Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Larry Harvey
https://burningman.org/Photo source: BurningMan.com
[NOTE: All quotations are by Larry Harvey.]
“Milton Friedman once said, ‘Only a crisis, real or imagined, produces real change.’ When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic mission: To develop alternatives, and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
“You can’t base the core of a culture on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Only an adolescent will tell you that.”
“The fact of the matter in the Sixties, at least the Hippie part, were avid consumers. They were happy consumers. The only people who came up with a critique of it later on were the Punks. As unattractive as they were, they figured out what the essential problem was. They would not sell out. They would not be commodified.”
“You are not going to create community unless you struggle together with other people. You will not create community unless you face survival with other people. Community isn’t about sentiment. It’s not about Kumbaya. It’s not about loving other people., per se. It’s about struggling with them, because only when you struggle together for survival with other people do you begin to see their soul. That’s how it’s done.”
“The Sixties were America’s great recess.”
“If you want a stage at Burning Man, build it yourself.”
“We’re not hiding from the world, we’re trying to change it.”
Burning Man Official Site
Burn on the Bayou
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:36 ►
And today, well I’m sorry to say, but we’re here to pay tribute today to a man who is directly responsible for you and me being together here in the salon today.
00:00:43 ►
His name was Larry Harvey and he is most famous for being the person who started the Burning Man event.
00:00:45 ►
And had it not been for Burning Man, I never would have begun this podcast series. In fact, if it wasn’t for my 2002 Burning Man
00:00:52 ►
experience, I’d still probably be calling myself Larry. And I’ve told all of those stories in some
00:00:59 ►
of the past podcasts from here in the salon, so you don’t need to hear him again. But it’s now been over a week
00:01:06 ►
since Larry Harvey died, and well, there have been many, many tributes to him already, with I’m sure
00:01:12 ►
a lot more to come. But since Larry Harvey, without ever knowing it, became an important figure in my
00:01:19 ►
life through all that my Burning Man experiences have given me, well, I’d be remiss in not adding to these tributes.
00:01:27 ►
However, rather than go on myself about the importance of his work
00:01:31 ►
in exposing the destructiveness of the consumer cultures
00:01:35 ►
that we are now finding ourselves stuck in,
00:01:39 ►
well, I thought that instead I’d let Larry speak for himself.
00:01:42 ►
And so I put together a few short audio clips of talks and interviews that he gave
00:01:47 ►
so as to better let this wonderful man speak for himself.
00:01:52 ►
So now, here is Larry Harvey.
00:01:57 ►
So, it’s a great honor to be here and to be able to talk to the original guy
00:02:03 ►
who had a fire on a beach with a bunch of friends 25 years ago.
00:02:08 ►
And, you know, a lot of us have probably had a bonfire on the beach and a party and we said,
00:02:13 ►
hey, let’s do this again next year. But there’s only one that evolved into a city of 60,000
00:02:21 ►
of the most creative, imaginative, wonderful, interesting, crazy people on the planet,
00:02:28 ►
and that’s this one.
00:02:30 ►
And so my first question to Larry is, how did that happen?
00:02:35 ►
What happened? Why did that happen?
00:02:37 ►
Well, I believe it was a radical self-expression.
00:02:40 ►
I just called a friend one day and said, let’s burn a man on the beach.
00:02:42 ►
And he said, would you repeat that?
00:02:45 ►
And I did.
00:02:47 ►
And we did and took our two little sons.
00:02:53 ►
And we installed it at the Tideline
00:02:55 ►
at Baker Beach in San Francisco at twilight one day
00:02:58 ►
and doused it with gasoline
00:03:01 ►
because we didn’t know any better.
00:03:03 ►
And it was just like a second sun brought down to earth. doused it with gasoline because we didn’t know any better and and and it
00:03:05 ►
was just like a second son brought down to earth but that really wasn’t when
00:03:10 ►
Burning Man began it I think it began when and everybody on the beach came
00:03:16 ►
rushing toward us and surrounded the figure and formed a semi-circle just as
00:03:21 ►
you folks here formed today and and I could see the fire
00:03:26 ►
reflected in their eyes and a woman came running over the fire was being shunted
00:03:34 ►
to one side by the wind and she took his hand held it for a moment and it was
00:03:41 ►
that infusion of enthusiasm that inspired us.
00:03:45 ►
It was the people and their response to us,
00:03:48 ►
to this gift that we had improvised without really thinking.
00:03:53 ►
And it was at that moment we decided we’d do it again.
00:03:57 ►
Did you actually envision what’s happened now?
00:04:00 ►
I mean, at what point did you see that this is more than a party?
00:04:05 ►
At what point did it become something really, really deep?
00:04:08 ►
Because I think everybody here, that’s the way they feel it, that’s the way they see it.
00:04:11 ►
It’s changed probably everybody’s life who’s been here.
00:04:14 ►
You can see a shift in their life from before Burning Man and after Burning Man,
00:04:18 ►
from their own virgin burner experience.
00:04:21 ►
When did it become that, something much deeper?
00:04:26 ►
experience. When did it become that something much deeper? Well that vision began to clarify when we came out into the space and I remember standing alone
00:04:34 ►
by the man. There were only about 40 people initially and I looked around and
00:04:40 ►
and the man was this big singularity that seemed to define, you know, the whole universe and the largest thing in sight.
00:04:48 ►
And they were dust devils, like whirlwinds of dust rising at the four corners near the horizon.
00:04:57 ►
And it seemed like I was standing at the center of the world.
00:05:01 ►
And I thought, I remember the thought.
00:05:06 ►
world and and and I thought I remember the thought I thought to myself well those columns of dust are being raised by armies that are converging on this
00:05:11 ►
site and I was the only one who thought that time but but it was a vision and
00:05:18 ►
this place summons up visions and and I found it compelling and indeed armies have converged on this site.
00:05:30 ►
So that’s the answer to that.
00:05:38 ►
Some people think of this as like a Neverland and actually you’ve been compared to Peter
00:05:42 ►
Pan. And you’ve certainly been a
00:05:46 ►
Peter Pan character, hero of mine ever since I first came here. But my question to you
00:05:52 ►
is, is this a Neverland and then you go back to the default world and you grow up? Or do
00:05:59 ►
you have a completely different vision of what it means to grow up? What does it mean
00:06:02 ►
to grow up. What does it mean to grow up? We came out here for otherworldly reasons. And in order to persist and build the city, we
00:06:10 ►
discovered that we were responsible for thousands of people. And that certainly,
00:06:16 ►
at that point, you quit being Peter Pan. And if this were merely an escape from reality,
00:06:27 ►
And if this were merely an escape from reality, that would be a very depressing fact.
00:06:38 ►
People come back and they go back to the default world, which is a funny word because it’s as if the source code determines that the world is what it is, and it automatically resets itself.
00:06:47 ►
But out here, everyone discovers that they can express what is utterly necessary, feels essential within them, and they can project it out in the world. They can summon up a vision themselves.
00:06:51 ►
They can find creators then to make that vision into substance, and they can make their own
00:06:58 ►
world in effect. We made our own world, and all of you are engaged here today making your
00:07:02 ►
own world, but you’re making it together
00:07:05 ►
with others now you can go back to the the so-called default world and and be greeted by
00:07:11 ►
an entire community of people around you who have shared that experience
00:07:15 ►
so what’s stopping you from what what’s stopping you from refashioning that world
00:07:22 ►
we’ve seen so many examples of that here,
00:07:26 ►
where people have brought the innovation and new ideas
00:07:29 ►
that they’ve kind of birthed at Burning Man back to the world,
00:07:32 ►
and it’s just been extraordinary to see that.
00:07:36 ►
And so we really want to thank you for giving us a place
00:07:39 ►
where we can birth ideas, however crazy and wild they are.
00:07:44 ►
You named the, or your team named the theme this year, Rites of Passage.
00:07:49 ►
And I wondered, is there for you personally, not the event, not the city, but for you personally,
00:07:55 ►
is there a Rite of Passage going on right now for you?
00:07:58 ►
And if there is, what is it?
00:08:00 ►
Can you tell us about it?
00:08:03 ►
For me personally?
00:08:05 ►
Well, the themes are meant to be multivalenced.
00:08:09 ►
That is, you know, as electrons whirl around the center
00:08:13 ►
and layer after layer of meaning.
00:08:18 ►
And this is a meaning-saturated environment.
00:08:20 ►
That’s why synchronicity occurs.
00:08:22 ►
environment. That’s why synchronicity occurs.
00:08:30 ►
What’s my rite of passage?
00:08:31 ►
Oh, let’s not talk about me.
00:08:35 ►
Let’s talk about the world.
00:08:39 ►
I brought along just so I remember
00:08:42 ►
I’d like to cite a quotation by Milton Friedman.
00:08:49 ►
Who remembers Milton Friedman?
00:08:54 ►
He’s a man who fashioned a strategy that changed American politics greatly over the world.
00:09:04 ►
greatly over the world.
00:09:07 ►
And some decades ago,
00:09:11 ►
they said it was part of the Chicago School of Economics and laid down a strategy that was pursued.
00:09:19 ►
Following that strategy,
00:09:20 ►
that’s how the word liberal got to be a bad name. That’s how it came to seem
00:09:27 ►
that Franklin Delano Roosevelt never existed. That’s how it came to seem that we were headed
00:09:33 ►
back to the Gilded Age in our politics. And he said, only a crisis, real or imagined, produces real change.
00:09:46 ►
When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
00:09:53 ►
That, I believe, is our basic mission, to develop alternatives,
00:09:57 ►
to keep them alive, available, until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
00:10:06 ►
And I think that’s our mission.
00:10:09 ►
You go back to that default world people talk about,
00:10:12 ►
and it seems implacable, it seems inevitable, it seems like it won’t change.
00:10:19 ►
But we know, and if you study history, you know that real change is happening in the Middle East right now.
00:10:24 ►
We know, and if you study history, you know that real change is happening in the Middle East right now.
00:10:33 ►
And that’s because an entire generation there grew up and got educated,
00:10:38 ►
couldn’t find a job, and started to connect with one another.
00:10:40 ►
And it happened overnight. It looked like the government in Egypt was sitting on all the guns and all the power,
00:10:40 ►
And it happened overnight.
00:10:44 ►
It looked like the government in Egypt was sitting on all the guns and all the power,
00:10:50 ►
and the establishment was, well, I mean, how could a single, unaided individual do anything about it?
00:11:01 ►
Our mission here, as it’s emerging, and everyone can feel it here today, is to develop alternatives, a new way of looking at the
00:11:10 ►
world. You’ve gained the courage to imagine you could change the world. Now you’ve gained
00:11:15 ►
the human resources by which you might change that world. Now let’s work on the ideas that
00:11:22 ►
will be lying around when the crisis comes. And the crisis is coming.
00:11:26 ►
We’re in it.
00:11:27 ►
Very interesting times.
00:11:31 ►
We’re living in a world in which people, well, we’ve run out of ideas.
00:11:37 ►
I noticed our government is telling us that we should save our money,
00:11:42 ►
but spend a lot on consumer items to boost the economy.
00:11:49 ►
We’re suffering from political paralysis.
00:11:52 ►
The political will to change simply doesn’t seem to exist.
00:11:56 ►
As far as the eye can see,
00:11:57 ►
there doesn’t seem to be any change in hand
00:11:59 ►
or any possibility of it.
00:12:02 ►
But I think that it is possible now to begin creating ideas of a lie on the ground
00:12:09 ►
so when, you know, people are in pain right now or people are losing jobs, it’s going
00:12:16 ►
to continue. The pain is going to get worse. I hate to say that, but it will get worse.
00:12:20 ►
But think about your own lives. Generally, people don’t think unless they’re in pain.
00:12:28 ►
In fact, they end up in a corner.
00:12:30 ►
You end up in all of your lives.
00:12:32 ►
They’re talking about rites of passage.
00:12:33 ►
You end up in a corner, and the pain becomes unendurable,
00:12:38 ►
and it feels like the world is bearing down on you
00:12:40 ►
like some implacably solid object that’s going to crush you.
00:12:44 ►
And unaided, that leads to trauma.
00:12:50 ►
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
00:13:25 ►
I think what we have to begin to imagine is a world in which we are not defined by commodities. the human resources around us are available,
00:13:34 ►
in which projects can engage us,
00:13:38 ►
just as this project has engaged us for all these years.
00:13:47 ►
You know, if you added up all the resources that create Black Rock City,
00:13:54 ►
it far exceeds the resources that our organization has brought to bear by a huge factor.
00:14:05 ►
I think that right now, I’m really glad that intellectual discourse is taking place.
00:14:13 ►
Because when the pain gets worse, people are going to reach for ideas.
00:14:20 ►
And if the pain gets so bad and they can’t connect with one another, then trauma will occur and political and terrible things could happen. But on the
00:14:28 ►
other hand, as in your own lives, when the pain gets desperate, it gets bad and you feel
00:14:34 ►
desperate, what has changed you? Well, you do the last, the most desperate act. You open
00:14:40 ►
your heart. And once you begin to open your heart, then like the man is poised between two pinnacles,
00:14:48 ►
then it’s possible to step out into nothing
00:14:50 ►
and the earth will rise up to meet your step.
00:14:53 ►
And so, you know, what we’re doing out here,
00:14:59 ►
we face economic challenges, political challenges,
00:15:03 ►
but I don’t think that any instrumentality of that kind is going to do us any good
00:15:09 ►
unless there’s cultural change, and that starts…
00:15:16 ►
So we need to create a new kind of culture, a new way of being, a new way of being together. And when that happens, then it will be possible
00:15:28 ►
to revolutionize the way we live.
00:15:32 ►
If we don’t do that,
00:15:34 ►
and if we can’t do that,
00:15:36 ►
then we’re going to be in trouble.
00:15:44 ►
So, anyway, rites of passage.
00:15:49 ►
Let’s see if we can pass over into a new way of being together.
00:15:56 ►
And what is unthinkable now will be inevitable.
00:16:00 ►
inevitable.
00:16:10 ►
I don’t know, Larry, if you want to say anything about how Burning Man
00:16:12 ►
started, but I’d be curious.
00:16:15 ►
I mean, what do you think
00:16:16 ►
made that thing grow?
00:16:20 ►
Well,
00:16:21 ►
let me say this in response
00:16:24 ►
to something that was just said
00:16:25 ►
I agree you can’t
00:16:28 ►
base the core of a culture
00:16:31 ►
on sex, drugs and rock and roll
00:16:32 ►
only an adolescent would think that
00:16:34 ►
the 60’s
00:16:37 ►
was about to baby boom
00:16:38 ►
this huge age cohort
00:16:39 ►
that was spawned and came of age
00:16:42 ►
at that time
00:16:43 ►
and one reason it was so exciting was because we emerged out of immense security.
00:16:52 ►
The 50s were boring, but the 50s were secure.
00:16:55 ►
Families were whole.
00:16:56 ►
And as the 60s began and Johnson’s Free Society came in, everything was free.
00:17:01 ►
Education, food, you name it.
00:17:03 ►
The entire hippie cuisine was based on free food.
00:17:05 ►
Lentils, bogar,
00:17:08 ►
and those conditions
00:17:12 ►
have changed.
00:17:17 ►
People,
00:17:18 ►
young people right now
00:17:19 ►
have been brought up in an era in which nothing
00:17:23 ►
is secure. Families have unraveled.
00:17:27 ►
Jobs, forget it.
00:17:28 ►
There’s no social safety net.
00:17:31 ►
Capitalism has achieved its late, monstrous, postmodern bloom.
00:17:40 ►
And since 1950, I was born in 1948.
00:17:42 ►
Since 1950, the baby boomers were the first TV generation.
00:17:47 ►
Well, the generation now, they’ve been diddled by the media beyond anything anybody could have imagined them.
00:17:54 ►
Every value in our world has been commodified, everything.
00:17:59 ►
And if you don’t, and in a world where every value, every transaction, every relationship is a commodity transaction,
00:18:06 ►
then there will be no culture.
00:18:10 ►
There will be no spirituality.
00:18:12 ►
There won’t really be much of anything.
00:18:16 ►
And yet, I’m working constantly with people who are in their 20s and 30s.
00:18:23 ►
Our mean age out there is, well, it’s 30s into 40s,
00:18:28 ►
and then some 20s, and then 60s, and then 6-year-olds.
00:18:34 ►
And part of the reason that we’ve grown as much as we have
00:18:38 ►
is that we did something that my generation didn’t do.
00:18:43 ►
The fact of the matter is, in the 60s,
00:18:46 ►
at least the hippie part,
00:18:48 ►
hippies were just avid consumers, really.
00:18:51 ►
They were happy consumers.
00:18:53 ►
The only people who came up with a critique of it later on
00:18:55 ►
were the punks.
00:18:56 ►
As unattractive as they were,
00:18:58 ►
they figured out what the essential problem was.
00:19:01 ►
They figured out they would not sell out.
00:19:04 ►
They would not be commodified. They didn’t go to big venues.
00:19:08 ►
They did their art in garages. And they made it so
00:19:12 ►
repulsive that it couldn’t be commodified.
00:19:15 ►
I mean, that really was part of their idea. We will make this so obnoxious that no one
00:19:19 ►
is going to hawk this and sell it, denature it, and rip it out
00:19:24 ►
by its roots and rob it of any reality it ever had
00:19:27 ►
in an actual community.
00:19:31 ►
The fact of the matter is,
00:19:32 ►
life was so damn easy.
00:19:35 ►
And it flattered our vanity enormously.
00:19:39 ►
I’m not saying good things didn’t come out of it.
00:19:48 ►
I think that there was a vision of community but you’re not going to create community unless
00:19:50 ►
you struggle together with other people
00:19:52 ►
you will not create community unless you face survival
00:19:56 ►
with other people, community isn’t about sentiment
00:19:58 ►
it’s not about kumbaya, it’s not about loving other people per se
00:20:02 ►
it’s about struggling with them because only when you struggle together for survival with other people do you begin to see their soul.
00:20:09 ►
That’s how it’s done.
00:20:11 ►
And in a consumer society where you live with your credit card
00:20:14 ►
and you’re completely independent of everybody else,
00:20:20 ►
then you will not have community.
00:20:22 ►
You just have a lot of pieties about it.
00:20:22 ►
then you will not have community.
00:20:24 ►
You just have a lot of pieties about it.
00:20:31 ►
One of the reasons we grew is that we took people out into the desert and we made them face survival together.
00:20:34 ►
And that took a whole lot of nonsense out of it.
00:20:38 ►
And it wasn’t enough.
00:20:39 ►
There wasn’t free kitchens.
00:20:41 ►
We said, bring food, survive.
00:20:43 ►
And it turned out that people became communal,
00:20:46 ►
began to share resources,
00:20:48 ►
began to work with one another
00:20:49 ►
in this very immediate way.
00:20:52 ►
Not out of an ideal,
00:20:53 ►
but because they had to.
00:20:55 ►
And I look at kids today,
00:20:59 ►
and it’s interesting.
00:21:00 ►
There’s a communal basis for the way they relate to one another.
00:21:02 ►
It’s just different from the way it was then.
00:21:05 ►
What they’re doing is forming little…
00:21:08 ►
They’ve grown up in this world where there isn’t any security,
00:21:10 ►
and so they hang on to one another.
00:21:12 ►
And they form these little age cohorts, these little cohorts.
00:21:16 ►
And indeed, it’s really very interesting.
00:21:20 ►
We started a thing called a theme camp.
00:21:22 ►
It turned out our whole city is organized around theme camps.
00:21:26 ►
20, 30, 100, 200 people working together to produce some kind of gift made through art that they offer to a civic society.
00:21:35 ►
It’s what they’re doing out there anyway.
00:21:40 ►
The thing about the 60s is we were so vain about, we were egotistical.
00:21:44 ►
We were so vain about, we were egotistical. We were so vain about ourselves.
00:21:47 ►
We could afford to be.
00:21:49 ►
We could afford to be.
00:21:51 ►
It was too easy.
00:21:53 ►
Listen, the 60s were, it was America’s great recess.
00:21:59 ►
It was recess.
00:22:01 ►
And it was fun.
00:22:04 ►
And there were ideals
00:22:06 ►
and there were great thinkers too
00:22:08 ►
my intellectual heroes come out of that era
00:22:10 ►
they were great
00:22:11 ►
it was a glimpse and it was a vision
00:22:14 ►
and it’s a vision that can be started anew
00:22:17 ►
but it’s got to be started in a new way
00:22:21 ►
and I think we tell ourselves too many lies about the past.
00:22:27 ►
I think we should take the best of it and move on.
00:22:35 ►
I don’t know.
00:22:41 ►
Well, annually, we build a temporary city on a prehistoric lake bed
00:22:48 ►
in the wilderness of Nevada in the U.S.
00:22:52 ►
And it now has a population, an annual population of approximately 70,000 people.
00:23:04 ►
And it is a city. It’s not just a festival ground. In fact, people. And it is a city.
00:23:05 ►
It’s not just a festival ground.
00:23:06 ►
In fact, people live in it.
00:23:09 ►
It’s many things at once.
00:23:10 ►
It’s the world’s largest
00:23:12 ►
interactive art exhibition.
00:23:15 ►
It’s a wilderness camping trip
00:23:18 ►
at the same time
00:23:19 ►
and a place subject to
00:23:22 ►
vicissitudes of nature
00:23:23 ►
that are frequently awe-inspiring
00:23:27 ►
and sometimes appalling.
00:23:32 ►
And so it is survival camping,
00:23:35 ►
even as it is also a cosmopolitan city.
00:23:40 ►
You have to remember this is created largely by participants.
00:23:44 ►
You know, it’s not big-name stars, you know, playing to massive crowds.
00:23:51 ►
If you want a stage at Burning Man, build it yourself.
00:23:55 ►
If you look at it as an entrepreneurship, which we didn’t really, we looked at it as a project.
00:24:01 ►
Our nonprofit is called the Burning Man Project, something we do together.
00:24:04 ►
at it as a project. Our non-profit is called the Burning Man Project, something we do together.
00:24:11 ►
But from that standpoint, for ours, it’s one of the biggest success stories in the post-modern era.
00:24:18 ►
You know, to have started from something so simple and now to be global in scale and growing fast,
00:24:26 ►
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We never saw it as a retreat from a society.
00:24:29 ►
We never saw it as a refuge from society.
00:24:32 ►
Well, maybe some people have, but I haven’t,
00:24:34 ►
and the people who’ve led it haven’t thought that way.
00:24:38 ►
We’ve thought that those values combined represent a potential for a good way of life.
00:24:43 ►
We’re not hiding from the world. We’re trying to change it.
00:24:45 ►
When people go to Burning Man,
00:24:47 ►
and they’re so moved
00:24:48 ►
that they want to go home
00:24:50 ►
and be as they were at Burning Man,
00:24:53 ►
find a way to be that way outside the event.
00:24:56 ►
Now, if it were a consumer event,
00:24:58 ►
they wouldn’t have that feeling.
00:24:59 ►
This isn’t so much about transactions.
00:25:01 ►
It’s about transformation.
00:25:04 ►
And so they asked for some
00:25:07 ►
guide, some credo, something, because without the customs that had grown up in the surrounding
00:25:15 ►
environment of Black Rock City, they were at a loss. They didn’t know what to do. And
00:25:19 ►
given the principles, they said, okay, now we can talk to one another, and now we can share ideas, and it’s made coherent just by these simple ideas.
00:25:32 ►
And so we formed, we’re now a nonprofit.
00:25:37 ►
We started out, we were a limited liability company for years,
00:25:42 ►
and myself and my partners owned it.
00:25:44 ►
We surrendered our
00:25:45 ►
ownership and transferred it to a non-profit. Its mission is to seek out anything that acts
00:25:54 ►
and behaves like our culture, whether it’s in our lineage or not, it doesn’t matter,
00:26:00 ►
and to find those embers wherever they are and blow a little oxygen into them
00:26:07 ►
and fan that flame.
00:26:09 ►
We have now seen an incredibly diverse array of activities that have united people in various
00:26:22 ►
places that, in fact, if looked at
00:26:25 ►
through the lens of the ten principles, define that way of life
00:26:28 ►
in unexpected ways.
00:26:31 ►
Philosophy should address what makes life worth living.
00:26:36 ►
It’s very simple in that way,
00:26:40 ►
and that’s what we’re trying to redefine,
00:26:44 ►
because speaking to the growth question, in this consumer society we’ve created,
00:26:51 ►
does anybody think that the present levels of consumption can continue very long?
00:26:56 ►
But then I ask, I was at a gathering sponsored by The Economist,
00:27:01 ►
and asked the audience, let’s do a thought experiment.
00:27:01 ►
sponsored by The Economist,
00:27:02 ►
and asked the audience,
00:27:03 ►
let’s do a thought experiment.
00:27:08 ►
Let’s imagine that everyone in China has two cars, a garage,
00:27:11 ►
a guest house, and a pool.
00:27:14 ►
And the audience was appalled at the thought.
00:27:17 ►
I said this earlier at the press,
00:27:19 ►
and one woman went, oh, God.
00:27:21 ►
Well, that doesn’t seem plausible.
00:27:24 ►
It leads to a cognitive dissonance.
00:27:26 ►
Oh, will we just grow and grow and grow?
00:27:28 ►
But what’s the character of that growth?
00:27:32 ►
The world’s population is increasing,
00:27:34 ►
so wealth of some kind has to be generated.
00:27:36 ►
But I think that social capital,
00:27:39 ►
the sum total of human connectedness in a society
00:27:42 ►
has to grow apace with that.
00:27:45 ►
And so now I’m talking about, you know,
00:27:48 ►
our ethos and our little experiment
00:27:50 ►
to see, you know, what’s of value in life
00:27:53 ►
and how culture might be generated.
00:27:59 ►
And if we don’t…
00:28:01 ►
I think we’re due to redefine what’s valuable
00:28:04 ►
because I think consumerism as a philosophy is bankrupt and scary
00:28:09 ►
and it’s prevented people from even thinking
00:28:13 ►
because you can’t think beyond that.
00:28:17 ►
Well, you know the Roadrunner cartoons?
00:28:19 ►
You’re like the Roadrunner, you know, like the wily coyote
00:28:23 ►
who tries to catch the roadrunner,
00:28:26 ►
and at a certain point runs off the cliff, and his legs are still churning, and that’s
00:28:31 ►
where we are right now. That’s where thinkers are right now. And you remember in the cartoon,
00:28:39 ►
suddenly he looks down, and he sees there’s nothing, no earth beneath his feet, and that’s when he drops.
00:28:47 ►
And so we’re about, I don’t know, 10 feet out there past the edge. We’re getting to the edge,
00:28:51 ►
a little beyond the edge, and we’re running, and we call it progress. But if you look at some of
00:28:57 ►
the overarching meta facts, it doesn’t make sense that we can continue to go on.
00:29:06 ►
So maybe we need to find new satisfactions
00:29:09 ►
and find value in things that don’t necessarily require
00:29:14 ►
that we produce all this stuff
00:29:20 ►
that we can’t afford to increasingly quite create anymore,
00:29:27 ►
unless everyone wants to believe
00:29:28 ►
that everyone in the first world and the third world alike
00:29:31 ►
is going to have a nice suburban house,
00:29:34 ►
a nice station wagon, two kids, the wife or the husband,
00:29:38 ►
and it’s all going to be fine,
00:29:41 ►
have manicured lawns perhaps.
00:29:42 ►
I don’t think so.
00:29:54 ►
Larry Harvey is here. He is the co-founder of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.
00:30:00 ►
It started way back in 1986. Burning Man has grown into the largest outdoor art event in North America. Last year, it hosted nearly 68,000 participants along with hundreds of original
00:30:06 ►
works, performances, and theme camps. Here’s a glimpse from the documentary Spark, a Burning
00:30:11 ►
Man story, which came out last year. We arrived out at this vast plain. I took a stick and I drew
00:30:19 ►
a line on the ground and I said, on the other side of this line,
00:30:26 ►
everything will be different.
00:30:29 ►
And everything has been different.
00:30:42 ►
The place is an idea.
00:30:52 ►
That’s so powerful and so alluring that people will go to the worst place in the world just to get a little taste of it.
00:31:03 ►
It’s very disconcerting in a one-week period of time to realize that everything that you’ve done in your entire life could potentially be wrong.
00:31:07 ►
I walked away from Burning Man like,
00:31:09 ►
I need to learn how to weld because I’ve got ideas.
00:31:11 ►
I still have a long ways to go.
00:31:16 ►
Burning Man is a great venue to build giant stuff and blow it up.
00:31:27 ►
You people here today are the people from this moment on that creates the framework and the cauldron that will cook their soul.
00:31:41 ►
In order for us to survive on this planet, we have to engage thousands, millions of people.
00:31:49 ►
We have to do it.
00:31:51 ►
We’re giving our lives to it.
00:31:53 ►
It’s that important.
00:31:59 ►
Meet Larry Harvey.
00:32:00 ►
I am pleased to have him here at this table for the first time.
00:32:02 ►
Welcome.
00:32:03 ►
It’s my pleasure.
00:32:04 ►
Mine.
00:32:02 ►
Harvey, I am pleased to have him here at this table for the first time.
00:32:03 ►
Welcome.
00:32:04 ►
It’s my pleasure.
00:32:04 ►
Mine.
00:32:14 ►
So what’s the idea that will bring so many people to not the most attractive place or the easiest place?
00:32:16 ►
No, it’s not easy at all. Although an international city in its own right, it’s a wilderness survival experience.
00:32:25 ►
What brings them?
00:32:26 ►
I think it must be because they find something there that isn’t readily available elsewhere,
00:32:32 ►
a certain sort of authenticity.
00:32:38 ►
It’s a little like what Daniel Payne talks about.
00:32:40 ►
He talks about motivating people in the workplace, but you can apply it to
00:32:45 ►
what we do. He says people need to experience autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose
00:32:53 ►
for their life to be meaningful.
00:32:55 ►
Autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose.
00:32:57 ►
That’s right. And that, in a sense, that’s very much what we do. We tend to formulate
00:33:03 ►
it, I formulate it a little metaphysically, I am, we are, it is.
00:33:07 ►
But it’s the same arc of meaning.
00:33:09 ►
The sense that you’re real in yourself, and that what you have should and must be shared
00:33:14 ►
with others, and that your abilities, your gifts can merge with the world, and the real
00:33:24 ►
answer to that.
00:33:26 ►
And lastly, that old-fashioned idea of transcendence, and that you’re connected to something much larger than you are.
00:33:34 ►
And that you can do all three at the same time.
00:33:37 ►
And that together, we think, makes a whole life, and we call it an ethos, and we’ve described it in ten principles that we follow.
00:33:44 ►
Tell me how it
00:33:45 ►
began it began it began as in the impulse of an afternoon i called a friend and said let’s burn a
00:33:51 ►
man and he said what would you repeat that statement and so we went down to the beach
00:33:56 ►
we took our you were doing what at the time i i was what was i doing at the time uh oh i’d gone through a series of just placeholding jobs that that
00:34:06 ►
afforded me as much free time as i could i was it had become part of a bohemian milieu
00:34:14 ►
and in which uh whimsy amounts to an iron will and and uh so it seemed like a plausible thing
00:34:23 ►
to do and so we took down at the beach and we set it on fire.
00:34:26 ►
And instantly our numbers tripled because a burning human form, if you put one up at the Republican National Convention, the people would say down in front.
00:34:37 ►
It would so compel.
00:34:39 ►
And it was very accessible.
00:34:42 ►
There wasn’t a need to explain it.
00:34:43 ►
And we haven’t explained it to this day.
00:34:41 ►
And it was very accessible.
00:34:44 ►
There wasn’t a need to explain it, and we haven’t explained it to this day.
00:34:48 ►
When they ask us what it means, we say, you have to achieve that through your engagement,
00:34:51 ►
through your actions, what you are.
00:34:52 ►
We won’t tell you. And who came?
00:34:55 ►
Originally?
00:34:56 ►
Yeah.
00:34:57 ►
Curiosity Seekers?
00:34:59 ►
Originally, it was a small group of, it was in the underground culture of San Francisco.
00:35:07 ►
San Francisco, it has distinction as an international city for that fact.
00:35:11 ►
And so they came and it was a group called the Cacophony Society who came out there in the first year.
00:35:20 ►
We were on a beach.
00:35:20 ►
We moved to the desert.
00:35:22 ►
And they were devoted to guerrilla theater, appropriating public places for performances, that kind of thing.
00:35:29 ►
And in that desert, where there’s so much nothing, the least gesture had a world engendering power.
00:35:37 ►
It was any photographer’s dream, any artist’s dream to have a canvas like that.
00:35:42 ►
And then it just spread through word of mouth for a few years
00:35:46 ►
and our numbers doubled and redoubled
00:35:47 ►
and now of course we’re at
00:35:50 ►
70,000?
00:35:52 ►
Yeah, near that.
00:35:54 ►
70,000 people.
00:35:56 ►
68 was the last figure.
00:35:58 ►
But we’re working with the BLM.
00:36:00 ►
We have a good relationship
00:36:02 ►
with them, the Bureau of Land Management.
00:36:03 ►
And we think that we can increase the population in a way that will serve everyone.
00:36:10 ►
And then explain to us, because some people have heard of this,
00:36:13 ►
but most people don’t understand it.
00:36:15 ►
What are the rules?
00:36:17 ►
What is the organizing principle, for example?
00:36:22 ►
You don’t buy things there.
00:36:24 ►
No, we’ve decommodified
00:36:27 ►
yeah there is it’s it’s odd there’s no um and no advertising we we don’t do vending uh
00:36:34 ►
any of those things that are normal uh uh you can’t really use your cell phone right and uh so it’s it’s it’s a retreat from from the normal
00:36:47 ►
world that’s for sure and uh and while you’re there uh well we have 10 principles uh they
00:36:53 ►
emerge from our own experience and and they describe our interesting principles yeah
00:36:58 ►
radical self-expression right uh which means you just have to decide what makes you real and put it out there. And through, I spoke of that experience of mastery,
00:37:28 ►
the sense of flow in which you work with others,
00:37:31 ►
and they in turn work with you.
00:37:32 ►
And finally, that creates a kind of community reality
00:37:35 ►
that makes you feel that you belong.
00:37:38 ►
I mean, people came who wanted to create art.
00:37:42 ►
Oh, yes, and art.
00:37:43 ►
And we’re the largest interactive art exhibition in the world.
00:37:50 ►
But we say, we have a saying, people come for the art very often, but they stay for the community.
00:37:58 ►
And if you look at the art, if you look beyond, there’s a lot of spectacle and a lot of very ambitious things
00:38:05 ►
that require armies of artists to do
00:38:08 ►
and they’re very organized
00:38:09 ►
self-organized
00:38:11 ►
but if you look beyond that
00:38:14 ►
you see that
00:38:16 ►
that it says a lot about
00:38:21 ►
social organization
00:38:23 ►
in order to do that they have to fundraise.
00:38:26 ►
We give out grants, but they fundraise,
00:38:28 ►
and that creates huge communities of people
00:38:30 ►
contributing to a work of art that’s going to appear at the event.
00:38:40 ►
It’s a funny thing.
00:38:41 ►
All these years, we never said this.
00:38:44 ►
This is just culture and operation.
00:38:46 ►
It was never spoken.
00:38:48 ►
No artist or artist group has ever signed their work.
00:38:51 ►
Isn’t that extraordinary?
00:38:52 ►
That’s amazing.
00:38:54 ►
We never told them that.
00:38:56 ►
We did say…
00:38:57 ►
They didn’t feel necessary to sign.
00:38:58 ►
Well, we did say, and this is maybe the most essential idea.
00:39:01 ►
We did say this is devoted.
00:39:02 ►
It came out of a bohemian world where people actually
00:39:05 ►
are very generous
00:39:05 ►
about giving things.
00:39:07 ►
You can go to an artist’s studio
00:39:08 ►
and your eye keeps dropping
00:39:09 ►
on that one thing.
00:39:11 ►
Finally, the artist will say,
00:39:12 ►
you want it?
00:39:12 ►
Yeah.
00:39:13 ►
I’m done with it.
00:39:14 ►
I made it already.
00:39:15 ►
I’m doing something new.
00:39:16 ►
And the joy of creation
00:39:18 ►
was mine.
00:39:18 ►
Now you can take it.
00:39:19 ►
That’s right.
00:39:19 ►
That’s exactly.
00:39:20 ►
We took that attitude
00:39:21 ►
and we plucked that out
00:39:22 ►
of bohemia
00:39:23 ►
and then we organized an entire city around it.
00:39:27 ►
And so it’s devoted to acts of giving, which do not contemplate a return.
00:39:34 ►
We’ve just taken transactional economics out of it.
00:39:38 ►
Well, some people say, here’s what’s interesting.
00:39:41 ►
Some say it’s therefore a kind of anti-capitalist coming together.
00:39:48 ►
And yet, at the same time, the people who come are some of the most successful capitalists in America who come for the experience.
00:39:57 ►
Take Larry Page, Sergey Brin, take the high-tech community, take all kinds of people in the venture capital business who come there for something else.
00:40:10 ►
Community.
00:40:11 ►
Autonomy.
00:40:11 ►
That’s right.
00:40:13 ►
Well, we never said we were anti-capitalist.
00:40:16 ►
I know you didn’t say it, but I mean people said because.
00:40:18 ►
We did say that we think we need to critique and get away from consumerism.
00:40:24 ►
Yeah, right. Which is another proposition altogether.
00:40:30 ►
Everything is about buying something.
00:40:33 ►
Everything is about buying something.
00:40:35 ►
In fact, your entire identity is invested in what you consume.
00:40:39 ►
And we said that’s not an authentic life.
00:40:43 ►
And it looks like we were right because people
00:40:45 ►
are coming from all over the globe to see what that feels like yeah and and so there there’s
00:40:50 ►
there’s an empirical way of looking at it uh oh we have a lot of people from silicon valley who’ve
00:40:58 ►
been coming out from early on but then it’s not in a way we’re a little like them. I don’t want to overdo the analogy, but nonetheless, they work on a frontier.
00:41:09 ►
At Google, I know, they put aside time to let people pursue their own.
00:41:13 ►
That’s right.
00:41:13 ►
20% of your day, you can go off and do something entirely of your own.
00:41:16 ►
In the interest of autonomy and mastery, they do that.
00:41:18 ►
Yeah, right.
00:41:19 ►
And so they naturally looked at us as cousins, you know, in a sense.
00:41:27 ►
And we were on the cover of Wired magazine years ago.
00:41:33 ►
The Bible for some of them.
00:41:34 ►
And then people from that industry began piling into the event.
00:41:37 ►
And then they said, oh, they’re going to ruin it.
00:41:39 ►
But they said every migration is going to ruin it.
00:41:41 ►
And it just enriches the environment, you know.
00:41:43 ►
Do you get some feedback that people say
00:41:46 ►
changed my life?
00:41:48 ►
That somehow they were infused
00:41:50 ►
with values, ideas,
00:41:53 ►
relationships
00:41:53 ►
that made them rethink
00:41:56 ►
what they were doing with their life?
00:41:57 ►
Incessantly.
00:41:59 ►
It sounds like
00:42:01 ►
a conversion
00:42:04 ►
experience in religious terms.
00:42:06 ►
Though when they say we’re a cult, we reply that it’s a self-service cult.
00:42:12 ►
You wash your own brain.
00:42:14 ►
You do what?
00:42:16 ►
You wash your own brain.
00:42:17 ►
Yes.
00:42:18 ►
Self-reliance, radical self-reliance.
00:42:21 ►
What’s the cargo cult?
00:42:23 ►
I do the themes and and uh and it it just it took the
00:42:28 ►
the phenomena of the cargo cults in melanesia in which uh the the the indigenous people uh were
00:42:36 ►
so disoriented impressed by the uh it’s a great story oh but, but the British and the Americans occupied the islands and built air strips.
00:42:46 ►
During World War II.
00:42:47 ►
Yes.
00:42:47 ►
Right.
00:42:48 ►
And the only explanation they could come up with for it was a supernatural one.
00:42:54 ►
Yeah.
00:42:55 ►
And so they looked at them as avatars, perhaps ancestors.
00:42:59 ►
Yes.
00:43:00 ►
Come from the skies.
00:43:01 ►
And so when they left, they began.
00:43:03 ►
And then one day they were gone.
00:43:05 ►
One day they were gone. One day they were gone.
00:43:06 ►
And so the people who lived there began building airstrips and planes out of bamboo,
00:43:15 ►
thinking through sympathetic magic to attract the return.
00:43:20 ►
And I just said, isn’t that the way we live today?
00:43:24 ►
We don’t know where anything’s made.
00:43:25 ►
We don’t know where it comes from.
00:43:27 ►
It seems that they say it’s all stored in the cloud.
00:43:31 ►
And we live on our cell phones, carrying them around like totemic objects.
00:43:35 ►
And really, we know the way we live isn’t sustainable.
00:43:41 ►
And we’re just hoping that more cargo will save us.
00:43:46 ►
And we really wanted to suggest that acquiring more things probably isn’t the path.
00:43:55 ►
But we didn’t.
00:43:56 ►
There’s usually a more of a…
00:43:57 ►
Do you want to be a proselytizer?
00:44:01 ►
Well, we want to affect the world.
00:44:04 ►
You want to what?
00:44:04 ►
Change the world? Yes, we want to affect the world. You want to what? Change the world?
00:44:05 ►
Yes, we do.
00:44:07 ►
We’ve just transferred the event.
00:44:11 ►
It’s been privately held all these years by myself and my five partners.
00:44:15 ►
And we just surrendered ownership, and we’ve given it to a nonprofit that has been created, the Burning Man Project.
00:44:20 ►
And its aim is to disseminate our culture at a global scale.
00:44:30 ►
So there’ll be Burning Mans everywhere?
00:44:32 ►
Well, that would just be the beginning. We look at our event as an immersive experience that
00:44:36 ►
brings change into people’s lives individually, helps them to form relationships socially once
00:44:42 ►
they leave. There are communities, Burning Man communities on five continents now.
00:44:48 ►
And we didn’t tell them to do this.
00:44:50 ►
They did it.
00:44:50 ►
And then we just organized to, you know, help it to keep happening.
00:44:55 ►
And we imagine that just as a beginning, emulating our city, creating immersive experiences of another way you can be.
00:45:09 ►
An ethos.
00:45:12 ►
Globally would have tremendous leverage on events.
00:45:16 ►
And then when you get out of the granular level, we’re a little like Silicon Valley in this too.
00:45:22 ►
We imagine that we create a platform, but it’s
00:45:25 ►
the people who create the apps.
00:45:27 ►
We create the context.
00:45:29 ►
It’s the people that create the content.
00:45:32 ►
Where’d you get all these ideas?
00:45:34 ►
For me personally, it was being raised
00:45:35 ►
by Dust Bowl immigrants
00:45:38 ►
who…
00:45:39 ►
My father was born in 1899.
00:45:42 ►
They came west
00:45:43 ►
on a Model 8 Ford.
00:45:46 ►
It worked with migrant workers.
00:45:49 ►
I knew a lot about self-reliance.
00:45:53 ►
But then coming to San Francisco when I was young and then later to live there, I’ve been there many years,
00:46:01 ►
I walked into this bohemian scene I’d always dreamed of,
00:46:05 ►
and that had a big effect.
00:46:07 ►
The principles themselves weren’t written until 2004.
00:46:10 ►
And we never had an ideology.
00:46:13 ►
We don’t have one yet.
00:46:14 ►
We didn’t start out with one.
00:46:15 ►
It’s not outside of your experience.
00:46:17 ►
It all emerged from what we did,
00:46:19 ►
and the heart, and finally the minds we brought to regard the resolve of our actions.
00:46:28 ►
And the community isn’t very tolerant of central authority, but they just inhaled these things.
00:46:35 ►
So there must be a real resonance there.
00:46:38 ►
Of course it is.
00:46:39 ►
Hey, take a look at this.
00:46:40 ►
This is an image of the man on fire from the 2013 festival.
00:46:44 ►
Well, it’s standing
00:46:45 ►
on a flying saucer the man is that was cargo cult right the uh the aliens had come in a flying
00:46:51 ►
saucer and they were going to give us consumer items and save us the next one is a temple of
00:46:55 ►
juno the art temple featured at the burning man festival in 2012 created by david best look at
00:47:01 ►
that a good friend of mine and and. And he’s built many of these.
00:47:05 ►
And then other people have jumped in, and now it’s an inevitability.
00:47:11 ►
And how long does it take them to do this?
00:47:14 ►
Oh, about three weeks.
00:47:16 ►
The next is the Trojan Horse, one of the largest independent projects.
00:47:20 ►
The Burn Wall Street, the multi-building art installation by Otto van Danger,
00:47:24 ►
which was engulfed in flames at the conclusion of Burning Man in 2012.
00:47:28 ►
The next is the Angler Fish art car, which was created by Mark Whitman.
00:47:33 ►
Art is our public transportation.
00:47:35 ►
Yes, exactly.
00:47:36 ►
The next is the Chattelbox art car, which was created by Fernando Barroso.
00:47:41 ►
The Church Trap, another large-scale interactive art installation piece from 2013 by Rebecca Waite.
00:47:47 ►
I love this piece.
00:47:48 ►
You like this?
00:47:49 ►
The church is supported by a giant stick.
00:47:52 ►
Yeah, I can see it.
00:47:53 ►
And when the pews are inside, so it’s precariously perched like a mousetrap, like a very primitive mousetrap.
00:47:59 ►
So you can interpret it from there.
00:48:01 ►
Larry Pace, CEO of Google, he proposed a tech Burning Man.
00:48:05 ►
I remember, yeah.
00:48:06 ►
Yes, I bet you do.
00:48:07 ►
This was in May 2013, keynote speech.
00:48:10 ►
Here’s what he said.
00:48:11 ►
We don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we could set apart a piece of the world.
00:48:16 ►
I like going to Burning Man, for example, an environment where people can change new things.
00:48:22 ►
I think as technologists, we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society
00:48:29 ►
with the effect on people without having to deploy it to the whole world.
00:48:34 ►
You know, it’s like what it is, it’s a laboratory.
00:48:36 ►
It is a laboratory, and the interesting thing is there’s technology and there’s art,
00:48:41 ►
and then there’s this fascinating interzone where art and technology are confabulating with one another.
00:48:50 ►
So then people take drones and they say, well, how can we turn drones into art?
00:48:56 ►
And there’s a lot of that.
00:48:59 ►
It’s very cross-disciplinary.
00:49:00 ►
And I think the thing about our art especially is that it is interactive.
00:49:05 ►
That means that not until people act in relation to it and involve themselves with it,
00:49:11 ►
it actually elicits actions from the audience.
00:49:13 ►
It’s not done until that happens.
00:49:15 ►
And what that does is it makes art do something that it started,
00:49:20 ►
it ceased to do in the modern era after a while.
00:49:22 ►
It generates community around itself.
00:49:27 ►
And that’s a new standard for public art, really.
00:49:31 ►
Art that requires community for its creation,
00:49:34 ►
engenders community in its advent,
00:49:36 ►
that links people together.
00:49:39 ►
You know, statues of culture heroes don’t do that anymore.
00:49:43 ►
But this is…
00:49:46 ►
We have another organization that’s
00:49:47 ►
placing art in cities around the world.
00:49:50 ►
What’s that called?
00:49:51 ►
The Black Rock Arts Foundation.
00:49:54 ►
And we’re going to
00:49:55 ►
fold it into the Burning Man project,
00:49:57 ►
and then we’ll be done.
00:49:59 ►
There are those who say the sum, maybe only one.
00:50:02 ►
But it’s this idea, as it always
00:50:04 ►
is, when someone comes up with a great idea and it grows and it gets bigger and it grows
00:50:09 ►
and people who you wouldn’t expect necessarily to be at the founding come and make a part of who they are and what they are.
00:50:16 ►
It becomes, in somebody’s judgment, too mainstream.
00:50:21 ►
Are you aware of that and know that you don’t care?
00:50:27 ►
Well, I agree that what can happen over time in any institution is that it will cease to be a
00:50:36 ►
matter of discovery and become something that’s merely received. But of course, what Burning Man produces is culture and a community.
00:50:50 ►
And I think that as long as we design the new institution as meshed with that culture,
00:50:57 ►
as being what it wants to manifest, as animated by that, that’s really an interesting challenge.
00:51:04 ►
We want to last for
00:51:05 ►
100 years, and so
00:51:08 ►
we have to find a way that
00:51:09 ►
Burning Man can reinvent itself
00:51:12 ►
and the institutions of Burning Man can keep
00:51:14 ►
reinventing themselves and rediscovering
00:51:16 ►
things as we did as
00:51:18 ►
founders. But as far as it being mainstream?
00:51:22 ►
I can’t imagine.
00:51:24 ►
Well, I don’t imagine. People is that we represent the ritual antithesis of that.
00:51:45 ►
That’s why we seem so novel and attractive to people.
00:51:50 ►
That’s the very essence of our success.
00:51:52 ►
So I’m not really worried about that.
00:51:54 ►
There’s also finally this, while you become global and huge and big and all of that,
00:51:59 ►
but I’m interested in this initiative, the small town initiative.
00:52:02 ►
What is it?
00:52:04 ►
Well, it started in Nevada.
00:52:07 ►
And a state, you know, in these economic
00:52:12 ►
times, particularly challenge.
00:52:14 ►
My people originally came from a very small town
00:52:19 ►
in Nebraska.
00:52:22 ►
And we thought
00:52:25 ►
that it would be a good gesture.
00:52:28 ►
We all so thought
00:52:29 ►
it might help the towns economically
00:52:34 ►
because people would come from afar
00:52:36 ►
to see the elephant
00:52:38 ►
or whatever it was.
00:52:39 ►
No, no.
00:52:39 ►
And so, you know,
00:52:44 ►
we run, as I say, a sort of international city,
00:52:49 ►
but we thought that it ought to be relevant for small towns as well.
00:52:58 ►
And when we started out, we were a little hamlet out there.
00:53:01 ►
After all, we were a little town.
00:53:03 ►
We haven’t forgotten where we came from.
00:53:07 ►
As Larry Harvey just said,
00:53:10 ►
we haven’t forgotten where we came from.
00:53:13 ►
And he also said,
00:53:14 ►
we want Burning Man to last for another hundred years.
00:53:19 ►
And, well, I completely agree with that
00:53:21 ►
because Burning Man isn’t about a big party in the desert.
00:53:26 ►
Burning Man is about creating a new culture,
00:53:29 ►
and the worldwide psychedelic community is most definitely a part of that new culture.
00:53:34 ►
The society that’s being created by the global Burning Man community is,
00:53:38 ►
well, in fact, it’s a multicultural society that includes not only psychedelic experiences,
00:53:44 ►
but art and music and
00:53:46 ►
poetry and storytelling and dance and family, extended family in particular. And to make that
00:53:54 ►
point, I’d like to play a brief story from podcast number 436. It’s a story that Marion Goodall told
00:54:00 ►
at Planque Norte in 2014, and us burners know her as Maid Marion,
00:54:06 ►
who is the CEO of the Burning Man organization
00:54:09 ►
and was Larry Harvey’s significant other.
00:54:12 ►
Now, this story is just one of countless other stories like it,
00:54:16 ►
stories that have been repeated around the world
00:54:19 ►
by people who have come away from the playa with a new spirit
00:54:23 ►
and then put it into practice back in the default world.
00:54:26 ►
So here’s Maid Marian.
00:54:29 ►
The thing that I think is really worth thinking through,
00:54:33 ►
and you have to have had these experiences to really understand it,
00:54:36 ►
but this is a powerful place.
00:54:41 ►
To be here for eight days or more is incredible.
00:54:43 ►
In fact, in my book, to be here about three days or more is great.
00:54:48 ►
Anything shorter than that is kind of short.
00:54:51 ►
Unless you’ve been here before.
00:54:53 ►
If you’ve done it before and you come in for two days, I feel like you’re fine.
00:54:55 ►
But if you’re a newbie and you come in for two days, I think you’re selling it short.
00:55:00 ►
What’s the point? Seriously.
00:55:02 ►
You’re not even acclimatizing.
00:55:03 ►
You’re not even acclimatizing.
00:55:04 ►
You’re still getting dehydrated. Yeah, there’s the point? seriously you’re not even acclimatizing you’re still getting dehydrated
00:55:06 ►
yeah there’s no point
00:55:08 ►
when we look at regional events around the world
00:55:11 ►
we really encourage the ones that are three days or more
00:55:13 ►
we really encourage that
00:55:15 ►
it takes enough time to come into a culture
00:55:17 ►
look around and realize how you’re supposed to act
00:55:19 ►
and what you’re supposed to do
00:55:20 ►
start doing it and do it enough
00:55:22 ►
so that when you leave, your habits are formed,
00:55:25 ►
the way that you leave no trace and take care of your trash,
00:55:28 ►
and the way that you live in immediacy and self-reliance.
00:55:33 ►
But things like Burners Without Borders, I was in Katrina.
00:55:37 ►
Burners Without Borders was born out of Katrina.
00:55:40 ►
And we didn’t know this was going to happen.
00:55:43 ►
The organization didn’t know.
00:55:44 ►
But when Burners left here,
00:55:46 ►
who was here on site when Katrina hit?
00:55:50 ►
Right, so we were all here on site.
00:55:53 ►
I would say there was 50,000 or so people here, maybe 49,
00:55:58 ►
and everybody heard right away that there was a hurricane hitting New Orleans,
00:56:01 ►
and so by the time everybody left, people were leaving money.
00:56:03 ►
They were taking Media Mecca.
00:56:05 ►
They were leaving donations.
00:56:07 ►
And some folks from the DPW,
00:56:09 ►
a gentleman who had a crane,
00:56:12 ►
went down to Biloxi
00:56:14 ►
because his girlfriend’s father
00:56:17 ►
had helped build a Buddhist temple
00:56:20 ►
that they had taken time to raise money for
00:56:23 ►
for several years,
00:56:24 ►
and it had just been finished like 11 days previous.
00:56:27 ►
And so it was one spot with one crane, and another burner went down
00:56:32 ►
and said, we’re down here.
00:56:34 ►
And so we created Katrina at BurningMan.com, and anybody,
00:56:38 ►
don’t make me cry.
00:56:41 ►
It was self-organized. the organization didn’t organize it what we did
00:56:47 ►
is we had an email address and burners could find the other burners and they did it without any
00:56:53 ►
formal leadership and the leaders showed up the people with the heavy equipment became the leaders
00:56:58 ►
and the group met each morning and at one point they maxed out around 80 but they had what they
00:57:04 ►
had 80 people come and go at different times.
00:57:05 ►
And the camp typically had 25 to 40 people.
00:57:08 ►
And they used Burning Man values.
00:57:10 ►
They used the values of leadership.
00:57:15 ►
They did not do deep into consensus because they were in the middle of a war zone, so to speak, in a disaster area.
00:57:24 ►
And we got emails saying, this is Burning Man.
00:57:29 ►
And they had people joining the group who had never been to Burning Man,
00:57:33 ►
who then subsequently went to Burning Man.
00:57:35 ►
And they didn’t put ten principles up on the wall.
00:57:37 ►
They just used what you would use to get a theme camp going.
00:57:41 ►
They made sure to take care of everybody.
00:57:42 ►
They orientated everybody.
00:57:44 ►
And every day the group went out and took away detritus from the poorest people in this small
00:57:49 ►
town outside of Biloxi. After they were at the temple, they moved to this tiny town.
00:57:55 ►
And on Saturday evenings, they took the day off and they took the detritus and they made
00:58:02 ►
art. And they taught the people in this little town how to make art
00:58:05 ►
and they used drills and they used headboards
00:58:08 ►
and they had frames from picture frames
00:58:11 ►
and things that would turn when they heated up.
00:58:15 ►
And so they worked hard.
00:58:17 ►
They did community service.
00:58:19 ►
They engaged in their own camp.
00:58:21 ►
They taught others and then they celebrated by burning things
00:58:24 ►
and they invited the town on Saturday nights,
00:58:26 ►
and they’d have a potluck.
00:58:29 ►
Nobody told them to do this.
00:58:31 ►
Nobody had a list.
00:58:32 ►
We just did it as we would do it if we were here.
00:58:36 ►
And that’s what gets me choked up,
00:58:38 ►
about how can we make this happen here?
00:58:41 ►
We can find those opportunities
00:58:43 ►
outside of Black Rock City and generate those
00:58:46 ►
experiences and invite other people into them.
00:58:50 ►
That one lasted for five months.
00:58:52 ►
And it had one Burning Man staff member there that after a while he said, I’m willing to
00:58:56 ►
stay five months if you’ll kick me a couple of grand so that I can help take care of everything
00:59:01 ►
here.
00:59:02 ►
And we did.
00:59:03 ►
And so I feel like that’s a great starting point.
00:59:05 ►
Burners Without Borders-type work is different from going out and celebrating,
00:59:11 ►
but it is real community work where you can actually, by doing,
00:59:15 ►
help people see what it is that we are and who we are.
00:59:23 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends