The Demise Of Rapture: A Failed Utopia

The underwater city of Rapture, the setting of the first two BioShock games, is conceived of by its visionary Andrew Ryan as an egoist utopia of sorts, free from outside influences, moral concerns, and the alleged inherent destructiveness of altruism.  It quickly becomes a hub of genetic experimentation that collapses into the natural consequences of widespread egoism.  Even a contributor to Rapture's development, Dr. Tenenbaum, the woman who oversaw the Little Sisters' conditioning, was forced to acknowledge that all of Rapture's innovative genetic engineering could not guarantee moral improvement, even when the city was separated from all other cultures.

A geographical location cannot cure anyone of their respective sins, as Dr. Tenenbaum came to realize.  Utopia is therefore more than just a place.  It does not follow from moving to the bottom of the ocean that a community is protected from whatever real or imagined stupidity or moral offenses they sought to avoid, and Rapture was actually founded specifically to escape "petty morality" according to Andrew Ryan (as he clarifies at the beginning of the first game).  From the start, Rapture stood on the unstable ground of moral nihilism, or at least moral apathy.  Rapture was already built on epistemologically and metaphysically invalid ideas.

Perfect rationality and moral perfection are certainly not unattainable [1], but there is no specific location in any region, dimension, or logically possible world where a being with free will is rational and just without choosing to avoid the alternatives.  A utopia, therefore, can only exist where consistent rationality and justice characterizes every individual citizen.  If even a single person deviates from this, utopia is already at risk.  Even a city isolated from all of the irrationalistic societies in the world can still dissolve into madness and injustice from within if the inhabitants do not recognize that logical truths and moral obligations are greater than themselves.

Indeed, irrational, egoistic people can always make hell out of heaven itself.  Someone who wants to poison at least part of a culture will always be able to do so.  No amount of genetic manipulation or isolationism will prevent those bent on pursuing their own preferences and whims from forsaking reason, and without reason every aspect of themselves and the rest of reality cannot be understood.  Only rationalism and genuine moralism (although whatever moral obligations may exist are not immediately knowable like reason is) can allow for the creation of paradise on Earth.

Rapture's civil war between Ryan and Atlas, ADAM addiction problems, and eventual descent into Sofia Lamb's relativistic collectivism all originated from a lack of universal concern for reason and justice, the only two possible foundations of a philosophically sound society.  The concept of a genuine utopia (as opposed to "utopias" that are categorized as such only because they conform to subjective preferences and assumptions) is not something that cannot be brought to the political landscape, but this will never occur unless people abandon everything that conflicts with the two aforementioned pillars of a sound culture.  As Tenenbaum admits, self-imposed genetic evolution will not deliver people from flaws of a moral nature.  If one is to establish or preserve utopia, individuals must not pretend otherwise.

[1].  There is no specific category of sin or particular act of sin that is unavoidable.