Daniel Pinchbeck went to some trouble to insert himself into the media as one of the leading Burning Man scenesters, following in his counter-cultural heritage at the heart of the Beat scene growing up on Ginsberg’s lap.
Pinchbeck’s “Evolver” group was a Burning Man-related social engineering think tank run out of Baltimore, Maryland.
Whether you are a Playa newbie or the most grizzled Burner veteran, there is always more to learn and new techniques to master for maximizing your Burning Man adventure. As we approach Burn 2012, with hordes of rabid newbies getting prepped to descend on Black Rock City in faux fur, this is the moment to prepare your Psyche for the sub-cultural onslaught coming your way imminently, and brush up on your Playa protocol. In this learning experience, we will explore deep questions such as:
*Is it a good idea to snort bath salts from the bellybutton of a stranger?
*Is getting branded on your tongue something you are likely to regret later?
*Are Sparkle Ponies worth taming?
*Is the Burning Man camp a new form of social organism?
*Can hipster cache be bought with a credit card?
All these questions and more will be addressed in this unique one-time only webinar. Please bring your own “burning” questions to this interactive forum.
Join Daniel Pinchbeck, executive director of Evolver, along with Jill Ettinger and Baza Novic, Evolver LA honchos, with special guests, on a journey into the practice and philosophy of Burning Man, the festival’s dust-blown past and unclear future. We will discuss the evolution of the festival, its ever-growing cultural impact, this year’s ticket fiasco, and much more. Also, how do you integrate Burning Man into your daily life?
He has been a frequent stage speaker at Burning Man. We’ve talked about him a few times before:
The Greatest Cultural Movement of Our Time
Pinchbeck: “Why I’m Not Going To Burning Man This Year”
Webinar with Daniel Pinchbeck: Evolver Field Guide to BM 2012
In particular I recalled seeing him on stage at LIB explaining:
the reason women make noise during sex, is to attract the other males in the tribe to come and have sex with them, too – thus increasing their chance of being inseminated
Back in those days, like 2011-12, this neo-anthropological, polyamory and group sex positive view of the world seemed highly compatible with Burner culture. I would go so far as to say that it WAS the culture, based on almost all of the veteran Burners I know (let’s just close our eyes to all the kids and black magic which are also such a big part of the event).
Well, times have changed. 2012 is long, long behind us. Trump is President, Republicans run the country, the economy is booming, NFL is dying, the Clintons colluded with Russia for money, Weinstein is a rapist, and it looks like Pedowood is going down.
HUNDREDS of victims have already come forward. Thanks to effective and authentic hash tag campaigns like #rosearmy and #metoo, the dam is breaking and we are hearing reports of sexual abusers in advertising, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks critics, and now one of the leading charismatic characters of Burning Man counter-culture has been dragged into #metoo.
The New York Post said Writer Blames Predatory Ways On Women
He claims his actions stem from the way female family members treated him as a child https://t.co/M3tpW1xKkg
— Page Six (@PageSix) October 23, 2017
Pinchbeck took to Facebook with a confessional, justifying his abuse as being a victim of abuse. We have to break the cycle people, and that is why #pedowood must be exposed.
In the past, I have been sexually fixated, creepy, predatory. I acted in ways that were hurtful and upsetting to women. I feel very guilty about my past behavior. I want to make amends. I feel the way I can best do that is to speak honestly about what I did, and why I believe I did it. To do this I also have to explore my personal history.
To be clear about lines I never crossed: I never had nonconsensual sex, sex with a minor, sex with someone unconscious, or lied about my intentions to get someone into bed. What I have done are many unaware and disrespectful behaviors, specifically: Pushing for sex without listening to why she was hesitant; seeking sexual contact with volunteers in an organization that I helped to start; the use of substances as tools of seduction; being incredibly insensitive and tone-deaf to women’s wants and needs; making unwanted advances; focusing on much younger women
[Source]
He has never had non-consensual sex, but he HAS pushed for someone to have sex and didn’t listen to her saying no and HAS used substances as tools of seduction. Dude, this is some Bill Cosby shit. Drugging them is not consent.
There has been a push within the Burner community for some time to get an 11th Principle added, that of Consent. It is really just so important to the preservation and survival of Burner culture. If we want to all feel free at home, there needs to be mutual respect by everyone.
Pinchbeck at least had the decency and guts to write a lengthy apology, more than some of the other celebrities named so far.
Daniel is certainly not the only person within the Burner scene who has ever acted like this.
IS THERE A BURNING MAN #METOO?
Or is Burning Man the place for all of the Weinsteins of the world to go to once they check out of rehab, Radical Inclusion meaning we welcome them whatever their sins?
Daniel’s mom, Joyce Glassman, was a central member of the New York beat scene when this free-love, sex & drugs counter-culture was just starting to break through from the elites to the masses. It didn’t make her happy. Pinchbeck first blames his wacky childhood…
The roots of it go back to my early childhood. I was traumatized when I was very young. The main things were: My grandmother and great aunts used to give me frequent enemas, which I believe I internalized as a form of sexual abuse. This left me with trauma and I would say a bit of OCD. I was never breastfed and believe that left me feeling lacking and desperately craving some essential connection to women. I feel my childhood was tinged with this sense of lack, even despair.
I became dangerously sick as a child with a spinal infection…The illness slowed down my psycho-sexual development and made me feel fragile and exiled from the world. It is because I experienced this core separation from the world and the body that I developed a particular kind of intellect that is able to think through areas that are uncomfortable for most people. It was how I learned to protect myself while I was in the hospital and afterwards. It also led me to mental rationalizations, idealizations, and justifications as a tendency.
My mother was a Feminist author and book editor. We lived together. She was alone, without a partner, and often depressed. I internalized a lot of her pain and frustration with men. I didn’t want to be another hurtful man – but I also lacked positive male role models.
…and then celebrity and the drugs he once promoted:
I had a taste of what it must be like to be rock star or a successful DJ – to a certain extent, it was the opportunity I had been yearning for. I had many beautiful and consensual experiences that I still treasure. What had been once so difficult to “attain” became normal.
When my second book on prophecy became a bestseller, I was suddenly a modest celebrity. I also put a huge amount of my energy into launching a company, Evolver.net, which drained me. I lost focus on my own creative work, which added to my frustration and resentment. In that several year cauldron of becoming famous, starting Evolver, feeling hopeless and futile in a prophetic mission that seemed utterly beyond me, my Shadow material got activated – and the area of its expression was my sexuality. I believed that I was propagating the same free love ideology that Allen Ginsberg, one of my heroes, had promoted. This included breaking through the boundaries around erotic expression. I now see I was ignoring issues of power dynamics as well as my own complexes.
One negative element, for me – I now understand – was the ongoing use of some of the mind-expanding chemicals I wrote about in my first book. Because I was compared to Leary and McKenna, people assumed I was a maestro of mind expansion – and I assumed it as well. In actual fact, I now see that the continued use of certain chemicals had a negative impact on my personality over time. They made me more impulsive and self-centered
[Source]
Do what thou wilt.
How many thousands, if not millions of people were lured to use these substances based on Pinchbeck’s promotion of them – and the media’s promotion of him? It is the same thing for Leary, McKenna, Ginsberg, Burroughs – the lot of them. All people closely connected to the Deep State, but being sold to us through the media as counter-culutral icons, role models for rebellion against The Man. Telling us to get out of our minds on drugs, because this will somehow make us smarter and better. How many relationships and lives have been ruined, not just by chemicals, but by the entire Crowleyan counter-culture that has been peddled by this Shadow World crew over the last 50 years?
Pinchbeck somehow manages to work President Trump into his tale of regret.
“I remember one friend – the son of a famous NY art gallerist who kept giving me heroin – giving me the same advice as Trump: If I wanted more success with women, I should just grab them between the legs,” he said. “The basic model of sexuality in that scene was aggressive, dominance based, and involved transgression of boundaries as a norm … This was the model of how things worked in the world where I found myself coming of age as a man – how I was conditioned. Looking back, it was incredibly primitive.”
Perhaps coincidence, perhaps connected, but famous New York art gallerist Vito Schnabel was arrested at Burning Man this year for distributing drugs. He is the son of even-more-famous New York artist Julian Schnabel
Pinchbeck wrote a post in 2013 defending himself from accusations by a former friend that he was a serial rapist. There is a broader story here about sex, consent, and psychedelics.
What can Burners do about #metoo?
Add an 11th Principle: CONSENT. We can make it first out of the 11.
How else are we going to educate the 40% virgins coming every year?
We’ll let Mr Pinchbeck have the last word:
I feel terrible that I could have avoided causing hurt to women if I had just been more aware and had some protocols and principles around sexual conduct – training in how to articulate desires and define boundaries
