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 | Ayn Rand Institute executive director comments on Objectivism-bashing video game Posted by Stuart K. Hayashi on 2/20, 12:27pm | |
| The best-selling and critically acclaimed video game BioShock deliberately caricatures Objectivism in the form of its villains. Interestingly, I came across a video game blog entry that quotes Ayn Rand Institute executive director Yaron Brook on what he thinks of it. You can read about that here. This is the part where Objectivism's critics assume that Dr. Brook must have launched into some angry tirade about the game's fans being irrational whim-worshippers, or something like that. Well, those who gleefully lick their lips in smug anticipation of such a reaction will be disappointed, because Dr. Brook sounds rather nonchalant about it. He notes that the upside is that this game has gotten many nerdy adolescents curious enough about Objectivism to read Ayn Rand for the first time. I know what he means, because a girl once told me that she loved the movie Dirty Dancing before she ever heard of Ayn Rand. This film makes a derogatory allusion to The Fountainhead, and that actually piqued that girl's curiosity, which led to her reading a lot of Objectivist literature. Hooray! :-) That didn't stop her from being a ditzy PETAphile, though. :-( It's pretty interesting that the game's creator, Ken Levine, keeps saying (1) that the game's intention is to demonstrate the fallacy of being really idealistic and committed to an ideology, and (2) the game's message is not intended to contradict Objectivism. In his knee-jerk denunciation of idealism and ideology, Levine sounds just like Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed, where Sowell says that you can choose between (1) the idealistic morality that goes with socialism, or (2) the crummy cynical anti-idealism that goes with capitalism, and that he chose the latter because humans aren't virtuous enough for socialism. While Sowell believes socialism is bad because it's too idealistic, Levine sees Objectivism as bad on account of it being too idealistic for him. | ||
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