I realize I am going a bit overboard with "Tao of…" posts.  But, hey, I'm reading the DDJ in my tutorial and Daoism is very much on my mind…

Jacob Davies at Obsidian Wings has a post about Burning Man, the (...what to call it?…) festival/movement/project that takes place out in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.  He describes it (ht Sullivan):

Burning Man is sort of nuts, and sort of like the future. Nobody has a job. There's nothing you can buy but everyone sort of has what they need anyway. Physical conditions suck. But everyone is really, really happy anyway. Things get done by volunteers, usually, mostly. Tattooed, unshaven people who you would probably give a wide berth on the street are expertly driving enormous cranes and forklifts, or rigging pyrotechnics. Women in miniskirts and pasties are working with tools you have no idea how to use. Everywhere people are just doing exactly what they feel like doing. Did I mention that they're all really happy? They're happy, I think, because nobody is telling them what to do, and it turns out that when nobody is telling anyone what to do, everybody is really, really nice. People are nice. OK, there are jerks. But it demonstrates that under the right conditions – and not necessarily conditions of great comfort or leisure – people can be really nice. They can be really happy. They can get big things done. And they can do much of that – not nearly all, but much of it – without the trappings of modern industrial life – jobs, salaries, competition, status displays, credentials, advertising, branding, the rat race.

Sounds like passage 80 of the DDJ:

Let nations grow smaller and smaller and people fewer and fewer,

let weapons become rare and superfluous, let people feel death's gravity again and never wander far from home.  Then boat and carriage will sit unused and shield and sword lie unnoticed.

Let people know ropes for notation again and never need anything more,

let them find pleasure in their food and beauty in their clothes, peace in their homes and joy in their ancestral ways.

Then people in neighboring nations will look across to each other, their chickens and dogs calling back and forth,

and yet they'll grow old and die witout bothering to exchange visits.

Small-scale cooperative communities, without formal institutions of rule and law, can be sites of happiness and contentment and peace.  That's the political promise of the DDJ…

Sullivan points out that at Burning Man everyone is happy because they are stoned.  The DDJ, and Daoism generally, would look down on this, in the belief that the happiness that emerges from following Way does not need drugs; indeed, drugs become just another obstacle to our apprehension of Way…