Perry Rod

From afar it seems like a dirty hippie ‘festival’ of freedom loving weirdos. Maybe that’s how it started.

Then, at some point, they added sexuality – a ton of free open sexuality.

Word got out.

Now, sex and fire and incredible art and lights converge for nine days in a harsh moon-like environment away from the real world where undesirables can’t even find their way onto – a perfect formula! Let’s all dance and play and fuck and enjoy mind expanding psychedelic drugs without boundaries, with a culture of fun and inclusion and giving …in short, let’s put together a kind of paradise on Earth with us, the good guys.

And look! Our people are so attractive and smart and interesting. Where are all the sad people of the default world? Why wouldn’t they spend thousands not to go to Europe but to go to a barren dusty desert and struggle for limited tickets, working, planning, creating, preparing, and then burning it all down? Don’t they see what’s happening here? The effort is mindboggling. The money is mindblowing. The privilege is mindnumbing. It’s like instead of the great line in Heart of Darkness – “the horror, the horror,” here you marvel and think, “the privilege, the privilege!”

Well, here they don’t use the word privilege. They call it gratitude.

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For those who truly participate, Burning Man is an absolute unbelievable inconceivable paradise on Earth in a dirty barren harsh environment designed to make sure most of its discoverers are either educated or attractive, filtering out the poor people, the disabled people, the mentally ill people, the underprivileged, and the generally unhappy.

Sound wonderful? The attendees are not entirely conscious about who is not attending. They are conscious about picking up the litter. But when most who go admit there is truly no better event on Earth, you have to wonder what makes it so. And when they take it a step further and want to turn the event into a lifestyle or a goal for the world, then, you have to wonder if that’s a healthy proposition or just delirium of the privileged few.

What about those missing out who will never ever get anywhere near this place. And who – if they did – would probably ruin it?

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There’s something happening on this planet. The billionaires are trying to get up into space to colonize new places. These are places whose conditions are harsher than Black Rock City. They are far, dramatically cold, and lacking ummm oxygen.

Unconsciously, they are really just giving up on our home – a place crowded by uneducated fearful people low on opportunities and high on access to the internet.

When we had better control of the media and the institutions, we silenced and shunned the under-educated and ignored the under-privileged. But the internet has changed the world and the slave-owners are experiencing a democratic revolt. It’s not so much a proletariat revolt. Rather, it’s a rise of stupid people (stupid because we didn’t bother to educate them). These people have no idea what they are doing and are causing chaos and the rise of authoritarian governments.

And so the rich are planning an escape (rather than trying to solve the problem).

What is Burning Man? It is an experiment in the great escape of the privileged few to go out and play in a big sandbox full of toys. Only 9 days? It should be a month. It should be all year! No, young burner man. You only see it this way because your eyes are closed meditating to the bliss that is your life.

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In conclusion, I highly recommend attending and participating in Burning Man.