(This post is part 5 in a series about the philosophical ideas of Bioshock and Bioshock 2. On the one hand, it’s probably the most interesting in the series, but it is also kind of tangent to the main thrust of my, and Bioshock’s, argument. Anyways, to begin at the beginning, click here.)



Each of us has a moral duty to increase the common joy, and ease the common pain. Alone, we are nothing, mere engines of self-interest. Together, we are the Family, and through unity, we transcend the self.



As I described in my last post, I believe that Bioshock’s deepest message is more general than any attack on the particular philosophy of objectivism. Rather, the game is trying to convey that all rigid ideological systems are broken and bad. Instead of striving to adhere to inflexible systems of belief, Bioshock tries to argue, it’s better to live life in moderation, behaving according to gut feelings and cultural traditions about what’s right.” The key word back there is “trying”. Because instead of that message, the point that I and most other people picked up on was something else, along the lines of “A moral code of selfishness and the pursuit of power are bad… so, a code of altruism and utilitarian action must therefore be good.”





Sofia Lamb exists partly to mess with those people. Her philosophy, grounded in the exact kind of strict altruistic thinking that most players of Bioshock prided themselves about, exists to both demonstrate the flaws of that moral code and to show that players never came close to living up to those utilitarian standards in the first place.

But Sofia Lamb is more complex than a set of ethical commandments. Her worldview encompasses the antithesis of everything Ryan stood for, permeating Rapture with emanations of mystery, subtlety, paradox, and myth.

The root of Ryan’s ideology is deeper than selfishness; his doctrine of rational self-interest is motivated by a fundamental reverence for the greatness of the individual’s “self”: their unique and essential being. Ryan saw the human self as fundamentally noble and powerful. For Ryan, the unsurpassed ability of a man’s rational intellect, when coupled with his inalienable right to liberty and independence, allows for the greatness of the self to be expressed through the creations of the will.





Sofia, by necessary contrast, finds idea of self to be abhorrent; it represents for her not just humanity’s violent, competitive, destructive nature, but also the fact that we are shackled to that nature. Baruch Spinoza famously wrote that “Men believe they have free will because they are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” Sofia sees the self as nothing more than a collection of such desires:

To the individual, his or her own instincts appear divinely ordained, but our drives are the product of evolved self worship and are, therefore, naturally corrupt. Alone, we are enslaved to our own perspectives. It is a kind of protagonist syndrome, of which we are all afflicted.



As a psychiatrist, Sofia would roll her eyes at Ryan’s emphasis on mankind’s pure and fundamental rationality. She believes that humans are weak and pathetic at the core; we are sinful creatures bound by natural law, driven by a tumultuous stew of subconscious desires beyond our control or ability to understand. “Rationality” is only a thin illusion thrown up by our deepest irrational –perhaps irretrievably insane– nature, for the purpose of appeasing our higher consciousness.





The story of Bioshock 2 keeps this theme at the forefront with the usual barrage of audio logs, and also by regularly subjecting the player-character to liminal states of consciousness: a long coma, multiple momentary blackouts, flashbacks, and extended hallucinations. But one of my favorite things about games is that, in the words of a Sequelitis youtube video, “You don’t have to empathize with a character on a screen– the feeling can happen directly to you.”

Bioshock 2 attempts to arouse the unconscious, nonrational aspect of our nature by flooding Rapture with new sexual and mythic resonance. Little Sisters, which were drooping abominations in the original Bioshock, now wear cleaner clothes and feature more inviting, adult faces. The star new enemy in the game, the Big Sister, is an agile and eerily sexualized echo of Bioshock’s Big Daddy. (Note: Bioshock’s “Rosie” type of Big Daddy is vaguely female, but totally not sexual, which goes to show that having such feminine Big Sisters is deliberate on the sequel’s part, rather than a necessary consequence of introducing female minibosses.) Furthermore, Bioshock 2’s story is driven by the player character’s implanted psychological drive to reunite with Sofia’s daughter, Elanor Lamb (pictured above as a Big Sister). This creepy father/daughter relationship is called a “pairbond” –a term which, in biology, refers to animals which mate for life.

Furthermore, by portraying Rapture eight years after the events of the first game –now fallen, flooded, and overgrown with sea life– Bioshock 2 emphasises Rapture’s underwater setting in a way that the original game never managed. The city which once was a sharp-edged monument of concrete and steel is now almost an organic entity, colonized by the pulsing metabolism of deep-sea life. And although Bioshock’s claustrophobic hallways and cramped tunnels always had a sense of intimate interiority, this feeling is deployed more deliberately in Bioshock 2, and greatly magnified by the encompassing presence of the surrounding ocean.

All this sex stuff exists to do more than simply creep the player out. (Although it is interesting that Bioshock 2’s atmosphere banks so hard towards horror compared to the first game, even as its gameplay moves away from scares towards bigger, more explosive action. Unlike the first game, Bioshock 2 is comfortable with contradiction.) The game uses sexuality to not only invoke thoughts of our irrational drives, but also to represent that which is fundamentally beyond rationality. This metaphor of woman as the yearned-for transformative/transcendent Other is the same thing that is at work in Braid, To The Moon, and arguably Dear Esther. Each of those games uses the same basic metaphor in different ways; in Bioshock 2, the Rapture Family’s religious use of sexual yearning points towards a critical pillar of Sofia’s philosophy.





Ryan’s city was named “Rapture” not in reference to any kind of literal transcendence: his point, rather, was that greatness and deep fulfilment could be attained in this world, because the heights of human experience were not qualitatively different from everyday life. Ryan’s philosophy, positing that life in this world is at its core something to be respected and celebrated, concludes that the best possible life is merely a more focused, more free and powerful version of normal, everyday experience. The tacky mythological names of Rapture’s many buildings and locations originate not in reference to the distant heavens that Ryan despised, but out of the ambition to capture the greatness and sanctity of this life, to create a true utopia in this world.





But Sofia has not such respect for everyday existence. She sees human life in its natural state as a blind evolutionary struggle, a “war of every man against every man” which Thomas Hobbes famously described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In Bioshock 2’s finest moment, the player is forced through a scripted escape sequence, blindly following a directional objective-arrow as the camera rocks erratically, lights flicker, explosions go off on nearby objects, and jets of high-pressure water rupture the level. “I want you to commit this moment to memory for me –this howling, brutish slog through the dark.” Sofia commands, as the player swings their view around corners and sprints down flooded hallways, “This is who we are.” In the flooding of Siren Alley, Sofia shares her vision of our universe of matter and natural law: it is cold and hostile to human emotional needs, an indifferent void which rejects any search for meaning, happiness, and deep satisfaction. The human condition, she argues over the sound and fury of the dying city, is only a brief interval of depression, delusion, pain, and the paralysis of existential horror, cruelly bookended by absolute oblivion.

And lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from Ego…



What hope remains in this grim picture? Sofia tells us that our lives can be redeemed only through a kind of spiritual transformation inaccessible to rational thought. This radical state of transcendence is completely unlike ordinary life, which (no matter how stable or pleasurable) is empty and unsustainable.

Ambient touches of this mysticism pervade Sofia’s Rapture: galaxies of tiny candles shimmer in reverent devotion, enshrining the bronze abodes of the Little Sisters. The recurring image of the striking blue butterfly, representative of the “Imago”, the final transformative stage of metamorphosis. The echoing lamentations of repentant Splicers: “We thought we could hide from the light down here. We were wrong!” In the particularly philosophical Siren Alley level we see how Simon Wales –Rapture’s original architect, now grown old and blind– has turned to a Rapturian perversion of gnostic Christianity to redeem his shame at the crumbling of the city’s flawed infrastructure. In Bioshock 2, the religious names of Rapture’s locations take on a different meaning: from the perspective of inhabitants who have fallen so far, the city is an ancient ruin, an impossible and mythical place. Even the scientific basis of Tenenbaum’s work with plasmids and sea-slugs is re-cast in a mystical light, with the miraculous ADAM-generating sea slugs revealed to have been produced by the radioactive emanations of a deep abyss glowing with the godly, transcendent blue light of cherenkov radiation.

With mysticism the game can go farther than it did with sexuality, by invoking this religious sense of transcendental yearning even more directly within the player. Since the player-character in Bioshock 2 is a diving-suit-clad Big Daddy and thus immune to the extreme pressures of the ocean floor, the game features several short segments that occur in the depths outside Rapture’s walls. Look up any review of Bioshock 2: all seem to agree that these slow-motion underwater walks are calm, novel, beautiful, and far too tantalizingly brief. The contrast between the glowing, arresting beauty of the Dear-Esther-like deep ocean paths versus the complex, stressful, tactical and systems-driven shoot-and-loot gameplay of mundane play creates a deep rift in the game. This split mirrors the two worlds of religious faith: the plane of temporal, earthly affairs, and a hidden, higher, eternal realm of redemption and perfection.

Personally, I’m not sure if Sofia Lamb actually believes her own mytho-poetic religion. On the one hand, she definitely has transcendent ideals: Sofia, unlike Ryan, recognizes that her philosophy of life is extremely difficult for normal humans to obey, hence her plans to unite all the consciousness of Rapture in the mind of her daughter Elanor Lamb (who is to become a new breed of human: the first of a society of “Utopians”). On the other hand, she also seems to view religion as a convenient opium of the people; as a comforting lie that promotes happiness and altruism among the suffering, weak-willed masses.

Trying to mesh Sofia’s metaphysics with her morality exposes another seeming contradiction: if Sofia has such a low opinion of her fellow (pathetic, sinful, lost, broken) humans, why is she so eager to devote her life to the greater good of this sorry species? Here’s how I see it working out:

Sofia’s hatred of selfishness (and, indeed, of “the self” entirely) does not exist a priori, but is motivated by the same fundamental force that drove Ryan: the pursuit of absolute freedom of will. But while Ryan fought against constraints on his liberty imposed by an altruism-preaching external society, Sofia Lamb’s psychiatric training led her to consider the greatest enemy of free will to be her own internal, instinctual desires and selfish compulsions. For her, the main attraction of altruism is not actually the benefit it provides to others, but the self-denial that allows her to rebel against her inborn selfishness.





(As you may have realized, this strategy does not totally solve the problem: Sofia’s “altruism” is in a certain way quite selfish, since she is motivated by an intellectual craving to rebel against her inborn desires. Sofia realizes this; it is the reason why she labors to create a race of self-less utopians, genetically freed of inborn compulsions.)





But regardless of the success of Sofia’s Utopian experiments, we might ask her: “What’s the end goal here? I could understand Ryan’s vision: a world of independent artists, scientists, and industrialists, fearlessly pursuing their own interests. But what happens when the whole world (Utopian or not) adopts your altruistic worldview? If everyone’s sacrificing themselves to help others, who’s left to help?”

This is where Sofia would say that we’re still looking at society like Ryan did, as an arbitrary collection of important individuals. In fact, according to Dr. Lamb, it’s the nebulous network of relationships between individuals that really matters, just as individual ants are insignificant and stupid compared to the emergent intelligence and power of a colony. (I’m talking in Godel, Escher, Bach terms here, but Sofia would probably phrase things more similarly to real-world social activist, feminist and psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller, who posited a “relational model” of human development in her book Toward a New Psychology of Women, a theory in which social isolation is “one of the most damaging human experiences” and a therapist should “foster an atmosphere of empathy and acceptance for the patient, even at the cost of the therapist’s neutrality”) This is the purpose of Dr. Lamb’s quasi-religious movement, the “Rapture Family”: to shift the foundation of meaning away from the individual and towards the community, and furthermore to offer the promise of individual redemption through immersion in the transcendent “soul” of the community:

What is the soul? An ineffable spark of continuity, living within us, yet beyond us. Mortality, our eldest truth, and the soul, our eldest contradiction. I submit the following conclusion - the soul is not in us, but between us.



Of course, for all her philosophical subtlety and sophistication, Sofia’s religious, altruistic, communalist worldview will be her downfall as surely as Ryan’s simple Objectivist creed was his. And, just as Ryan was slain by his own biological son, we’ll soon see just how keen Sofia’s daughter is at becoming the First Utopian, and Savior of Rapture…