I knew that the setting of these games was based around Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy and was curious as to how, Ken Levine, the BioShock creator envisioned that it could somehow lead to the disaster that he had portrayed in his games.  I quickly realized that his image of Objectivism was indeed flawed, morphed in such a way that he could smear it and in such a chaotic fashion that I furthermore question as to how anyhow regards these games as cogent and intelligent?

To me, these games are a modern example of The Emperor’s New Clothes in which those that decry that this game is intelligent have no empirical evidence as to support the Why? of their conclusions.  They seem to instead, as lemmings, be following the advice of others for fear that if they were to admit that they didn’t understand the game, then their ignorance would be chastised by everyone else.

The astounding success and continuing perception of these games demands an accurate analysis and defense of Objectivism, for Ken Levine has misrepresented it, and I fear that without dissenting opinion this will become the de facto perception of Ayn Rand amongst the vast, and younger, gaming audience.

In these efforts, I would like to post a comprehensive review of BioShock, written from an analytically philosophical perspective by my brother, Christopher.  He has been a student of the philosophy for nearly four years and is better able to answer the allegations of this game than I am at present.  Following is his unabridged analysis of the Bioshock franchise’s misrepresentation of Ayn Rand Objectivism.

BioShock, a video game for the Xbox 360 system is a popular first-person shooter that unfortunately, is a top seller for the console.  I have only witnessed the demo of this game, and have no desire to see the rest of it, so a part of this review is based on the Wikipedia synopsis.  The game supposedly portrays an Objectivist dystopia created and brought to the level of mutated monsters by a disgruntled businessman named Andrew Ryan.  (His name is an anagram of Ayn Rand.  Remove the “R” from “Ryan” and one has the letters that make up the name Ayn, and move the “R” to the front of “Andrew,” truncating the “rew”, and one has Rand.)

Literally, the game is an attack on Objectivism and Ayn Rand, and expresses a profound hatred of ability, reason, and man.  BioShock states that Rand’s ideas could only result in a city full of monsters, and that Ryan is a man who murdered the mother of his child.

The game is set just after 1957, the real published date of Rand’s magnum opus, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Throughout the game, some tenuous allusions to Rand are made, with the word altruism blindly thrown in once in a while, sprinkled with the horribly misshapen mutated citizens screaming that one is a “welfare parasite” and other such inanities whilst these monsters try to beat the player to death.

Comparing Miss Rand to a man who kills his significant other is so base and ridiculous a charge that it is unworthy of a response.  But is BioShock an accurate attack and refutation of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, or a monstrous misrepresentation of it?

At the start, the player, Jack, begins the game aboard a crashed plane and descends via a bathysphere to Ryan’s underwater city of “Rapture”, a city Ryan wanted to become an “Eden”.  This city literally mocks Rand’s idea of an ideological Atlantis, as in this case it is literally Atlantis. Rapture is an impractical underwater city with towering buildings that looks like New York City from the late 1950’s, presumably an attempt to parody Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s love of architecture.  This last is shown chiefly in the magnificent achievement of man that dominates Rapture: skyscrapers.

This smear of skyscrapers is just one of many instances in which the creators of BioShock show their hatred for ability.  Rapture is a world where pursuit of science results in pure evil, people desire to be hideous monsters, and irrationality is king.

Once the player descends in the bathysphere, the city greets the player with a banner announcing that in Rapture, “No God, No Government” is permitted.  The player is subsequently manipulated by a man calling himself Atlas in another of many smears of Atlas Shrugged. After this introduction, the player wanders around killing the monstrous citizens of Rapture that have forced evolution forward by injecting their bodies with chemicals called “ADAM” and “EVE” so that they can, along with a slew of other mystic fantasies, shoot fire and lightning bolts out of their fingertips and use telekinesis.

The player, a mindless automaton, cannot continue forward in the game without doing the same to himself, stabbing his forearms with every stray needle in the city to gain these very abilities that the game damns as evil.  According to Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock) the only “virtuous” characters are the “Little Sisters”–small girls with a black pallor and glowing eyes, who have been injected with the chemicals.  It is possible that the makers of the game were mocking Rand with the moniker “Little Sister” as former Communist and William F. Buckley Jr. colleague, Whittaker Chambers, famously denounced Rand and Atlas Shrugged in his 1957 review: “Big Sister Is Watching You” (in which it is clear that he did not even read the book).

These girls roam the ruins of the city, demonically singing while stabbing dead citizens of Rapture in the head with syringes as large as their bodies, and draining the vicious chemicals from the corpses.

So, would an Objectivist society end up in a destroyed metropolis littered with Christian references where the citizens shoot mind-destroying chemicals into their bodies at rates that would make junkies jealous?  Would Objectivism cause people to degenerate into a society in which the brainwashed children go around sucking substances out of their dead parents’ heads?

I’ll let Ms. Rand do most of the talking, as she did over 30-50 years ago, refuting every single point of this insipid game’s fraudulent attempt to portray Objectivism.  On the topic of conceptual corruption, Rand wrote in the Ayn Rand Letter essay “Representation Without Authorization” p. 92:

“Ever since Kant, the dominant method of modern philosophers has been to fight issues not by open intellectual presentation, but by corruption – the corruption into its opposite of any concept which they dared not oppose explicitly.  Just as Kant corrupted the concept ‘reason’ to mean a mystic faculty pertaining to another dimension, so his theoretical and practical descendants have been employing his technique on an ever growing scale and shrinking subjects.”

BioShock not only misrepresents Rand and Objectivism, but also corrupts it by portraying the opposite set of values as Objectivism.  In fact, the entire game offers a “straw man” of Objectivism.

According to Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man): “A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.  To ’set up a straw man’ or ’set up a straw man argument’ is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent’s actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent.”  Also, “A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it carries little or no real evidential weight, because the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted.” (Emphasis mine.)  This last is the case with BioShock.  The article continues about the methods of a straw man argument: “Present[s] a misrepresentation of the opponent’s position and then refut[es] it, thus giving the appearance that the opponent’s actual position has been refuted.”

BioShock is full of religious allusions; from the city name Rapture that, as mentioned before, Ryan wanted to become an “Eden”, to the chemicals injected into the citizens ADAM and EVE.  The word rapture has several customary definitions; all incompatible with Objectivism: “a: a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion b: a mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of divine things.” (Merriam Webster Online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rapture) and from Dictionary.com: “3. The carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence. 4. The Rapture, Theology. the experience, anticipated by some fundamentalist Christians, of meeting Christ midway in the air upon his return to earth.“  (All above italics mine.)

So, the first step in creating its straw man, BioShock paints Rand and Objectivism with a religious coating that the Vatican would applaud.  Anyone with even a faint knowledge of Objectivism knows that to be an Objectivist, one must be an atheist.  All religion is derived from a realm outside of existence, and the first axiom of Objectivism is, according to Miss Rand in her essay Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology: “existence exists; and only existence exists”.

Objectivism is based on the primacy of existence, apart from any consciousness.  There are no other forms of existence to receive mystic revelations from.  Non-existence is not an alternative to existence, but literally, nothing.  The only method of gaining knowledge is by man’s senses as interpreted by reason.  This is in stark contrast to the straw man BioShock constructs, which “carr[ies] a person to another place or sphere of existence”, is “a mystical experience”, “a knowledge of divine things”, and “meet[s] Christ midway in the air upon his return to earth.”  All these definitions rely on another existence separated from reality.  Strike one, BioShock; mysticism can’t be mixed with Objectivism.  No “ADAM”, “EVE”, “Rapture” or “Eden” is permitted in this philosophy.  Nor is “a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.”  This is what Rand deemed a “whim-worshipper”: a person that has denied reason, and thus relies on the previously automatized value-judgments a person made–emotions.  Someone “carried away by overwhelming emotion” is out of control, and therefore, irrational.

As an interesting side note on the intellectual credentials of the makers of the game, 2K Games, notice that they could not even remain consistent in their presentation of atheism: Mr. Ryan has violated his own “No God, No Government” banner, (which is not even true of Objectivism, see below) in all the religious allusions to fundamental Christianity.  Either Ryan is an atheist, or he isn’t, he can’t be both–religion and atheism are mutually exclusive.  For trying to mix reason and faith, 2K Games earns a big strike one for BioShock.

Next, the game puts the arms and head on the straw man, which is to be seen in a thorough examination of the “No God, No Government” banner from the game.  Both of these statements are not in agreement with the principles of Objectivism.

An Objectivist society would allow people to worship religion, because such a society would have both rational and irrational people living in it.  The term “Objectivist society”, in the only possible context, allows freedom of ideas, including dissenting ideas.  A society that enforces “No God” is a dictatorship.  Miss Rand in the Ayn Rand Letter essay “How to Read (and Not to Write)” p.116:

“No advocate of capitalism ever held the workings of the marketplace as the arbiter of all societal values and outcomes – only of the economic ones, i.e. those pertaining to production and trade.  In a free marketplace, these values and outcomes are determined by a free, general, ‘democratic’ vote – by the sales, purchases and choices of every individual.  And – as one indication of the fact that, under capitalism, there are social values outside the power of the marketplace – each individual votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests and needs.  The paramount social value he has no power to encroach upon is: the rights of others.  He cannot substitute his vote and judgment of theirs; he cannot declare himself to be ‘the voice of the people’ and leave the people disenfranchised.”

Another discussion of the freedom of ideas can be found in the Ayn Rand Letter essay “National Unity” p. 127:

“Since agreement on the principle of individual rights does not impose any official dogma and does not violate anyone’s convictions, the greatest variety of views and ideas could coexist peacefully in the same country without threatening anyone.  If two men disagreed, they were free not to deal with each other, and neither could force his choices on the other.  Incidentally, this applied even to the man who refuses to respect individual rights, i.e., the criminal: if he chose to initiate the use of force, he was answered on the terms he had chosen, i.e., by force.”

Thus, Objectivism holds that the marketplace of ideas is free.

And more on why an Objectivist society would permit religion, here is Rand answering a question about fighting against religion in Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A:

“There are rational religious people.  In fact, I was pleased and astonished to discover that some religious people support Objectivism.  If you want to be a full Objectivist, you cannot reconcile that with religion; but that doesn’t mean religious people cannot be individualists and fight for freedom.  They can, and this country is the best proof of it.  Of course, one should not forbid religion.  Today’s culture is such that the moment you oppose something, people believe you want to forbid it by law.  If we did that, we’d return to the Dark Ages.  Leave people the right to be wrong in their own way.  So long as they don’t force their ideas on you, you cannot forbid religion to anyone.”

So much for “No God”.  Notice that Rand’s statements point out another flaw in the illogical world of BioShock: it takes laws, and therefore a government to try and enforce what a man thinks.  This can only be implemented by physical force, the monopoly of a government.  That is another contradiction by 2K Games, still only five minutes into the game.  For there to be “No God” in Rapture, there would have to be a government.  Strike two, BioShock. Time to get out the gasoline to douse the straw man.

The second half of the banner, “No Government” is equally incompatible with Objectivism.  Either out of ignorance or malice, many of Rand’s detractors portray her as an anarchist.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Here is Rand on anarchism from the Objectivist Newsletter of September 1971:

“I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called ‘hippies of the right,’ who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism.  Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either.  Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshipping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.”

Rand elaborates on anarchism in The Virtue of Selfishness essay “The Nature of Government”:

“Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: … a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang welfare.  But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.”

Notice that the chaos of gang warfare is what BioShock presents in its anarchy of “No Government” while simultaneously maintaining the contradiction of “No God” that requires government enforcement to uphold, i.e. legal censorship.  Strike three, BioShock, you’re out.  Clearly, the ideological credentials at 2K Games are bankrupt.  Time to get some matches.

As for Rand’s idea of a proper government:

“If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.  This is the task of a government – of a proper government – its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.  A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control – i.e., under objectively defined laws.”  Observe that this is the only way to protect selfish interests, based on individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Furthermore, Rand states:

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.  A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.  The only proper functions of government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules according to objective law.  But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had force no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality.”

Is there any doubt that a potential banner stating Rand’s ideals would more appropriately read: “God Permitted and Government is Necessary”?  2K Games should look into the ideas and people they intend to portray before they make a game–the straw man has been charred beyond recognition.

Later in the game, the hatred of ability that dominates BioShock is revealed to the player in a description of the event triggering the downfall of Rapture: the citizens believed menial labor to maintain the city to be demeaning, and refused to do it.  Yet again, this is a direct inversion and misrepresentation of the events of Atlas Shrugged. This time in a scene in which the heroine, Dagny, discusses with Andrew Stockton his happiness to cede the position at the Galt’s Gulch foundry to a man more able than himself.  From Atlas Shrugged p.668:

[Dagny:] “Then somebody could put you out of business, too?”

[Stockton:] “Sure. Any time. I know one man who could and probably will, when he gets here. But, boy!—I’d work for him as a cinder sweeper. He’d blast through this valley like a rocket. He’d triple everybody’s production.”

A rational man understands that it is in his self-interest for the most able man to have the best job, as all benefit from the increased production, even if this means losing one’s own job.  Rand expands on this idea in Atlas Shrugged p. 978-9:

“But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.”

(For a fuller discussion on Objectivism’s answer on this topic, see the essay “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests” in Rand’s book, The Virtue of Selfishness.)

The makers of BioShock chose to ignore and invert these passages about life in a rational society of an ideological Atlantis to be that of a society not based on reason.

At this point, an examination of the chief man behind the game and source of this fallacious attack on Objectivism proves enlightening.  Prior to being named 2K Games, the studio was founded by Creative Director, Ken Levine, under the name Irrational Games.  Here, in an interview with IGN.com, is Levine’s own words on the inspiration for the game: “I have my useless liberal arts degree, so I’ve read stuff from Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and all the sort of utopian and dystopian writings of the 20th century, which I’ve found really fascinating.”

So, a man that has a “useless liberal arts degree” makes a game where the player is a manipulated automaton of evil businessmen while injecting himself with mind-altering, body-destroying chemicals, and occasionally rearranging water pipes in the heads of security robots.  Irrational Games, indeed.  This sounds like the curriculum of a humanities degree at any university.  Apparently, Mr. Levine has gotten use out of his degree–he is spewing verbatim the hatred of today’s academia for man, reason, ability, along with a nearly Pavlovian response of denunciation of businessmen, and most of all, the desire to sling mud at a woman and philosophy with an absolute view of reality and of good and evil.

Whatever the motive, whether the result of ignorant misunderstanding, or more likely, conscious malicious intent, BioShock is an ideological travesty.  For misrepresenting Rand–the paramount defender of individual rights–as a murderous dictator, and Objectivism–the only moral philosophy in history, the philosophy that holds an absolutist view of reason–as an immoral philosophy of unreason, 2K Games should issue a formal apology.

An aside regarding the nature of media reviews on BioShock:

The unbelievable number of awards this game won has resurrected some musty Rand haters.  The Boston Globe described the game as: “a beautiful, brutal, and disquieting computer game…one of the best in years,” and compared the game to Communist Whittaker Chamber’s 1957 riposte to Atlas Shrugged, “Big Sister Is Watching You” (in which it is clear that he did not even read the book.)  I’ll agree with disquieting.

The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer wrote: “I never once thought anyone would be able to create an engaging and entertaining video game around the fiction and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but that is essentially what 2K Games has done…the rare, mature video game that succeeds in making you think while you play.” I think while I do everything.  That’s more than can be said for that reviewer.

The Los Angeles Times reviewer concluded, “Sure, it’s fun to play, looks spectacular and is easy to control. But it also does something no other game has done to date: It really makes you feel.” (Italics mine.)  Written by Eugene Lawson from Atlas Shrugged?  It sounds like someone is already in the rapture of “a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.”

And of course, The New York Times reviewer described it as: “intelligent, gorgeous, occasionally frightening” and added, “Anchored by its provocative, morality-based story line, sumptuous art direction and superb voice acting, BioShock can also hold its head high among the best games ever made.”  (All quotes from Wikipedia.)

The defense rests.  The destroyers certainly know what has to be destroyed.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5365704

a.  The part where he announces that Cleveland will win a title before Lebron (notice that he insinuates that Lebron will eventually when one by his wording)

b. The part where he refers to a Christian tenet that has taught him that you must die in order to go to heaven (what the hell does this even have to do with anything?  Does he want Lebron to die?  Does he want him to go to hell?  Does he think Lebron is going to hell when he dies?  I’m baffled…)

c. The part where he describes the assortment of bad karmic, widju board inspired black magic that he has cast upon Lebron for leaving.

I can’t even believe this was real.  In fact, my first thought was, “man… who found Dan Gilbert’s computer unlocked, opened Outlook, and went to town?”

Perhaps the most shocking fact of all this, is that this same man somehow acquired enough wealth to purchase a professional sports franchise?!?  How?!?  It is impossible that this mystic garbage he touts ever led to good decision making in business.  It must have been some sort of inheritance/nepotism.

Hey Dan, it’s OK to be disappointed.  We’ve all been there- just be honest and say so instead of acting like a religious three year old.  If  I was a Cavs fan I would indeed be livid… @ Dan Gilbert.  Y’all really think any free agents are interested in going there lest they get a better offer down the road an be subjected to the “Insane Dan” treatment?  You should all boycott lest the Cavs become the official team of CrazyTown.

Edit: OK, so according to Wikipedia, the Quicken Loans label on the arena is because he owns the company.  Neat.  I’m never using TurboTax again.

Now for the technical details.  You will probably notice a new look and feel to the website, hopefully you will find it improved over the original incarnation.  I have a new provider with a much more appropriate cost model with a slew of server side support that will provide me with a sandbox for toying around with new dynamic web technologies.  I’ve upgraded the blog itself from an ancient MovableType version to WordPress which greatly enhances the accessibility and maintainability of the blog.  I hope to continue to launch features on this, my personal site, as a launch pad and test bed toward technologies that will be applied elsewhere. I thought about changing the domain name given that it is, uh, setting specific, and may not be appropriate as time goes on, but more on that as time progresses and certainly a topic for future posts.  I would like the accessibility of the site to be enhanced and tied to my various social networking platforms, but upgrading the layout of the site is on the back burner and something that I will delve into as time permits.  Suffice it to say, that the social networking links will at some point in the future actually go someplace meaningful, but for the time being are simply placeholders.

So as the end of the decade approaches (I like the term “noughts” for the 00’s, let’s start a trend), I am looking forward to new chapters all around, and THC.com is no different.  For those that are reading- old friends, new friends, and potentially future friends alike, I look forward to discussion and interaction that will hopefully be fruitful and beneficial to each one of us individually.

Now, without further ado…