Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.
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I'll believe in utopia when I meet my first perfect person, and this community is made up of 70,000 imperfect persons.
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I'm actually a very shy person. You'd be surprised how many leaders are shy. They're not all extroverts by nature.
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People give because they identify with Burning Man, with our city, with our civic life. The idea of giving something to the citizens of Black Rock City has enormous appeal to them because it enhances their sense of who they are and magnifies their sense of being. That's a spiritual reward.
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I've learned never to expect people to be better than they are, but to always have faith that they can be more.
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If all of your self worth and esteem is invested in how much you consume, how many likes you get, or other quantifiable measures, the desire to simply possess things trumps our ability or capability to make moral connections with people around us.
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People out here build whole worlds out of nothing, through cooperating.
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Burning Man is like a big family picnic. Would you sell things to one another at a family picnic? No, you'd share things.
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It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.
