I Gotta Be Me!

Self-responsibility is at its root, self-determinism. I am willing to be responsible for the choices I make or don't make so that I am free to create the kind of life I want to live.

I don't want big brother deciding for me what my life is going to look like, what it is going to cost, or where I am best able to live out my days.

This past August/September some friends of mine went to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. While they were there I house sat for them. During this time, I thought long and hard about what I know about Burning Man and what Burning Man says about itself.

I find I like the idea of Burning Man, but generally speaking I don't care for what Burning Man actually is. They like to think of themselves as building this huge city "overnight" in the desert, and while it is a large convergence of people - around 50,000 of them - it isn't a city. It isn't even a community. It is a party, a vacation, a drug induced haze for a good majority of the participants.

But I wonder. I wonder what it would be like if the 'experiment' actually involved survival like the building of towns did as our country was founded. It seems to me that Burning Man is really no different than taking your vacation to any other tourist spot, with the notable exception of you have to bring everything you need or want with you for the few days you are there. What if it required you to make a living? To labor with others to build more permanent shelters, to find real sources of water, to figure out how to dispose of human waste, to protect yourselves from criminals, to grow your own food, take care of livestock, negotiate a real sense of community where there were shared values. What if their wasn't the pleasant haze of drugs and alcohol?

How long would it take before the collection of people became a group of followers and dependents, turning their lives over to others so that they don't have to accept responsibility for themselves? How long would it be before the vast majority of creativity was stifled by the need to survive?

Granted the city built by Burning Man should have a head start over how the west was developed because there is a disproportionately large number of engineers and geeks that attend Burning Man, but I wonder none-the-less.

What would happen to the handful of people who attend Burning Man that area actually individualists, rather than leftist socialists? How long would it take for them to walk into the wilderness alone? How long would it take for there to be discussions about "community" vs. "self-responsibility?" Would they ever reach the conclusion that there can be self-responsibility within community?

That's it for today. I hope your day was all you wanted it to be.