a w a r e n e s s

In his latest novel, “Emergency,” Neil Strauss shares, in entertaining and informative detail, his sentiments and self-revealing quest to becoming his archetype of masculine, machismo, self-sufficient…essentially a survivalist man. A series of 69 lessons, which could be disastrously dangerous in the wrong hands (in my humble option), addresses a range of touchy topics and pointers from US politics, paranoia, and Darwinian evolution to slaughtering a goat named Bettie, creating caches “just in case,” and picking a padlock with a coke can.

He starts off on a mission to escape the system, so to speak; believing the US government is not to be trusted, seeking asylum in dual citizenship and offshore ventures; all inspired by dodgy cult groups, the infamous Y2K panic, and his rich friends hoping to purchase an island of refuge. His Wikipedia page, which I casually consulted shortly before cracking open Emergency, notes that Strauss’s nationality is American, Kittitian. The book truly goes into specifications on the trouble he went through to earn that second, well-researched but completely unrelated nationality; all in an effort to breakout from the catastrophe that is, from historical precedence and current signs, the US’s destiny to perish as the world’s hegemonic power. While I admittedly note that he’s inspired my investigation on attaining dual citizenship for myself, American & South African (minus Strauss’s hassle), I can’t agree more with his realization that, after he found himself in the threatening darkness of St. Kitts blackout post-Hurricane Katrina, he hasn’t escaped from anything; “The lesson of Katrina wasn’t that the United States can’t protect its own. It was that no country can protect its own. No place and no government can guarantee the well-being of its citizens. There’s only one place to find true safety: from within.”

So Strauss goes forth describing his lessons on becoming a man- and “as the world of survivalism opened up, I began to realized that I’d been rendered completely helpless by convenience….Life was more exciting now that I was learning to handle just about anything that came my way without having to depend on anyone else. Two decades after puberty, I was finally coning a man.” Little do we know that calling the 1-800-plumber when the toilet floods, purchasing mozzarella cheese at Trader Joe’s, or consuming vitamins to mentally compensate for the lack of fiber, protein, and calcium in our diets, is inadvertently, making us less of a “man.” I can agree with Strauss in some sense; because if the world was to end as we know and we were challenged in pulling a Robert Neville, how many hours, days, or weeks would we survive?

Strauss made frequent references to one of my favorite and most influential novels, Lord of the Flies as he himself, is a fliesian. If society were to tumble into unfamiliar shreds, humans would turn violent and animalistic; fending for themselves at the expense of anyone else; the Hobbes mentality; we are born naturally brutish and short. I paged through the novel questioning whether I myself, am a fliesian or a humanist, or somewhere in the vast grayness that lays between. While I believe strongly that human beings have the capacity to turn from kind and generous (when the resources are not scarce) to conniving and aggressive, I also believe that a situation like an apocalypse could evolve people in the opposite way. Is that survival instinct that some of us hold deeply within the very root to hostility we would inflict on another for a morsel of food or a sip of water to help us see the sun for at least one more day? Is it the denial of death (of ourselves) the stem to living beyond at our neighbor’s life sacrifice?

Strauss straddled a fine line between irrationality and inspiring awareness. While he seemed excessively paranoid, he indicated that “though paranoia is often used as a derogatory term, the truth is that it’s a survival instinct. In you your postman is stealing your checks or your nurse is poisoning your food, eve nits not true, the accusation is rooted in an innate desire for self-preservation. When a cat perks up its ears or hides under a bed when a completely harmless stranger approaches, it the exact same response developed through millennia spent living in the wild, where the unknown was a threat. And because the future is unknown, no matter how good or bad things may be today, it will always be a threat. So, ultimately, the sole arbiter of what’s paranoia and what’s common sense is what happens tomorrow. You’re only paranoid if you’re wrong. If you’re right, you’re a prophet.” And if that’s not convincing, I know that if/when sh*t hits the fan, I’d want to be stranded with Neil Strauss because he knows how to make, for example, drinkable water, from practically nothing; something we supposedly can’t survive 3 days without (unless you’re the Buddha Boy of Nepal).