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(Aug 1, 2006) -- It's not that Larry Harvey wants to take over the world. It's just that he wants it to be run by Burners. In a lengthy telephone interview from his home in San Francisco last month, the Burning Man founder laid out a blueprint for the expansion of the Burner community into mainstream culture.

The initial impetus for greater Burnia is coming from the surprisingly robust growth of regional events that duplicate elements of Black Rock City at other times in sites around the world -- Flipside in Austin, Nowhere in Spain, Playa del Fuego in Delaware -- bringing a taste of the Burning Man culture to hundreds or thousands of people who might never have had the inclination or opportunity to attend the annual event in Nevada. Indeed, Harvey said, it is conceivable that Black Rock City will cease to exist in about a decade.

That seems a little far-fetched. Unless they stop having summer, it seems that as long as there is a Black Rock Desert, thousands of people will congregate there and burn themselves in the sun and burn other things at night. But the growth of regional Burns is undeniable even if the number of attendees is undocumented. The Burning Man organization figures there are currently about 85 regional groups that it has sanctioned, with perhaps 30 more waiting in the wings.

To get the Burning Man imprimataur, regional organizations must have one annual event and agree to abide by the 10 Principles that guide the organization, among them radical self-expression, decommodification and participation. That's about all they have to do, Harvey noted: "When we signed agreements with the regional contacts, we didn't say kick money back to us. We didn't create a franchise, we didn't ask them for anything." Regionals that want to donate excess funds, he added, could give to the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a separate not-for-profit organization that encourages interactive art.

By making it easy for regional groups to create their own Burns -- though Harvey pointed out that actually burning something is not a requirement -- the organization has created a transmission vector for the Burning Man ethos. "You have this immense diversity of these Burns that happens, and my impression is that after the Burns people are going to bring these things back to Main Street because -- why not? Unless they are happy in the way they are living now."

Harvey, who at 58 is near the leading edge of the Baby Boom, is most definitely not happy with the way life is lived, at least in America, now. At the heart of his unease is criticism of a consumer culture that includes people living far beyond their means as they strive to acquire arsenals of mass-produced and largely superfluous goods. The "Hope and Fear" theme of 2006 is inspired by Harvey's uncomfortable relationship with what he sees as the postwar decline of American society.

Black Rock City is meant to illustrate an alternative, he said: "Can you preserve community and engage in commerce and live a good life that is meaningful? Black Rock City has been designed to demonstrate that it can."

Okay Larry, fair enough, but how far into the mainstream can the quirky Burning Man lifestyle get? If the greater Black Rock City community numbers, say, 100,000 and via the regionals you manage to increase it one hundredfold, that will come to 10 million people, or roughly 0.16 percent of the world's population. Almost by definition, the Burner community is not part of the mainstream. Burners are a self-selecting group: to join you have to want to go on a wild camping trip in the desert at the height of summer surrounded by people who look like the extras from the Mad Max movies. Besides, not all Burners are there for the art or the sense of community. Some percentage comes for sex and drugs and to play awfully loud electronic music that just ain't rock and roll.

"I have got nothing against radical self-expression," Harvey countered. "I am surrounded by weirdos. I'm a weirdo." Still, he opined, most people come to Black Rock City infatuated with "the idea that they can express themselves uniquely. That is what beguiles people. 'Burning Man has changed my life.' We hear that chorus chanting every year. Did debauchery lead them to a spiritual transformation?"

Maybe it did, though you might also consider the metaphysics of desert bacon. Yet even if many, most or all Burners are touched by the community in fundamental ways, it remains a small group.

Small, said Harvey, but poised to become influential.

"Come the Revolution," he said. Well, no, that is not what he said, though you might be excused for hearing it in the undertone. What he really said, citing inspiration from Jimmy Carter, was, "It is clear to me that there is a great malaise, on the land."

Harvey laid out a crisis scenario that is very familiar to economists and journalists but that fails miserably to elbow Jennifer Aniston's personal life out of the mainstream headlines. When he complains about Americans living beyond their means, the Burning Man founder points to the vast U.S. trade deficit and growing federal budget deficit.

To keep it simple: Americans borrow money on the governmental level and individually by way of home equity loans and credit cards to finance consumer purchases and the occasional Middle East war. More than $2 billion flows out of the country every day, on a current account basis, and much of it finds its way into the foreign reserves of China and, to a lesser extent, Japan. Those countries use many of the dollars they earned from exporting things like electronic gizmos, cars and shoddy shoes to America to buy U.S. securities -- primarily government bonds -- sending the money right back to greedy Americans who buy more mass-produced stuff at soulless shopping malls. As of June 2005, the latest data available from the Treasury, Japanese investors, private and public, held $1 trillion of U.S. securities, more than half of that in government bonds, and Chinese investors owned $527 billion, most of it Treasury and U.S. agency issues.

To look at it in human terms, figure that every day, weekends and holidays included, if you're an average American you buy about $6.67 of stuff from overseas that is paid for either by borrowing from foreigners or selling them something you own. Last June, you owed about $5,300 to foreign investors who held U.S. Treasury bonds (money borrowed in your name), of which $1,900 was accounted for by Japan and $920 by China. The Chinese portion, however, is growing much faster as that country sends wave upon wave of consumer goods abroad.

There is a school of thought that says this does not matter. In the long run, it goes, Yankee ingenuity and the laws of economics will cause the trade and budget imbalances to subside, and besides, with all those Treasury bonds in their coffers, China and Japan will not do anything to imperil America's ability to pay its debts.

An opposing camp, which includes the Burning Man founder, says that a day of reckoning will come. It may take the form of a cataclysm or it may be a long decline into relative poverty. "That's the story of every empire on Earth," Harvey said.

So when the dark days arrive, who you gonna call? "Our culture is well-equipped to think creatively," said Harvey. "Right now, they are starting to fan out and starting to apply that to everyday life. How they do it, that's another question."

The Black Rock Arts Foundation might cozy that along, Harvey said, by starting a think-tank. The idea would be "to get creative people together. The only requirement would be that they go to Burning Man." "In a crisis," he continued, "the establishment will reach for ideas, and they'll start to compete."

Even without this kind of organizational support, Harvey said, Burners are likely to take the lead on responding to crises at grassroots levels.

So can we expect President Harvey to find a place for the Jiffy Lube sign on the White House lawn? He said not. "I do not intend to form a party, I am not going to run for office." Indeed, Harvey claimed he was not really in charge of Burning Man.

"I am in charge of some things. We [the organization] are in charge of the social context. We are not in charge of the culture. It is the difference between making a table out of wood and growing a tree. You can assist it, you can water it, you can prune it, but the tree grows itself."