Davis Aurini - Bioshock & Objectivism

July 17, 2015 - Davis Aurini

21:15

Bioshock & Objectivism

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey folks, this video is actually a follow-up to the Arini's Insight video I had requested on objectivism.
	I can't believe I did a video on objectivism without mentioning Bioshock.
	I've actually been planning to, you know, look at this game for over a year now.
	I just have never really got around to it.
	And I think it is a very genuine and decent exploration of the philosophy.
	Now, I'm not recommending it as a video game.
	I don't think there's been a decent first-person shooter since Mad Max, or since Max Payne 2.
	Okay, they all suck nowadays.
	The only redeeming features of modern shooters are that they have really good storylines in them.
	So, yeah, spoiler, the game's, what, 10 years old?
	Alright, yeah, there's spoilers, deal with it.
	So, Bioshock.
	There's two interesting things going on in the world of Bioshock that kind of reflect what I was saying in my video on objectivism.
	And if you don't know, the entire universe of Bioshock, the city of Rapture under the sea, is essentially an objectivist paradise that falls into ruin because of the adherence to the philosophy, the over-adherence to the philosophy.
	Now, the very first thing is the plasmids.
	The plasmids in the game, they are basically magical superpowers that have been discovered through science.
	And what happened in the narrative of the game is that because everybody was taking these plasmids and overuse of the plasmids has negative psychological effects, it eventually devolved everybody into junkies, into smart.
	If you think of them an objectivist junkie, so they weren't some loser hanging out on the street corner, you know, getting drunk with the needle hanging out of their arms.
	These were ubermensch junkies.
	So they wind up being extremely dangerous, constantly seeking a fix of more Adam, the thing that powers the plasmids, absolutely desperate for that, only working in teams when it's beneficial to them in the short term, and being completely willing to betray one another.
	It winds up with the society falling into ruin.
	And ironically, and this is one of the brilliant aspects of the game, for you to survive in Rapture, you, the player character that arrives in the city not understanding anything about it and just getting introduced to it, you are forced yourself to take all of these addictive substances just to compete, just to be on par with all of these downgraded ubermensches that have destroyed the civilization.
	Now, I think that the plasmids, well, let's put this into a metaphor that might make some sense in contemporary culture.
	I think of them like performance-enhancing drugs.
	Now, I love performance-enhancing drugs.
	You know, one of the sponsors for the podcast is, of course, Island Lion, Herbals, Kratom.
	Great stuff.
	I love caffeine.
	I love nicotine, which has many beneficial effects for the brain.
	I love performance-enhancing drugs.
	I personally have nothing against steroids.
	Personally, I am too lazy to actually look into all the biochemistry so I can use them safely.
	So I don't use steroids.
	But people that do, they can be used safely.
	They certainly help you bulk up.
	lots of potential benefits from using steroids.
	I have nothing against it.
	However, however, imagine your favorite sports ball team.
	And yeah, I stole that from Confused Matthew sports ball, a hilarious term.
	I love it.
	Now, in professional sports, steroids are banned.
	And there's this naive libertarian approach that says, well, why should we ban steroids?
	You know, like, they're already genetic freaks.
	You've got to be a genetic freak to make it into the NFL to play sports ball.
	You know, they're already doing where they're taking creatin, all of this other stuff.
	They're managing their hormone levels through the meat that they eat, etc.
	Why is it that we ban steroids?
	Well, the answer is because if you legalized steroids in professional sports, you would quickly have the exact same spiral that you get in Rapture.
	You would not only have to be a genetic freak, you would also have to be doing extremely unhealthy levels of steroids.
	You would wind up with people that by the age of 40 would be getting prostate cancer, their bones would be destroyed, etc.
	You would turn every sport into a blood sport because that raw competition that's not being mitigated by anything is going to wind up destroying the sport itself.
	It's going to demand more and more sacrifices from all of the players.
	If you think of the Rocky movie, for example, where Rocky has to fight the Soviet giant, the genetically engineered man, you know, this is a guy that's just being pumped full of all these chemicals that are shortening his lifespan.
	You know, and it's kind of a metaphor for the Soviet space program, which was successful.
	But quite frankly, Yuri Gergerin?
	Yuri Gergerin was not the first man in space.
	The first man in space is unknown because his capsule broke down and he was relaying a distress signal and the Soviets completely denied that he exists.
	The poor bastard died in outer space because the Soviets had no safety protocols.
	They did not care about the survival of their people.
	They were just units to be used.
	With any of these utopian ideologies, like pure objectivism or pure utilitarianism, and I mean, Soviet-style governance is just another form of utilitarianism where we create a paradise by turning all the humans into useful cogs.
	The humans aren't important all of a sudden.
	The moral health of humans is not important.
	And so in the present world where we have these bans on performance-enhancing drugs in the NFL, etc.
	This is because there's a moral aspect to sports as well.
	We expect our athletes to behave sportsmanlike.
	And it's unsporting to be using performance-enhancing drugs.
	And we even apply this to warfare.
	We have the just war theory in the West, in Christendom.
	We try and limit, like nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare are considered inhumane.
	They are too brutal.
	And so, at least when we're warring against one another in the West, we don't use those tactics.
	Now, and we'll get back to like what's the solution.
	You know, we'll get to that in a minute, because there's another side effect that you get from this pure objectivist reality.
	And in Bioshock, that is the Little Sisters.
	So, to harvest the atom, the atom is basically the magical sea cucumber juice, whatever it was.
	It's the magical BS that's used to power the plasmids.
	And because everybody's using plasmids, for you to compete in society, you need to use plasmids too.
	And so, what's the best way to get plasmids to get the atom?
	Well, it's to rip these little girls away from their families and do some genetic engineering nonsense to them so that they're basically worker bees.
	They're kids working in mine shafts at this point.
	Now, in actual Western history, we had child labor, and poor countries still have child labor.
	The reason that there's child labor is because the countries are poor.
	Now, you see all of these government bans for child workers and etc. back over the past century.
	All these laws were put into place after child labor was pretty much gone already, once the market no longer needed it.
	When you have a poor society, and most societies have been poor, children need to work.
	Whether it's working on the farm or even terribly working in the coal mine, it's something that we don't like to think about nowadays, is that you need to eat.
	You know, we're a bunch of privileged and entitled little brats these days.
	Most societies' kids have to work, and that's just a fact of the universe.
	It's very unfortunate.
	And the government bans are not what stopped it.
	Increasing wealth, industrialization, the free market is what eliminated child labor.
	But in Rapture, we see a return of child labor, a return of very exploitative practices, because this is what the market demands.
	And, you know, this argument about exploitative labor practices, you know, this is an argument that the left makes this argument, but it doesn't mean the argument's completely wrong.
	About how, you know, in the West, you know, in Europe, North America, we have very high standards of living, which is a good thing.
	You know, again, free market increases quality of life.
	But when you get transnationals, what transnationals can do is they can export all the labor overseas.
	So not only is that destroying the manufacturing base within North America, but it does get a little bit of an exploitative thing going on where you're now, you're exploiting.
	And this is also connected to the Federal Reserve and printing money.
	If they weren't printing money in North America, and if the U.S. were not the world reserve currency, then it would actually make a lot more sense to manufacture things to higher standards here.
	But that's a whole other part of the argument.
	This is a very complex issue, and I am really oversimplifying it.
	But there is an element of we want cheap textiles, we want cheap plastic toys, we want cheap stuff, and so we're going to turn a blind eye to the exploitative practices that are happening overseas so that we can all get that.
	And you see that in a society without any moral guidance, without anything, even you know what, like the minimum wage laws that they're trying to pass, which are completely economically illiterate, but they come from a good place.
	There's a motivation that people deserve a living wage.
	Now, the reality is the best way to achieve that is to leave the market alone.
	But there's this moral sense that paying somebody two bucks an hour or 10 cents an hour or what have you, that there is exploitation going on there, and that we should be willing to pay for what something's worth.
	Now, of course, this gets all tied up into politics, into Keynesian economics, and all into Leviathan.
	But there is a moral core there.
	So, this brings us back.
	What is the solution?
	You know, if you have this pure capitalist society, pure economics, where you take the ideas of free market economics, which are good, sound ideas.
	They are a good way to run your country, to run your community.
	It's the fair and just way to run things.
	If you take those and raise them up to the top, above justice, above decency, above moral development of people, above sportsmanship, if the highest absolute principle is the free market, is self-interest, is the individual, not the family, not the community, but the individual.
	If you completely discount everything else, you wind up with these exploitative practices.
	If a corporation can get away with dumping waste into the environment, well, why shouldn't they under that system?
	Now, it's quite possible the best way to prevent that is through private lawsuits.
	Okay, the free market anarchists, they generally don't place the free market as the highest value.
	What they say is the free market is the best way to achieve the highest value.
	So, understand that I am not advocating for Leviathan.
	When you get simplistic thinkers, when you get people that don't understand the complexities of the market, they see a moral problem with the market, they want to institute a morally simple solution.
	They try and institute Leviathan.
	They try and institute the mechanical God.
	And they say, well, we'll raise up the state to have this much power over us, to have unlimited power over everybody, and the state will now be responsible for regulating all of this stuff.
	And there's two obvious problems with that.
	The very first one is that the state is not that smart.
	You know, the old saying, who's smarter, the platoon or the sergeant?
	Well, the platoon smarters, there are 30 of them.
	The free market relies upon the wisdom of crowds.
	And the wisdom of crowds, nine times out of ten, is going to supersede that of the state, that of Leviathan.
	The second obvious objection is that if the state has this much power, then the people that have finances, the people that are in the 1%, they now will capture the state to ensure their monopolies.
	So, given a choice between rapture or Leviathan, believe me, I'm on the side of rapture.
	I'd rather live with the crazy tweakers and plasmid users than live under the Obama's police state.
	Absolutely, give me rapture under the sea any frickin' day.
	At least it's interesting.
	But the solution that I'm getting at here is that you need something of a higher value.
	You need a higher principle for society.
	Not something orchestrated and governed by the state.
	The seat of morality of a society needs to be separated from the state.
	It needs to be the church.
	For a society to function, you want a limited government that does the basic things that government is supposed to do, roads, courts, national defense.
	But you also need a church.
	You need a core of morality for the society.
	You need an organization that understands what the principles of moral development, of spirituality, what all of these things are.
	And when you have that, then the business owners, the ones that own the NFL, either they understand because they are part of the church and they seek out to do moral things with their lives.
	They want to make sure they're not exploiting their players and destroying them by the age of 40.
	Or at the very minimum, the populace is going to look at this business.
	And the owner will say, well, we need to keep these guys happy.
	I might be a complete psychopath that's willing to use people, but I need to at least pretend to be a good person to please my customers.
	And the similar, it's also there with the government.
	Was it Madison that said this constitution was built for a moral and religious people?
	Because when you have a moral, religious, disciplined people that watch the government, they're not going to export their morality onto the state.
	That's what Leviathan does.
	That's the mechanical God.
	That's leftism.
	That's what we have presently.
	Instead of being moral and responsible people, the vast majority of the population doesn't want to be held accountable for anything, so they'll let the government make their morals for them.
	Objectivism is an excellent reaction against the sort of monstrosity that we have right now.
	It's an excellent reaction against Leviathan.
	But by focusing only on the individual, because Leviathan takes a bunch of individuals and turns them into cogs.
	And so the objectivist looks at this and it sees the cogs, it sees the communism of the entire thing.
	And they reject that to celebrate the individual.
	But see, the way you form communism is that you turn everybody into an atomized individual in the first place.
	You turn them into the cogs.
	Whereas the actual human strength comes from community.
	It comes from the networks of friends and family and neighborhoods that we're allowed to build, you know, under actual freedom.
	You know, actual freedom is the freedom to do the right thing, is to form healthy bonds with other people.
	It's the freedom to exclude other people from those bonds.
	It's not individualism.
	It's not this pure rarefied individualism, because then you get the case of, you know, divided we stand, divided we fall.
	Together we stand, divided we fall.
	The defense of the individual needs to be for the growth of communities and ultimately for a state, a governance that is responsible to the community.
	So while objectivism is certainly a noble philosophy, it's a very positive response against what we have presently, and it celebrates the greatness in the human spirit, it's missing a couple of things.
	It's putting the individual, it's putting self-interest a little bit too high, and it's not acknowledging the transcendence within us, the universalism of morality, of spirituality.
	So again, I love it.
	It's great.
	Atlas Shrugged is one of the best books in the world.
	But Bioshock is an excellent exploration of what happens when you base everything upon a very mechanical philosophy and upon something that doesn't have the transcendent within it.
	Anyway, thanks for watching, folks.

▲