My Point of View #2

Question: "So, why haven't these people been sucked into the pervasive evil nastiness that is Black Rock City, you paranoid freak?"

Answer: How kind of you to ask. For one thing, as noted in the last aside, for their social circles to develop in that direction would be to go against the grain, by the very nature of the kind of these people they need to be to get their jobs done. They will find, both in real life and in Black Rock City, that the society they encounter will tend to reinforce their natural tendencies in this area. In the former case, this is probably why the West maintains its technical supremacy; as for the latter ...

BMORG, even at its most reaching, knows that if these people stop coming, Burning Man will be over. The reply reportedly given to PlayaPhone in response to its concerns about a BMORG takeover was telling : not "we don't do that sort of thing", but a statement that BMORG wouldn't have the expertise needed to do their jobs. Without a doubt, one can be sure that some will resent the relative aloofness of these people who will exchange pleasantries with those who pass, but stand apart from the community infighting. Some, with the usual anger management problems, will probably try to make trouble for them because of it. But BMORG, who a hard core burner will follow like a rabid (but loyal) dog, won't be having any of that, and so these professionals are free to think of other things, and enjoy their stay. Learn from them.

If you stick with those people, focusing on the kind of projects they do, which is probably the kind of project you'd enjoy the most if that's the kind of person you are, anyway - you'll probably have a good time. Isn't that what you were really going there to do, anyway ? So, why let yourself be sidetracked? Do as they do. Come with your friends, take advantage of the opportunity to do your thing and have your fun, and depart - and leave it at that. Don't try to become part of the larger "community". You wouldn't try to hang out with a collection of day laborers at home, so why would you think that doing so would be a good idea here? The quickest way to get in trouble is to forget who it is that your people are, and try to be the regular guy you never were. This is trouble that will not go away as long as you associate yourself with Burnerdom, because psychotics just won't let go.

"And if you're not that kind of person? What is somebody isn't bright or talented enough to take part in any of these things?" As in, can't do anything artistic or technical, and yet still want to go to an interactive, participatory arts festival? OK, ask yourself what that leaves open to you. You can watch any number of fairly attractive members of the sex you prefer walking around naked, by people who very often will appreciate you right back if you wear as little as they do, even if your body is pretty average. There couldn't possibly be more opportunities to dance or listen to music, and there are no cover charges above what you paid to get in. If you're looking for alcohol and drugs, I found both to be readily available and cheerfully offered. You can do any number of bizarre things and take any number of really stupid dares. And you can go out and look at, listen to or watch the things other people are doing.

What you have left to you are the defining elements of the bar culture - what barflies would be looking for, if only the bouncers and police would not get in their way, for better and for worse. This is especially true because most of the tasks you'll find available will be menial, solitary work that will give you no stories to tell. ("Man, I was pulling up this tent, and you should see the rebar gash I got". "Um, cool. So, let's hear more about that opera somebody put on". Just doesn't work). Small wonder, then that the bar culture is so visible at night at the event. (During the day, a lot of these people were sleeping off the previous night's dancing, which tended to continue until about 2-3 am, and drinking and drug use, which continued well past that). If that's what you're seeking, you'll have a good time. If you're seeking more than that, though, you may find yourself feeling a little lost and bored after a while.

But then, if you have $200 to spend on an arts festival, just how likely is it that you're the bag boy in the local supermarket? If you can take a week off to drop by this thing, and how many days setting up a project, how likely are you to be a corporate drone? This event, however unintentional the result might be, tends to automatically select either for those who are up to contributing in a positive way or for those with so little in the way of lives that they'll make due with candy bar lunches for a month or two just to have this week, and are such visibly unpleasant, losing individuals that one will easily know to avoid them. A strange mix, of both the best and worst that contemporary society has to offer, but not a very explosive one in real life (as opposed to online).

At least, not yet. Yes, there have been some reports of some unfortunate incidents involving theft and out of control DPW members. ("Department of Public Works", the people who take off a few months and build the "city"). In time, they'll probably get worse, given BMORG's own collective mentality, which doesn't seem much more pleasant and is setting an example which these people seem to be following - "give us what we want, or we'll make you wish you had". But isn't that a fair description of what most social settings are like these days? One just has to deal and make the most of the opportunities that come by. What's the alternative?

Click here to continue.

My Point of View # 1

Question: "Why is this event turning ugly?"

Answer: The culture itself is at fault. A blanket prohibition against "negativity" may keep some from admitting it and inebriation may keep them from thinking about it, but human nature can't be denied. When one person finds that he has to lick another person's boots in order to not be beaten up (or expelled, or suffer some other unacceptable loss) and he has to look happy about it, no matter how much he may go into denial about it, he's going to resent that. The only thing that suppressing awareness of what it is that he resents (by convincing him that he has no right to resent it) will achieve will be to turn his resentment into a free floating rage, always looking for something to attach itself to, and never satisfied for long because it is never really addressed. This is part of what is wrong with "don't worry, be happy", a normative attitude in the "white bread" mainstream of American culture which is only going to be reinforced by the strangely evangelistic apathy which marijuana seems to promote.

This attitude, straight out of the commercially published "The Power of Positive Thinking" by Norman Vincent Peale with maybe a touch of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, is very convenient for a corporate world which likes its workforce docile and found, to its undoubted joy, that political conditions in the New World (including a trendy and more than slightly intolerant rejection of Old World culture) gave it an opportunity to remake the culture in its own part of the world to its own liking. And what would that liking be?

Think about what the defining characteristic of a corporate executive is, that which made him the man he is, today. It isn't professionalism. Hard working, talented people languish in obscurity for years. It isn't ability. The half-witted manager is such a cliche that I won't even bother to digress on that point. I'll just point the reader in the direction of the nearest book about Dilbert. The defining trait of a corporate executive is an overbearingly aggressive thirst for power, and it is that trait that allows him to run roughshod over his competition as he rises to the top in a bureaucratic system in which advancement is based on politics, not on results, because results in such subjective areas where so much teamwork is involved are hard things to quantify. And if your driving urge is a thirst for power, what is the one thing that is going to get in the way of quenching that thirst more than anything else? Assertiveness out of the people one is dealing with. And thus, you will love the concept of people being told that they should be positive "no matter what", because on those terms there is no way for them to assert themselves and question the status quo you are creating for them.

Like alcohol abuse, such a willful shutting down of one's own critical faculties, while it does make for appalling results, has a way of maintaining itself because life starts feeling a lot worse for a while before its starts to feel better when the addict puts away that to which he is addicted - here, to the illusion of happiness which willful obliviousness offers. The first thing that the groupthinking "go along to get along" type is going to be confronted with, should he start thinking for himself, is just how stupid he has been. If, like a number of the people you saw in the account of the silliness I saw in the Burning Man forums, he is not too bright by nature, this is going to hitting him on a sore point, and for him to retreat back into the illusory safe and warm embrace of the group will be all too easy. And thus, while this artificial culture has been created in order to make him (and others like him) more easy to take advantage of, our "Joe Sixpack" will fight to keep it alive, becoming an accomplice in his own exploitation and wondering why others view him with scorn, even as he makes yet another feeble attempt to browbeat his intellectual betters into letting themselves be exploited as well.

Now, how would you describe the behavior seen out of BMORG which, for example, has gone on the attack because of the creation of a Chicago area burners list to compete with their own, and which the aforementioned Playa Phone people have expressed concerns about, citing a fear that BMORG might attempt to take over their operation? One which tolerates no dissent from its opinions on its boards, even as it tries to cover up the reality of its own censorious tendencies by making vague, hand-waving allusions to "harassment" on the board, stonewalling anybody who asks them for specifics on what form that alleged "harassment" took? One which has taken control over what, by its own account, was a gathering of anarchists out in a place remote enough for those present to be left alone? This is power seeking, corporate behavior seen out of people from a vacuous, corporate dominated and defined cultural background. Having created a parody of their own unwholesome cultural roots, they have lead their followers into an exaggeration of its own unwholesome cultural implications. The hard core burners are just like the American mainstream in the worst possible way, only more so.

It's enough to make one throw a party, just to celebrate the fact that one is a relatively unassimilated ethnic.

Question: "So, the event is a lost cause?"

Answer: No, far from it.

In real life, the "don't ever make waves or be negative, no matter what" approach has one fatal flaw : as fond as the culture it created may be of solipsism in its various forms, the fact is that there is such a thing as objective reality. A culture may be able, in the short run, to survive the mistake of driving out the philosophers in its midst and even maintain the illusion that this wasn't a mistake. If it drives out its physicians and engineers, though, the understanding that this was a mistake will be as close as the next reactor meltdown or outbreak of bubonic plague, and as inescapable as the misery that follows.

Professionals in fields such as these almost never take the "don't make waves" attitude as far as "Joe Sixpack" would like them to, because they couldn't do so and get their jobs done. No matter how positive your thoughts about your circuitry may be, the reality is that if you don't worry about filament formation in a high power semiconductor device, you're going to have a lot of barbecued silicon on your hands. No matter how hopeful you are about the operation, you aren't going to be able to treat a lymphoma with spinal cord manipulation. Objective reality is just that - objective - and if you are too busy making nice with the crowd to pay reality the respect that it is due, it will bite you in your proverbial ass before you have a chance to blink. This forces people in such fields to put politics aside for a large chunk of their day and when they get off work? Like any other addiction, the kind of willful, groupthinking stupidity described makes a mess of the addicts' lives. Those who are not already addicted will take one look, and find that they have no desire to partake.

It is a very different culture that results, and far different cultures that those who enter these professions come from - in many ways, far more liberating ones. The gainfully employed professionals one often meets during the day have rich, well developed lives outside of Burning. Confronted with a Playa "eviction" most would shrug, call the eviction team a pack of idiots, and leave with the thought "it's just a festival; on to better things". They can take it or leave it, and so peer pressure on the Playa won't touch them, and likewise with those from the circles in which they run. "And the relevance of this digression would be?", you ask ...

Click here and we'll discuss that.

Setting Things on Fire

Points of view do change, and back when I had first returned from Burning Man 2001, while I had little use for the Green Tortoise, I was an unreserved fan of Burning Man, and strongly leaning toward being a supporter of BMORG. This is what I originally wrote ...

" Once a year, out in the desert near the town of Gerlach, Nevada, there is a festival of the arts, and general celebration of strangeness called "Burning Man". No, that doesn't quite cover it. OK, how about this? 24,000 people get together, create a temporary city, in which there are many, many theme camps, each of which makes its own reality. During the day, much of this looks amateurish, albeit often in a charming and creative way. By night, it is positively surreal, an oasis in the midst of a 21st century desert of boredom.

This is not to say that all is wonderful. It would be a lie, for example, to say that independence of thought is encouraged, or even really tolerated in Black Rock City. Political Correctness frequently runs out of control. A lot of the "rebellion" is choreographed. As for the sense of "brotherhood" (or should that be "siblinghood"), an all too typical image was that to be found in the Temple of Ishtar, where, in a dance that was supposed to promote "sacred sexuality", the dancers were admonished to not notice each other! The only kind of "sexuality" that is going to promote, is masturbation. The real thing calls for an intense fascination with the other, not self-absorption and obliviousness.

But, you know what? The things that are wrong with Burning Man - and, yes, there are a lot - are almost all things that are wrong with most of American society right now, and usually in far greater measure. Let me tell you a little story about things going right. I've managed to work my way to the inner circle around the main Burn. "With 24,000 people there?". What can I say? Determination pays off. Also, given that I was one of the few people there who was still unclothed at that hour, getting close to that much heat appealed to me a lot more than it did to a lot of those more fully dressed.

When the man collapses and burns, the resulting fire is not symmetrical. As some of us approached an extension of the fire, I noticed a bit of unwelcome behavior, all too familiar to anybody who has ever gone to the Independence Day festivities in Grant Park. There was a chain of people, holding hands, shoving their way through the crowd, in the inner circle. Worse still, they were shoving people from behind, right toward that outcropping of flame!

Some were already all too close. So, as the leader approached me from behind, I told him to cut it out, that he was going to get somebody hurt doing that. Have you been in Grant Park, during a crowd scene? You're expecting a nasty confrontation, right? Or a lot of attitude, at the very least? So was I, but it didn't happen that way. The leader looked ahead, saw the problem, and stopped being part of it. Instantly. No argument, no hesitation. To my amazement, I then saw the response travel like a wave around the circle, as people slowed down, and stopped shoving. Total cooperation.

If only crowds worked like that at Rock concerts, eh? Sitting in my living room, right now, as I type this, it almost doesn't seem real, even though I clearly remember it. That, much more that the nastiness and pettiness of the mailing lists, was the spirit of Burning Man, in the time I experienced it. Are there dysfunctional elements? Yes, but they are ones that Burning Man inherits from its era and cultural setting, and ones that one can watch fading away during the week of the festival, with amazing speed.

What are you going to find out there, that is worth the trouble of getting out there, and dealing with a "harsh desert environment"? Freedom. Real freedom. When you watch the funkmobile working its way down one of the "streets" of Black Rock City, at its comfortable 2 mph, and you see the people dancing all around it, completely at ease with each other and themselves, you can't help but think of one thing. That scene could never have happened, here at home.

The police would have been out dispersing the crowd, and ticketing the operators of the vehicle, even if it was going down a path in a private park. People would be getting into fistfights, because somebody danced too close to somebody else, or because somebody thought somebody else looked at his girlfriend. We are so used to being told where we can walk, and what we can look at, who we can talk to, and what we can talk about, that we've forgotten what real freedom is. We've forgotten that the possibility of spontaneity is an essential part of it, and maybe what we really need is to have 24,000 "freaks" descend upon us and slap us out of our collective coma.

What a shame that it only happens once per year.

I'm not going to try to explain the experience to you, because I can't. I could have the videocameras running 24-7 with me, the whole time, and you still wouldn't have the feeling of being there. I could talk to you about how surreal and smoky the maze became as the dust storm hit, or of the illusion that somebody created of a cartoon kangaroo dancing across the Playa, as I encountered these things with a group of all-too-temporary friends, and you'd go "so, it's a special effect, so what?", because it's just qualitatively different, being on the other side of the screen, or the stage. All that I can say, is go visit the main Burning Man site, and start planning your trip. Included, for your interest and convenience, are a few links of interest to local burners. Have fun."

Did you get the impression, coming in, that maybe I had a few misgivings about this passage? If so, good, because I do. At the time that I had that experience by the fire, I took it as a sign of reasonability. But was it? A shepherd can get a flock of sheep to not wander off a cliff, but this is not a tribute to the reasonability of sheep, just to the reasonability of the shepherd who knows how to put the herd instinct of the sheep to good use. What I was to find was just how well developed that herd instinct was in much of Burnerdom, and how little reason mattered in much of what went on.

Looking back, it occurs to me that I was large (well over six feet tall), a few years older than the person at the head of the line, and visibly annoyed. In short, I probably came across as an authority figure; the lead man gave in to me, and his friends, used to going along to get along, followed suit, all without my ever having tried to intimidate anybody. This produced good results in the short run, under those circumstances, but it really was not a victory for the human spirit. I saw good things that night, not necessarily because they were there, but possibly because I so wanted them to be there that I jumped to positive conclusions which weren't warranted by the facts visible to me.


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