A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys.
On the Hidden Chains We Forge and the Freedom We Abandon.
Spoiler Warning: The following contains major plot details from BioShock (2007), created by Ken Levine and Irrational Games.
“The assassin has overcome my final line of defence, and now he plans to murder me. In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No, a man chooses, and a slave obeys! You think you have memories — a farm, a family, an aeroplane, a crash, and then this place. Was there really a family? Did that aeroplane crash, or was it hijacked? Forced down, forced down by something less than a man, something bred to sleepwalk through life unless activated by a simple phrase, spoken by their kindly master. A man chooses! A slave obeys!”
As the player, you are forced into a sequence of events you cannot control or affect, including the graphic killing of the man who spoke those lines. Up to that moment, your choices were not yours. BioShock drops you into Rapture after a plane crash; its society has imploded, and you must survive and escape. The city, its themes, and its antagonist, Andrew Ryan, are a parody and critique of Atlas Shrugged’s Galt’s Gulch, Objectivism, and Ayn Rand.
For many players, it is their first encounter with Rand’s ideas, and despite the parody, the game delivers a stark, undeniable truth: our sense of agency can be an illusion, especially when we no longer control the contents of our own mind. With a single key phrase -“Would You kindly?”- Jack, the protagonist, becomes a sleeper agent, compelled to act on whatever follows those words. Only after the reveal do you realise that every objective, every action, was chosen for you. You thought you were playing the game; in truth, the game was playing you.
It mirrors how most people approach their lives - mistaking conditioned responses for conviction, and mistaking direction from others for choice. They believe themselves autonomous, while every value, emotion, and conviction they express was pre-selected for them by culture, by tribe, by “the narrative”.
Every goal you pursued had been placed there, waiting to be ‘chosen’. It is a perfect metaphor for the modern mind: mistaking pre-programmed responses for thought. Dictated both by designers and narrative. The impact lands like a physical blow: you have been navigating the world under orders you did not even know you held. It achieves something no other medium could: to make you feel the loss of your own agency.
While that was a game, I have lived through moments that struck just as deep. I never wanted to be a Jack; I wanted to be myself. Since the first election of Donald Trump, I began to notice how many Jacks there were.
They spoke in slogans, thought in hashtags, and outsourced judgment to algorithms. Each believed himself awake, yet none could name the principles guiding their outrage.
It wasn’t politics that shocked me, but the mechanism, the way language could rewire cognition. A slogan could suspend reason faster than a bullet could stop a heart. The illusion shattered completely on 7 October 2023, when the Palestinian attack on Israel showed how easily people could be triggered, activated, as if by code words.
Entire populations of dormant minds react to being activated by a few simple phrases:
“No justice, no peace.”
“From the river to the sea.”
“Build the wall.”
“Make America great again.”
Each one is a moral trigger disguised as a political statement. They do not instruct; they absolve. They free the speaker from the need to think. Spoken with the right tone, at the right moment, to the right crowd, such phrases ignite instant obedience. From there, the frenzy builds: roads blocked, cities smashed, violence excused as virtue. With enough conditioning, the worst atrocities become conceivable.
Since recorded history, the vast majority of people have surrendered judgment to others, kings, priests, ideologies, and mobs. They wait, dormant, for the words that grant permission to act.
This is not new; it is the oldest tyranny, the rule of the unexamined premise. The masses have always sought moral permission, not political freedom.
Unlike Jack, whose obedience was chemically imposed, these human beings submit voluntarily. Their drug is moral certainty. Once dosed, it grants immunity from doubt and pleasure in submission. They no longer need to be told what to do, only assured that what they do is good. Trained by education and culture to validate feeling above reason, they obey not because they must, but because they believe it is moral to do so. With the right phrase at the right time, crowds will commit acts they would never contemplate alone, and all the while they believe themselves righteous.
The danger is not external coercion but the internal surrender of thought: the quiet, willing abdication that transforms a man into a willing slave. They do not hear “Would you kindly” as an order; they feel it as moral permission, a whisper that tells them their surrender is good. This is obedience reborn as virtue, a virtue measured by the depth of one’s surrender. The identification of obedience as self-administered sedation is central. This is the narcotic of the age, comfort bought at the price of consciousness. They trade freedom for tranquillity and call it peace of mind, for what chains could ever bind tighter than those forged by one’s own evasion.
It is the quiet horror of our age: people no longer cry out for liberty because they have forgotten what it feels like. Sedation masquerades as serenity; evasion, as peace.
I stand apart and watch these hordes and the havoc they wreak in the street, online, and across our public life. Civilised disagreement has dissolved: what once could be a measured, “I respect my opponent, but I disagree with his approach,” has hardened into declarations of moral annihilation - he is evil and should be destroyed - and some have already paid that price.
We now live in moral economies of hate, where outrage is currency and virtue is measured by how loudly one condemns. Discussion has become excommunication.
The worst part is that it is spreading, or at least becoming plainly visible as the many masks fall away. Vast swathes of people are choosing the ease of dronehood over the labour of thought. After the calamities of the twentieth century, one might have hoped we would learn; apparently, we have not. This is where a man must choose. Does he stay and try to halt the decay, or move and leave it to collapse? What can one rationally do when unthinking hordes itch to tear each other apart? How does one remain civilised where civilisation is burning down - legally, morally and literally? There are only two real options: leave the ruin behind, or build a shelter that will weather the storm.
Make no mistake: day by day, civilisation is fading. The calm, the rational, the open are being drowned out by the emotionally incontinent, the irrational mystics, and the closed-minded. Weekly, we witness marches where last century’s ideology would have shouted “Sieg Heil”; today, they shout “From the river to the sea” or “Blood and Soil”. Governments seize industry under the pretext of fairness or crisis, and leaders sanction acts of violence while the populace cheers. Civilisation frays first in the mind, and minds are fraying everywhere.
In BioShock, Andrew Ryan saw this and then chose to make this speech a reality:
“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.”
Ryan’s speech, however twisted in its execution, was at least an act of vision, the declaration of a man who refused to live as a pawn. His tragedy was that he built a world that forgot its premise. Ours is worse: we celebrate the pawn and sneer at the man who dares to choose.
“Ryan’s failure was not merely architectural; it was moral. Rapture did not fall because of pressure from the outside, but because its founder rejected morality itself. ‘Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality’ - in that single boast lay its undoing. A civilisation that scorns morality is already rotting from within; it needs no invader to destroy it.
It is one thing to follow somebody rationally, to see their ideas and support them, to help them, to follow Andrew Ryan’s inspiration as in John Galt from Atlas Shrugged. It is quite another to follow somebody who is opportunistic, deceitful, impulsive, pragmatic, inconsistent, power-lusting, and braggart like Donald Trump. He has millions of devoted followers who, in their eyes, can do no wrong simply because he is “their guy.”
There are no chains on these followers; their obedience is self-imposed, a sedation they administer to themselves. Many claim with a straight face that the man can do no wrong, that he is “winning” and “making America great again,” though “winning” is never clearly defined. They allow him to shred the US Constitution, to erode their rights, eroding the very values the Founders fought and were willing to die for, all as long as he fulfils the MAGA narrative. Their loyalty is absolute, not because of force, but because they have internalised the story of his greatness and convinced themselves it is righteous.
On the other side, progressives chant just as fervently: “No justice, no peace!”, “From the river to the sea.” They act with conviction that requires no external compulsion. Their obedience is voluntary and self-imposed: they block streets, smash property, chant slogans, and, in extreme cases, commit murder, as seen in the killings of Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and sometimes takes on a ritualised form, as with weekly protests for Gaza. The content differs; the mechanism does not. Both sides surrender thought, prioritise emotion over reason, and abdicate judgment voluntarily, convinced that to question the narrative would be immoral, disloyal, or cowardly.
They move through the world as if under a silent, moralised command, a real-life “Would You kindly” whispered into the mind. This is the quiet power of self-administered obedience, a sedation of the mind that transforms a man or woman into a willing slave. Against this backdrop, the real choice appears: to surrender as they do, or to stand apart, thinking, judging, and acting for oneself.
However, this kind of transformation does not occur on its own. No rational person would willingly lower themselves to such a state without incentive. This is where institutions, the media, and culture enter the frame. Altruism teaches that to serve is moral, that to live for one’s own sake is a sin. Education, universities, television, film, government, and religion all conspire to reinforce this: surrender your mind, obey the collective, and consider it virtue. Over time, with constant bombardment of altruistic messaging, and amplified during “crises” of every sort, most decide to surrender, offering silent consent to a world that demands it.
Each “emergency” becomes a moral reset - climate, pandemic, war - each one demanding new obedience, new sacrifice, never new thought. The habit of crisis becomes the habit of submission.
When a person surrenders their mind, they commit the only sin there truly is: the sin of evasion. They begin to live second-hand, allowing others to choose for them. They invert morality: from the question of how to live as a human being, to how best to self-destruct in the service of others. They no longer choose; they obey. They cease to be men and become slaves to any master who lays claim to their minds.
What remains is not political alignment but metaphysical allegiance: either to reality as absolute, or to the fog of collective illusion. Every crisis, every slogan, every “Would You Kindly” test that you serve.
This was the truth Andrew Ryan glimpsed but could not hold: that the real battlefield is not in politics or economics, but in the mind that chooses to think or to evade. He also failed because he did not take morality seriously; otherwise, he would never have allowed Fontaine into Rapture. Remember: a man chooses, a slave obeys. “A slave obeys, not because he must, but because he refuses to know.”
So, the choice remains: to surrender and obey, or to rise and become human. To choose clarity, reason, independence, self-mastery, and integrity. It is to succeed where Andrew Ryan failed: “Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.”
It is only through a proper understanding of morality that we can choose to be men. And yet, to live by such morality is not a grim duty but a triumph. There is a rare, fierce joy in seeing the world clearly, in knowing that your thoughts are your own, your achievements unborrowed, your soul unbent. The independent man does not live against the world but above it, his happiness earned, his suffering understood, his life an act of creation. This joy is the proof and reward of reason: that existence, once seen as it is, becomes a thing to love. To think is to live; to live by one’s thought is to rejoice.
A rational morality, born of objectivity, rooted in the love of one’s life, that elevates the productive over the parasite, the rational over the slavish, the independent over the second-hand. It allows us to make principles we can justify to ourselves, and to live by them consistently. Independence is not isolation, but integrity; it allows one to face the worst the world has to offer and come out on top, to survive intact. Mind and body, thriving as one.
In the world of tribes and mysticism, it lets us cut through the fog, see the worst before it arrives, and prepare. If it means withdrawing, creating our own communities, starting over with fellow travellers, so be it. Not out of desire, but necessity. I will let the world drown in its obedience. I will remain a man who chooses.
A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys, captures a disturbing truth about our age: that most people now live under a kind of moral anaesthesia, mistaking obedience for virtue and sedation for peace. It is a fine piece of writing—lucid, literate, and morally serious. Yet it ends where the problem begins. You decry our collective sleepwalk into obedience but ground your cure in the same ideology that made it possible.
1. The illusion of choice
The phrase “Would you kindly?” from the video game BioShock is the perfect metaphor for contemporary consciousness: the illusion of agency under conditions of control. You see this clearly. The player believes they act freely, only to discover that every “choice” was programmed by another. It is a parable for modern life: our convictions are pre-selected, our emotions cultivated, our freedom marketed back to us as lifestyle and opinion.
So far, your diagnosis is acute. But then you pivot toward a strangely familiar salvation: the solitary, rational man who “chooses” and “rises above” the herd. Here the essay slips from Arendt to Ayn Rand.
2. Arendt and Minnich: thoughtlessness as moral failure
Hannah Arendt, writing after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, described evil not as demonic will but as the banality of thoughtlessness—the failure to think from the standpoint of another. Elizabeth Minnich later called this the evil of banality: the systemic manufacture of moral numbness through bureaucracy, ideology, and conformity.
For both, the antidote was never solitary reason but dialogical thinking—the hard work of staying present to others, of judging, of imagining consequences. Thoughtlessness, they warned, is not cured by intellectual pride but by moral imagination.
3. The Randian residue
Your essay ends by exalting “the man who chooses”—the independent rationalist standing above the mob. But this is the neoliberal fantasy itself. The cult of autonomy, the moralisation of self-sufficiency, and the suspicion of relationality are not the enemies of thoughtlessness; they are its architects.
Neoliberalism colonised the language of choice and freedom. It taught us that value lies in independence, that dependence is weakness, and that solidarity is sentimental. In this world, to choose is to consume, and to think for oneself means to withdraw from the social body that makes thinking possible. You see the sedation but not its source. You condemn the obedience yet re-enact the ontology that demands it: the isolated, calculating subject of the market.
4. Critical realism and the social production of consciousness
From a critical-realist perspective, agency is not a switch that heroic individuals flip; it is a relational capacity shaped by structure, culture, and context. Margaret Archer reminds us that reflexivity develops within the conversation of concerns we conduct between self and society. When institutions reward conformity, precarity, and speed, they erode that reflexivity.
People do not surrender judgment because they are weak but because the system trains them to. The algorithm rewards outrage, the workplace punishes hesitation, the economy extracts attention as labour. Thoughtlessness is not a moral flaw but a social pathology.
5. Fromm’s moral psychology: freedom for, not freedom from
Erich Fromm saw this long before the internet. In Escape from Freedom he argued that modern individuals, stripped of community and security, flee into authoritarianism or conformity. They escape from freedom because freedom, under isolation, is terrifying.
True freedom, Fromm insisted, is freedom for—for relationship, for creation, for love—not merely freedom from restraint. Your independent man is the latter: heroic but hollow, mistaking solitude for sovereignty. The task is not to rise above the crowd but to rebuild the human bonds that make autonomy meaningful.
6. Neoliberalism’s “Would You Kindly”
The real “Would you kindly” of our age is not political obedience but the market’s gentle whisper: Would you kindly compete?
Would you kindly monetise your worth?
Would you kindly optimise yourself?
We obey without coercion because the command is moralised as virtue. The nurse working unpaid overtime, the student optimising her “personal brand,” the worker smiling through exhaustion—all have internalised the creed that to serve efficiently is to be good.
This is the genius of neoliberal power: it colonises conscience. It turns solidarity into sentiment, resistance into unprofessionalism, and obedience into moral excellence. The subject becomes both master and slave—Andrew Ryan and Jack at once.
7. Lifeworld colonisation: the system inside the self
Here Jürgen Habermas’s warning becomes crucial. He called it lifeworld colonisation—the quiet conquest of everyday meaning by the logics of money and power. The lifeworld is the space of relationship, moral discourse, and mutual understanding: the domain of family, care, and community where we sustain our humanity through dialogue.
When that space is invaded by instrumental rationality—by algorithms, bureaucracy, and market language—we begin to speak through systems rather than with each other. The result is the psychic and moral hollowing-out that you describe. “Would you kindly?” becomes not merely a command but a grammar: the syntax of colonisation itself.
We internalise the language of management, the metrics of worth, the idioms of efficiency. The human lifeworld—once sustained by conversation and care—becomes a data field for extraction. This is the deeper meaning of the sedation you perceive: the colonisation of communicative life.
In health and education, this invasion is almost complete. The clinician who must tick boxes before holding a patient’s hand; the teacher who measures empathy by rubric; the citizen reduced to consumer—each is living proof that the system has entered the soul. The moral imagination is displaced by compliance; reflection by performance.
8. Health, exhaustion, and the sedation of consciousness
From the perspective of health sociology, your “sedation of the mind” is not only moral but physiological. The nervous system of late capitalism runs on cortisol and caffeine. Chronic stress, insecurity, and digital overload dull the very faculties—reflection, empathy, imagination—that sustain moral life.
Burnout is not just occupational; it is civilisational. When attention becomes a scarce resource and empathy an inefficiency, thought itself sickens. The mind, like the body, adapts to survive by numbing sensation. The result is precisely the moral anaesthesia you lament.
9. Thought as care
In nursing we speak of care not as sentiment but as disciplined attention to the real. To care is to stay present, to resist abstraction, to treat the person as more than data. Thinking, in this sense, is a form of care. It requires what the nurse calls presence and what Arendt called judgment.
The opposite of obedience is not defiance but participation—the recognition that we are members of one another. The man who truly chooses does not rise above the world but returns to it with open eyes.
10. The world of membership
Wendell Berry once wrote that “health is membership.” To be whole is to belong rightly—to each other, to place, to truth. The pathology of our time is not lack of reason but loss of belonging. A civilisation cannot think if its members live as economic atoms.
To recover thought is therefore an act of healing. It means rebuilding the moral and relational infrastructures that allow reflection to flourish: communities of dialogue, workplaces of trust, institutions that prize care over metrics.
11. Conclusion: to think is to love the world
So yes, you are right to say that obedience reborn as virtue is the horror of our age. But the cure is not the proud solitude of reason. It is the humble, risky work of thinking with others, of rediscovering what Arendt called “the joy of public freedom.”
The choice is not between choosing or obeying. It is between illusion and relation. Between the sedative of autonomy and the discipline of belonging. Between the market’s “Would you kindly” and the moral imagination that asks, instead, “Would you care?”
Suggested reading:
1. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking.
2. Minnich, E. (2017). The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Rowman & Littlefield.
3. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.
4. Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.
5. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System. Beacon Press.
6. Berry, W. (2012). It All Turns on Affection.