Brittle Platoons: The Burning Man Problem

“Choose your own adventure” yields cheap adventurers.

Every summer in the heat of the western American desert, tens of thousands of thrill-seekers, new-experience-chasers, and self-expression enthusiasts come together for a nine-day exercise in carefully controlled spontaneity. Hailing from all around the country and world, these 21st-century pilgrims assemble on the Nevada playa to assemble a makeshift city, express their inner artistic spirit, and somehow forge a return to the primal human state of nature in the spirit of wilderness ‘survival’ and communal living—as long as you’re willing to pre-buy all your supplies and shell out almost $500 for a ticket, because in 21st-century America, the nomadic lifestyle comes with some strict rules, calculated financial expenditures, and an Amazon wishlist to boot. This is the world of Burning Man: a world billing itself as far removed from the troubles of everyday life, yet somehow almost entirely populated by people for whom real life isn’t all that difficult.

Founded in 1986, Burning Man is an outdoor communal festival entirely staffed and planned by volunteers. Over the course of the event’s nine-day span, buildings, art exhibits, and a mini society emerge, fueled entirely by the ingenuity of the free-spirited who attend. In recent years, as seemingly with all things, the festival’s also become a destination for the rich and influential (be that influence real or merely Instagramesque), bringing even greater amounts of publicity to this truly strange spectacle in the middle of what would otherwise appear to be a barren wasteland. Each year, the festival concludes with its titular event: the burning in effigy of a massive human-shaped sculpture and other festival structures constructed during the past week, before everything ends and the traces of the festival disappear, along with the 80,000 in attendance. I am Ozymandias, king of kings.

Except sometimes it’s just not that simple. Days ago, as thousands of Burners, as they’re called, were ready to wrap up yet another annual run of the Definitely-Not-A-Cult-In-The-Desert-Party, tragedy struck in the form of rains, soaking the desert lakebed where Burning Man has been held for 30 years running and rendering travel virtually impossible. 70,000 people, united solely by their liking of events where weird and unexpected things happen, were forced to weather the true horror of a weird and unexpected thing happening as leaving became impossible for days.

In case you haven’t noticed, this is a very odd event populated by rather odd people, most of whom, as many have noted, experience very little of the real scarcity and subsistence struggles they seemed to be LARPing out on the playa. And in case it’s not obvious, it’s rather difficult to feel any real sympathy for people who pay between hundreds and thousands of dollars to go into the desert with RVs and do art. But there is something deeper going on, beyond the readily accessible drugs and sex (Grove City students, find a trusted adult to explain if you don’t know what those are) and the super-down-to-earth sand party that all of the richest tech CEOs on earth just happen to be at.

In a sense, the hype behind Burning Man is about reconnecting with that deep part of humanity, the pioneering and conquering spirit that drove Ernest Shackleton to the South Pole, motivated the heroes of New York City to rush into burning buildings on 9/11, and convinced a bunch of ambitious riffraff to take up arms, defy an empire, and build the most special nation our world has ever known. In a sense. It’s also true that such a pioneering and conquering spirit now motivates us to do things like get out of bed, persevere in video games, attend idiotic protests, and just generally try not to be “delulu about the solulu” (God help anybody over the age of 25 trying to figure out what I’m talking about anymore).

Our human innovative spirit isn’t doing much for most of us these days, and it’s incredibly telling that our craziest ideas of adventure involve hanging out with a bunch of artists, bicycle riders, and Elon Musk in a place where the biggest danger is a sudden rainfall. We created our own adventures, and they (inadvertently or otherwise) reflect the shallowness of the adventurers who embarked upon them.

Philosopher Edmund Burke, in his musings on the French Revolution, spoke of “little platoons,” or local communities, as the building blocks of a society that rightly understood both its obligations to its people and its relationship with the state. And it’s no secret that millions of Americans are operating out of profound dissatisfaction with the communities that they’re part of, and I’d hazard a guess that at least some Burners roll up to the Nevada playa in the hopes that they’ll find something in the desert that will scratch that itch. But you won’t get a true community out of something that melts into the desert in nine days, the magic of which gets killed by a rainstorm.

Burning Man is portrayed as an event that vindicates a certain philosophy—a philosophy that speaks to the enduring power of human creativity and commonality. In reality, it’s a party for hippies and the people who tolerate them, and shoutout to the Burners who are honest about the fact that it’s not really much more than that. Is that as far as our pioneering spirit is taking us, though? To a world of make-believe when our own world is still fairly prosperous and decadent? To paraphrase The Edge, “Never feel sorry for a man who owns an RV and can afford a $500 art festival ticket.”

But maybe I do feel bad—because a world where that’s considered out-there and remarkable is a world that’s selling the spirit of exploration unbelievably short.