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I'm just now half way through CotM, but my question really has more to do with Ender's Game and how he grew up. Please forgive my posting this if I'm treading on an already worn canyon.
If I understood Ender's Game correctly, then Andrew was taken from his family (where he was loved by at least Valentine and his parents) at five years of age. He was then thrown into a fairly brutal and unloving environment where he had to survive by his wits, counting on noone. How did he manage to become a decent person instead of a killing machine? We are learning that young boys in war torn Africa (Rwanda, Liberia, etc.) who are made to become soldiers at an age older than Ender become killers and who treat that way of life as the norm. It is only through intervention that there is any hope that these children will change and become human rather than killing machines. Ender received no such compassion.
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One can presume that some intervention was made after Battle School, in the dark period of Ender's life during which we know relatively little.
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Ender is just a kick ass person. There are some people like that in the world. Who go through hellish lives and emerge okay. Well, ender is one of them. He is quite rare really. Also, I think he is too smart for that. he understands the system and tries not to let it get to him.
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Well the other thing is from the begining the only reson hes ever truly visious is when it's all or nothing. And that is the one part of him-self he truly loats, when he is forced to use his great abilty of understanding people to hurt them.
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Correct me if I am wrong but didn't he have a break down after he killed all the buggies (the alien creature with the hive queen, it has been a while since i read the books)? Wouldn't this mean that he had compasion from the start and never had to gain it? Just wondering...
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Yes, I agree that he had compassion from the start. But my question is "how did he come by that?" His upbringing was brutal after he left his parents, and yet he maintained his humanity.
Is there an altuism gene? Valentine seemed to possess that quality, but not the brutality that would allow her to survive and let the human race survive. Peter seemed only to have the brutality. Andrew had both. What this implies is that these are inborn traits that nurture won't change. Can this be true?
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If I recall, Ender didn't leave home until he was...eh...seven, I think. Or six?
So that gave him six/seven years of a decent upbringing. Valentine's influence was a part of it, as well as Peter's. Ender disliked Peter enough that he made a concious effort not to be like him.
I don't know if there is an altruism gene, only that some people are jerks and some people aren't. Perhaps it's a little bit of nature, a little bit of nurture, and a lot of choice.
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I believe that the reason for Ender's decency was that he was strong and couldn't be broken. Remember that he was constantly followed by the shadow of guilt that was tacked on him by Graff and Anderson (did anyone know that Anderson was a woman?) Remember also that he was the perfect balance of Valentine and Peter, violent enough to kill when in threat (or thought he was, in the Formics' case), and mild enough to love. Remember that Ender had to learn to love the Buggers before he could learn to think like them and defeat them. His being the perfect combo of his siblings made him the perfect being.
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There are several key differences between ender and children who are raised in war-torn countries. The main one being that ender didn't know what he was doing when he killed the buggers, and all of his other encounter, such as the one with Bonzo, he was just defending himself. And then, even though he could have rationalized in his mind to convince himself it wasn't his fault, he took responsibility for his actions and essentially spent the rest of his life looking for redemption.
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