fandomhigh | Practical Philosophy, Monday

Ender was still holding a cup of coffee from the Starbucks branch at the Baltimore Portalocity terminal in his hands when he arrived; he'd ordered the largest size, and still sipped it from time to time even though it had gone cold.

He had another portal back to Coruscant in only three hours-- a day would have passed back there, and he would probably spend some time sleeping to make up for lost time earlier this morning.

Now, though, he was outside again, sitting down on the lawn, putting the coffee between his legs. "Sorry about the lack of food," he said. "But I'm currently in the process of hurrying back and forth between here and my partner's galaxy on account of a minor crisis. Nothing for you to worry about, though."

He scraped his throat. "I didn't want to go into this last week because for some of you, the issues at hand might have still been too fresh," he said. God knew he'd been reeling himself, and the nightmares still hadn't gone away-- but he was ignoring that now. "But I'd like for us to talk about identity, and what this island does to it."

"I'm sure at least some of you have been asking yourselves the question, 'how much of that was me? Whatever it was I did, was it my fault?' It's a question for which there are no easy answers. In fact, it's an ancient argument in many fields: is it nature that defines us, or nurture?" He glanced over the faces of his students. "Because in the case of this particular week, our nurture was decidedly different. Or rather, to use a word less tied up with child-rearing, our circumstances."

"There are people who'll say that you won't know who you are until you're pushed to your extreme, and that's a valid point," he said, "Though I'd nuance it by saying that who you are at your extreme is just another part of you. It predicts what you would do in certain situations, but it isn't a worthwhile indicator of a full bonafide human being. Would you do the things you'd do to an enemy in an extreme situation if the situation was not extreme? If you could talk to them, reason with them? Would you do it if it was someone you loved?"

"Or would you balk? Would you sacrifice yourself in one situation but not in another? Of course you would. You're human." He took another sip of his cold coffee. "This is one of the reasons why debates about ethics always become complicated, and even our resident class with Professor Skywalker won't prepare you for the realities of it. There are people who say they won't kill who will become murderers, and people who say they would who never do. Some of it is circumstance and some of it is who they are-- we aren't simple creatures, except for when we are."

He put his coffee down. "But I could lecture on this topic for a very long time," he said. "I'm more interested in letting all of you squawk for a while. What did you do that week, and was it something you thought you would do? Is it something you think you might do here, if the circumstances are right? What if they're different? I'm not looking for ethics here-- I'm absolutely the last person who has any right to pass moral judgement on anything. I just want to know who you think you were and who you think you are, and whether you think the two have any connection whatsoever."

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"So you feel you were you because you acted the way you would have," Ender summarized. "You're used to this kind of adversity."

"Maybe not with the people hunting me down and actively trying to kill me," Sparkle noted, though there was a 'not usually' lurking under that for good measure, because, shit, streets in Toronto, "but I've been arrested a few times and I swore that I'd never get taken in again, and I'm going to stand by that, yeah. If you grabbed me today and threw me back there with all my normal memories and a warning, I'd probably do things the same way."

Hell, maybe he'd even enjoy it more without having to struggle his way to freedom beforehand. It would be less personal.

"How about everyone else?" Ender asked, after a short pause. "Would you say they were kidding themselves if they felt differently about their own actions?"

Sparkle actually took a moment to chew on that question. And then he shrugged.

"Don't know," he admitted. "There was magic flying around, messing with people's heads. If they didn't have control of what they did, then they didn't have control of what they did. And maybe there were some people there for years, instead of me, just there since the start of summer. That much time in the worst situations, that'll fuck anybody up. You see it happen all the time if you're in the right places, like there's this weight that's pressing down, right there, constantly on their chest, and some people can shake it off and start breathing again, and some people... they'll just do anything if it means they can stop gasping even if they think they have to make it better by making it worse. That doesn't mean that's who they are now. That means someone danced into the China shop on the back of a bull, swinging around a fucking hammer."

Welcome to the wonderful world of Sparkle's colourful metaphor.

It was a lovely one, though. Ender's expression showed some amusement despite his better judgment, the corners of his mouth briefly curving up.

"So the circumstances made the men," he said, "and the women. In this case, at least. And they are conceivable circumstances, at least to you - something we can understand. It usually falls out that way."

"The people who actually chose the other way... I don't think I blame them, either. I mean, it sucked. I would have punched them all in the face if someone had lined them up for me back there, and they would have dragged me in or killed me if they had the chance. But if the lady at the top wasn't such a sadistic psycho, I could see me going the other way, too. It would have been safer." Sparkle shrugged. "You didn't exactly hear the radio reading off a list of Loyalist dead every day the way the newspaper rattled it off for us. I can't really fault anyone for not wanting to end up under the ground for joining the underground, either. People want to keep living. I mean, we're animals, it's what animals do. We survive. That means different things to different people, and sometimes you have to crack before you know how much it's really worth to you."

Yeah. Ender was well aware of that.

"Of course whether you can live with what you learn is a different question," he said, "but I suppose the survival instinct wins out even there."

"For most people, I guess," Sparkle replied, shrugging a bit. "That depends on the person, too. Sometimes, people have different ideas about what it means to survive."

Simply breathing wasn't always enough. Sometimes it wasn't anything at all. Sometimes, you were already dead, if you chose to compromise who you were in order to do the right thing, or the wrong one.

Sparkle wasn't going to launch into how he'd seen that happen, at least not while he was here in class. Spend enough time around unwanted teens, and you saw a lot of things.

"In the end, everyone does what they feel they need to do, right or wrong. That's all."

Likewise, Ender wasn't going to let on that Sparkle had just touched upon a source of personal shame for himself - the knowledge that he would fight and kill, not just for his life, but for much less than that if it came down to it; that he wasn't one of those people who'd die for a good cause.

And that that meant sometimes other people died instead.

"You think personal motivation always springs from that one source?"

"In the end?" Sparkle shrugged. "People are animals, but they're complicated. Maybe someone's idea of surviving means that they live on through their kids, or what people remember them for. Maybe a few words on a headstone telling the world how noble they were is their idea of immortality. Or... people who believe in Heaven, or whatever, who are okay with not being alive so long as it means they get eternity somewhere better. We have instincts, but we also have minds. In the end, all it really means is an adjustment to our definition of living. But it all comes back to the same thing, once you account for how people define it, yeah. We want to keep going, mostly."

Practical Philosophy, Monday

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