What Burning Man can teach you about yourself and the world, even if you never go
Burning Man events are held worldwide and burners often travel by bike
By Gina Park, CNN
(CNN) — Have you ever wanted to burn a man?
In June 1986, the founders of the Burning Man project and nonprofit, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, built a wooden human effigy and set it on fire on San Francisco’s Baker Beach as a symbolic act of letting go of their personal crises. They call it the “First Burn.”
Every year since, the two committed to doing it again. While it started as a one-day event in San Francisco, in 1990 it moved to Black Rock City, Nevada, about 120 miles from Reno, and now lasts a week.
It’s an interesting event because you have to survive a couple of days with people you’ve never met, surrounded by art and dust, and “the challenge of being self-reliant in the desert,” said Henry Wu, a photographer and content creator on Instagram. He has been attending Burning Man every year since 2010 and will be going again this year.
“Burning Man is all about you. You’re part of the whole thing and not just there as an observer. You’re there as a participant,” he added.
Although mainstream media focuses on Black Rock City, there are Burning Man events all over the world.
What is Burning Man?
“Globally, Burning Man is a cultural movement that exists in every continent and all over the place. But what it means, as far as experientially, it is very idiosyncratic. It really does depend on who you are and what part of it you see,” said Stuart Mangrum, director of Burning Man’s Philosophical Center, a department within the nonprofit.
Although some people refer to Burning Man as a festival, many say it’s closer to a living art piece. Every year around this time, the cities of Burning Man get built in different parts of the world, attracting more than 70,000 people to Black Rock City and another 100,000 or so more in affiliated events worldwide.
Together, over the course of one weekend or eight days, burners (people who attend Burning Man) cultivate a de-commodified society with various camps and neighborhoods that focus on art, performance, expression and community service, Mangrum said.
“You know you can come to a city of 80,000 people, and you might not ever get out of one neighborhood. That’s what you’re going to see. It is a city and a very cosmopolitan city, and everybody comes away with a different reaction to it,” Mangrum said.
At the end — Sept 1, at least in the Nevada desert — the city gets deconstructed and wiped from the face of the planet.
The principles of Burning Man
As more people experienced Burning Man since its founding, questions flooded the organization’s inbox about how to bring the event to places outside of the West. To guide them, Harvey wrote 10 principles, which could be used to recreate the vibe of Burning Man events.
“The 10 principles were never meant to be taken apart one by one,” but to be viewed in context with each other, said Marian Goodell, CEO of the Burning Man non-profit, which organizes the project.
Some of the principles, like decommodification, are physical. During Burning Man events, burners are not allowed to have money. Any art or food they bring is exchanged in gift form, or brought as a means of supporting the community.
“We take away transactions. We remove the transactions because we want the interaction, like that’s a deliberate piece to what creates connection and community,” Goodell said.
The principles were created in a way to encourage community involvement and building. But it’s not all collective.
Other principles, like radical self-expression, encourage individual authenticity as a way to connect.
What is radical self-expression?
“We tend to want to conform to society and (the extent we conform) changes by environment as well. So, the way we act from place to place may change,” said Dr. Maya Al-Khouja, motivational psychologist and research manager at Bristol Student’s Union. She is not connected to the Burning Man project.
“We act a certain way at work, but we may act a different way with friends or with family. And we do this because it helps us fit in and keep our relationships positive.”
Whether we know it or not, most people have a hard time acting authentically because of our tendency to conform. This can mean being limited by the social rules that you have in friendships or by external influences, like capitalism.
“So, something like radical self-expression, it’s not just being your authentic self, but it’s doing it in, like, a really bold, deliberate way. Sometimes it’s even in a performative way,” Al-Khouja said.
Authenticity to this extent requires you to have some level of psychological safety, which is when you’re in a space where authenticity and uniqueness are rewarded, according to Al-Khouja. This is not something that is readily available in most situations, since the norm is to conform.
Most people don’t have the ability to experience radical self-expression because of social limitations, but Burning Man encourages that behavior by creating an environment where people can “express themselves in whatever media they like,” Mangrum said.
“You know, the mainstream art world is a super commodified, very controlled market, right? It’s a market of scarcity, where fewer artists means that those who are working make more money. We’re at the opposite end of that spectrum, where the more the better.”
Although physical pieces of art, like portraits and costumes, are common at Burning Man events there are also many people, like Wu, that choose to express themselves by serving their community and providing food there.
Service-based expression can be done either individually or with your camp since burners can choose to attend Burning Man in groups or with organizations focused on specific service goals, like providing food or transportation.
And these camps can get creative with their self-expression.
One year, there was a camp that planted a payphone deep in the desert. If you could find the payphone, you could make a reservation at that group’s camp and they would cook you an elaborate dinner, said Wu, who looked but did not find the illusive payphone.
“We want people to feel creative. We want them to feel that self-expression is a very accessible way to get in touch with yourself and how you connect with other people,” said Goodell.
Burning Man isn’t about buying and selling art. It’s about creating “it together. So the self-expression is meant to happen in the context of the others,” she added.
Bringing radical self-expression in the real world
Although Harvey created a list of principles, they’re not a checklist that needs to be followed in a specific way.
“They’re not values, they’re not ideas, they’re not pie in the sky. They’re just ways of existing, ways of being,” Mangrum said.
Outside of the event, radical self-expression can be done by taking risks, like speaking your mind or sharing art. It’s commonly seen during Pride month, where people wear outfits that “traditionally wouldn’t be something that you could wear normally,” Al-Khouja said.
Burning Man, at its core, is an ongoing project, Mangrum said. It expands and changes every year depending on how burners choose to participate.
“We never had a goal. It is its own thing, and we’ve just been, as Larry liked to say, it’s an experiment, a laboratory, a petri dish, right? We started an experiment back in 1986 and it continues, and it gets different, and it morphs, and we’re just watching to see how it grows,” Mangrum said.
“You know, people think the 10 Principles are like the 10 Commandments. Like Larry wrote them on a stone tablet and handed them out,” he added. “It was based on observation of how he saw people getting together and working together and enjoying each other’s company and doing great things outside the mainstream. So that’s what I’d say to it. It is its own objective.”
You don’t actually have to attend a Burning Man event to be part of the project. As long as you generally follow the principles, use them to live your authentic truth and build a community (however big it is), then you’ve contributed.
“It’s an educational system. The whole process teaches us about ourselves. It teaches us about leadership. It teaches us about, you know, how to get along with each other under really hard circumstances,” said Goodell.
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