It’s rare to see actual Biblical-level events taking place in normal, everyday life. But that is what is happening over at Burning Man.
According to the Associated Press:
“An unusual late-summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a sloppy mess with tens of thousands of partygoers stuck in foot-deep mud with no working toilets in the northern Nevada desert.”
When a hurricane hits Florida, the Left acts as though it’s because of the great sin that we have all committed in driving cars and running our air conditioners.
So now, I get to joke about how a bunch of morons decided they were going to jet-set into the desert, in the middle of nowhere — where it’s 115 degrees — to screw each other. Then there’s a giant, Biblical-style rainstorm and flood and no one bothered to bring enough wood to build an ark.
“Some Burning Man revelers said Sunday their spirits remain unbroken.”
Unfortunately, their toilets do remain broken. And so they are just sitting there in their own poop, screwing each other. It sounds like the height of human experience.
The elites there treated it as though they escaped the beaches at Normandy. You wonder why people don’t trust the elite. You wonder why there’s a giant cultural gap between the Left Coast and the East Coast on one side and everybody in the middle of the country on the other.
These morons went out in the middle of the desert to worship their pagan selves and then got stuck in the mud? Well, that’s a rough ride for you.
A lot of Americans have been dispossessed of the Judeo-Christian architecture that used to undergird the United States of America. They’ve been dispossessed by a bunch of pagan morons who believe that the actual value system is radical self-expression and individualism. The great capitalists, from Adam Smith to John D. Rockefeller, understood that undergirding capitalism was a Judeo-Christian value system. Rockefeller went to a church and sat in the pews next to people who were a fraction of his wealth.
What used to unify the country was a belief system that the elites held in common with the common man. It was the same belief system overall. It was the radicals who were proclaiming the creed of radical self-expression. But now it’s not the radicals — now it’s the most powerful people in the society who have basically decided the reason they became powerful is because they followed their star.
But it’s not true. They’re actually more likely to be married with kids than people who are not high earners in American society. But they promulgate the lowest values. When I say the lowest values, I mean like the hippies on the commune or burning giant nine-foot tall statues.
One of the weird elements of the United States is that the counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It used to be that we called people who did things like Burning Man strange. But now, if you say they are weirdos who are participating in weird pagan mystic behavior, you are considered strange. You’re considered part of the problem. You are intolerant.
The counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It is, in fact, just the culture, which is why you see so many rich and famous people going to Burning Man.
It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn’t show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then go to the Orgy Dome all day. It used to be that serious people in our culture were serious.
You get all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man and then proclaim they have allegiance to these sorts of principles. Then others adopt the principles, and then it becomes the culture in which they swim.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
It used to be that if you showed up at Burning Man, you showed up with a bunch of plywood and a hammer; now, if you are a rich person, you show up at a turnkey camp. According to Mashable, the festival offered luxury amenities, cleaning staff and chefs, while reportedly wreaking havoc on the environment by chartering flights to get there.
You have an entire elite strata of our society that hates itself and that is constantly seeking to signal to everybody else how much it hates itself by doing things like going to Burning Man. They don’t seek to exemplify the behavior that everybody else should engage in. And if they do, they believe their behavior should be this hippie garbage and we should all just laugh and giggle along with them as they go to their Sodom and Gomorrah-style pleasure dome.
The principles of Burning Man look like a religion. Burning Man’s 10 principles declare:
“Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”
That’s a lie. If you show up as a Bible thumper, I guarantee you you’re not going to be welcome over at Burning Man, where no one has a shower, but they’re all having sex with one another.
Burning Man’s principles also state:
“Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.”
That is wildly untrue. It turns out that Burning Man has had a bad history over the past few years of leaving garbage strewn along the highways as people careen out of there as fast as possible.
Contrast the Ten Commandments of Burning Man with the actual Ten Commandments, things like respect thy father and mother, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, don’t commit murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t commit idolatry. One of these sets of rules has built a civilization that has lasted for literally thousands of years. The other set of rules lasted until a heavy rainstorm.
Perhaps that’s the real story of Noah’s Ark, that the rain wasn’t all that heavy. Maybe the society was just not durable. In the absence of God, paganism rules. It is not that there is no God, it’s that there are many gods. And these gods typically involve self- worship, which is where things currently stand. This idolatry is idolatry of the self.
We celebrate a holiday in Judaism that’s coming up shortly called Sukkot. You build a hut outside your house and you are supposed to live in it for a week. The purpose of it is to remind you that you are at the mercy of God. You’re supposed to build the hut so you can see the stars through the roof. It’s open to the rain. The whole purpose of it is to remind you that while you are a physical creature, there is something more spiritual to you than that.
The idea is that when you decorate all the physical surroundings around you, that’s not the essential you. So then, what is the essential you?
It’s unity with God. That’s the part that matters.
Disconnect that and all you end up with is a bunch of morons rolling around in the mud and then being mad at each other when they have to poop in a bucket.