Self-Esteem in Ender's Game
Ender's Game deals with some interesting and important topics, including the development of self-esteem.
This is not a review. Click here to see why.
Context
Earth is at war. Twice, it’s been attacked by mysterious creatures called “buggers.” Now, Ender and other hand-selected boys train to protect Earth from the Third Invasion. Taking children from their families is considered to be justified since it’s for the common good. Ender, who was taken from his family at six years old, is small for his age and remarkably brilliant. He quickly surpasses his peers, moving up the ranks and repeatedly winning the mock battles his school hosts—even when outnumbered with an exhausted army. At twelve, he moves on to command school. Ender’s Game is the story of his training and its consequences.
Author’s Note: I am departing from my usual format and covering just one idea in this article, but in more depth. I plan to read the sequel to Ender’s Game (Speaker for the Dead), at which point I will write a “normal” article covering 3 ideas across both books.
Idea: Self-sufficiency is necessary but not sufficient for self-esteem.
Ender is the “chosen one”; from monitoring of his brain activity, behavior, and genetics, military leaders expect him to be capable of leading an effective army against the buggers at a very young age. So from the moment he’s taken from his family, he’s manipulated and isolated. He’s set apart by his instructors for being the smartest—first with verbal remarks, later through his unprecedented meteoric rise through the ranks. This is done, we learn, deliberately to isolate him. “He can never come to believe that anybody will ever help him out, ever. If he once thinks there’s an easy way out, he’s wrecked,” explains General Graff, who manages the Battle School, to his colleague (39).
This treatment has mixed results. Ender does become remarkably self-sufficient. He learns not only battle strategy, but how to bring people together, how to earn their trust, how to make use of their strengths so that they feel trusted and efficacious. He quickly learns that an overly strict, regimented battle plan that gives soldiers no autonomy will often fail—but so will a lack of discipline in which everyone is left to their own devices and training isn’t taken seriously. He comes up with his own strategy; he breaks his army up into smaller teams, training them all in a variety of strategies and empowering individual soldiers to make decisions on their own when necessary. He takes one promising young soldier, Bean, and tasks him with coming up with creative strategies that nobody would ever think of. He tells his protegé, “I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid” (200). In this way, he shows trust in the remarkably bright and innovative Bean, and benefits from Bean’s ideas and his loyalty.
But Ender has no actual friends. At first he has allies against bullies; later, he has comrades who respect him; eventually, he has subordinates who look up to him. But never does he have any friends; he always feels isolated, separate from the other trainees, soldiers, and officers. They’re all on the same team, but he’s playing in a different room (sometimes literally). For any young person, wanting to have friends is a natural desire. But it’s especially difficult for Ender, far from home, to watch his teammates and the other armies bond and not to be able to do so.
Ender is pushed to develop self-sufficiency, but not holistic self-esteem. Self-esteem is the firm conviction that you are able to deal with the world (and are therefore worthy of success) and that you are morally good (and therefore worthy of happiness).1 But efficacy and morality apply both to one’s work and to the personal realm. Ender is pushed into working in a high-stakes career at a young age, and learns to be extraordinarily efficacious in that field. He learns to work with people, but not to bond or connect with them. The result is that his efficacy is off-balance; one aspect is well-developed, and the other underdeveloped.
The other component of self-esteem is morality. Ender absorbs the utilitarian morality of the Battle School, rarely being upset by injustice if it unites the army or contributes to victory. For example, when he first joins an army as a trainee soldier with no experience, the commander belittles him, but encourages the army to believe they’ll win despite having this undersized, untrained soldier in their midst. He begins the army’s chant, and “Ender’s perception of these events changed. It was a pattern, a ritual. Madrid was not trying to hurt him, merely taking control of a surprising event and using it to strengthen his control of his army” (78).
But uncritically absorbing moral principles, though understandable for a child, isn’t sufficient for him to believe he’s actually good when he acts on it. He doesn’t understand why he should accept those principles. When he’s tricked into taking a larger part in the military than he realizes, he hates what that turns him into. He never wanted to be a killer, and though he chose to train for the military to protect his family, he’s not convinced that sacrifice and violence really are the right choices, even in the context of being threatened by the buggers. The end of the book shows Ender trying to atone for his role in the war in light of knowledge he didn’t have (and couldn’t have had) at the time.
To be fully convinced that one is moral, one must understand the reasons behind one’s code of morality and practice it consistently. There are many problems with utilitarian ethics—the most significant of which is that there’s no reason that a large group of people’s welfare matters more than a smaller group’s welfare or an individual’s rights. Another problem, and one that Ender confronts, is the idea that only consequences matter, regardless of one’s knowledge or actions. This sets up an impossible standard. Nobody is omniscient; nobody can fully predict every consequence of his actions. When you judge yourself as though you should have, you will invariably fall short. This is what Ender does; he blames himself for the consequences of his actions even though he couldn’t possibly have foreseen them, because some of the information necessary to do so was deliberately kept from him and other information was unknown to anyone in his society.
Ender was taught a deeply flawed morality, and he learned it from the behavior and incentives at the Battle School—not by understanding why it’s good. As a result, he’s unable to develop the sincere conviction that he’s morally good. Further, he’s not able to develop normal social skills, because he only interacts with fellow soldiers and must always be on his guard; the teachers won’t protect him. The school administrators deliberately isolate Ender to teach him self-sufficiency, but their morality and methods of isolation actually deeply undermine his self-esteem.
Conclusion
Ender’s Game deals with some interesting concepts, including the question of whether it’s moral to sacrifice a child for the good of others, the value of intelligence over brute force, and how different forms of power work. It is rather dark, but for sci-fi fans who enjoy these themes, it’s a solid read. There are other books in the series, and I plan to read the sequel—at which point I’ll write more about the ideas Orson Scott Card is portraying.
For a full discussion of this view of self-esteem, see Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994).
I appreciated Ender’s Game, but I did not care for the next book in the series. His relationship with his sister gave me a creepy sort of “Donnie and Marie” vibe, and the story was way too heavy into mysticism.
I will enjoy reading your thoughts.