"I'm Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question:
is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?
No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something
different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
RAPTURE.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where
the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where
the great would not be constrained by the small. And
with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your
city as well."
One of the biggest games of 2007 is Bioshock, an examination of Objectivism as applied to society ... and gone horribly wrong!
The story of Andrew Ryan, a passionate man who built his dream city under the sea, whose dreams were threatened by a petty smuggler named Fontaine and a freedom fighter named Atlas, Bioshock adds a science fiction element to Rand's grand plans, sets them under the sea, and suggests that human nature ultimately renders Objectivism a bad idea.
You may not believe that this video game, replete as it is with gene splicing, Little Sisters who act as carrion harvesters, and men in diving suits as their body guards ... but I assure you, it is! I had played and finished the game mere weeks before devouring the movie of The Fountainhead, and was absolutely tickled by Howard Roark's speech. There are banners all throughout Rapture that proclaim "A Man Creates. A Parasite asks 'where's my share?'"
The deal with Rapture, you see, is that its prime is long past: you come to this city a year after most of its inhabitants have died in its vicious civil war. An unnamed fellow forced under the sea by a plane crash, it only takes stepping into Rapture to realise that Ryan's vision has gone horribly wrong: the first event you witness before your bathysphere opens is a man getting killed by a Splicer. A government based on the policy of "every man for himself" has, perhaps unsurprisingly, spawned a society where people kill each other for their own personal gain. The ugliness inside has manifested into murderous anarchy.
Yet it is human nature, not objectivism, that is at fault. For all of his presentation as the game's villain, Andrew Ryan turns out to be quite sympathetic, if paranoid and delusional. The true villain is Atlas, who turns out to have been Fontaine all along. Atlas has been telling you throughout the game to find Ryan and to kill him. When you do meet Ryan, he tells you that you are, in fact, a genetic experiment: in essence, Atlas's slave. Practically shouting "Nobody takes what's mine!" while clasping Patricia Neal (actually, Ryan killed one of his lovers for getting pregnant, and spurned the other because she no longer conformed to his ideal of beauty), Ryan sets Rapture up to self-destruct and, knowing the way you're programmed, commands you to kill him. Except, of course, he's an Objectivist, and he has no passion.
This is the highlight of the game: you have absolutely no control over killing Ryan and, you realise, you've never had any control at all. Even when you're deprogrammed by Tenenbaum, who has realised the moral implications of the genetic work that pleased her so dearly, free will is still an illusion. Atlas/Fontaine makes no bones of letting you know this: you've simply switched masters. While it's clear to the player that Tenenbaum's path is just, the idea that your character is the equivalent of a Banner reader stings. A video game is a good place to explore this idea of free will, because if you don't do what Atlas or Tenenbaum tell you, then the game can't advance - and, indeed, if you don't follow Tenenbaum's orders to cure yourself of the last of your conditioning, you will die.
The only place in the game where you have a real choice is in the treatment of the Little Sisters: you can choose either to harvest them or to save them. If you kill them, you get more currency with which to boost your genetic makeup but, well, you've killed a little girl. If you save them, the results take longer to show but are more satisfactory. Objectivism as an "every man for himself" ideal does not allow room for the idea of a family unit, but the majority of people are not supposed to want to see others die.
As a slave to The Man, to whom should the sweat of your brow belong? The only answer worthy of a human (for Howard Roark, Dominique Francon et al are surely not human): the Little Sisters.
Ayn Rand teaches us that society should be every man for himself, every woman to be raped by every man and to enjoy, even to demand it. Bioshock teaches us that a dream cannot be realised if it belongs to one man alone, because a gangster will totally subvert it. Either that, or that the hunger for power can corrupt even the most innocent of dreams, and that there's no such thing as sole ownership.
Oh yeah, and if you don't believe me, how do you explain the posters littered throughout Rapture proclaiming "H Roark Presents"? You can't! I win.
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