Bioshock Infinite and the political philosophy of reincarnation (Patreon)

Bioshock Infinite wants us to murder America to death

Section 1: Introduction

In 2007, 2K games, later Irrational Games, released Bioshock.

Metacritic gave Bioshock 96/100 on Xbox 360 and PC,and 94/100 on PS3 and it won Best Game and Game of the Year from a whole host of different places. It is universally accepted as one of the most influential and thoughtful games of its time, and I personally know several people who would describe it as their favourite game.

In Bioshock, a POV character called Jack is in a plane crash, and finds a lighthouse which transports him to an underwater city called Rapture. Rapture was founded by libertarian and successful businessman Andrew Ryan, who wanted to escape the regulation of the American government and live in a society where everyone is free and works for themselves. Rapture was, at first, a paradise for businessmen, artists, musicians, scientists and philosophers. The scientists also discovered a chemical called ADAM, that would allow people to make genetic modifications to themselves and become superhuman.
When Jack arrives however, Rapture is a dystopian nightmare. As the player journeys through the city, uncovering the history and downfall of Andrew Ryan’s utopia, they discover that Rapture has undergone a civil war after Andrew Ryan became increasingly irrational and authoritarian in attempts to protect his power and his dream. Ryan’s enemy in this war, Atlas, aides Jack through the game in a mission to find and kill Andrew Ryan.
At the climax of the game, Jack confronts Andrew Ryan who reveals to him that Atlas is in fact Frank Fontaine, Andrew Ryan’s old business competitor whom Ryan had tried to murder, and furthermore that Fontaine had been controlling Jack through hypnotic suggestion with the phrase “would you kindly”. A die-hard libertarian to the last, Andrew Ryan insists “a man chooses, a slave obeys” and makes Jack kill him rather than allowing anyone else to best him.

Past this point the antagonist of the game is Fontaine, and the goal is escape. In the final confrontation, Fontaine transforms himself into a glowing titan using copious amounts of ADAM before being defeated. Depending on the choices of the player, there are different endings to the game.

The three key ideas in Bioshock, are a political statement, a moral statement, and a statement about video games. 

The moral question posed by the game is one to do with free will - we, as the gamer, assume that we are making our own choices to help Atlas, but later we realise that Atlas has been controlling us, or at least controlling our character all along. The game makes us ask whether there is a difference between helping someone who promises to help you in return because you want to, and being forced to help them. 

The statement about video games is inherently tied to this idea, and comes to a head in the scene where it is revealed that your character is under mind control, after which you kill the first antagonist, Andrew Ryan, while unable to use the console controller to any effect.

The political message here is that Libertarianism is founded on hypocrisy. The game shows this by creating an almost ideal libertarian utopia as set out in Ayn Rand’s Atlas shrugged, and then having the objectivist leader transform into an authoritarian - the message here is that libertarians don’t want to be free from regulations, they want to be the ones enforcing their own regulations. Furthermore, the second libertarian antagonist of the game turns out to be controlling you with hypnosis, which is about as fascist as you can get.

In Bioshock Infinite, a POV character called Booker DeWitt is brought to a lighthouse and transported to a city in the sky called Columbia. Columbia was founded by religious zealot and general garbage person Zachary Comstock, who wanted to escape the moral failing and tyranny of America and live in a society where everybody just lurrrrrrves JESUS. Columbia is a paradise for WASPs who lurve JESUS, but not so much for black, asian, irish, non-christian… well everybody else. In Columbia, the scientists have also discovered quantum physics drugs called Vigors that allow people to become superhuman.
When Booker arrives, Columbia is in a period of upheaval, on the brink of all-out civil war. As the player journeys through the city, witnessing the downfall of Comstock’s utopia, they discover that Comstock may not entirely be who he seems. Booker’s companion through this is Comstock’s daughter, Elizabeth, who also has quantum physics superpowers, although hers allow her to see between different timelines and realities. At the climax of the game, Booker decides that to deal with Comstock he’ll have to “go back to when he was born, and smother that son of a bitch in his crib”. He discovers however, that Comstock is just him from a different timeline in which he was baptised after the battle of wounded knee, and in which he was sterile. Comstock travelled to Booker’s timeline and bought his baby daughter off him. Trying to stop Comstock in a moment of regretful panic, Booker grabbed the baby as Comstock was stepping through a portal back to his timeline, and the babys finger was severed as the portal closed. This was in fact the source of Elizabeth’s powers.
In the final level of the game, Elizabeth is taken and her powers are magnified, and Booker races to try to stop her from transforming into a genocidal monster. He is too late, and it is clear that because of Comstock’s influence her fate is inescapable, and so the only way to save Elizabeth is for Booker to go back to his baptism in which he chose either to live on as Comstock or not, and let Elizabeth drown him. 

When you look at these two games side by side, it is immediately obvious that Bioshock Infinite is really similar to Bioshock. This could just be because it is the long awaited sequel - say it with me, Bioshock 2 NEVER HAPPENED. However, in this essay, I’d like to argue that Bioshock Infinite is doing more than just replaying the classics, it is making a statement about the political philosophy of reincarnation.

Section 2: Parallel Games, Parallel realities

Bioshock Infinite is all about parallels. The protagonists travel between parallel realities and timelines, even very briefly to Rapture. It is hinted that Rapture and Columbia are diegetically parallels for each other in different timelines.

Both games are based on the same basic narrative structure: a male POV protagonist travels to a dystopian city run by a madman, rescues a female protagonist or female protagonists, kills the madman and the female protagonist(s) escape(s). This similarity is commented on in Bioshock Infinite, as part of the unbroken cycle of Booker and Elizabeth occurring across infinite timelines.

In terms of the interplay of ideas, however, there are four steps involved: An axiom, or assumption; a slow build to get across an idea; a twist; a takeaway message overall. In Bioshock, we start with the axiom that Authoritarianism is bad - this is both an assumption that the game assumes that the player makes naturally, and gently reinforced in-game by Andrew Ryan’s introduction where he demonstrates how he made Rapture in order to escape Authoritarianism. Then, there’s the build. You go through this world learning about its history: that it was once occupied by dreamers, artists, explorers; that Andrew Ryan is a die-hard libertarian; that he’s a charismatic leader and used to be well liked, but as he tried to take more control of Rapture and the dream of this beautiful freedom based utopia, the more it slipped through his fingers, ultimately leaving him as an authoritarian himself. At the same time, the freedom fighter Atlas is guiding you through your journey to defeat Ryan, and you come to see that if anyone really values freedom it’s him - but then comes the twist: Atlas is actually Frank Fontaine, and he’s been controlling you the whole time. Atlas, for all his devotion to freedom, is actually a powerful capitalist villain, manipulating you for his own goals. Andrew Ryan, for all his devotion to freedom, has become a dictator. This leaves us with the message: Right-wing libertarianism is hypocrisy. Libertarians don’t want to be free, they want to be free to rule over everyone else.

Axiom: Authoritarianism is bad. Build: Charismatic freedom lover trapped in self fulfilling prophecy and revolutionary protester is the one truly fighting for freedom. Twist: The good guy is actually a bad guy. Message: Libertarianism is garbage

Detour: Libertarianism is garbage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqGuQIq1htM

In her book The Idiot, Elif Batuman describes a “day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo: a Disney movie about a puny, weird-looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that all the kids [...] even the bullies [...] were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors. Over and over they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to the bullies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”

In a nutshell, what Libertarians believe is that regulation and government power is bad, and that freedom and liberty (hence, libertarian) come before everything else. Libertarianism can be tricky to grasp because it doesn’t sit on the left/right-wing alignment axis. It is a philosophy concerned with the freedom of individuals to do as they please primarily, and people with both capitalist and communist beliefs can also hold libertarian ones.
On the left-wing, libertarianism manifests as the intent to remove centralised power structures and hierarchies, and in particular to abolish capitalism. On the right, libertarians are most concerned with protecting the freedom of capitalism, rights to property and powers of individuals and corporations. The left-wing libertarian ideology is now mostly known as anarchism, and in modern discussions right-libertarianism and libertarianism are mostly synonymous. So, let’s forget about left-wing libertarians… for now at least… put it away in your sock.

Philosophers as far back as Laozi have developed ideas on the rights of an individual to freedom, and on personal autonomy, but it is undoubtedly Ayn Rand who has shaped modern libertarianism more than anyone else, with a philosophy she called Objectivism. 

Now straight away, you can tell objectivism is a scam, because it’s named to appeal to people who consider themselves to be rational and intellectual, but also are very happy to have their worldview spoonfed to them by a fanfiction of how evil socialism is.

Objectivism tells people that if they are successful, it is because they are inherently better, more hard working and worth more than others. Ayn Rand first achieved large scale success with her book, The Fontaine-head (Fontaine-head… like Frank Fontaine… because they named him after The Fountainhead… fine forget it). 

In the Fountainhead a weird sort of anti-person called Howard Roark who thinks that nature exists for him to turn it into materials and make things with it is trying to make it as an architect. Nobody wants to work with him because he’s kind of an asshole (???) and the book paints this as a good thing (?!?!?) so he ends up with no work, and then is forced to work in a quarry, where he meets a character, Dominique, who is pretty clearly Ayn Rand’s self-insert. He sneaks into her house and rapes her, which according to Rand makes her secretly love him.

As all good pieces of blatant propaganda does, the book ends with a big trial where the protagonist wins everyone over with a big speech about their beliefs. Howard Rourke converts everyone to Objectivist thinking and he and he hooks up with Dominique and everyone claps and Obama was there. His speech about being an arrogant asshole was so good that they let him off for the silly minor charge of dynamiting a building just because the client wanted to make changes to it.

The book really is objectivism told straight-forwardly at the reader. For example, here’s a quote from the book about pity:
“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”

Rand grew more and more popular over the 14 years after publishing The Fountainhead, and in 1957 she released her masterpiece: Atlas Shrugged. If you can believe it, Atlas Shrugged is even more of a dumpster fire than The Fountainhead.

The premise of Atlas Shrugged is that the United States has been completely ruined by having too many laws and regulations, because of course it is - incidentally this is a rehash of a previous Rand novel in which socialism has ruined the country by giving people too much free healthcare and…
In Atlas Shrugged a railway magnate discovers that all the CEOs and business people of America have been running away to join a Libertarian hero called John Galt because they hate how many rules the government is making them follow and they definitely aren’t tiny babies. And since all the CEOs and business people - you know, the people really responsible for success - have left, the situation in America is getting worse and worse. Eventually John Galt gets up on the radio and makes a big speech about Libertarianism and it’s so good that the government collapses, and everyone claps and that one kid who was always mean to John Galt in school admits he was really just jealous the whole time. 

At the end of the book, Galt and the others are planning how they’re going to build a new capitalist Utopia, and only let in the good people, kind of like the rapture. 

(Incidentally, something really fun about Ayn Rand’s writing, if you ever want a laugh, is that she’s really homophobic, but also hates women so much that in her books, only men are worthy enough to do anything good and only men are worthy enough to watch men doing things and admire them - and this leads to some amazing unintentional homoeroticism.
There’s a scene in Fountainhead where Roarke argues with a big strong construction worker about making a hole in a girder so he can lay some pipe and the construction worker won’t do it because he isn’t sure how safe it is, so the book describes how Roarke grabs the other man’s tool in his strong, hard hands, and forces a hole with it, after which he says effectively “I’ve opened this hole for you now put your pipe in my hole now.”

So that’s fun.)

In 1976 the US government ruled that there should be no restrictions on how people spend their money on political communication. In their words

“A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached“

The knock on effect of this decision is that money in American politics is considered to be a form of speech or expression and therefore will be protected under the first amendment. This, obviously, gives rich people a more powerful voice in America proportional to how much richer they are than the average citizen.

This is such a bizarre ruling, not just because it is a cosmic brain take being made into legal precedent, but also because it uses the language of personal freedom to defend the right of a powerful minority to shout louder than everyone else.

In Bioshock, Andrew Ryan is very smooth, and he has some really memorable slogans, like “No Gods. No Kings. Only Man.” and when you confront him “A man chooses, a slave obeys”. The trouble with these slogans is that, in the context of the game, they are heavily ironic, because there is an obvious unspoken second half to both of them. No Gods, No Kings, only Andrew Ryan, who is now a god. A man chooses; a slave obeys - and a man chooses to make other men slaves. So when the slogans are repeated and passed around outside of the game on merchandise, they end up effectively espousing Andrew Ryan’s ideas. What’s worse, they’re good at furthering these ideas because ideas of personal autonomy and freedom appeal to everybody.

Therein lies the key to how we got from philosophers exploring the basic ideas of liberty, to where we are now: Left or Right wing, man or woman, rich or poor, Everybody thinks they’re dumbo.

Section 2 continued: Parallel Games, Parallel realities

In Bioshock Infinite the basic assumption is that… well, that authoritarianism is bad. The game delivers Booker to the doorstep of Columbia, and pretty quickly there is a lot of bad shit going on there. Working class people - almost entirely black and irish -  are second class citizens, scientists have transformed disabled people into the terrifying “Handymen” and in an early iconic scene of the game, citizens of Columbia are lining up to stone an interracial couple to death. Furthermore, just like Andrew Ryan, Comstock himself has founded his city in order to escape what he sees as tyranny in continental America. The difference of course is that while Ryan wants to be free to own the sweat on his brow, Comstock thinks people in America are getting too sweaty and he wants to be free from them. 

The build up of Bioshock Infinite is that Comstock is an authoritarian leader and that Booker is the freedom lover. Booker’s mission is to free Elizabeth, he fights against Comstock’s regime, and he actually serves as a symbol of hope to the revolutionary uprising. Booker is the prophesied “false prophet” who is the mortal enemy of Comstock and whom Comstock has foreseen killing him. The twist, of course, is that Comstock and Booker are the same person - that for everything you hate about Comstock, and everything you love about Booker, they are simply the same.

So you now have Axiom: Authoritarianism is bad. Build: Charismatic freedom lover trapped in self fulfilling prophecy and revolutionary protester is the one truly fighting for freedom. Twist: The good guy is actually the bad guy.

Doesn’t it feel like things are repeating over?

The message of Bioshock Infinite is a little trickier to glean, and I think that’s because its message relies on it being a sequel. This means that you have to view it in the context of the first game.

The deliberate reappearance of Rapture in Infinite is telegraphing that the two games run parallel to each other, just as the two cities of Columbia and Rapture run parallel to each other in the multiverse of Bioshock. Once you see that, you see the message of Bioshock Infinite: that all the same things that are wrong in Libertarianism were also wrong with Manifest Destiny, and therefore, as Manifest Destiny is the political foundation of America, the whole American political landscape is rotten, and has to be thrown out in order for the future to prosper.

You see, in media analysis, there’s this thing sometimes referred to, called a “metaphor”, where something in the media has a non-literal interpretation outside of the media. These can sometimes be easy to spot, just by describing what happens in the plot of a story, when it sounds absolutely absurd. For example, if you had a game where the main character is revealed to be the same person as the bad guy and then the main character’s child travels back in time and murders him so that they can live on free of his influence that might be, you know, a metaphor for something.

The message of Bioshock Infinite is that Manifest Destiny and the biblical zealotry of the frontier has been reincarnated into modern libertarianism. Religious zealotry translated into zealotry for the 20th century religion: money. The conclusion, in Booker’s murder, of Bioshock Infinite, is that to be free of these problems, the whole american political structure needs to die in order for the next generation to succeed.

To understand this better, you have to understand a little historical context.

Section 3: Historical context

Looking at the periods of American history at the times that these games are set, we can start to trace the evolution of Libertarianism by looking at Emma Goldman. Born in 1869, Goldman was a jewish Russian immigrant to the United States, just like Ayn Rand. Unlike Ayn Rand however, Goldman was a prominent anarchist, or left-libertarian. So I guess take left-libertarianism back out of your sock now.

Emma Goldman was an essayist and renowned philosopher and lecturer, discussing issues of anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She was a revolutionary and was key in the development of the anarchist philosophy, and at one point was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Henry Frick, the most powerful capitalist in America at the time. This was supposed to be an example to others and incite anarchists of America to revolution. J Edgar Hoover called her one of the “most dangerous anarchists in this country” saying “return to the community will result in undue harm”.

As you can see, Emma Goldman was the very definition of a radical babe, but beyond her involvement with left-libertarianism, there is another reason I’m talking about her here. In 1914 Goldman worked with another feminist activist called Margaret Sanger. Sanger was a proponent of women’s rights and was doing her best to inform people about contraception, promoting it in her monthly publication the woman rebel under the anarchist slogan “No gods, no masters”. That said, Sanger was also in favour of some sketchy shit that amounted to essentially eugenics in pursuit of battling poverty… so that’s a few minus points for Sanger.
In 1914 while working together to inform the public about contraception, Sanger and Goldman were arrested and charged under something called the Comstock law. The Comstock law was named for Anthony Comstock, originally a US postal inspector who was such a purse-clutching garbage person that he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to supervise the morality of the US public. After that startling success he went on to make the US congress pass the Comstock law, which prohibited the distribution of any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material. After being essentially snitched on to the feds by Comstock, famous author and playwright George Bernard Shaw coined the phrase “Comstockery”, meaning “censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality”, saying that Comstock and comstockery were “the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States”. In her autobiography, Emma Goldman referred to Comstock as leader of America’s “moral eunuchs”. Comstock, by all indications, was a man who hated women having rights, hated abortion, and loved getting dunked on by famous people.

Going back to American anarchists now - Emma Goldman was deported from the US back to Russia for partying too hard for those squares to handle in 1920. Apparently at the time of her deportation the US was trying to drive out anyone it could prove was an anarchist under the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, which enabled authorities to deport anarchists, beggars, sex traffickers, and bizarrely enough, people with epilepsy(?!)

And so anarchism in the United States went somewhat dark for a little while, seeing a return after WWII in a much more peaceful, pacifism-focused school of thought and eventually progressing into the anarcho-communism of the 60s and 70s. This rise in popularity of the ideas of liberty were possibly a response to the Nazi-fascist threat of the 40s. It was during this time that The fountainhead was starting to gain traction with Americans, and in 1957 Ayn Rand released Atlas Shrugged, launching right-libertarianism to the height of its power.

In Comstock’s era, America was still finding its feet. It had been through a war of independence, then a war with the native people, then a civil war, then a period of tremendous lawlessness. All the time, the driving force of the American experiment was the ideology of Manifest Destiny. This idea was essentially that god had given North America to the settlers as a gift and ownership of it was their divine right. This is why the Battle of Wounded Knee is so crucial to Booker’s story in Bioshock Infinite.
In Ryan’s era, an era of capitalist growth instead of religious faith, America was finding its feet again, not as a young nation, but this time as the most powerful nation in the new world. This is why the cold war is a prominent theme in Bioshock. In this era, the driving force of American imperialism is American Exceptionalism. This is more or less the belief that because of the free markets and its economy, America is capable of producing the best of everything the world has to offer. 

If you can imagine Comstock morphing into Ryan, as counter-intuitive as that transformation seems, you can picture the evolution of Manifest Destiny into American Exceptionalism. 

In 2014 in Burwell vs Hobby Lobby the US supreme court decided that businesses would be able to decide what treatments health insurance providers would cover their employees for. Once again, this decision used the justification of defending the freedoms of powerful parties to take away the liberty of everyone else. This decision is particularly interesting to us though, because the treatments that most troubled American employers were abortion and provision of contraceptives. Just like in the era of comstockery, the US government rules again to limit women’s rights.

Doesn’t it feel like things are repeating over?

This time though, the justification is the polar opposite. The philosophy of Emma Goldman, of Laozi, of Booker Dewitt, has now morphed into the philosophy of Ayn Rand, of Rand Paul, of Andrew Ryan. The twist in this story is, the good guy becomes the bad guy.

Section 4: Conclusion

Before we go we need to talk about free will. In Bioshock, the choices of the player are deliberately limited to the point that only one real choice affects the plot, which is whether or not to save the children. This, interestingly, is something revisited in Bioshock Infinite - the fate of the future seems to have been a key concern to the creators of Bioshock from the beginning.

In Bioshock Infinite, by contrast, there are many choices that can be made but they are all futile, because history is repeating over and over and there is no way out for your POV character, Booker. 

This ability to choose but inability to affect change creates a powerful feeling of the inescapability of fate. In the context of the series however, it is a pointed change. First you have a game that deliberately denies the player choices in key plot scenes, but then allows you to make a change about the future, what happens beyond your own story, but then a sequel with freedom of choice that always results in the same inevitable conclusion.

This progression is signalling that the conclusion of Bioshock Infinite is the only forward, at least according to the creators.

Maybe the repeating loop of Bioshock Infinite is symbolic of the reincarnation cycle of american politics. Maybe it is the freedom of choice for Americans to vote for whoever they want, and maybe it’s the freedom of the rich to corrupt whoever runs for office.

Maybe it’s the cycle of ideas created to protect the most vulnerable, being perverted for use against them. Maybe it’s the good guy becoming the bad guy.

Maybe Bioshock Infinite is just trying to say this:

If the same thing keeps going wrong over and over and over again, maybe it’s because you’ve got something in the wrong place.