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And that's Burning Man culture's dilemma in a nutshell: If you have a source of cash or a ready supply of volunteers willing to put in hard work (or both), you can make amazing things happen for your community — and Burning Man inspires this in people. An extraordinary number of people devote years of their lives and countless dollars to creating theme camps, community events, and art cars just to make other people happy. Though seen as a bacchanal of total freedom, Burning Man is equally an iron shackle of art and culture that ordinary people voluntarily put on — sublimating themselves for the sake of creating extraordinary shared experiences.
But if you don't have money, connections, or a strong volunteer base, then the barriers for engaging the culture in more than a superficial way are steep — and even more so when trying to live it year-round. That's a dispiriting message for many Burners to hear, and they haven't yet found a way around it.
That doesn't stop them from trying, though.
What exactly is Burning Man, anyway? Books have been written on the subject, but the best way to understand that question is to realize the lengths to which the Burning Man organization has gone to not answer it.
In 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built an 8-foot wooden man at Baker Beach. There are a lot of theories as to why: that Harvey was protesting "the man," that he was engaging in an act of pagan spirituality, that it was an attempt at catharsis after a bad breakup. But when he was asked, Harvey declined to say. The act — not just of burning the man, but of building him, of taking him to the beach, of getting a group of people to lift him up — spoke for itself. That's all he's said about "why" and "what it means" for more than 25 years.
Silence is golden. In 1991, an estimated 250 people made the long trek out of town to go to "Burning Man" in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. In 1992: 600. In 1993: 1,000. Nobody knew where the hell all these people were coming from.
"We could barely keep up," Burning Man board member and Chief Transition Officer Harley DuBois remembers.
By 2006, cars were waiting in line up to eight hours to get into the event.
In 2004, Harvey was asked to develop a statement for the young Burning Man regional network about just what this "Burning Man" thing was, because the members were having a hard time explaining it to people in their communities. Harvey wrote the 10 Principles of Burning Man, a document that has energized and (to some extent) unified the culture. But many of the principles are contradictory. How does "Radical Self-Expression" fit with "Radical Inclusion?" Doesn't "Radical Self-Reliance" contradict "Communal Effort"? There aren't clear answers.
This isn't an accident: Harvey did it on purpose.
In 2013, Harvey brought a number of leading writers about Burning Man together to discuss launching a new blog series exploring the 10 Principles as a body of thought and practice. At the meeting, it was agreed that rather than laying out a "Bible for the 10 Principles," the writers would be encouraged to publicly disagree with each other, and even argue, so that Burning Man's official body of thought about the 10 Principles would not lead to official doctrine.
While today the first few burns are often recalled as full of significance and portent (a Burning Man joke says that there are hundreds of people who remember being among the 30 people who attended the first burn), no one saw it that way at the time. When the San Francisco Cacophony Society sponsored the event and then helped take it out to the desert, it's because its members thought it was awesome to build and burn a giant man. The first few years in the desert were marked by total anarchy: Nobody was saying that they were engaged in a major spiritual or philosophical movement. That all came in as more and more people crossed the threshold between what Burners call "the Default World" and Burning Man.
Even today, most Burners bristle at the idea that anyone can tell them what Burning Man "is." And the Org doesn't try. People come out to the desert because amazing stuff happens there, and you — if you go — get to contribute. It's an engine of possibility where people (correctly or not) feel like they can live authentically and encourage one another to be authentic. Even if they never agree about what that is. It is the act of deliberately struggling with the issues of what burning the Man "means" and how the 10 Principles should be applied (of what the hell you're going to do when given the world's best sandbox) rather than simply accepting a common dogma, that represents the entrance into Burning Man culture.
That lack of a centralized definition meant that as Burning Man grew it came to symbolize a number of otherwise independent movements that were emerging into mass consciousness — and became the tissue that connected and inspired them.
Mike Zuckerman, the executive director of Freespace — a global movement launched in 2013 to provide unused commercial areas to communities without dictating their use — says that his is one of the many movements to be symbolized and supported by Burning Man.
"It's interesting, there's a lot of these trends: There's Maker spaces, hacker spaces, the sharing economy, the DIY movement — so many related things are trying to manifest themselves," Zuckerman says. "And Burning Man provides a lot of the metaphors and references that we all use: People say things are 'playa-esque,' or 'like the 10 Principles.' I think in part that's because Burning Man is the largest experiment of a place where people's goal is to enhance their own and other's experiences instead of what they can get out of it. Of course that's inspiring. It creates agency for people."
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