LARRY HARVEY

It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.

I grew up on a farm in Oregon, an adopted child, with one sibling, and parents the age of all my peers' grandparents. We lived in isolation from the people around us, and it was always a struggle to cope with as a child. The heart can really expire under those conditions. I always felt like I was looking at the world from the outside.

Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.

We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other.

Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.

I've learned never to expect people to be better than they are, but to always have faith that they can be more.

I'm actually a very shy person. You'd be surprised how many leaders are shy. They're not all extroverts by nature.

When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.

Belief is thought at rest.

They become the keepers of the mystery. They place themselves between the communicants of the religion, and the immediate experience. And then they dictate the terms on which you can have contact with this wonderful mystery. We don't dictate those terms.

Kleenex would have made a mint today.

Our preoccupation has always been to craft space in such a way as to induce social interactions that would in turn generate a sense of community and a culture, but starting from the very immediate issue of how action influences perception.

Burning Man is like a big family picnic. Would you sell things to one another at a family picnic? No, you'd share things.

We didn't worry about getting a venue or asking permission. We started out guerrilla. We were illegal, going down to the beach to burn this thing.

People craved orientation. It was a very basic primal need. So we could create a boundary that served lots of functional purposes and especially create boundaries that people would camp along.

The bicycle thing - well, since people couldn't use their cars, they had to use their bicycles, didn't they?

I think it's a little much to expect the organisation to solve the problem of racial parity. We do see a fast-increasing influx of Asians, black folks. I actually see black folks out here, unlike some of our liberal critics.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

My wife is from Jamaica. My ex-wife. My stepchildren - and then there's my son. So, it's a biracial family.

People give because they identify with Burning Man, with our city, with our civic life. The idea of giving something to the citizens of Black Rock City has enormous appeal to them because it enhances their sense of who they are and magnifies their sense of being. That's a spiritual reward.

If all of your self worth and esteem is invested in how much you consume, how many likes you get, or other quantifiable measures, the desire to simply possess things trumps our ability or capability to make moral connections with people around us.

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

As a child, I craved sophistication and culture. My parents didn't know what to make of me.

We don't use the trademark to market anything. It's our identity.

People out here build whole worlds out of nothing, through cooperating.