Reply #58: "once humans start practicing it they pervert it" [View All]

[Occulus]

Bioshock. This is a first-person-shooter game for the PC, 360, and PS3. It is, without a doubt, the very best deconstruction of Rand's so-called "philosophy" I've ever seen.

From the game's opening moments:

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."

Rapture is a city with... problems. In the game's backstory, a dockworker in Neptune's Bounty (one of the sections of Rapture) discovers a deep-sea slug with an amazing property- when it bites, it injects stem cells into the wound that seem capable of regenerating damaged tissues. After some experimentation, Rapture's scientists discover that this substance- which they call ADAM- can also be used to rewrite genetic code. This gives rise to ever-more-powerful abilities based on genetic mutation (would anyone like to hatch bees from their arms?); what begins as a set of harmless body modifications quickly becomes weaponized and on New Year's Eve, 1959, civil war breaks out. These abilities, called "plasmids", are powered by a substance called EVE, and it is the fight over control of these resources that eventually leads to Rapture's downfall.

Anything goes in Rapture and everything is for sale- even oxygen. The free market was allowed to go its own way there, and utter horror resulted.