Upon returning from the desert in '17 after my first burn, a blunt contrarian friend of mine offered a few words on the festival which I dubbed worth sharing --
So if I ask you to help me push my car out of a ditch, you may well agree. But if I offer you $10 to help me push my car out of a ditch, you’ll likely think: Are you kidding? My time is worth much more than that. In other words, the mere act of putting a price tag on a good or a service bumps people from the social to the economic mode, and reduces their natural inclinations towards altruism (which doesn’t truly exist, BTW) and generosity. So it seems that Burning Man has managed to create an entire city operating in the social framework rather than the economic one.
The tricky question is what, if anything, one should take away from it. Unfortunately, the results are not extrapolatable. That’s because, although it’s true that the people who give you food and massages and rides all week were technically strangers, they weren’t just any strangers. They are your fellow tribe members (“burners”), i.e., your ‘in-group”. As I mentioned to you, from Robert Sapolsky’s ”Behave”, homo sapiens brains are hard-wired to respond favorably to “in-groups” and negatively to “out groups” (although who falls into each category is dynamic and can change rapidly). The real, harder question has always been: How do we foster cooperation between different in-groups, or otherwise stated, with an “out-group"? Here, Burning man has little to offer….
Based on Sapolosky’s work, I would love to do an experiment with testosterone and oxytocin with those 70, 000 participants in the dessert:
Testosterone has gotten an awful reputation, whereas oxytocin has gotten a Teflon presidency that is not deserved.
Testosterone does not invent new pathways of aggression; it increases the volume of the pathways that are already there. But, what testosterone is mostly good for is that it makes you do what ever behavior is needed to hold on to status when it is being challenged. So, if you are a baboon it's obvious what you do--that is aggression. In humans, if you set up a situation in which you gain status by for example being generous, then, testosterone makes you more generous. if you took a thousand Buddhist monks and shot them up with testosterone, they would just run through the streets doing random act of kindness to see who would do the most of them the fastest!
Oxytocin is involved in oceanic feelings of cooperation, mother-infant bonding, monogamous pair Bonding, etc, i.e., an amazing, wondrous prosocial hormone. But when you look more closely, Oxytocin makes you much nicer, more empathic to people who you feel are just like you-to "in group" members. When it comes to "out group" members, it makes you more crappy to them, more preemptively aggressive, less cooperative. In other words, more xenophobic.
On the level of philosophy:
"Life is,” as Dostoyevsky wrote, "and it is our job to figure out what the 'is' is". That’s one of the core responsibilities of being human, and this perhaps serves as at least one unconscious drive for the yearly mass exodus to the desert...