Crossing Values

Pg. 269:

“And when she died, the others all died.”

“No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn’t move, didn’t respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There’s nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone.”

Pg. 270:

“Why did they kill the crew?”

“Why not? To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about. They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder’s no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path.”

“…Think of it this way. In all the bugger wars so far, they’ve killed thousands and thousands of living, thinking beings. And in all those wars, we’ve killed only one.”

These quotes describe one of the ideas that I found most intriguing this time through Ender’s Game. Mazer justifies their actions in the war by discounting the lives of all of the buggers except for the queen because she is the only bugger who thinks. At the same time, he offers a justification for the actions of the buggers, that they did not understand that all humans are capable of independent thought. The buggers did not understand the value that humans place on each individual life, and by killing the crew of the tug, they were merely following their own standard procedures.

What I find interesting about this is that as each culture came to understand the other, it adopted the other’s values. Since the buggers actions revealed to humans that they did not value individual lives, humans began to disregard the lives of individual buggers. The third quote from above by Mazer Rackham illustrates of just how little concern the lives of the dependent buggers have become to humans. At this point Mazer only counts the single queen that died as a casualty, none of the other buggers matter at all. Buggers, on the other hand, came to respect the individual life more as they realized that each human is an independent person. As the pupa queen let Ender know, “We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.” Once they understood that each human was a thinking being, they gained a more human respect for individual life. It’s interesting that despite the interaction between the two groups having been a war, it allowed them to further understand each other, which caused each group to take on certain values of the other regarding individuality. They already placed the same value on independent thought, as each group considers murder only to have occurred when the subject is a thinking being.

A closing thought: He isn't named Ender just because it's a derivative of Andres. Card named him for what he does. He ends things. He ends the war; he ends the buggers, and I'm sure you all can come up with other things he ends. Ender is an ender.