Talking to Dink later, Ender seems to agree with this idea – he’s a tool meant for a particular job (8.155). If this is true, then manipulation is a perfectly fine way for people to interact. That is, “manipulation” is another word for using a tool for a job, but it sounds bad when we’re talking about people’s relationships because we usually associate that word with telling lies or tricking people. But what if you could manipulate someone without doing anything bad?

Here’s Ender fighting that internal battle with himself. Check out the argument he’s having with himself: I didn’t mean to hurt him… well, yes, I did. And we also see one of the effects of this war: Ender doesn’t like the dangerous, Peter-ish part of himself, so he feels sick when he acts that way. In other words, Ender has lost this little battle against that part of himself, and he’s his own casualty.

This is both the administrators’ plan and their problem: they need someone who will be creative and find new solutions for old problems – so they isolate Ender.  Yet they still need him to be able to deal with people and lead them. If they isolate Ender totally, good-bye social skills. In some ways, this captures the double-edged sword that is isolation: it has its upside (yay, creativity) and its downside (boo, lack of social skills and empathy). As we’ll see some more, this issue is tightly connected to Ender’s education/manipulation.