru is a foil to Kiroumaru: whereas Kiroumaru is loyal to his liege, Yakomaru usurps power from his, and whereas Kiroumaru is honorable in his conduct, Yakomaru is scheming and treacherous; this, too, humanizes him, for he is not merely the servile animal the humans believe him to be. The two embody the capacity for both heroism and villainy that the humans have abandoned in their pursuit of stability.

But while humanity may encompass both the greatest heroism and the greatest villainy, there are disordered patterns of thought which are inhuman in nature. Hashimoto-Appelbaum syndrome occurs when a person is unable to control the negative imagery in their subconscious mind, and the destruction which ensues when their cantus seeps forth to manifest these subconscious visions. Though karma demons retain their conscious faculties, they are unable to restrain the subconscious usage of their cantus, which lashes out in destructive bouts of increasing intensity until, at last, the karma demon self-destructs. Raman-Klogius syndrome is similarly destructive: yet if karma demons unwittingly wreak destruction, fiends consciously seek to harm others. Though the appearance of fiends in the last days of modern civilization predates the introduction of attack inhibition and death feedback into the human genome, neither mechanism functions, as they require the individual’s recognition of another being’s humanity. A common link between these two disorders is that they are both destructive patterns of thought given physical consequence by cantus. Fiends and karma demons are the greatest fears of human society: preventing their occurrence is the foremost priority of the government of Kamisu 66. Perhaps if innovation and progress are the hallmarks of modern society and contain some essential component of humanity, fiends and karma demons are inhuman because they seek senseless destruction and the unmaking of what is human.

The importance of the subconscious mind is underscored by the existence of cantus, which grants it the ability to influence the physical world. After children are visited by the “spirit of blessing,” they undergo a ceremony in the Temple of Purity to seal their cantus and place it under the control of a mantra. Hypnotic suggestion is used to implant the idea that without their mantra, they possess no power: the user is told to focus their power upon a paper doll, which is then consumed away by fire. This means of manipulating the subconscious is used by the priest Rijin when he discovers the children with the false minoshiro: he apprehends them and seals their cantus, using the embedded suggestion to cause them to forget their mantras. Yet only their belief restrains them; there is no physical mechanism by which their abilities are sealed. The holy barrier, reminiscent of a Shinto shimenawa, also serves to redirect the subconscious usage of cantus outward; these leakages facilitated the development of countless new species, including the minoshiro. Yet in actuality it is merely a roped barrier with some paper charms; only the people’s belief in its power makes it effective.

Consequently, these attempts to control the subconscious mind are tenuous at best. The visions and dreams which Saki has are conjured by her subconscious mind: knowledge of how to unseal Satoru’s cantus appears to her in one of these dreams. She dreams again that she is dressed in funeral robes, standing with Subaru at an unmarked grave; Shun, whose face and name she cannot recall, speaks to her and shows her another grave with her sister Yoshimi’s mirror. Her memories are tampered with after Shun’s death, presumably by similar means, yet her subconscious mind brings to light the knowledge which is hidden from her conscious thoughts. Shun, after becoming a karma demon, mentions that they attempted to seal his cantus to no avail. Just as death feedback and attack inhibition fail to regulate the conscious minds of fiends, hypnotic suggestion fails to rein in the subconscious of karma demons, as their subconscious minds reject the belief that they are constrained.

Death feedback operates on more than belief or mere recognition of another’s personhood, however, requiring empathy. In the ceremony at the Temple of Purity, children who have awakened their cantus have their death feedback tested, when the head priest pretends that the child is hurting him. Death feedback is an extension of empathy, the ability to feel another’s pain as one’s own: the individual feels the pain that they cause another person, to the point where if they kill another human being, they themselves die. The recognition of another’s humanity is a prerequisite for empathy; if consciousness is the defining feature of humanity, then one must recognize another’s consciousness in order to understand and feel their pain.

Yet not all forms of killing trigger death feedback. The doctor in Tomiko’s memory is able to kill the fiend with a lethal injection without suffering death feedback. The psychobuster, essentially a weaponized vial of anthrax, is another method which doesn’t trigger death feedback. Just as the development of firearms has created a degree of impersonality to the act of killing, these methods reduce the act of murder to something more mundane. Nor do most humans suffer death feedback when killing queerats, despite the fact that queerats are also descendants of modern humans. Their grotesque appearance and the otherness of their behavior and speech prevents the recognition of their humanity. The sole exception is Maria and Mamoru’s child: her attack inhibition only enables her to disarm other queerats, and her death feedback triggers when she kills Kiroumaru. Because of her upbringing, she recognizes queerats as human, and sees humans as alien to her, able to attack them without repercussions.

Humanity, then, is something which is defined by the subject, which can be bestowed and denied. Humans without cantus were modified to turn them into queerats, and thus, were stripped of their humanity. The names bestowed to queerats such as Kiroumaru and Yakomaru serve to humanize them to an extent. Saki and Satoru uncover this truth and wonder whether they should have died of death feedback, having killed many queerats. Yet beyond this minute of reflection, they conclude that queerats are not human after all, being too different from them. Squealer’s rebellion is his attempt to assert the humanity of his species: seeing that the humans hold absolute power of life and death over queerats, and treat them merely as disposable slaves, he concludes that queerats cannot be free so long as there are humans, and thus, seeks to overthrow the cantus users. Yet this plan fails, ending in his defeat and capture. Squealer’s punishment, the death of pain, is hypocritical in a sense. Tomiko swears to inflict more pain than ever before endured by any living creature upon him, treatment unbefitting of any human being; her successors see to it that her last wishes are carried out. Yet to do so acknowledges that he is a being of consciousness, capable of experiencing the torment which they inflict upon him: for it would be meaningless to inflict such pain on a mere animal. Saki, who kills Squealer as an act of mercy, does not quite restore him to humanity: even animals are put out of their misery. Yet she at least recognizes that to allow his continued suffering would be wrong.

To recognize humanity, then, is to be able to conceive of another’s consciousness as being similar to one’s own. Humanity in Shin Sekai Yori is something which can be granted and withheld; its presence or absence can be determined by circumstance or perspective. Different aspects of consciousness, which itself is a complex and multifaceted quality, may render another more or less recognizable as human, yet ultimately it falls to the subject to decide where the line is drawn, defined by one’s capacity for empathy.