BioShock's Failed Fictional City Of Rapture Is More Rooted In Reality Than You Might Think
BioShock recently celebrated its 15-year anniversary. Below, we take a closer look at how the iconic setting of Rapture reflects real-world libertarian philosophies.
BioShock's Rapture always felt like someone else's dream, right from the start, and that's because it always has been. There may not always be a lighthouse, but there's almost always been a man wishing for his own city to serve his interests and needs.
Libertarians have been misunderstanding problems with society and trying to apply their top-down thinking to new settlements in remote places, far away from government rules and regulations, for practically as long as people have been telling stories of running off and starting somewhere new. It's easy to understand the temptation to just leave and make a new city, but the compromises that come with individual freedoms being limited are often part of what makes a society a place where people want to be.
After all, if people are completely free, left to nothing but their own decisions and desires, they're beholden or responsible to no one, so are you really part of anything at that point? Can you really make something detached from everything without leaving everything? Or would that simply leave you with less than what you started with? A man with ideas and visions that's more likely to harm groups of people not represented in the room.
15 years ago, BioShock flooded the world with the magic, wonder, and terror of what an isolated city built with absolute freedom in mind for individuals could look like. Everything from the art they create to the science they explore was subject to this freedom, for better or worse. And in the process, Andrew Ryan's Rapture also came further than any real attempt to start a
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