World's History

This article tells the history of the Shin Sekai Yori world, as revealed by sources such as the False Minoshiro.

History

Discovery of Cantus

In the year 2011 of the Gregorian calendar, scientists conclusively documented the existence of psychokinesis, which until that point had always been a considered an occult phenomenon. Before that, whether it was in public or in laboratories, all PK experiments were complete failures. However, in the Republic of Azerbaijan in 2011, cognitive scientist Imran Ismailov conducted successful experiments in the capital city of Baku. In quantum mechanics, there is a well known paradox of an observed particle affecting another particle, but Ismailov was the first to predict that the microscopic world being magnified to a macroscopic event applied to PK as well. Those doubtful of the success of Ismailov's experiments were recruited to act as observers with the latent ability to resist PK. After going through several trials, they were subdivided into various groups so that no observer knew the entire scope of the experiment. These observers were then asked to conceal certain facts from someone who knew of Ismailov's experiment design. There were multiple control factors.

The first person Ismailov discovered with extrasensory perception, Nona Mardanova, was a nineteen-year-old girl. All she was able to do was move a light plastic ball sealed within a transparent tube, but like a seed crystal that prompts a chemical solution to nucleate, she was the catalyst that awakened mankind's latent power. The number of PK users grew rapidly and eventually reached 0.3 percent of the entire population. In the ensuing years of societal disorder, further statistical data was lost. However, a rise in the percentage of people diagnosed with schizoid personality was documented.

In the beginning, ordinary people ostracized PK users. Even though they only had weak abilities, it was more than enough to potentially destroy the social order of that time, and PK users kept that fact well hidden. For Japan, this destruction began with the "Boy A Incident".

Boy A Incident and downfall of the Golden Age

A's powers were rudimentary, but one day he realized that he could open any lock he came across. Using this ability, he repeatedly broke into homes in the middle of the night, raped nineteen women in their sleep, and killed seventeen of them.

Following A's arrest, the number of crimes involving PK increased, but most went unsolved often because common methods of surveillance were rendered useless with PK. Normal people began attacking PK users as a whole, beginning with personal harassment and elevating to public abuse that nearly ended in executions. In defense, PK users formed their own factions and the most zealous of them proposed establishing a PK-exclusive society. Indiscriminate terrorism by PK users followed. The resulting political, ethical, and philosophical conflicts plunged the world into an age of violent discord. Without previous experience in this situation, there appeared to be no end to this world war.

The country with the greatest military power, America, started a civil war in order to eradicate all PK users. Using electric shocks to distinguish between normal people and PK users, and the widespread availability of guns, the population of PK users in North America dropped from 0.3 to 0.0004 percent in a short amount of time. On the other hand, the scientific superpower, India, successfully differentiated the DNA of normal people and PK users, was researching methods for controlling peoples' genes. Unfortunately, their search was unsuccessful, but the data garnered were found to be useful later on.

Ironically, because their lives were continually being threatened, the surviving PK users' abilities evolved rapidly. At first, PK was thought to be the projection of energy from the breakdown of sugar in the brain. Because of that, it should have been naturally limited to the amount of sugar in the body. But that was incorrect. In reality, there was no upper boundary to how much energy could be used. At that time, the strongest PK user had enough power to stop a nuclear attack. So the balance of power shifted to the PK users and governments all over the world collapsed. The history books we have now make no mention of the past civilization because it was, in essence, completely reset. The wheel of time was reversed, and we returned to the dark ages. Due to war, famine, epidemics, and other disasters, the human population fell to under two percent of what it was during the Golden Age.

Dark Age

Whatever happened during the Dark Age that was the next five-hundred years was impossible to recall completely. Infrastructure collapsed, and naturally, Internet communication was severed. Once again, the spread of information was limited by geography, and people reverted to living in a narrow, closed-off world. However, some new books were published during that time. The most reliable literature from that era says that societies in Northeast Asia were split into four conflicting groups. Ironically, due to the sharp decrease in population, such segregation was possible. The first group was slave empires ruled by PK users. The second was non-PK hunter-gatherer tribes that wanted to escape the slave empires. The third were wandering bandits who used PK to pillage and murder. And last was scientists who wanted to preserve the ancient knowledge and technology.

Bandits

The first to die out were the bandits. Each family of bandits were made of about twenty or thirty related members. Because they did not hesitate to use PK, and sometimes massacred entire towns, they were highly feared. However, this lifestyle was extremely unstable. To the bandits, the slave empires and nomads were prey, but to these two groups, the bandits were nothing more than a nuisance, so they used every possible method to exterminate them.

The bandits’ preferred method of transportation was by automatic two-wheeled vehicles. Although in that time there were no longer any means to produce engines and tires, they used PK to revive iron production techniques. They used hundreds of kilos of iron to make wheels and used PK to propel them at speeds of three hundred kilometers per hour. They tore through the plains, sparks flying from the wheels, ransacking towns as they went. Whenever the villagers saw the dust clouds and heard the roar of their engines, they knew the death gods were coming. In defense, the villagers dug pits lined with sharp bamboo spears and strung thin wires up at neck-height. They also used other simple yet effective traps such as planting land mines, putting slow-acting poisons in food set out as bait, infecting young women with deadly diseases and letting the bandits rape them, and more.

The bandits retaliated by attacking mercilessly with PK, but their downfall ultimately came from infighting. Since they were all related by blood, the bandits were formidable against enemies from outside the group, but within the ranks, there was always the fear of being killed by a fellow bandit. To survive, they had to be wary of any sign of hostility from another member. This kill-before-you’re-killed mentality escalated to the point that dissolution of the group was inevitable.

Slave Empires

The approximately nineteen slave empires in Northeast Asia survived for six hundred years on a policy of mutual nonaggression and nonintervention. Out of the four empires that existed in the Japanese archipelago...[was] the Holy Cherry Blossom Empire, which consisted of the Kanto and Chubu regions. The Holy Cherry Blossom Empire’s longevity was second only to the New Yamato Empire, which encompassed everything west of Kansai. However, the Holy Cherry Blossom Empire went through ninety-four generations of emperors in five-hundred seventy years.

Holy Cherry Blossom Empire

Main-article: Holy Cherry Blossom Empire.

Scientists' Intervention

The five centuries of the Dark Age ended with the demise of the slave empires. They had long since severed contact with the mainland, and through intergenerational elimination, the PK bloodlines in the Japanese islands had all but died out. The empires split and fought amongst each other. The wandering hunters living in the wild began plotting attacks against the now ungoverned villages, but the villages banded together and the wars increased in intensity. In the decades of fighting that followed, those who had been killed by PK in the past five hundred years were raised to the status of martyrs. The scientists, who had only been observers until now, stepped in at this time to impose order.

In trying to impose control and create a new society, different policies were adopted. Since all knowledge is essentially a double-edged sword, the scientists wanted to control the flow of information as strictly as possible. Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of books of the world's history were burned. The scientists realized the infinite potential, as well as the destructive power of PK, so the biggest issue at the end of the previous civilization was how to protect oneself from harm. To this end, psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and other researchers conducted various studies, but there was no information on which policies they adopted in the end.

One of the first proposals was the importance of education. Early education about sensibility, logical and moral education stemming from parental guidance, zealous proselytizing about religion, every aspect of education was clearly laid out. But results showed that although education was of life-or-death importance, it was not omnipotent. No matter how perfect the education system was, humankind's violent tendencies could not be completely repressed. Another suggestion was a psychological approach. Anger management techniques that trained the mind, such as zen, yoga, and transcendental meditation, along with more extreme measures like psychotropic drugs were also studied. Both were effective, though it was immediately clear that neither was a panacea. However, psychological and behavioral tests could filter out potential problem-children with almost perfect accuracy. So the next step was to implement the "Rotten Apple Theory" (See below). After that, it became convention to eliminate a child who showed any warning signs. But even that was not enough to avert all dangers. Even normal humans, warm, friendly people leading fulfilling lives, could forget themselves in a moment of anger. Research indicated that ninety percent of peoples' stress came from other people. The question was how to maintain a safe society if, in a split second of intense anger, one could easily rip off the head of another person.

Once the psychological approach was exhausted, it was replaced with medications designed to regulate hormonal balance in the brain. This method too soon revealed its limitations, because it was impossible to keep people on medication for their entire lives. The next notion to take precedence was ethology, focused on the societies of primates called bonobos. Bonobos are sometimes called pygmy chimpanzees, but while chimpanzees are known to fight amongst each other, sometimes to the death, there are almost no violent physical encounters in bonobo groups - When stress and anxiety among members of a group arise, they relieve it through intimate sexual behavior. Mature males and females engage in intercourse, but even immature and same-sex individuals will rub their genitals together in an act of sexual play. Primatologists and sociologists decided that it was of utmost importance to change the current violent society into one of love, like the bonobos'.

There were three stages to change the human behaviour, as stated in the book "Toward a Society of Love", written by the scientists. The first step was to have frequent physical contact like hand-holding, hugging, and cheek-kissing. The second step was to encourage such contact between the opposite as well as the same sex from childhood to puberty. They wanted to make it a habit to use sexual play, and the ensuing orgasms, to dispel tensions between people. And the third step was to encourage free sex among mature humans. Of course, convenient and reliable contraceptives would be needed. But even that was not sufficient. Computer simulations predicted that the society would collapse within ten years even if all the proposed measures were carried out perfectly. The reason for this was abundantly clear. All the members in a PK society possessed the equivalent of a launch button for a nuclear missile. If just one person lost control, the entire infrastructure would be destroyed. Since human behavior can be controlled with education, psychology, and eugenics, and since humans are also a type of primates, ethology could also be applied to create a safer environment. However, in order to protect the dam called society, not even a single crack could be allowed in its walls. The final solution brought about the idea that humans were nothing more than social mammals and to treat them as such.

Death Feedback

• Main Article: Death Feedback

Footnotes

• The Rotten Apple Theory: The phrase "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch" alludes to the spread of mold or decay from one infected apple to the rest. A person can be called a rotten apple for being a bad individual among a good group.