Rachel McKinnon
From nearly our first experience entering the underwater city of Rapture in BioShock, we’re treated to a taste of Andrew Ryan’s propaganda in the form of the following message:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? “No!” says the man in Washington, “it belongs to the poor.” “No!” says the man in the Vatican, “it belongs to God.” “No!” says the man in Moscow, “it belongs to everyone.” I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
This is part of Ryan’s ideology, which closely follows Ayn Rand’s (1905–82) Objectivism. It’s the idea on which he designs Rapture and its laws, glorifying people who are producers and masters of their own fate and denigrating those Ryan refers to as “parasites” or slaves. Through propagandistic messages, he champions Objectivism, pictorially emblazoning it, for example, on placards in shopping carts along with the text: “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?”
But what is propaganda, and what makes it problematic? Are all instances of propaganda lies? Are all cases of propaganda morally problematic? Are all lies problematic? And finally, is there a difference between bullshit and propaganda?
“Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” Ryan’s view is that one is entitled to the products of one’s work, and not entitled to the products of another’s work. He is committed to a view of capitalism where the rich deserve to be rich, through their own talent, intellect, and efforts, and the poor deserve to be poor, through their laziness and stupidity. It’s a view that the ideal society is an extreme meritocracy: whatever one has in life is connected to one’s merits. Not surprisingly, most of Ryan’s propaganda messages revolve around reinforcing this ideology.
One commonplace view of propaganda is that it’s a lie in the service of a government’s goals. Some commentators suggest that the point of propaganda is to serve the interests of the propagandists themselves, to persuade people that there is only one valid perspective and to eliminate all others.1
So what difference is there between propaganda and lies? Contemporary philosopher Jennifer Saul provides a useful definition of lying.2 Simplifying a little, a speaker lies if and only if she says something that she believes to be false. So in lying, a speaker misrepresents what she believes to be true. However, it’s possible to lie and yet say something that happens to be true, provided that the speaker believes it to be false. This is an important part of the definition.
Andrew Ryan regularly says that citizens of Rapture need to avoid all contact with the surface world because it’s filled with parasites who seek to destroy Rapture. Let’s assume that Ryan doesn’t actually believe this. It’s quite possible Ryan merely thinks that there are values and objects on the surface world that he doesn’t want to pollute Rapture’s citizens. But let’s also assume that the surface world has a real problem with the existence of Rapture, and that it really is filled with people who want to see Rapture fall. Even though what Ryan says about the outside world is true, he’s lying because he believes it to be false. As Ryan says, “Even in the book of lies, sometimes you find truth.”
When we lie, we want our hearer to think that we’re trying to say something true. That’s how lies work, after all: I trust that you’re trying to tell me something true. When a person lies, they perform what we call a speech act. Different speech acts include things like questions, commands, assertions, requests, promises, and so on. Lies involve assertions, claims that something is true. Good liars, then, assert something that they believe to be false, but that the hearer thinks the speaker believes to be true. We recognize that the speaker at least appears to be trying to say something true. This is different from what contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls “bullshit.”3
When we lie, we say something that we believe to be false. This means that what a liar says is somewhat connected to the way things are, since liars are aiming to say something that isn’t true. According to Harry Frankfurt, though, bullshit is when the speaker doesn’t particularly care whether what she says is true or false. The bullshitter is up to something different. Whereas the liar is trying to misrepresent the way things are and what he believes to be true, the bullshitter is trying to misrepresent what she’s up to with her assertion. The liar only succeeds if we incorrectly believe that he believes what he says (“Any contact with the surface exposes Rapture to the very parasites we fled from,” Ryan says in an audio diary). The liar has to convince us that he’s at least trying to say something that he believes to be true. However, the bullshitter succeeds when we incorrectly believe that she is even trying to say something that she believes to be true. Frankly, the bullshitter doesn’t care whether what she says is true or false; that’s beside the point. So what the bullshitter says is completely disconnected from what she takes to be the truth.
This analysis suggests that propaganda is more closely connected to bullshitting than lying. When Ryan says, “Any contact with the surface exposes Rapture to the very parasites we fled from,” he doesn’t care whether it’s true or false. He’s just trying to influence his citizens’ reactions to smugglers, which is of course connected to his move to institute the death penalty for smugglers. Now, certainly, sometimes propaganda involves lies, when speakers (or the government) are trying to say something they believe to be false. But if saying something true would work just as well, maybe even better, they might just as well speak the truth. What matters isn’t fooling citizens about what’s true or false; what matters is controlling the citizens’ thoughts and behaviors so as to further the government’s needs. Whoever, or whatever, is using the propaganda is trying to make it appear as though they care about (saying) what’s true. But they don’t care, not really. So what they say is driven by what will work, not what’s true or false. What liars say is driven by what they think is false. Propaganda, then, is more closely associated with bullshit than lying.
Frankfurt also argues that bullshit is more morally problematic than lying. Skilled liars also have to be skilled at discerning the truth so that they can aim to avoid it in what they say. Frankfurt thus thinks that frequent liars won’t lose their ability to discern truth. But skilled bullshitters don’t have to have any skill at discerning the truth, since they don’t care about whether what they say is true or false. And Frankfurt suggests that habitual bullshitters will lose (or lessen) their ability to discern the truth. So he suggests that bullshit is a bigger enemy of truth than lies.
If I’m right that propaganda is more closely associated with bullshit than lies, then this also means that we should be particularly worried by governments (or individuals with power, such as Andrew Ryan) that engage in lots of propaganda. One worry is that these governments may attenuate or even lose their ability to determine what’s true. Andrew Ryan may have done just that. In a later audio diary recording we find in the first game, he says the following:
Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me. But the city… it is collapsing before my… have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? Perhaps. But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me, and destroy my city. To question is to surrender. I will not question.
He admits that he may have convinced himself of his own propaganda, to the point where he can’t easily determine what’s true and what’s false. If propaganda were more like lies, then one could simply disbelieve one’s propaganda to get at the truth. But what makes propaganda so troubling is that it’s more like bullshit: it’s hard to tell whether it’s true or false. And after engaging in enough of it, even the government may lose the ability to tell the difference.
Can a government or speaker be warranted or justified in their use of propaganda? We can answer this by considering what makes some lies good, and what makes others bad. This is a debate in philosophy known as the “norms of assertion.” In this debate, norms are standards for evaluating actions. So if one violates a norm of assertion, then one did something wrong. A natural intuition is that all lies are bad: they’re unwarranted assertions. But I don’t think that’s right.
Near the end of the game, as Jack (the player) works to confront Ryan, we hear Ryan say:
So far away from your family, from your friends, from everything you ever loved. But, for some reason you like it here. You feel something you can’t quite put your finger on. Think about it for a second and maybe the word will come to you: nostalgia.
Of course, Jack has no family or friends, at least not the ones he thinks he remembers (since they’re a fiction planted in his memory). So Ryan’s lie here is really in service of having Jack come to realize that he’s just a pawn—Fontaine’s pawn, for Fontaine (who is also known as Atlas) purchased Jack’s embryo in order to cultivate Jack as a tool to take down Ryan for the control of Rapture. Indeed, Ryan ends up telling Jack the truth when Jack finally confronts Ryan face to face (and Ryan eventually orders Jack to kill Ryan).
I’ve argued elsewhere that some lies are warranted, provided that the lie is in service of the hearer (potentially) coming to know the truth.4 That’s what’s going on with Ryan’s lie about Jack’s family and loved ones. Jack isn’t actually far away from the people he knows (or used to know before his memory was altered): he was created and raised in Rapture. However, by connecting Jack’s sense of being far from the people he knows, and yet probably also having a sense of nostalgia or familiarity with Rapture, Ryan is trying to get Jack to come to know the truth about who, and what, he is. Of course, Ryan is also doing this to try to control Jack and stop Fontaine’s takeover, but that’s beside the point.
So while what Ryan says to Jack is false, and he knows it to be false, he tells that lie only in order for Jack eventually to learn about the truth. So while his assertion is “proximally” false (what he says is literally false), he says it in service of a related truth. On my view, when we assert properly, aiming at saying something true, our assertion is warranted. This means that some false assertions – even ones we know to be false – may be warranted if that proper aim is in place. And this is what happens with this lie of Ryan’s, making it a warranted lie. Of course, many of Ryan’s lies don’t have this structure, and so are problematic.
On this concept of warranted assertion, then, not all lies are bad. Lies in service of the truth are warranted. Earlier, I argued that propaganda is more closely associated with bullshit than lies. Lies, remember, involve speakers saying something that they believe is false. Bullshit involves speakers saying something and not caring whether what they say is true or false. Now, while one might not strictly care whether what one says is true or false when one bullshits, one might bullshit with a further aim of truth in mind. Suppose that Andrew Ryan is right that smugglers’ contact with the outside world will expose Rapture to a number of problems that he’s trying to protect the citizens against, yet he knows that, strictly speaking, it’s false that “Any contact with the surface exposes Rapture to the very parasites we fled from.” Still, he doesn’t say this because he wants to fool them about the truth, per se; he does it to control their behavior and their opinions of the smugglers. It’s propaganda. We may suppose, though, that he does it for his citizens’ own good. He uses this propaganda in order for his citizens to see something that (we may suppose) is true: the smugglers will expose Rapture’s citizens to the very problems of the outside world that Ryan is trying to protect them from.
Propaganda that proximally doesn’t aim at truth (or falsity) but does have a more distant aim of having hearers come to believe something true seems sufficiently close to the “good” lie that Ryan tells Jack. Both are quite plausibly warranted assertions. If that’s right, then not all propaganda counts as unwarranted assertions, and not all propaganda is clearly morally problematic. However, Frankfurt’s concern still stands: those who engage in too much propaganda may attenuate or lose their ability to tell the difference between truth and falsity. As Atlas (Frank Fontaine) says: “Ryan and his precious Rapture. You don’t have to build a city to make people worship you… just make the chumps believe they’re worth a nickel.”