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When Jack first arrives in Rapture in the bathysphere at the beginning of BioShock, the city's pretty much already on its last legs. Most of the populace is dead, missing, or deformed from ADAM abuse, the city's systems and structures are flooding and falling apart, and it's just generally a place no human being should ever set foot.
How did all this happen, though? You learn the general sequence of events through supplementary material like Audio Diaries, but the matter goes a little deeper than that. Rapture, as a society, was an extremely ambiꩵtious project, but may well have been doomed from the start due to a few crucial factors.
Hypercapitalism
Rapture's first and foremost philosophy is that "a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow." Basically, anyone with a good business proposal and the means to put it into action should be able to do so, and reap all the rewards it brings exclusively. The problem with a hypercaptialistic society is that, without social services and good graces, people start falling through the cracks at an alarming rate.
Every single service you could possibly think of in Rapture, up to and including the air you breathe, was the express property of a person or company. Even the city's primary police force, Rapture Security, was a subsidiary of Ryan Industries, which means they were only obligated to serve the company's other subsidiaries or any individuals who could afford to have them on loan.
So yes, anyone who had the idea and capital for a startup could do okay for themselves, but if your company fell through, you were on the streets almost right away.
Class Divide
In addition to the aforementioned individuals whose business ventures bore no fruit, Rapture had a sizable working-class population. Most of these laborers were brought on by Ryan Industries when the city was first being assembled, while others joined the city's established companies as employees later on.
Frank Fontaine explains in one of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:his Audio Diaries that everyone who came to Rapture was expecting a utopia of industry, while conveniently forgetting that someone still had to scrub the toilets every day.
Many of the laborers who lived in Rapture's lower quarters were disgruntled by this, believing the city would be a chance for a better life, only to end up in the same demeaning positions they already had (or worse). Those who tried to complain were swiftly shut down by those with more disposable income.
Once you were at the bottom of Rapture's rung, it was borderline impossible to work your way back up to the top.
Andrew Ryan's Paranoia
Andrew Ryan grew up in a small village outside what is now modern-day Belarus, which was destroyed during the rise of communism. It was this traumatic event that instilled in him his hatred for "Parasites," those that he believed take endlessly from others without creating anything themselves. When he moved to the United States, he enjoyed the switchover to capitalism, but was frustrated again by the country's social welfare programs.
When Ryan created Rapture and invited others to join him, he billed it as a city in which everyone could flourish. In reality, though, it was always meant to be his city, his oversized model train set, even if he didn't admit it.
Ryan wanted a place where he could expand his 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:personal industries and wealth without having to worry about things like charity or the welfare of others. Unfortunately, since he installed himself as the head of the city, the people naturally came to him when they had problems they couldn't solve themselves, which revived his old distaste for "Parasites", despite their problems being mostly his fault.
As the class divide grew and the people turned to socialism and collectivism on their own, Ryan grew paranoid that his city was pulling away from him. He thought it was only a matter of time before someone squealed to the world powers of Rapture's existence, and his property would be seized again, his world once again taken away from him.
This is why Ryan began to instate stiff penalties against public demonstrations and religious worship, and eventually disabled the bathysphere network to ensure nobody could leave the city.
Dangerous Individuals
Rapture's ambitious nature and capacity for unrestricted development attracted many highly unsavory characters, either there under false pretenses, or driven to criminal behavior by desperation. Two of the most dangerous individuals to come to rapture were Frank Fontaine and Dr. Sophia Lamb.
Fontaine, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a lifelong conman, found the cracks in the city's philosophy all too easily, setting up poorhouses to house the displaced working class, all while setting them up as his private army of thugs to ultimately steal the city and its secrets from Ryan.
Dr. Lamb, meanwhile, was a social psychiatrist whose ideals ran completely counter to Ryan's and was brought to the ci♉ty in what was effectively a misunderstanding.
Sophia had no interest in business or competition; rather, she united the downtrodden into the "Rapture Family," attempting to force her extreme ideas of Utopian individuals upon them. To Lamb, the best kind of person is one who works exclusively in the common interest, with no free will or pursuits of their own.
ADAM
Given the social problems, Rapture was almost destined for an armed conflict sooner or later, but the one thing that made it so much worse was ADAM, raw stem cells produced by a sea slug that could be manipulated to imbue people with fantastic powers, called Plasmids.
Originally marketed by Fontaine Futuristics as a household helper and novelty, Rapture citizens took to 'splicing' right away, enhancing their physical appearances and minds. Additionally, once tensions started ramping up, Fontaine offered self-defense Plasmids as well, prompting concerned citizens to splice up to protect themselves and their business interests.
Of course, as more people spliced up and ADAM became harder to come by, more of them began to degenerate into wild Splicers, no more than beasts who would tear each other apart for the slightest lick of ADAM. This caused a feedback loop that made things even worse, as the frightened citizenry continued to splice up to protect themselves, not realizing they were dooming themselves to Splicer-hood.
In one of his Audio Diaries, Bill McDonough called it a genetic arms race, where instead of building a better gun or bomb, everyone was in competition to become 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:less human and more monster.
So what ultimately killed Rapture? It was a combination of factors, but at the bedrock of it all was unchecked ambition. Ryan and those like him wanted a city that didn't need to concern itself with safety nets, not realizing that when your society has no safety nets, it only takes one misstep to fall into oblivion.