Even with a new season of anime being upon us, I had something left in Shinsekai Yori that I wanted to write about. This is mainly about the ending of it, so that means spoilers, lots of them. But fear not, if you have never seen the anime, check out the spoiler free review I wrote and maybe check out Shinsekai Yori anyway.
Now, the subject I wanted to write about is the idea that because a person is superior, at least in terms of where people stand in society, they automatic think they are correct when compared to someone beneath them. We see this example manifest in the form of the humans versus queerats, in Shinsekai Yori.
With that sense of superiority, many of the humans felt like they had a right to control, and even kill queerats without any remorse. This led to the full out war on the humans, driven by the queerats of Robber Fly and Giant Hornet colony, who's commanders were Squealer and Kiroumara respectively.
We are Humans
After the defeat of the queerats, mainly from quick thinking of Saki and sacrifice of Kiroumara, we soon found out that queerats were originally non-cantus using humans, spliced with mole rat DNA. With that we have to wonder if the village was correct in controlling a species who's ancestors were human, like them.
And even without the knowledge of queerats once being human, would the acts taken upon them be more or less justified because they are not like us. The event I would point to, is went the humans tortured Squealer for hours, while healing him with cantus -- so he wouldn't be able to die -- and be further tortured later on. It was pretty much revenge and torture porn for the higher ups, that ended up reducing Squealer to this state of no real structure, just a blob of muscle and intestine.
Lead by Fear
In many cases, and of course Shinsekai Yori as well, the decisions made by the village are highly influenced by fear. They took the "us vs them" mentality and escalated it to the extreme, via genetics. And why was this decision made? Because the cantus users had genetically modified their body to have a death feedback in order to keep people from using cantus to kill; leaving the ones without cantus no real reason not to fight back, since cantus users couldn't even defend themselves.
Fear of their own kind, fear of people different from them. The only way to stay on top was to lower the status of the people different from them, and keep the common enemy tactic prevalent. Leaving the "inferior" no choice, but to follow the order of the superior -- even if the superior have to real leg to stand on, in the case of being correct.
The Fall
Now, from what was the ending of Shinsekai Yori, I would consider it a gray one. The ending wasn't happy or unpleasant, we just saw the corruption of humans and queerats; when both were lead by fear, and no really insight of the future, only the goal they are working toward.
Although they had good intentions, the methods used weren't the best. We ended in this middle ground of the perspective and no one really got the good end of the stick; just people try to lead, thinking they are right, and only a few remain from the chaos to reflect on the actions of their society.