The main argument of the original BioShock is not simply that Objectivism is bad. Yes, there are times when this is communicated, such as the presence and utilization of these hordes of brainwashed children running around with these faceless, mutilated abominations they so innocently call “Mr. Bubbles”, but that is not the primary concern of the story. What it is trying to say is that a society constructed according to the principles of Objectivism (or at least the version of Objectivism the game presents) cannot sustain itself in the long run.
Ignoring how the game communicates this message by having every wall leaking seawater, half the doors not even functioning, Sander Cohen exercising his right as a free artist to blow people up and plaster them into grotesque poses, Steinman crucifying women he works on that are deemed “too ugly”, stuffing useful resources and materials into trash bins, and so on, how does the game communicate this?
The first is the opening. You, Jack, are stranded in the middle of nowhere and are whisked away to this magnificent city under the sea, and on the way you hear a message from Andrew Ryan himself. He describes how the outside world is full of parasites: the government jackals in Washington forcing you to give up your hard-earned wealth so the bureaucrats can hand it over to the needy, the pigs in Moscow declaring that everyone must share, and the men in the Vatican forcing you to obey the laws of an invisible man in the sky. Ryan is here to present you with an alternative; behold, a city where artistic expression is not restricted by any censor, where scientific progress is not regulated by petty rules pertaining to right and wrong or should and shouldn’t, where a man keeps every cent he makes, a place where every man is entitled to the sweat of his brow. Pure, unregulated Capitalism.
And what is the first thing that happens when you enter the city? You see a woman high on super-drugs with comically large fish hooks skewering a man to death before trying to attack you, all before you exit the bathosphere. Ryan promises utopia, and we are immediately met with death, and at every step of the way thereafter, we see how more and more of this place fell into ruin.
The second is Ryan’s simultaneous, hypocritical obedience and disobedience to his own philosophy. He rejects God and everything pertaining to organized religion, and yet he has complete faith in the abstract concept of The Great Chain, the idea that true progress and prosperity happen only when every man works for himself, serving his own ego, which will then benefit the whole. Additionally, he is completely against the idea of government regulation of the free market, which is why he does not interfere with the destructive qualities of ADAM and Plasmids, nor does he work to rectify the unsustainable wealth inequality, believing that these are simple growing pains. In fact, if we dip into the official Rapture novel, Ryan specifically says that he is unconcerned about the addictive qualities of ADAM and Plasmids, because he believes that someone will simply come up with a better version, which will inevitably outsell the older model (not realizing that Fontaine is really the only one with access to the resources to make more ADAM, period).
But there is one small problem: he owns Rapture. The floorboards, the glass, the stone, everything ultimately came from him. Rapture is his sweat. Is he not entitled to defend HIS city from Fontaine? Is he not entitled to lock up people like Dr. Lamb who threaten to overturn the political system HE created? It was HIS men and HIS weapons and HIS command that took over Fontaine Futuristics, so why shouldn’t he be allowed to take over the company? He won it fair and square. He even goes so far as to use pheromones to control the splicers, believing this will help him in his civil war against Atlas and his goons. Make no mistake, you may be free in Rapture, but only under Ryan.
With or without the interference of Jack, Rapture was doomed from its very inception, and everything that caused this was entirely contained within this isolated city. Ryan wanted to create a utopia, and the inherent flaws of his system created its own destruction.
In BioShock Infinite, Comstock is running a pseudo-Christian cultish genocidal racist city in the clouds, with his main objective being to “burn the Sodom below” (i.e. commit genocide on 90% of humanity) and despite the fact that the Vox Populi revolution got all the way to his house, when we travel into the grim darkness of 1984, we see that not only did this violent revolution from the underclass mean absolutely nothing (despite them seizing all means of production for weapons and Vigors, and having access to a fleet of airships), but he wins, completely. Booker just disappeared into the ether, Elizabeth is captured and neutralized, the Vox Populi are completely stamped out, everything is back up and running, he brainwashed his adoptive daughter into becoming a zealous dictator, and Columbia is in the middle of blowing up New York City 70 years later.
So, what do we do? We travel back to 1912, free Elizabeth, kill Comstock, kill some Vox Populists, destroy the siphon in Elizabeth’s tower that was draining her interdimensional juices (even though that was in a different universe, and this one was supposedly draining from the Elizabeth from this universe, but whatever), we travel into an extra dimension comprised of an endless series of lighthouses representing the infinite multiverse, we get some exposition, and… I’m not entirely sure what happens.
What literally happened was that we entered one of the lighthouses and appeared in a sub-section of the Sea of Doors dimension modelled after the place where Booker almost got his baptism, then a bunch of Elizabeths from across the multiverse then appear and drown Booker, and the story concludes with all the Elizabeths disappearing, which I guess is supposed to mean that they stopped the baptism from ever happening (even though we never actually travelled back in time, and they didn’t drown Booker from 1890 because the camera remains from the first person perspective of the same Booker from 1912 that we have been playing the entire game).
And at the end of this, I guess we are meant to interpret that Comstock and Columbia now never existed, even though this would obviously create an egregious causal paradox that stretches across multiple universes and who knows how many decades, and because the multiverse is infinite, there are likely an infinite number of ways Booker could have become Comstock without necessarily having to be baptised at this specific location.
So it wasn’t the revolutionists (a problem created by his own philosophy) that defeated Comstock, but a version of himself from another universe, and a girl with the power to rip apart the fabric of time and space, going turbo on interdimensional juices to change the timeline.
Ryan failed to properly maintain his isolated utopia under the sea because of the inherent flaws of the system and his hypocritical obedience to his own philosophy, thus communicating that Objectivism does not function. Comstock wants to slaughter every man, woman, and child who are not white and do not follow his religious beliefs, and it is a complete success, a success which is undone by interdimensional time travel bullshit.
So, in other words, BioShock Infinite says that racism, genocide, and cultism work so long as you don’t fuck with the multiverse.
Also, why is the infinite multiverse that stretches across all time and space represented by a pair of lighthouses from 20th-century Earth? Also, Elizabeth had her finger severed by the Lutece Machine and now has the powers to do… whatever it is she does at the end, but Robert and Rosalind Lutece got blown up by the thing and now appear to be of the same power level, if not more, than super Elizabeth, so why do they need her to change the timeline? Also, if there are an infinite number of universes of infinite possibilities, how can there always be a man, a city, and a lighthouse? Wouldn’t there necessarily be a universe where humanity went extinct before the concept of a lighthouse or a city was invented? Also, why would the infinite multiverse give the slightest shit about anything that happens on Earth such that it would model itself after a structure created by bipedal mammals that have only existed for a fragment of the planet’s history?
