The Moaning Ghost of Ayn Rand

BIOSHOCK PART ONE The Moaning Ghost of Ayn Rand

We’ll start with the basics.  Ken Levine of Irrational Studios used Ayn Rand as a start for his game.  You probably know more about Rand than you think if you’ve been paying attention to politics in the last decade.  Republicans seem to be using her philosophy as a springboard into their policies, so when you hear about “job creators” or the” fiction” of global warming or cutting taxes and social programs, then you’ve Ayn Rand whispering. 

Rand believed in individualism and rationality.  To Rand, man’s ambition and rationality (read science) should be unfettered by concepts of spirituality or communal responsibility.  Those oil producers should be able to go after oil wherever they like and have no regulations, everyone should keep the money they earned; man’s responsibility is to himself, “ The individual should exist for his own sake neither sacrificing for himself to others or others to himself.”  Rand was completely against governmental interference.  She hated statism, theocracy, monarchy, dictatorships, pretty much anything that imparted another’s will over your own or attempted to curb the heights man could achieve through his power of his own mind and ideas, “Man is a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute.”   Everyone can govern themselves.  It is unclear to me where the nonelite fit into this vision, what about those who aren’t the best and the brightest?  What about teachers who make the learned learned?  Parents?  Why should they spend all that energy and effort on another?  What happens when men’s views differ or collide?  And most important to me, what if man’s rationalizing exceeds his rationality- how often do we create a bulwark of ideas to support us and a blindspot to others to rationalize what we want to happen?  Levine and his team took these into account when creating Bioshock.  Beyond this the game shows that any idea, no matter how pure, is tainted and reshaped by everyone who touches it.  We as a society can not live dedicated to one ideal; it will ruin us and we shall ruin it.

Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s creator, was born in Russia and reinvented himself in the USA; he found both political systems wanting (for a great synopsis look here http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Andrew_Ryan) Socialism made sure no one ever gained, a revolution that traded names and made no difference.  In the U.S. he looked down on a government that could take what was his and hand it to others who had done nothing to earn it.  Ironically, Ryan became both these governments in Rapture, becoming a dictator who squashed any opposing voice, weeding out parasites who attempted to live off the work of others.  Ryan made the mistake of missing that he was doing the same, who did he think was keeping his society going, who used their hands and minds to build it?  Who maintained it?  An idea does not make it real.  In Rand’s Atlas Shrugged the elite leave the United states to create their own society far from failing ideologies, while they are gone the world falls apart, they discover an amazing type of energy and will return to create a new world celebrating achievement,  Levine and his crew show what they believe will happen in the world that follows. Their experiment is the city called Rapture, a paradise ruined, an intellectual marvel that consumed itself.