"Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive." (Card 35). A major theme in Ender’s Game is manipulation, and this quote sums it up perfectly. The adults, and in some cases the children, manipulate the students of the Battle School into doing exactly what they deem needed for the survival of the human race. At the end of the book, we find out that Ender had been tricked into leading a real army against the buggers and without knowing, had annihilated a whole alien race. In Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, the way the adults manipulate Ender into committing mass genocide was the right strategy because of Ender’s compassion.
To begin, lying to Ender about the war was the right strategy because Ender’s compassion would have kept him from making the impossible choice. After the final battle, Mazer tells Ender that “[Ender] made the harder…show more content… This applies especially to Ender’s last battle when he is going to use the Dr. Device on the bugger planet. Deploying the Dr. Device in this situation is extremely difficult to pull off, Ender even wonders if “any of his ships would survive long enough to get in range” (295). If he were to know that there were actual pilots in those ships, the choice to sacrifice them would have definitely been harder. Furthermore, when he does find out that the battles were not actually simulated, one of the first things that registers in his mind is that he “was ordering pilots to go in and die” (298). This realization emanates from Ender’s compassionate side, the side of him that wonders about those pilot’s families left on Earth. Although in the past he has said that he would never win if he was “terrified of losing a ship”, I believe the knowledge that the ships contained human lives would definitely change his perspective