Our Relationship to Risk is Broken
Risks—taken—have shaped all of human progress. In spite of this, most of us run from it, hiding behind social norms, laws and institutions created expressly to minimize it. We would do far better to embrace our own societal evolution, and the risks it requires of us.
At Burning Man—a temporary community of 80,000 people in the Nevada desert—there is a tongue-in-cheek idiom: “Safety Third.”
Those who know it chuckle every time it’s uttered, for two reasons. First, it runs counter to prevailing cultural wisdom, laws and their enforcement. And second, at Black Rock City—as the temporary metropolis built and occupied over two-week period every year is called—that sentiment is a fair reflection of how people actually act there.
It’s magical.
Burning Man, which ended just a few weeks ago, is, in many ways, an object lesson in how to get Project Human right. Among these are the near-ubiquitous creativity, generosity, inclusivity, positivity and industriousness that one finds there, and which visibly defies the conventional attitudes one finds in the “default world”, as everything outside of the city is called.
