Elites, Burning Man, Paganism, The Flood - And The Need For God

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 people.

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.

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 you are a physical creature, but that 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.