Oh boy, I wonder what my favourite SocDem Anime Grandpa is gonna say... Oh. Oh God.

If the population continues to balloon to 10 billion within our finite resources, it will be disastrous. Yet, we don’t hear these words from the people of the 20th-century mindset. For example, do you know the mission of Japan’s Minister for Measures against the Declining Birthrate?

――― Policies to increase the number of children and create a society conducive to child-rearing.

That answer is already wrong. What the Minister really needs to do is something completely different. Our current social system was built in an era when the population was continuously increasing, but from here on, there will be a surplus. This means there will be vacant houses, so the Minister should be working on creating a balanced society where a population of around 50 million can live. Yet, they are still saying, ‘have more, increase the population.’ This is the thinking of people stuck in the 20th-century mindset of mass production and mass consumption, the excessive capitalism.

Yay! Enviromental Activist Tomino is my favourite Tomino. (As an aside, and this is less a criticism of Tomino in particular, but I do hate how depopulation has crept into the discourse surrounding environmental activism, so even well-meaning liberals pave the way towards eco-fascism.)

One can see the potential impasse of relying solely on specialization. There needs to be a revolution in the way we think. However, words like ‘innovation’, ‘revolution’, ‘reform’ are as misleading as communism—they tend to push us towards a totalizing way of thinking, synonymous with socialism, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is akin to dictatorship; hence, by default, we should lean towards democracy. But democracy is perpetually plagued by the issue of populism—if we were to consider all public opinions, the end result would be indecisiveness. That brings us back to the paradox of needing some form of control over the whole.

The Newtype I envision is an entity that transcends those limitations, one that integrates opposing views and the status quo, while simultaneously seeking a novel system or direction. Humanity needs an Aufheben – to transcend and sublate. This diverges from the traditional notion of revolution, and is certainly not the same as reform. This isn’t a matter of right or wrong. Considering its social impact, there’s hardly anyone, including those in their 30s, who can articulate and contemplate this issue accurately. They are all Oldtypes, and hence, President Zelenskyy is just a budding Newtype.

The children of today, aged around seven to thirteen, who can precisely grasp the explicit issues surfacing in Putin’s War, and discern a future path forward from a neutral perspective, are the ones who may embody the Newtype once they assume decision-making positions. It’s your generation’s duty to ensure they safely reach adulthood. This is something beyond my capabilities now, so please, do persevere.

To be a bit more serious and discuss the concept- as I understood it, this was always Tomino's intended meaning: a person who was the end product of dialetics, a Hegelian counterpart to the Ubermensch at the End of History (in short, a New Type of Person), able to transcend the old ways of thinking and sublimate them into synthesizing a new way forward that would get history moving again- hence why in all his stories Newtypes don't resolve the conflict with violence, but empathy and understanding. (Also, for some reason, he coded them all autistic so maybe he was being more literal than I care to credit him for.) You can see the ghost of the Marxist that was here, although maybe the roots of this concept was too deep in Hegel's idealism, and the failures of the New Left followed by the fall of the Soviet Union too traumatic.

Having said all that, I have no fucking idea how he landed on Zelenskyy lmao wtf is he thinking

On the whole this is one of his less spicy and problematic interviews (Tomino Don't Be Weird About Women Challenge: IMPOSSIBLE), but this probably should be an abject lesson that no one is immune to propaganda.

Edit: You know what this means Hexbear, we need a Zelenskyy Newtype emoji now

Edit 2: Somebody good at photoshop put Zelenksyy's face on this

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