Diary.07: Andrew Ryan - The Creator and Tyrant of Utopia

Introduction: The Icon of Objectivism Sunken in the Abyss

Far isolated from 1960s America, where Cold War paranoia enveloped the world, lies the dark and ruthless deep seabed of the North Atlantic. Amidst the 1950s Art Deco skyscrapers, groaning under the crushing pressure of thousands of meters of water and beginning to flood in places, the city of Rapture—once hailed as humanity’s utopia—is sinking into a mire of madness and decadence. This beautiful yet gruesome dystopia was born solely from the intense will and paranoid philosophy of a single man. His name is Andrew Ryan. He was the creator of a utopia, a fanatic of extreme Laissez-Faire capitalism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, and ultimately, a tyrant who led his city into civil war and ruin by betraying his own ideals.

This report logically unravels the psychological depths and the process of philosophical collapse of Andrew Ryan, the greatest singularity in the history of Rapture, based on “facts” such as audio diaries, environmental visuals like posters, and his own demise left within the game. The existence of Andrew Ryan is not merely that of a power-hungry megalomaniac or a madman. He is the epitome of a tragic ideologue who, having rejected God and the state for his beliefs in pursuit of absolute freedom, ironically degenerated into the very “oppressive totalitarianism” he despised most, and in the end, was willing to reduce the city he built with his own hands to ashes.

1. The Blood-Stained Primal Scene - The Birth and Terror of the “Parasite”

The roots of Andrew Ryan’s obsessive philosophy and the psychology behind his pathological hatred of others, whom he calls “Parasites,” can be traced back to his traumatic childhood experiences. As a matter of historical fact, Ryan was not born in America. He was born as “Andrei Rianofski” into a Russian-Jewish family near Minsk during the era of the Russian Empire.

What decisively influenced the formation of his character was the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent gruesome Reign of Terror by the Bolsheviks (communists). During his boyhood, Ryan witnessed his relatives (his father Pyotr’s cousin, Dmitri, and his wife, Vasilisa) being brutally executed as “enemies of the anti-communist regime” by the Bolshevik Red Army, which had seized state power. They were deprived of their lives despite having committed no crime, simply because they were associated with Ryan’s father and other anti-communists.

This memory of bloodshed implanted an absolute conviction (or perhaps a curse) in Ryan’s mind. Namely, the conviction that “groups that usurp the efforts and property of others under the guise of a righteous cause will destroy the world.” To escape the bloody purges brought about by the “workers’ paradise” of communism, he abandoned his homeland in 1919 and traveled alone to America via Constantinople. Having changed his name to “Andrew Ryan,” he called this flight his “Second Exodus” and believed that America was “a place where great men could prosper by their own power alone.” He despised his former homeland as a country that had “traded despotism for madness.”

Here lies a crucial observation for analyzing Ryan’s mental structure. The word “Parasite,” which frequently appears in his vocabulary, does not merely refer to the economically disadvantaged or the poor. To him, a Parasite is “any entity that creates nothing itself, but attempts to legally seize the creations and property of others, using morality, religion, or the laws of the state as a shield.” This definition, rooted in intense trauma, directly leads to the extreme individualism and the absolute rejection of welfare and Altruism in the later Rapture.

2. Disillusionment with the American Dream and the Philosophy of the “Sweat of Your Brow”

After immigrating to America, Ryan amassed enormous wealth through his exceptional intellect, iron will, and good fortune (the discovery of oil on his property). Having founded Ryan Oil and come to control massive domestic coal mines and the second-largest railway network in the United States, he was truly a champion of capitalism and the embodiment of the American Dream. However, the “free America” he loved underwent a major transformation in the 1930s due to the New Deal policies pushed forward by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

To Ryan, state-led social welfare programs and market interventions were nothing less than spoon-feeding the American public “Bolshevik poison.” A symbolic event demonstrating his ideological radicalization during this period is the “forest arson incident.” When the government attempted to nationalize a vast private forest owned by Ryan (which he used as a personal retreat), pandering to public demands that it was “God’s land” and should be made a “public park,” he adamantly refused to surrender it to the Parasites and instead burned the entire forest to the ground with his own hands. This behavioral principle of “destroying it with one’s own hands rather than having it taken” serves as a crucial foreshadowing of his final choice during the collapse of Rapture.

Furthermore, the catalyst for his definitive break with the state was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. In Ryan’s eyes, the atomic bomb appeared as the worst possible example of “Parasites” (state power) usurping and weaponizing the ultimate creation born of science and human reason for the purpose of destruction. Those who could not create themselves had stolen the power of others (scientific achievements) and obtained the power to easily destroy what they could not control. This despair drove him to completely detach from the surface world, embarking on an escape to the deep seabed.

His speech echoing through the Bathysphere terminal at the entrance to Rapture is the crystallization of this ideology.

“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.”

What can be inferred from this declaration is that Ryan treats political systems (Washington = democratic welfare state), religion (the Vatican = self-sacrifice to God and Altruism), and communism (Moscow = Collectivism) all equally as “the same kind of parasitic behavior” that crushes individual free will. In an environmental audio diary, he condemns Altruism as “the most wicked fiction in human history, surpassing even slavery and the Holocaust.” This is because when someone wants to make others work, they force Altruism upon them by using the needs of “someone else”—be it the state, the poor, the army, a king, or God—as a shield. To him, morality was nothing more than a deception designed to enslave the strong.

3. The Philosophy of the Undersea City - “The Great Chain” and Absolute Egoism

Despairing of all surface regimes, Ryan invested his entire fortune to build the secret city of Rapture in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. To realize a place 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,” it had to be the deep seabed, out of reach of the Parasite’s evil grasp (Audio Diary “Impossible Anywhere Else”).

The social philosophy flowing at the foundation of Rapture is Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, specifically “Rational Egoism” itself. Ryan’s ideology is encapsulated in his unique economic and social concept known as “The Great Chain.”

“I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a ‘Great Chain of Industry’ that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. (…) Anyone who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck.”

This ideology is an extreme purification of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand,” stripping away all ethical and legal constraints. In Ryan’s philosophical structure, the world is always reduced to a binary opposition between the “creating man” and the “exploiting Parasite.” In the environmental audio diary “A Man or a Parasite,” Ryan clearly defines this difference as follows:

Based on this extreme dualism, Rapture was operated as a pure capitalist society with absolutely no welfare, public services, or market regulations. However, this miniature garden system, which seemed ideologically perfect, began to rot from within due to the hypertrophy of irrational human desires and the emergence of ADAM, a gene-altering substance that completely shattered ethical boundaries.

4. Descent into Tyranny - Smuggling, Executions, and Self-Contradiction

The downfall of Ryan, who championed absolute Laissez-Faire, was ironically not caused by external invasion, but by the massive shadow cast by the very system of “The Great Chain” he believed in—namely, the rise of Frank Fontaine, the ultimate egoist (and another Objectivist).

To protect the secrets of Rapture and prevent the influx of the ideologies and systems of surface “Parasites,” Ryan laid down the only absolute law in the city: “Unauthorized contact with the surface is forbidden.” However, under unregulated capitalism, the enormous demand for contraband inevitably creates the supply of smuggling. This prohibition consequently formed a massive black market, bringing immense wealth and power to the smuggler Fontaine. Using this illicit money, Fontaine invested in the practical application of ADAM discovered by Brigid Tenenbaum, gradually monopolizing the Plasmid industry.

In the early days, even as society fell into chaos due to the permeation of ADAM culture and victims turned into Splicers (genetic mutants), Ryan believed that “The Great Chain Moves Slowly, but with wisdom,” and stubbornly refused to intervene as a government.

“Is there blood in the streets? Of course. Have some chosen to destroy themselves with careless splicing? I do not deny it. But I will not issue a statement, nor will I enact laws. The Great Chain moves slowly, but with wisdom. It is our impatience that invites the ‘Parasite’ of big government.”

However, when Fontaine’s power came to threaten his own authority and the very foundation of the city, Ryan’s rational outer shell collapsed. Driven by the obsession to protect his utopia, he began to discard the doctrines of “freedom” he had set himself, one after another. Unable to legally corner Fontaine due to insufficient evidence, Ryan finally invoked an authoritarian measure that fundamentally overturned the city’s ideals: “Punishing smugglers with the death penalty for treason.”

“The death penalty in Rapture! The Council is in an uproar. Riots in the streets, they say! But this is a time for leadership. Measures must be taken against the smugglers. (…) If it means protecting Rapture from the very Parasites we sought to escape, hanging a few men is a small price to pay compared to our ideals.”

The cold-blooded voice recorded in this audio diary marks the decisive moment when Ryan transformed from a philosopher into a dictator. Depriving others of their lives and rights through violence to protect an ideal—this was exactly the same behavior as the “Bolshevik purges” and “surface state power” he had hated most in his childhood.

Furthermore, after Fontaine faked his death following a shootout with the police force, Ryan forcibly nationalized “Fontaine Futuristics” (Ryan Takes F Futuristics). In a society that held individual effort and the pursuit of profit supreme, the state usurped a private enterprise under the pretext of “the city’s interests.” Despairing at this blatant act of betrayal, his sworn friend Bill McDonagh resigned from the Council, and was later hung as a corpse in front of Ryan’s office for the crime of plotting his assassination.

The following table is a structural comparison showing how Ryan betrayed his own ideology during the power struggle and transformed into the very system he despised.

5. The Rampage of Madness and Passion - Jasmine Jolene and the Betrayal of Blood

While political contradictions were exposed and Rapture’s social structure began to creak, what decisively sealed Ryan’s mental collapse and drove him to madness was a deeply personal and visceral “betrayal of the flesh.” Ryan, who fancied himself a rational and cold-blooded thinker, was also merely an imperfect man unable to escape human emotions, suspicion, and lust.

Ryan had an official mistress named Diane McClintock. However, consumed by the maintenance of Rapture and power struggles, he gradually treated her coldly, and as a result of neglecting her after she was injured in a bombing incident, she defected to the side of his enemy, Atlas (Fontaine, resurrected from his faked death). Meanwhile, Ryan was secretly having a physical relationship with Jasmine Jolene, a former chorus girl at a theater he supported and a strip dancer at Eve’s Garden.

In 1956, Ryan unknowingly impregnated Jolene. All of Rapture’s defense systems, travel authority for the Bathysphere, and critical infrastructure such as the “Vita-Chamber” (discussed later) were designed to function only when tied to Ryan’s genetic code (DNA). Fontaine and Tenenbaum set their sights on the superiority of this genetic structure and bought Ryan’s embryo (the future protagonist, Jack) from Jolene.

When he learned the fact that his own genetics had fallen into the hands of the Parasite he hated most (Fontaine) and had been bought and sold as a “living key” to hijack his city, Ryan’s staunch rationality was completely blown away. The facts inferred from the ghosts (residual thoughts) and audio records played in the in-game strip club are utterly gruesome. In response to Jolene, who tearfully pleaded, “I thought they were just taking an egg,” Ryan mercilessly swung down a plumbing pipe and bludgeoned her to death.

This barbaric act signifies the complete defeat of Ryan’s philosophy. The man who preached that “man follows reason and creates the world through his own effort and sweat” could only respond with primitive violence and passion to a situation born from the mishandling of his own lust. To Ryan, the existence of Jack was not merely an assassin targeting him, but the very stain on his ideology, born of “his own carnal desire, the lower class that parasitizes others for money (Jolene), and the ultimate Looter who exploited it (Fontaine).”

As a nuance in the performance of Ryan by voice actor Armin Shimerman, the subtle pause when speaking about the Little Sister—“I… understand the NEED for such creatures”—has been pointed out. This “pause” brilliantly expresses the psychology of him struggling between ideal and reality (the fact that young girls must be inhumanely sacrificed to produce ADAM) and forcing himself to accept it. The murder of Jolene can also be said to have been a desperate attempt to forcibly eliminate an impurity that had arisen in his perfect philosophical world through violence.

6. Collusion with Behaviorism - The Death of Will and the Return to Totalitarianism

On New Year’s Eve 1958, starting with the attack on the high-class Kashmir Restaurant by the revolutionary army led by Atlas, Rapture plunged into a gruesome state of civil war. This battle did not stop at mere gunfights; it triggered a biological “Genetic arms race” using Plasmid technology, thoroughly destroying the city’s infrastructure and the minds of its citizens.

As the war situation deteriorated and the complete collapse of the city and the victory of Atlas’s faction loomed, Ryan stepped into the greatest taboo of Objectivism philosophy. Accepting the proposal of the brilliant but unethical Dr. Suchong, Ryan permitted the genetic structure of commercial Plasmids to be altered, manipulating the citizens of Rapture to blindly follow the leader’s suggestions (mind control) through pheromones.

“Individual free will and rational choice are the supreme values of man.”

The man who believed this without a doubt, and who abandoned the surface for that belief, personally approved a brainwashing technology that turned the masses into literal “slaves without free will.” The psychological self-justification of Ryan inferred from this fact is an extremely twisted defense mechanism: “If Atlas wins, everyone will become slaves to the Parasite. Therefore, it is better for me to strip them of their will and control them.”

This signifies that Ryan’s ideology had completely succumbed from Ayn Rand’s individualism to B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorism (the ideology that views humans as mechanical response systems manipulable by external stimuli). Manipulating the masses with pheromones, eradicating the opposition, and ruling the entire city as an extension of his own will. As a result, Ryan himself had become the very “totalitarian Leviathan of the state” he had once seen in Moscow and Washington.

Further madness is evident in the activation of the self-destruct sequence. When Jack reaches Hephaestus (Rapture’s geothermal and power hub), Ryan attempts to activate the self-destruct mechanism for his entire city. This action is a larger-scale, pathological repetition of the episode where he burned down his private forest with his own hands when pressured by the government to nationalize it in America.

“Even in a book of lies (the Bible), sometimes you find truth. There is a season for all things. (…) A time to live, and a time to die. A time to build… and a time to DESTROY!”

If he cannot control it, if it is to be taken by Parasites, he will reduce it to ashes with his own hands. At first glance, this appears to be the ultimate exercise of property rights (self-determination), but in his deep psychology, it can also be interpreted as a manifestation of arrogant infantilism, attempting to flip the entire game board because he cannot face the reality that his ideals ended in failure. He was no longer trying to protect the prosperity of the city, but was willing to burn everything down solely to protect his own “absolute inviolability.”

7. The Human Condition - “A man chooses, a slave obeys”

The story of Andrew Ryan reaches a highly symbolic, gruesome, and philosophical conclusion in his direct confrontation with the protagonist, Jack, in Rapture Central Control.

Ryan had already fully understood that the assassin who had breached heavy security to break in was his biological son inheriting his own genetics, and that he was a brainwashed slave conditioned by Fontaine and Dr. Suchong to absolutely obey any command with the trigger phrase “Would you kindly.”

Here, there is a crucial mechanical fact that must not be overlooked. The “Vita-Chamber” outside Ryan’s office is a resurrection device that uses quantum entanglement to automatically revive those with Ryan’s DNA. The reason Jack can revive any number of times within Rapture is none other than because he inherited Ryan’s genetics. However, just before Jack entered the control room, the power to the Vita-Chamber in the office had been intentionally turned off by Ryan’s own hands.

In other words, at this moment, Ryan had completely cast aside his attachment to biological survival and was attempting to prove one absolute philosophical proposition through his own death.

When Jack enters the room, Ryan neither flees nor resists. He speaks quietly, yet with overwhelming majesty.

“The assassin has overcome my final line of defense, and now he has come to murder me. In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No! A man chooses, a slave obeys!”

He confronts the clone assassin he created with the fictitious nature of his memories. “A farm. A family. An airplane. A crash. And then this place. Was there really a family? Did that airplane crash, or was it hijacked?” He exposes that all of Jack’s past actions, which he believed to be of his own free will, were nothing more than the automatic reactions of a sleepwalker, triggered by the single phrase “Would you kindly” from his kindly master (Atlas).

Then, Ryan hands Jack a golf club and issues commands one after another: “Stop, would you kindly?”, “Sit, would you kindly?”, “Stand”, “Run”, “Stop”. Jack’s body obeys them regardless of the player’s will, moving like a marionette. Finally, Ryan offers his own head and shouts:

“KILL! A man chooses! A slave obeys! OBEY!”

Bound by the chains of brainwashing, Jack swings down the golf club with his own hands, repeatedly striking and bludgeoning his biological father, Ryan, to death.

This bizarre manner of death presents multiple layers of psychological and philosophical paradoxes. First, by allowing himself to be killed without resistance, Ryan physically proved that Jack was “merely a tool without free will (a slave to the Parasite).” Second, by making his own death (the most fundamental biological defeat) something “not forced by others, but chosen by his own strong will,” it was an intense self-suggestion that Ryan fulfilled his dignity as a “Man” to the very end. He was defeated in his physical body, but in the spiritual dimension, he declared absolute victory over Atlas (Fontaine). “You can kill me, but you can never take my city. My strength is not in steel and fire. It is in my intellect and will. That is something a Parasite can never understand.”

The words Ryan uttered just before his death: “You are my greatest disappointment.” This is not merely an insult directed at an adversary. It is the outpouring of despair from a creator and a father, seeing that the being born of his own flesh and blood (superior DNA) had become the “ultimate tool of the Parasite,” possessing no will of its own and merely being used by others. He must have seen in Jack the very image of the decadence and defeat that his utopia had suffered.

Conclusion: What Was Left at the End of the Impossible

Rapture, built by Andrew Ryan on the seabed of the North Atlantic, is not merely a failed example of a utopia. It is the history of an inevitable meltdown that occurs when the extreme ideology of Objectivism—that “the world can be run solely on human rationality and absolute egoism”—collides with the messy human emotions of love and hate, the lust for power, and irrationality (madness).

Ryan loathed “Parasites” and built a world in the deep sea completely severed from the state, religion, and the ethics of the masses. However, to maintain his own system and power, he himself executed smugglers, forcibly nationalized private enterprises, brainwashed citizens with pheromones, and in the end, tried to subjugate his own child by force. Ironically, in the struggle to protect Rapture, Ryan himself transformed into the most massive and cruel “Parasite of state power (Leviathan)” that he so despised. His downfall possesses a structure that can be called the essence of 1950s dystopian literature, demonstrating how easily absolute individualism can invert into totalitarianism in extreme conditions.

Even so, his abnormal obsession with “choice” shown at the moment of his death radiates a kind of gruesome yet dignified beauty in the dark, cold ruins of the seabed. He never admitted his own limits and mistakes. Though filled with madness, he never ran away from dying for his own philosophy.

“A man chooses, a slave obeys.”

Up until the very moment his skull was crushed, he controlled the world with his own will and chose to die by the rules he had set himself. Andrew Ryan will forever be engraved in the abyss of Rapture’s history as a sorrowful yet great icon who, though driven mad by ideals, defeated by reality, and torn apart by self-contradiction, still continued to try to be the “God” of his own world.