The Japanese light novel "Shin Sekai Yori" ("From the New World") explores a world where a small proportion of people develop incredibly powerful psychic powers

The Japanese light novel "Shin Sekai Yori" ("From the New World") explores a world where a small proportion of people develop incredibly powerful psychic powers. Spoilers: In it, the government follows TFA's first three methods of achieving stability through means that anyone today would consider immoral and brutal, eventually driven more by fear than reason. The story explores the question of how to balance morality with survival. As for the article, I don't see it as an apology for a panopticon. In fact, the author blatantly mocks the morality and likely political framing of a panopticon in describing a hypothetical one: "If suspicious activity is detected [by the freedom tag], the feed is relayed to one of several patriot monitoring stations." The problem with the article's argument is that it ignores non-apocalyptic problems that are still bad. We could spend a lot of time, resources, and political capital on establishing a world government. But we already use a lot of time, resources, and political capital on fighting disease, providing food, and fending off conventional wars. We can't relent much on any of those, or else we end up with a shitty world anyway. I like the typology of apocalypses. Those can help in planning. But the list of solutions aren't feasible.