Abstract
Ayn Rand is regularly referenced or put to thematic use in American popular culture. One of the best-known examples of a Rand-influenced product is BioShock, a videogame that takes players inside a “utopia” founded according to a version of Objectivism. In BioShock’s plot, Randian morals and ethics lead to civil war and dystopia; the game is a work of posthumanist science fiction, featuring mechanical technology and biotechnology with the power to bestow superhuman capabilities. Murnane establishes background to BioShock by demonstrating Rand’s prevalence within popular culture, as well as her use of the tropes of utopia and dystopia, which the game in turn draws on. The main analysis shows how BioShock uses Objectivism itself and posthumanism to interrogate Rand’s capitalist ideal.
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Alicia Florrick is the protagonist in US legal drama The Good Wife . The character, played by Julianna Margulies, is a founding partner in her own law firm; she is married to the Democratic governor of Illinois. Like any self-respecting liberal, Alicia scorns Ayn Rand. Her views were aired in a 2014 episode of the show, “The One Percent.” A major corporate client is being sued for discrimination. The head of the company, James Paisley (Tom Skerritt), tells Alicia she should read Rand. Alicia tells him he shouldn’t be getting his ethics from those novels: “It’s like basing your philosophy on the books of John Grisham.” Paisley is about to lay off a fifth of his workers. But he claims that he is a victim. Channeling Rand’s mid-1960s declaration that big business is America’s “persecuted minority,” he says: “The 1 percent is the new hunted minority in this country. Not unlike the Jews in Nazi Germany” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 40; Humphrey 2014).
“The One Percent” is an obvious reference to Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement that emerged in the course of the post-2008 recession, demanding greater income equality between the bottom “99 percent” and the top-earning “1 percent” of the population. Akin to many television dramas, The Good Wife taps into the zeitgeist and abstracts plotlines from current events. This was the third episode of the 2013–2014 season of the show to mention Rand. Its portrayal of an arrogant, Rand-touting corporate king is hardly an original take on her work. However, it is emblematic of Rand’s revived presence in the media sphere, in the wake of 2008. And it does emphasize the continuity that the political left sees between Rand’s works and corporate excess. 1
A subtler and more interesting reference to Rand is made in a 2007 episode of Mad Men , a TV drama about advertising executives on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the lead, is invited into the office of his boss, Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse). Cooper tells Draper that he appreciates all his work. He says that he knows Draper’s talents are unquantifiable, but nonetheless gives him a bonus of $2,500. “Have you read her?” Cooper asks, pointing to his bookshelf. “Rand. Atlas Shrugged. That’s the one.” He says that he and Draper are alike: “It’s strength. We are different. Unsentimental about all the people who depend on our hard work” (Provenzano 2008, emphasis in original). Mad Men is really about the birth of modern commercialized life. Rand is placed right there at the origin.
This chapter is about a work of popular culture that makes extensive use of Ayn Rand’s ideas, while also making extensive use of posthumanism—the videogame BioShock. Before I get to a discussion of the game, however, I would like to establish two things. The first is that BioShock is not so unusual in being a pop-media product that references Rand; many products in popular culture, across multiple media and genres, do so—the above being just two examples. We saw Rand put to work within a popular television show (Andromeda) in the last chapter; this chapter shows some of the other ways she has been put to use within pop culture. I delve into this phenomenon further, in order to set up a context for BioShock. The game may not be unusual in terms of referencing Rand, but it is remarkable for the extent to which is makes direct use of her philosophy, and interrogates it.
The second contextual aspect I want to establish relates to science-fictional utopias and dystopias. These were literary tropes that Rand drew on in her work, and which BioShock in turn draws on. I will briefly consider how Rand fits with other well-known twentieth-century writers of utopia/dystopia, before showing how BioShock turns Rand’s utopian creation (Objectivism) back on itself, resulting in—within the game’s narrative—a dystopian nightmare.
Multi-media Rand
The above scenes from The Good Wife and Mad Men are just two recent examples in a long line of TV references to Rand. Often she is a figure of fun, though sometimes her ideas are put to thematic use. The sheer number of programs that have referenced her is overwhelming. It includes everything from animated comedies The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park, to live-action shows across various genres: Frasier, Columbo, and Gilmore Girls, to name three (Sciabarra 2004, p. 4).
Young adult network The WB featured Atlas Shrugged in one of the earliest episodes of One Tree Hill —a program whose theme song, evincing Randian self-esteem, goes, “I don’t wanna be anything other than me.” Main character Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray) is finding it hard to hone his basketball prowess; fellow players on the high school team are giving him a rough time. As they chat in the school library, a teammate, Jake Jagielski (Bryan Greenberg), hands the protagonist Rand’s novel. He says of Lucas’s talent, “Don’t let ’em take it,” tapping the book knowingly. Lucas’s voiceover at the episode’s close, quotes from the end of Galt’s speech: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours” (Schwahn 2005). 2 Rand is fodder for stories of teenage angst as well as stories about the origins of the modern market system.
Nor is television the only pop-cultural medium in which she has made an impact. One of the best-known instances of a Rand-inspired product is the album 2112. Canadian progressive rock band Rush credit “the genus [sic] of Ayn Rand” in the liner notes to this, their 1976 long play. The album was released under Rush ’s label Anthem Entertainment: another explicit reference to Rand, as the company’s website makes clear. 3 The “2112” suite has a plot which mirrors the Anthem novella. It tells a story set in a collectivist dystopia. Rand’s hero reinvents the lightbulb, Rush ’s hero rediscovers the guitar; both present their discoveries to the authoritarian powers-that-be, and are shot down. Both imagine an alternative world where the individual is his own master. Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart was profoundly influenced by Rand; her impact is apparent throughout his writing. Creem magazine interviewed Peart in 1981, where he said: “Everything I do has Howard Roark in it, you know, as much as anything. The person I write for is Howard Roark” (qtd. in Bowman 2002, p. 183).
Surveying articles by Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jeff Riggenbach in a centenary symposium issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, one is faced with an ineluctable conclusion: Ayn Rand should be taught on all popular literature courses. The authors go into impressive detail regarding Rand’s influence on popular fiction: on numerous novelists and on writers for comics. Rand was not an artistic innovator, in the sense of form. As such, she has had little impact on literary esthetics, broadly conceived. It is an understatement to say that she is not a celebrated figure of modernism or postmodernism , the two major artistic movements of her lifetime. Indeed, she is a subject of scorn among literary critics—described by Slavoj Žižek , for example, as producing “ideological and literary trash” (Žižek 2002, p. 225). Within the field of popular literature, however, Rand has left a significant mark, even if her impact is not “pervasive” (Riggenbach 2004, p. 141). She has given younger writers philosophical–political ideas to play with, and taught them how to spin a gripping yarn. Popular literature in the manner discussed here conforms to Ken Gelder’s definition; not only fiction with a large readership, but that which is “simple”—relative to high literature—in terms of ideas, language, and structure; work which is “exaggerated” and “exciting” (Gelder 2004, pp. 19–20).
When it comes to sheer numbers, the most popular novelist derivative of Rand is Terry Goodkind , whose Sword of Truth fantasy series (1994–2015) has reportedly sold over 25 million copies worldwide (Amazon.com, n.d.). Goodkind is a self-described Objectivist, and acknowledges Rand as his sole literary influence (Perry, n.d.; Riggenbach 2004, p. 131). In a review of the series on the Atlas Society website, William Perry notes:
Each of Goodkind’s books has a theme expressed by a Wizard’s Rule, and in fact the title of the first book is Wizard’s First Rule. The first rule is, “People are stupid. They will believe what they want to be true or what they fear to be true.” This does not mean that people are necessarily stupid, only that they usually are. The second rule is: “The greatest harm can come from the best intentions.” This is the rule of unintended consequences from economics and politics, which is so familiar to Objectivists and libertarian s. (Perry, n.d.)
The characters and plotlines in Goodkind’s books play out these maxims, just as Rand’s philosophy is demonstrated in the course of her novels. Goodkind’s Randian themes are apparent even from these two rules: the first representing Rand’s belief that human competency is rare and to be venerated; the second her belief that you should never set out to help others (unless you’re helping yourself first).
Goodkind slips into paraphrasing Rand. Consider the following passage, quoted by Riggenbach, from Faith of the Fallen (2000), the sixth in the series. Richard Cypher—a magician, a warrior, and one of the series’ protagonists—is speaking:
The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced.
Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality—it’s our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see. (Goodkind 2000, p. 26)
This clearly draws on elements of Galt’s speech, which offer the foundation of Objectivism: “Existence exists …. To exist is to be something … A is A. A thing is itself. … Reality is that which exists”; “Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. … [R]eason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth” (Atlas Shrugged, pp. 1016–17).
Other novelists who count Rand as an influence include Kay Nolte Smith, who was part of Rand’s circle in the 1960s and 70s, and started her career writing for Rand’s periodical, the Objectivist. Erika Holzer was also part of the early Objectivist movement, and acknowledges what she terms a “profound literary debt” to Rand. Her thriller Eye for an Eye was adapted into a 1996 movie starring Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland, and Ed Harris. Helen Knode, author of mysteries The Ticket Out (2003) and Wildcat Play (2012), considers Rand’s theory of art—explained in The Romantic Manifesto—to be a major influence on her. The sci-fi subgenre of libertarian science fiction, including authors such as J. Neil Schulman and L. Neil Smith , counts Rand as a foundational figure, as mentioned in Chapter 4. Smith’s alternate-history series beginning with The Probability Broach (1979) designates Rand as president of the North American Confederacy, a continent-encompassing libertarian nation, between the years of 1952 and 1960. Smith has told Jeff Riggenbach: “Ayn Rand established the formal framework for my personal philosophy” (Riggenbach 2004, pp. 93, 105, 115, 121). A whole book could probably be written about the traces of Rand in libertarian SF—but that is not my focus here.
One novel incorporating Objectivism that has garnered considerable attention in libertarian circles—in part because it is a response to Rand—is Nancy Kress ’s Beggars in Spain. It initially appeared as a novella (1991), then a full novel (1993), the first of a trilogy. It is a work of posthumanist science fiction, and a precursor to the Rand incorporated texts I discuss here. Indeed, it is probably the most consequential science-fictional interrogation of Objectivism, until BioShock. Kress has said that in her twenties she became fascinated by Rand, reading her voraciously; she found her ideas both “very troubling” and “very compelling,” and she describes Beggars as an attempt to find the middle ground between Rand’s outright individualism and the collectivism of renowned SF novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (Kress, qtd. in Pendergrast 2000). In the original novella (which forms the first part of the 1993 novel), we are introduced to Leisha Camden—one of the first of a new breed of genetically altered humans, called the Sleepless, who are engineered to not need sleep. Leisha’s father is a prominent financier and font of Randian aphorisms, a follower of “Yagaiism,” a version of Objectivism. Roger Camden wants his daughter to not have to sleep, because he thinks of all he could have accomplished, were so many hours of his life not forcibly put to waste through rest. Because they do not need sleep, the Sleepless have more time to develop themselves and are typically higher achievers than the rest of the population. Because they do not dream, they are not as subject to the whims and unexplained urges of the subconscious, and are more rational and intellectual. A clear divergence exists between the Sleepless and the rest of humanity. Before long, the moral majority and its servants in government begin instituting laws that penalize the Sleepless, as a perceived threat to normal society. Conflict follows as the Sleepless fight for their right to exist on their own terms.
So, we see in Kress strong Randian themes: The importance of rationality and individual achievement; collectivist laws supposedly upholding the “common good,” which in fact drag down the best among us. Posthumanism is here the context for these themes: the fact that we can use science to create an improvement upon the species. The novella illustrates very clearly, concerns that philosopher Francis Fukuyama echoed a decade later in Our Posthuman Future (2002)—where he argues that genetic alteration will result in a kind of radical, socially corrosive inequality that the human race has not seen before, between the modified and unmodified. The conclusion Kress comes to in the novella brings forth a very unRandian idea: solidarity; the notion that we may find common cause and common bonds with others, regardless of their ability or intellectual outlook; the notion that we may someday depend on the help of another, regardless of our own abilities or position. By a fluke of nature, Leisha has a twin who is not a Sleepless. Unwanted by her father, because she is not special, and growing up in the shadow of Leisha, Alice Camden follows a very different path to her sister, whose life is one of continuous professional and personal growth. Alice moves into a cabin in the middle of nowhere, with a man who abuses her, and gives birth to a son she fears will also be abused. In the end, however—turning Randian expectations on their head—it is Leisha who relies on Alice for help, not the other way around. Leisha is able to save a Sleepless child from an abusive family thanks to Alice’s particular knowledge and circumstances. The novella’s conclusion is that our interactions should not be reduced to matters of linear, logical trade, where the benefits are immediately clear for each party, a la Rand; everybody has the potential to benefit from everybody else, in an “ecology of trade”: “Does a horse need a fish? Yes” (Kress 2011, p. 150).
Beggars in Spain is an important predecessor to BioShock and The Transhumanist Wager, in terms of how it uses a close reading of Rand to make a philosophical point. As a critique of Objectivism, however, BioShock has achieved far more in terms of mainstream impact, audience, and awareness. Beggars is also an interesting instance of how Rand has been a recurring subject within science fiction’s discussion with itself about ideal societies and optimum human relations.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra, in his article for the centenary issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, examines Rand’s impact within another field of popular literature—comics. One important example here is Frank Miller , creator of 300 and Sin City, and author of Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, which were used as a partial basis for Christopher Nolan’s hugely successful Batman films (2005–2012). Miller “credits Rand’s Romantic Manifesto as having helped him to define the nature of the literary hero and the legitimacy of heroic fiction” (Sciabarra 2004, p. 12). Miller ’s Martha Washington Goes to War (1994) draws on Atlas Shrugged, a debt acknowledged in the afterword. The premier exhibit in terms of Rand’s influence on comics, however, is Steve Ditko , co-creator of such Marvel heroes as Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Ditko’s comic creations include Mr. A (from Rand’s/Aristotle’s exhortation “A is A”) and The Question, both of whom personify Objectivism. Ditko’s Randian worldview is perhaps best summed up by a quote from Mr. A, who, Sciabarra notes, is appropriately drawn “in sharp blacks and whites” (Sciabarra 2004, p. 10). The hero exclaims: “Fools will tell you that there can be no honest person! That there are no blacks and whites. … That everyone is gray! But if there are no blacks and whites, there cannot even be a gray. Since grayness is just a mixture of black and white!” (Ditko, qtd. in Sciabarra 2004, p. 11) Alan Moore , whose politics are more left-aligned, created a character in his acclaimed Watchmen series as a response to Ditko (Sciabarra 2004, p. 9). “Rorschach,” an uncompromising vigilante, can be read as a critique of Ditko and in turn Rand’s absolutism.
There are traces of Rand everywhere in our culture. When Anne Heller titled her biography of the author, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, it of course had two meanings: the world that Rand created for herself through her fiction, and our world as it is now, which is left with indelible imprints. Rand’s work is at the center of a truly vast phenomenon; a network of influence that extends into politics, business, and popular culture.
Given Rand’s presence in so much of popular media, it should not surprise us that makers within the world’s most financially successful medium, which generates more revenue than movies or music (Nath 2016)—videogames—would also seek to find inspiration from the Russian-American novelist. So it is with BioShock. BioShock draws on Rand’s philosophy, while also drawing on Rand’s use of utopian and dystopian tropes. At the same time, the game locates itself within a tradition of utopian and dystopian literature. It is thus doubly aligned with Rand, in a sense: as a work making use of Objectivism, and as a work of dystopian science fiction, like Rand’s Anthem or Atlas Shrugged. It is, as I’ve suggested, probably the most serious and consequential fictional interrogation of Rand’s ideas, while remaining within the realm of popular media. Before turning to talking about BioShock and Rand by themselves, let’s consider how Rand was aligned with twentieth-century dystopian literature, with a view to contextualizing BioShock’s critique of Rand’s use of utopia and dystopia.
I, Utopian
The mid-twentieth century stood between utopia and dystopia, in terms of the absolute ideas of where humankind might end up. It was our technology in both cases that would bring about the end: the awesome technology of the nuclear bomb, reducing the earth to a new stone age; the awesome technology of the moon rocket, taking us where no men had traveled before. It is a banal comment to say that the tension between technology-as-force-for-good and technology-as-destructive lies at the heart of much twentieth-century science fiction. Here Rand bucked the trend of many of her fellow writers of science-fictional utopias/dystopias, in only ever presenting technological development—as an end in itself—in a positive light. Technology is a force for good when left in the hands of independent individuals.
It is after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, moving decade by decade toward the Cold War, that some of the most enduring SF dystopias emerge; fictional worlds that extrapolate from particular trends, in order to create utopia’s polar opposite, the worst kind of living environment, according to a particular perspective. These works include Yevgeny Zamyatin ’s We (c.1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), George Orwell ’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury ’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Rand’s novels of dystopian futures, Anthem (1938) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), were written and published contemporaneously with some of the most famous books of the genre. Anthem in particular is often likened to We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World.
For Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, the “dystopian imagination”—dystopian fiction—functions as “a prophetic vehicle, the canary in the cage, for writers with an ethical and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside” (Baccolini and Moylan 2003, pp. 1–2). The grip of totalitarian governments in the early to mid-twentieth century influenced the writing of all of the above examples of dystopian science fiction. We is usually interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the Soviet system; it was the first novel proscribed by the Soviet Chief Administration for Literary Affairs, set up in 1922 (Milgrim 2005, p. 137). Orwell and Bradbury both cite fascism and Soviet Communism in explaining the origins of their works. 4 Critics have been commenting on the connection between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the USSR since the earliest reviews (Snyder 1949; Underhill 1949; Gardner 1950). Brave New World was published before the Nazis came to power. The direct influence of Communism, however, is evidenced not only by the planned structure of society in the novel, but in the very names of the citizens of Utopia, as it is called: Bernard Marx, Polly Trotsky, Sarojini Engels, Lenina. All of these novels are also more generally about dilemmas for humanity as a whole, about where the future is headed. Their setting in a time more advanced than the moment at which they were written, suggests that the future could be disastrous—unless the trends extrapolated in the novels are checked.
How do Rand’s dystopian novels, Anthem and Atlas, compare to those of her contemporaries? Certainly, they were also influenced by twentieth-century totalitarianism. It would be folly to consider any of Rand’s work, her horrified responses to collectivism, without considering her experiences in Soviet Russia, where she and her middle-class family lost much following the revolution. 5 Randian scholar Shoshana Milgrim has written a comprehensive study comparing Anthem to “related literary works,” where she concludes that Orwell is the author of dystopia with whom Rand has the most in common. According to Milgrim, it is “possible” that Rand read fellow-Russian Zamyatin’s We, before she emigrated, or afterwards (the novel circulated privately in Russia in the 1920s, though was not published there until 1988; its first publication was in the US in 1924). However, there is no direct evidence that she read or was influenced by Zamyatin , notwithstanding certain similarities between We and Anthem, including “the regimentation of life, the world-wide state, the replacement of names by numbers, and the first-person narration by a secretly rebellious protagonist.” 6 In any case, as Milgrim goes on to point out, the moral conclusion of Anthem differs markedly from that of We—and indeed Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four—especially with regard to the role of technology in human enslavement. For Rand, technological advancement itself is never to blame for the use of technology by the state to coerce the populace. This is merely another form of the collective imposing its will on individuals. Rand’s dystopias—the worldwide state in Anthem, and the declining America in Atlas Shrugged—are technologically backwards compared to the twentieth-century West. Rand created primitive dystopias because, for her, technology is a liberator, not an oppressor. Moreover, it requires free men and women to create and sustain technological development. Rand does not see “technological advancement as compatible with political slavery” (Milgrim 2005, p. 149). As we will see, BioShock seems to accept the Randian suggestion that truly innovative tech advancement only happens in a capitalist environment. However, it turns this suggestion back on itself, by portraying how radical laissez-faire could ultimately create another kind of dystopia, one where the posthuman is ascendant.
Milgrim opines that of the various similar works by other authors she discusses, Nineteen Eighty-Four “is the one that comes closest to the idea of Anthem—and to the related ideas of The Fountainhead as well.” This is certainly fair. Notwithstanding Orwell’s lifelong avowed socialism, he was also a proponent of the individual. When protagonist Winston Smith is tortured by O’Brien, a member of the ruling Inner Party, toward the end of Eighty-Four, O’Brien expresses the view that power over others is an end in itself—sentiments which echo the worldview of arch-villain Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead (the totalitarian powers-that-be in both Zamyatin and Huxley maintain that the happiness of the masses is the purpose of their control). Another important similarity between Orwell’s novel and Anthem is “the observation that a decline in the quality of human life is accompanied by a decline in language” (Milgrim 2005, pp. 152–53). 7
We, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, and Anthem—despite their differing styles and the differing politics of the authors—are part of an economy of texts which situate themselves in opposition to the totalitarian political systems of the mid-twentieth century. All these texts delineate the deleterious effects of totalitarian states on the individual mind, on free-thinkers such as Winston in Eighty-Four, Bernard in Brave New World, and Equality 7-2521 in Anthem. The mind of the individual cannot flourish in the social environments depicted, which are marked by state control over vital aspects of life. Uniquely among the dystopian texts mentioned here, however, Atlas Shrugged sets up a “perfect” society within its dystopia, Galt’s Gulch within the failing socialist America. Rand, unlike anti-utopian writers, established her own utopian ideal as a counterpoint to dystopia; she did not just warn against dystopia but actively promoted a utopian opposite. BioShock interrogates this utopia and finds it severely wanting—suggesting that it in fact leads back to dystopia. Into the mix is thrown posthumanism, a Randian free-market philosophy leading toward rapid technological development, which eclipses what’s human. Thus, BioShock falls within the tradition of dystopian fiction—a tradition Rand also falls within—while making use of Rand in order to do so. The game opens with one disaster—a plane crash—before taking us to its disastrous city of sunken dreams, Rapture, where Objectivism has led to ruin.
Welcome to Rapture
It is 1960. You sit back, a cigarette lit, in the warm environs of a commercial airliner. You are looking at a picture of your parents. You say aloud: “They told me, ‘Son, you’re special. You were born to do great things’” (Levine 2007; note: all subsequent quotations from the game are from this source). Disaster strikes. The plane goes down. You are swimming for safety in the wide Atlantic Ocean, fiery wreckage all around. You spot a tall, grey structure—a lighthouse—and swim toward it. You see a set of solid gold double doors; embossed on them is the figure of a man, holding aloft an orb—it recalls the figure of Atlas. Above the doors there is a gold shield, the letter “R” centered upon it. A red banner greets your entrance through the doors: “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” Heading down stairs, you see golden plaques formed in art deco style, dedicated to “Science,” “Art,” “Industry.”
A curious submersible vehicle is ahead, and you step in. The vehicle plunges into the depths of the Atlantic. A recording of a man’s voice comes through the speakers, as a magnificent city comes into view upon the ocean floor:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his 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. 8
This is the opening of BioShock, a first-person shooter developed by the Boston division of 2K Games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, as well as for Mac and PC. The city of Rapture, standing at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, is the brainchild of Andrew Ryan, an entrepreneur who came from the Soviet Union to America—but grew tired of the overregulated economy even in that supposed bastion of the free market. To accomplish his vision of man, wholly free from the shackles of government, religion, and irrationality, he knew he would have to manufacture a new country: “It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.” Like Howard Roark, Ryan’s past experience was of looters corrupting his glorious, independent vision: “On the surface, I once bought a forest. The parasites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I establish a public park there. Why? So the rabble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy, and pretend that it was paradise earned.” Ryan’s solution is the same as Roark’s. When the government brings in other designers to amend Roark’s blueprints for a public housing project, Roark dynamites the project. The public good be damned: he wants his vision to be his. As does Ryan: “When congress moved to nationalize my forest, I burned it to the ground.” This is the methodology of the strikers in Atlas Shrugged: what belongs to them, they will not allow it to stand if they cannot have it on their terms. Francisco d’Anconia secretly destroys his own copper-mining business, so there is nothing left for the “looters” when it is nationalized. Ellis Wyatt sets fire to his oil well, rather than let the government seize his operation. “I am leaving it as I found it,” is the note he leaves, as he flees for Galt’s Gulch (Atlas Shrugged, p. 336). Rapture is a version of Galt’s Gulch. Rand herself called the Objectivist utopia in Atlas, “Atlantis”—actively courting comparisons with a mythical paradise beneath the sea; Rapture merely literalizes this. The loaded name of the city in itself references a number of notions pertinent to Rand and the posthuman: Rand’s view of man as a sacred being, and the joy in that sacredness; the endpoint of history and the “culmination of man”; the ascension of the worthy to a higher form of existence.
The name Andrew Ryan is a near-homonym of “Ayn Rand.” Ryan, the character, is both a version of Rand and a version of John Galt. Ryan shares elements of Rand’s biography: his Russian origins. His ideals are the same as Rand’s. He uses a linguistic tone and extremes of language—as well as a binary of moral extremes—that will be familiar to readers of Rand: “Ownership is civilization. Without it, we’re back in the swamp”; “What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds. A parasite asks, ‘Where is my share?’” The latter example directly recalls the words of Roark: “The creator originates. The parasite borrows” (The Fountainhead, p. 711). Ryan repeatedly refers to “parasites,” as does Rand: the human leeches sucking life from those more capable. Like Galt, Ryan has encouraged wealth creators to abandon productive life in the surface world, to leave the looters to reap what they have sown. The promise of Rapture is the promise of a new order, which is the promise of Galt’s Gulch: productive men and women can keep all the rewards of the products they create with their own minds. It is a view of man, like Rand’s, which sees ideas of the mind as the essence of wealth, not the work of the bodies employed to construct a mind’s vision. Ryan, like Galt, is engaged in an immense project of utopian social engineering: an effort to construct a society from first principles; what Karl Popper —in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)—terms “the reconstruction of society as a whole,” in an attempt to create an Ideal State. Popper predicts that such utopian engineering inevitably results in the centralization of power among those who are prepared to wield it over their fellow men, and hence it is a blueprint for totalitarianism (Popper 2013, pp. 149, 151). So it proves in BioShock: an imagined utopia becomes dystopian.
The BioShock franchise—the original game, along with its sequels, BioShock 2 (2010) and BioShock Infinite (2013)—“has attained something of a hallowed status as one of the greatest examples of commercial videogame artistry ever made,” according to Robert Jackson’s book “BioShock”: Decision, Forced Choice and Propaganda: “Its complex moralistic narrative, level of emergent customisation, immersive dark tone and technical artistry all culminate into a series of videogame experiences, somewhat elevated from the usual ‘cause and effect’ shooter” (Jackson 2014, opening blurb; it is not possible to identify page numbers in this Kindle edition). The original game is the recipient of multiple Game of the Year awards, including a BAFTA. The series’ adoption of Rand has undoubtedly helped raise it to a status not usually enjoyed by examples of this medium. BioShock’s use of Objectivism lends it an atmosphere of a secondary world produced in accordance with its own laws—the laws of Rand’s philosophy. Meanwhile, the game’s serious treatment of certain of Rand’s ideas affords thematic weight. It is, in the words of Jason Rose, a sort of “spiritual sequel” to Atlas Shrugged, “revealing a possible fate for John Galt’s mysterious hidden utopia”; a sequel in which the Galt figure (Ryan) is revealed to be not infallible (as Rand imagined Galt to be), but all too human. BioShock also draws on Randian ideas of choice and free will, in using the fact that the videogame is a participatory medium to its full advantage; the player’s in-game decisions have a direct role in how events in Rapture progress: “If BioShock were merely read or watched instead of played, it would lose much of its emotional impact” (Rose 2015, p. 18).
The use of Randian facets in BioShock is neither a coincidence nor mere artistic borrowing. The game is an intentional interrogation of Rand’s utopian ideal. The game’s lead writer and director, Ken Levine, says that the creative process began with the idea of an underwater city, a “complete” environment that the player could fully explore. “I started thinking about utopian civilisations … . I’ve always been a fan of utopian and dystopian literature.” Rand, whose books Levine had been reading in the years leading up to BioShock, fitted this mold: “The surety she has in her beliefs was fascinating … . I started to wonder, what happens when you stop questioning yourself?” (qtd. in Crecente 2008). BioShock’s whole mise en scène establishes a Randian ambience. The timeframe is an alternate-history 1960; in the real world, this was the period of Objectivism’s gaining flight, after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. The city’s motto, “No Gods or Kings,” alludes to Rand’s concept of the human sacred, “man-worship”—not recognizing the divine or any divine right. The names of the locations in Rapture take from Greek myth, as Rand did with her use of Atlas and repeated use of the Prometheus story: Neptune’s Bounty, Apollo Square, Hephaestus, Olympus Heights, Point Prometheus. Red banners with gold lettering throughout the city put forward Randian slogans, such as, “Altruism is the Root of All Wickedness,” “The Great Will Not Be Constrained by the Small.” A public address system repeats aphorisms like the following: “The parasite hates three things: free markets, free will, and free men.” The look of Rapture is art deco, an esthetic that Rand “loved” (Burns 2009, p. 282). Art deco takes from the actual, yet stylizes reality to be more cleanly beautiful—like Rand’s own utopian philosophy, we might say. The beauty is in the beholder’s eye.
As in Galt’s Gulch, there are no formal laws in Rapture, there are no restrictions on innovation or invention. It is out of this scenario that posthumanism comes into play. Unrestrained, rapid scientific advancement, and a transhuman impulse, has led to a posthuman vista. The continuum between Randian philosophy and posthuman technology is paramount. The chosen self—mind and body—is an imperative. The inhabitants of Rapture can choose to upgrade their capabilities, upgrade their bodies. A substance called ADAM is used to turn regular bodily cells into adaptable stem cells. Rapture residents can then inject Plasmids, “bottled abilities” available from vending machines throughout the city, which recode the user’s DNA. Depending on the Plasmid, different powers are bestowed on the body: the ability to shoot lightning bolts or fire from one’s hands, for example. This is an extreme form of “biohacking”—the trend in favor of upgrading your biology through pharmaceuticals and genetic research—which is currently in vogue in Silicon Valley (Sifferlin 2017, p. 62). The extraordinary powers of Plasmids, however, do not come without a cost. ADAM is harvested from young girls who have been turned into vessels for its production, “Little Sisters.” ADAM is the technological enabler of humans possessing godlike powers, through transcendent scientific knowledge and ability. The name is notable in the Randian context, since Rand saw the Garden of Eden resident as an exemplar of her kind of hero, the “unsubmissive and first” creator, who should be emulated for claiming his right to godly knowledge (The Fountainhead, p. 710). In BioShock, however, contra Randian morality, eating the fruit of the knowledge tree has wrought destruction. Plasmids must be powered by injecting a substance called EVE. Upgrading via ADAM, EVE, and Plasmids has proved to be notoriously addictive. Rapture is now populated by thousands of “Splicers,” humans made into a kind of hyperactive/acrobatic zombie because they indulged in too much gene splicing. The game suggests that were Ryan not such an ideologue, such a utopian, his city might not have been brought to ruin. Ryan resists the urge to develop the apparatuses of a state to regulate the evident chaos of the posthuman free market he has instigated. At one point, a recorded message from Ryan you pick up tells you: “There has been tremendous pressure to regulate this Plasmid business. There have been side effects: blindness, insanity, death. But what use is our ideology if it is not tested?” A later message from Ryan goes: “Is there blood on the streets? Of course. Have some chosen to destroy themselves with careless splicing? Undeniable. But … I will dictate no laws. … It is our impatience that invites in the parasite of big government. And once you’ve invited it in, it will never stop feeding on the body of the city.”
When the player arrives in Rapture, the city is in the midst of a civil war. Splicers have overrun the place; water leaks in through cracked walls; lights flicker on and off as electricity comes and goes. It is a gothic, gloomy, sunken world. Before you even exit the submersible, you are contacted via radio by a man with a homely Irish accent. The man is named “Atlas.” As you wander through the city, you see posters asking, “Who is Atlas?” The question obviously mirrors the repeated phrase in Atlas Shrugged, as well as the mystery at the novel’s heart: “Who is John Galt?” Atlas guides you through Rapture, as you upgrade your own body with Plasmids and fend off attacks from crazed Splicers. To garner ADAM, you must rescue or harvest the Little Sisters; rescuing gives you a smaller amount than butchering the girls in order to harvest. The Little Sisters are guarded by “Big Daddies,” men who have been transformed via enormous metal exoskeletons, to make them more powerful: another aspect of the upgraded body, the trans-/posthuman. Atlas initially enlists you to save his wife and son and get them out of Rapture. But when it appears that Ryan has killed Atlas’s family, the mysterious Irishman has you hunt down the city’s founder and confront him. It transpires that Atlas is the leader of an insurrection against Ryan. Ryan led one side of the civil war, attempting to preserve his city according to the ideals on which it was founded. “Atlas” is Frank Fontaine, not an ideologue like Ryan but a smuggler and a criminal who saw an opportunity to gain power for himself—by leading Rapture’s proletariat in a bid to take control of the city. Toward the end of the game, you enter Fontaine’s apartment, the sounds of “Danny Boy” drifting gently through the residence. Fontaine tells you: “These sad saps. They come to Rapture, thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry. But they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets. What an angle they gave me—I hand these mugs a cot and a bowl of soup, and they give me their lives. Who needs an army when I got Fontaine’s Home for the Poor?”
This, then, is where BioShock’s critique of Objectivist absolutism lies. BioShock comments on the ultimate unrealism of Rand’s ideal—on the impossibility of a Galt’s Gulch–style utopia in actual life. The game’s critique is, at root, the same as Alan Clardy’s, described in Chapter 3. BioShock questions “the soundness” of the Randian utopia’s “psychological and sociological underpinnings,” as Clardy does. Rand’s perfect society only works in her fiction because she “grossly caricatures and distorts the full range of human diversity,” dividing all humankind into heroic producers, power-seeking looters who usurp the work of the productive, and the noncommittal masses who will adapt to whatever ideology is prevalent (Clardy 2012, pp. 238, 259). Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged “works” because all its denizens espouse the same Objectivist value-system; the second-handers and the noncommittal have been removed from the equation. BioShock re-injects some of the to-be-expected diversity of human nature, and of human societies, into the Objectivist paradise, runs the experiment again, and shows its disastrous results. It is not just the wildcard of a criminal like Fontaine that causes the Objectivist paradise to fall. Ryan, faced with seeing the diversity of humanity not conform to the ideals of his city, becomes a megalomaniac, a murderous dictator. When you enter his lair to confront him, the bodies of those who have betrayed his ideal line the walls. Ryan becomes drunk on his own immovable vision, and on his own power, and is corrupted utterly. The game suggests a continuity between Objectivism and real-life tyranny, as does Andromeda. This is because of Rand’s philosophy’s absolutism, its utopianism.
There is an element of caricature in the game’s portrayal of Objectivism. At the entrance to the location Neptune’s Bounty, for instance, we see a man strung up by ropes, in the image of a crucifixion, a suitcase of Bibles at his feet. Religion is banned in Rapture and this man has been killed for smuggling it in. Though she despised religion, Rand was not in favor of its outright banning, or of wiping out its adherents. Ryan’s absolutism leads him to murder those who oppose his philosophy. One could argue, as Objectivists do, that BioShock is not a fair critique of Objectivism, because Rand’s whole point was that her utopia was only possible once enough people accepted her “rational code of ethics”: she was proposing people adopt a new philosophy, before a new kind of society would be possible. But this is precisely where BioShock’s argument is strongest. The idea that conflicting interests both within and between human beings could be harmonized by the widespread adoption of a new “philosophy”: this is patently not continuous with the nature of human beings or the nature of human societies. To re-use a John Gray quote from Chapter 3: “Conflict is a universal feature of human life. It seems to be natural for human beings to want incompatible things—excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, truth and a picture of the world that flatters their sense of self-importance” (Gray 2007, p. 17). And Clardy again: “Social stratification and economic classes do not vanish, under either Marxist or libertarian doctrines, and neither do the class conflicts embedded in the differential distribution of power, prestige, and resources” (Clardy 2012, p. 259). For many Objectivists, BioShock “seems to commit a blatant ‘strawman fallacy’” in establishing “a weak version of Randian Objectivism so that it can easily shoot it down” (Rose 2015, p. 21). Yaron Brook criticizes the game for misrepresenting Objectivism on the grounds that, for him—as a Randian—perfection does exist. Levine is “setting it up to fail,” Brook says. “I think it’s flawed logic in the sense that he thinks that people have to be flawed. … I think there are great people and perfect people and I think we all should strive to be great and perfect” (qtd. in Crecente 2008). What is Randian discounts the reality of pluralism—what is flawed to one person may be perfection to another. And this is where the continuity between the Randian ideal and dictatorship lies: in the very fact that Objectivists believe in the realizability of the perfect social order. Brook claims that BioShock puts forward a “misinterpretation of Objectivism,” because, for Brook , absolutism need not necessarily lead to disaster—if it is the right kind of absolutism (qtd. in Crecente 2008). But, in fact, BioShock does not misrepresent Objectivism, as such: Levine and Brook simply disagree profoundly about the compatibility of Randian philosophy with actual human life on a societal scale—and about what would happen if a society based completely on an Objectivist premise were ever to emerge. This author is far more sympathetic to Levine’s position than to Brook’s .
Will in a Time of Posthumanity
A rejection of utopian absolutism is not the only theme of BioShock. The work also addresses another very Randian human subject-matter—the idea of free will—brought forward into posthuman time. It is revealed in the course of the story that you, the player (who is named as “Jack”), are a genetically altered individual. You were bred in Rapture, before being sent out into the world in order to return at the appropriate moment. You have been engineered by Fontaine to respond to commands from Atlas, when prefaced with the phrase “Would you kindly…”—the words that the “Irishman” uses when issuing you instructions throughout the game. In the course of the normal gameplay, you make moral choices: whether to save or to harvest the Little Sisters, for example. However, at a crucial moment—the confrontation with Ryan—your free will is taken from you; the game assumes automatic control and has your avatar beat Ryan to death, while the player can only watch. BioShock thus plays with the issue of free will: Do you have it or is the course of your life externally determined?
BioShock’s focus on choice—different moral choices made by the player in the course of the game determine the atmosphere of the lived world as well as the ending—means that it makes the best thematic use of the videogame as a user-controlled medium. As Jackson points out, the series plays off the notion of free will versus determinism, in a meta sense, since in theory the outcome of the game is controlled by the user; but of course, all possible outcomes are programed in advance by the software. Jackson writes: “The series is important insofar as it self-refers to its own methods of forcing choices and deciding consequences for the player.” There is no better example than the sequence with Jack/Ryan where the game takes over and has you murder him. For Jackson, this aspect of BioShock is indicative of the franchise’s crucial connections with the “forced choices” that exist in today’s lived reality: “BioShock embodies the very worst of late capitalist logic: it offers the ambiguity of moral agency, ‘the freedom to decide’—when the real technical, social and structural decisions have already decided what will happen anyway” (Jackson 2014, Chapter 2).
In the context of the game itself, however, BioShock’s representation of choice is more simply a direct commentary on Ayn Rand and on posthumanism. According to the Randian view, every man or woman chooses his or her own fate. BioShock makes the sensible interjection that this is not always the case; that we have natures—and there are events—that also determine where we end up. This, then, is a critique of Randian absolutism (which holds that, in a free-market society, an individual always gets what they “deserve,” according to their ability and the choices they have made). It is also, as I’ve said, a treatment of free will in posthuman time. The player is a “posthuman”: genetically engineered to fulfill another’s purpose. More broadly, the game suggests that the transhuman impulse—the hyper-technological advancement which could occur in an unrestricted, Randian free-market environment—could in fact restrict or negate other aspects of Randian man: human free will being the most obvious example. This advanced transhuman technology in fact results in an erasure of individuality. The “Splicers,” for instance, are formed into different threat-groups depending on how they are equipped; they have collectivized not individual identities, named as Houdini Splicers, Thuggish Splicers, Spider Splicers, et al. The Splicers’ unique individuality as people is lost as they become slaves to the impulses of too much ADAM; their crazed addiction assists in Rapture’s being torn apart.
The Splicers are truly posthuman in that they have emerged out of humanity, but no longer display a complexity of characteristics which we might associate with the human; they are killers driven by cravings. As Lars Schmeink summarizes, the Splicers’ enhanced physical capabilities—“excessive strength, quick reflexes, and brutal resilience”—are matched by cognitive impairment: “the mutation has also incapacitated them as regards reason, emotion, and communication. Thus, they represent the posthuman in the sense of the anti-human, having lost all properties that are commonly ascribed to the liberal humanist subject” (Schmeink 2009). The Big Daddies, as well, are no longer each unique human beings. They have become a group of automatons, programed with one goal—to protect Little Sisters. Like the Splicers, the Big Daddies once were human, but now have no observable individual personalities; they are posthuman and not human.
BioShock makes a powerful statement regarding the unviability of Objectivism as a philosophy for a society; it also suggests that Randian ideas lead toward posthumanism. The game does more than raise questions, though it is less than didactic. Its portrayal of the posthuman is bound up with its critique of Rand; and since the game is, in effect, criticizing Objectivism, the transhuman and the posthuman (as they come about via an “Objectivist” free market) are presented as destructive. The upgraded self in fact leads away from individuality because it results in deleterious mutation, whereby people become “types” of monsters, slaves to impulses that do not come from their natural humanity. BioShock thus takes up an ideological position, one out of which Objectivism does not emerge well. On its own terms, “Objectivism” in the game achieves the opposite of its intent. Rand’s/Ryan’s drive is to venerate the unregulated individual mind, science, and technology; but the work of the unregulated mind results in science and technology that destroys the unique mental properties of man. In BioShock, neither Objectivism nor posthumanism is presented as continuous with what’s human.
An extra chapter which players can download for BioShock 2, called Minerva’s Den, gives us a further warning against posthuman extremes, delving deeper into the advanced technology underlying Rapture. This time the focus is on artificial intelligence rather than the upgraded body, but the message regarding posthuman technologies—that they are potentially destructive to human uniqueness and happiness—is broadly the same. A radical attempt to recreate the nature of the human is shown to be folly, suggesting that we should reinforce the boundaries between human and artificial life. Minerva’s Den tells the tale of Charles Milton Porter, creator of The Thinker, a supercomputer that can reason and is responsible for Rapture’s many automated systems. Porter attempts to mold the AI into a version of his dead wife, Pearl, so that she may “live” again. Pearl died in London during the Blitz, while Porter worked with the godfather of computer science and AI, Alan Turing , attempting to crack the Enigma code. Porter’s efforts to recreate Pearl lead only to sadness and trouble; and at the end, though it is the hardest thing, letting go of the life that is gone becomes a moment of liberation. The transhuman imperative—and its radical, utopian call for the conquest of death, rather than its acceptance—is shown as Porter’s albatross.
After the first game in the BioShock series, it becomes clearer that the franchise’s critique is not just of Objectivism, but of utopianism in general and all absolutist dogma. In BioShock 2, the player returns to Rapture, after its fall, this time as a Big Daddy looking to rescue his Little Sister. Since Ryan’s and Fontaine’s deaths, a new force has risen in the city: a woman named Sofia Lamb, advocating complete negation of the self and mystical collectivism (an incarnation of Ellsworth Toohey, perhaps). Lamb’s ideas are shown to be just as destructive as Ryan’s. BioShock 2 and Minerva’s Den were developed by a different team from the first game, while Levine and his team return for BioShock Infinite. Infinite makes something of a sideways move, while continuing to focus on the nature of ideals as they relate to reality—to focus on radicalism, its sources and dangers. The third game could be said to be an expansion of the Randian premise of the first, as it is still concerned with individual will as it interacts with social, class-based, and metaphysical dynamics. Infinite’s setting is a flying city named Columbia, a version of the United States in its earlier decades, and the game explores the religion-tinged notions of entitlement (manifest destiny) underpinning the entire American project. That game’s ideological force—so sure in his “perfect city,” like Ryan and Lamb before—is a “prophet” and “founding father,” Zachary Hale Comstock.
At the end of Infinite, the player returns briefly to Rapture, when the game’s protagonist, a private detective named Booker DeWitt, is transported there. DeWitt seems to view Rapture like something out of a dream, the whole idea of the city “ridiculous.” But the player’s companion, a woman with the power to traverse time and dimensions, tells you that such cities are infinite in history; she warns of the constant appeal of the shining light in the fog, of Utopia and the strongman who says he can deliver it: “There’s always a lighthouse. There’s always a man. There’s always a city.”
Notes
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1.
Gary Weiss, for instance, sees the same “philosophy of greed,” a concern only with personal profit, evidenced in both Rand’s work and the behavior of “the main actors in the financial crisis.” Whether such a philosophy was “explicitly adopted” by the individual actors is not important; it was a culture promoted from the top, by Rand advocates such as Alan Greenspan, and the consensus regarding “market supremacy” (Weiss 2013, pp. 2–3).
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The quote is from “The Places You Come to Fear the Most,” episode 2 of the first season, which originally aired on The WB on 30 September 2003. One Tree Hill ’s opening theme is “I Don’t Want to Be” by Gavin DeGraw (2003). The episode’s closing voiceover bears only minor differences with the passage in Rand. The voiceover highlights the final sentiment, “it is yours,” by undoing Rand’s contraction “it’s.” Lucas also skips a few words and adds an “and.” The original passage reads (words deleted in the episode are emphasized by me): “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours” (Atlas Shrugged, p. 1069).
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3.
“The name ‘Anthem’ was taken from a title of an Ayn Rand novel,” “About Anthem,” Anthem Entertainment Group, accessed October 16, 2014. http://www.anthementertainmentgroup.com/sro/anthem/about_anthem.php.
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Bradbury writes in his afterword to Fahrenheit 451: “What caused my inspiration? … . There was Hitler torching books in Germany in 1934, rumours of Stalin and his match-people and tinderboxes” (Bradbury 2008, p. 221). Orwell wrote: “My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism” (qtd. in Gardner 1950, emphasis in original).
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What the Bolsheviks did to her family is key to understanding the psychology of Rand’s writing. Burns sees as pivotal the moment when Rand’s father’s pharmacy was seized by the revolutionaries, in 1918. Rand’s father had studied hard to become a pharmacist, then worked hard to build up his business; his customers in the community valued him. And yet “in an instant” his livelihood was commandeered, for the benefit of “strangers who could offer [him] nothing in return. The soldiers had come in boots, carrying guns … . Yet they had spoken the language of fairness and equality … . It was a lesson [Rand] would never forget” (Burns 2009, p. 9).
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Milgrim continues: “[T]hese are not unique to We. The regimentation of life and the world-wide state are features of [H. G.] Wells … whom both Zamyatin and Rand read. The number-names and regimentation … can be found in Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘The New Utopia’ (1891); Jerome’s works were popular in Russia and easily available” (Milgrim 2005, pp. 137–38).
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There are other lines that can be drawn between Rand and Orwell , too. Indeed, Rand might be said to prefigure concepts that have come to be called “Orwellian” with her indictment of the Soviet state, We the Living, published over a decade before Orwell’s indictment of the Soviet state, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The significant common elements between the first novel about Soviet Russia by a Russian in English (Heller 2009, p. 91), and the novel by an English writer which—at least according to Soviet dissidents—best portrayed Soviet Russia as it was, should not be overlooked. A dissident Russian intellectual, Vladimir Shlapentokh, has described the sense of revelation he experienced upon encountered Eighty-Four, that someone in the West truly understood what was happening within Soviet borders; he says that Orwell had “godlike status” among the anti-Soviet Russian intelligentsia (Shlapentokh 2004, p. 272). Shlapentokh details how the operations found in Orwell would have been easily recognized by Soviet citizens as the modus operandi of their own state: the rewriting of history, the constraints on individuals’ behavior, the necessity of concealing one’s real feelings. It is the case, however, that Rand had detailed all these operations of the Soviet state in We the Living, 13 years before Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published. There are many moments in We the Living which call to mind the Orwellian concept of doublethink, which Orwell defines as a form of “reality control” involving victory “over your own memory” (Orwell 1984, p. 34). At a Party meeting in Leningrad in Living, the gathered are told: “We don’t need the obstinate, unbending Communist of iron. The new Communist is of rubber! Idealism, comrades, is a good thing in its proper amount. Too much of it is like too much of a good old wine: one’s liable to lose one’s head. Let this be a warning to any of Trotsky’s secret sympathizers who might still remain within the Party: no past services, no past record will save them from the axe of the next Party purge” (We the Living, pp. 295–96). The past does not matter: you must 100% agree with the Party line now. In another pre-echo of Orwell , Kira’s love interest, Andrei, is told by a Party operative after the same meeting: “I know—we know—what you think. But what I’d like you to answer is this: why do you think you are entitled to your own thoughts?” (p. 297) Rand drew such operations of the Soviet state into her fictional dystopias, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged, as Orwell took inspiration from the workings of the Soviet state for Nineteen Eighty-Four. After its publication, Rand became “familiar” with Eighty-Four, and was of the view that it was influenced by Anthem, though there is no evidence that Orwell read Rand’s novella (Milgrim 2005, p. 153).
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Ellipsis in original.
References
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Crecente, Brian. 2008. “No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock.” Kotaku, February 16. http://www.kotaku.com.au/2008/02/no_gods_or_kings_objectivism_in_bioshock-2/.
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Murnane, B. (2018). Objectivism in BioShock. In: Ayn Rand and the Posthuman. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90853-3_5
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