After some Internet research I’m calling this a 50/50 split. I never heard of Neil Strauss until I came across this piece about his douchebaggery on The Firearm Blog in which Strauss claims to have developed a vampiric bloodlust after supposedly receiving “survival training” that sounds more like a Palo Mayombe ceremony than instruction on how to survive hardship.
From the far too credulous pages of The Boston Globe:
Next he takes a course in killing with a knife, during which an instructor named Mad Dog demands that he slaughter a live goat. Strauss also studies wilderness survival, learning to build a shelter from leaves, find water, and live off the land. After getting instruction in shooting, he finds himself changing from wimpy writer to would-be killer: “Something strange had occurred. I developed a bloodlust I’d never felt before. I actually wanted an excuse to shoot a bad guy.”
Riiiight. It should surprise no one that the man who wrote a book on “the secret society of pick up artists” is given to, shall we say, embellishments.
I applaud anyone who can make a living convincing people there is some sort of sexual Illuminati whose secrets can change the lives of all the awkward and shy beta males out there when in fact the only secret to getting laid is going to bar and hitting on someone. But in his new book about survivalism, called Emergency, which he’s pimping in this article, his overactive fantasy life is not just borderline slander on the survivalist community, but guaranteed to get you killed if you take his “lessons” to heart.
But this isn’t a review of his book, it’s an analysis of his character, or lack thereof. Reading through the Globe piece it is painfully obvious to anyone who has ever left the confines of Manhattan that Strauss is lying his hipster ass off. There is no reputable knife fighting program that demands you slaughter goats and outside of the imaginations of of “writers” who have had their creativity sucked out and spit into the gutter by University writing programs there are no goat hating knife fighting gurus named “Mad Dog.” Strauss can’t even be said to have invented these sad fabrications because they are basically cliched images of survivalists that urban liberals have passed around for years.
What’s more incredulous is the idea that after picking up a gun and receiving what I guess is some hunting instruction so he can “live off the land” he immediately wants to kill people. This is probably a nice pick-up line at a PETA convention, but the reality is that it simply doesn’t happen to hunters. While many people enjoy hunting (or fishing), all will tell you that they DON’T enjoy the actual killing of an animal. As a child I fished with my grandparents and we ate almost every fish we caught, and we enjoyed the process of fishing, but the killing and cleaning of fish is not particularly enjoyable. Hunting is the same.
Hunting and fishing, from my perspective, re-immerses Man into nature, which modern urban society separates us from. It reinvests us in the natural world, and helps us remember the primal reality of life on Earth. Most hunters brag of how cleanly and humanely they take game, few brag of the death itself. They revel in the skill that allowed them to kill the animal, not the killing itself. Strauss’ reaction to learning to hunt, to just holding a gun, is not normal and not indicative of the experience mature adults have when they are learning to shoot. It is the reaction of the unstable man-child, the 40-year-old adolescent who seeks to take revenge on the world for slights from his childhood. Strauss describes his experience with learning to handle firearms and “live off the land” like it’s a review of a new first person shooter, which if we were to believe the veracity of his story at all (which I don’t) would say more about him than survival.
Read the whole thing and there will be no way to avoid questioning his credibility as the anecdotes get progressively more ham fisted. Like this gem in which he was told a good urban survival strategy would be dressing like a woman. You know, because women have it so easy in urban environments:
In perhaps the clearest moment of transformation in “Emergency,” Strauss dresses as a woman during an exercise in urban survival. As he’s putting on his disguise in a men’s bathroom, two aggressive civilians show up. Fearing they’re about to attack him, Strauss angrily rips off his hat and wig, informs the men he’s a Marine taking part in a drill, and warns them to back off. They do. “I’d learned my lesson,” Strauss writes: “cross-dressing is not an urban survival tactic. It’s an urban suicide tactic.”
It’s like a Friends episode written by a man who was overcompensating. Neil Strauss is the last person who should be taken seriously as an authority on the survival subculture, unless you need to sell books to urban liberals who are too naive to see through his newest pick up line. Skip the book and buy Patriots by Jim Rawles who runs the must read Survival Blog if you’re looking for survival related reading. Books on foraging and trapping (both much more efficient than hunting) are also good, but the best way to learn how to survive is practice surviving not reading books.
Or apparently writing them.
