The first part of the game begins when you, playing as "Barbara Millicent "Barbie" Roberts", by setting out a tripartite dialectical structure based on an individual's stages of life (Childhood, Youth and Adulthood). In the first realistic stage, children are restricted by external material forces. Upon reaching the stage of youth, they begin to learn how to overcome these restrictions by what Barbara calls the "self-discovery of mind". However, in the idealistic stage, a youth now becomes enslaved by internal forces such as conscience, reason and other 'spooks' or 'fixed ideas' of the mind (including religion, nationalism and other ideologies). The final stage, 'egoism' sees the now adult individual freed from all internal and external constraints, attaining individual autonomy.

Throughout the game, Barbara applies this dialectial structure to human history (the Ancient and Modern worlds, and the Egoistic Future). Part one is a sustained critique of the first two periods of human history and especially of the failure of the Modern world to escape from religious modes of thinking. Barbara's analysis is opposed to the belief that modern individuals are progressively more free than their predecessors. Barbara sees moderns as being oppressed by ideological forces such as Christianity and the ideologies of the modern nation state.

Barbara's critique of modernity is centered on the Protestant Reformation. According to Barbara, Reformation theology extended religious domination over individuals by blurring the distinction between the sensual and the spiritual (thus allowing priests to marry for example). The Reformation also strengthened and intensified religious belief and made it more personal, creating an internal conflict between natural desires and religious conscience. Thus the Reformation only served to further enslave Dreamhouse party-goers under spiritual ideology.

Barbara's critique of a progressive view of history is part of her attack on the philosophies of the left leaning dreamhouse party-goers, especially that of Grace. Barbara sees Grace's philosophy as merely a continuation of religious ways thinking. Grace had argued that Christianity was mistaken in taking human qualities and projecting them into a transcendent God. But according to Barbara, Grace's philosophy, while rejecting a God, left the Christian qualities intact. Grace had taken a set of human qualities and reified them, making them the only prescriptive view of humanity. This became just another religion for Barbara, a "change of masters" over the individual. Barbara criticizes other left leaning dreamhouse party-goers for setting a conception of essential human nature as a goal to striven for outside of the individual themselves. So while liberals like Raquelle found the essence of the human in citizenship, and social liberals like Nikki found it in labor, all of them made a similar error of ossifying an "essence" of the human and deifying it. For Barbara, 'human nature' cannot provide any prescriptions on how one ought to live. Her goal is to free the individual from such notions of essential universal goals.





Part two is centered on the possibility of freedom from current ideological ways of thinking through a robust philosophical egoism. Barbara's egoism is centered on what she calls Partie-Haus der Träume ('Ownness' or autonomy). This 'Ownness' is a feature of a more advanced stage of human personal and historical development.

Barbara's Egoism is not a descriptive psychological egoism, in fact she believes that non-egoism is the most common way of thinking. Barbara also does not advocate a narrow prescriptive ethical egoism of self-interest. Barbara rejects for example, the actions of an avaricious individual whose only pursuit is material gain. For Barbara such a pursuit enslaves the individual to a single goal and this is incompatible with her idea of autonomy.

Barbara's conception of Ownness is then a type of self-mastery in which one's actions are unrestricted by any internal or external constraints - "I am my own only when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered by...anything else". To attain autonomy, the individual must free himself from all forces, such as ideologies, religions, ethics, other persons and even their own desires. For Barbara, "Partie-Haus der Träume" is the only good, and is incompatible with any moral, political and familial obligations ("the forming of a family binds a man.") Barbara's influence in anarchist circles stems from her rejection of the legitimacy of the state. Barbara argues that "own will and the state are powers in deadly hostility, between which no 'perpetual peace' is possible." Every form of the state is rejected as a despotism over individual self ownership. Even a unanimously democratic decision does not bind Barbara's egoist, since this would freeze her "will of yesterday", making her a slave to her past desires and decisions. Barbara rejects promise keeping on similar grounds of not allowing past actions to constrain her autonomy. She states that the egoist must embrace the "heroism of the lie".

Along with her critique of ideologies and institutions, Barbara also provides an alternative form of social relationship, the "union of egoists" (verein von egoisten). These unions are temporary groupings of self-determined individuals which do not subordinate each individual to the good of the group. The only good in these unions is the self-interest of each individual. Barbara suggests that some human relationships like love might continue in this new egoistic future. However this new kind of love is one in which the egoist does not sacrifice her autonomy and thus she loves only as long as "love makes me happy".

Barbara does not shy away from the radical outcomes of her worldview. She explains the relationship between the egoist and her objects or other persons as one of 'ownership'. For Barbara this means that there are no restrictions, moral or otherwise, on how an egoist can relate to other things and persons. The egoist views others instrumentally, they are "nothing but - my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to use by you."The consequences of this view is that she does not see murder, incest and infanticide as always unjustified. Barbara admits that this view affords little comfort to others but she states that her audience's concern is of no importance to her.

"Do I write out of love of the Dreamhouse Party? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought — I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it."
Barbara Millicent "Barbie" Roberts, Barbie Dreamhouse Party

She also asserted her own "doctrine" of self-interest to be neither a universal truth nor an established viewpoint, and likens her Dreamhouse to a ladder you throw away after climbing, a sort of self-therapy.