One of my favorite quotes from Blood Meridian (which was published before Burning Man was a thing; I have no reason to believe it influenced Burning Man but the two are linked in my mind because of the setting and because this quote always makes me think of it)
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
I would note that there is a difference between experiential knowledge and propositional or factual knowledge - you can read as many books about dance as you want, but none of them will tell you what it feels like to dance. In the same way, everyone sort of knows, on some level, that essentially everything about society is arbitrary. Your clothes, your food, your house, your job, everything is the result of path-dependent evolution that didn't have to end up how it did.
Ok, great, so you can know that just from using logic, but how can you feel it? Burning Man is one answer to that question. It lets you experience the "fevered dream" that is reality.
> Your clothes, your food, your house, your job, everything is the result of path-dependent evolution that didn't have to end up how it did.
For example, we have a lot of wheat in our diet because wheat was convenient to grow in certain climates, and the countries that grew it ended up colonizing half the world (I'm not a food historian, but for argument's sake this is probably correct enough).
So there is a reason why we eat a lot of wheat; there is a reason why our clothes are cut the way they are; there is a reason why our cities look the way they do. Whether we know it or not, there is a good reason for almost everything. It may be the result of path-dependent evolution, but it isn't arbitrary.
I think Burning Man errs far too much on the side of "everything about society is made up, and you can make it different". There are lots of rules about how the tapestry is woven that aren't made up. If you want to change the world you have to be aware that many (most?) things happen for a good reason. It's not just all imaginary.
A better way to look at it is, in a million different places, the odds were a million to one. We happen to be observing from the one of those place where it did happen.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
I would note that there is a difference between experiential knowledge and propositional or factual knowledge - you can read as many books about dance as you want, but none of them will tell you what it feels like to dance. In the same way, everyone sort of knows, on some level, that essentially everything about society is arbitrary. Your clothes, your food, your house, your job, everything is the result of path-dependent evolution that didn't have to end up how it did.
Ok, great, so you can know that just from using logic, but how can you feel it? Burning Man is one answer to that question. It lets you experience the "fevered dream" that is reality.