FEAR AND HATE: LIVING AMONG THE SURVIVALISTS

Mathieu Burgalassi

(Michel Lafon, 256 pages, 2021)

In four years of ethnographic research, not once did I meet a single survivalist who was actually preparing to survive the apocalypse. It’s something else, some sort of disaster, that they are preparing for. This could be another Great Depression, or an ecological fallout . . . and they are certain that this disaster will precipitate the collapse of governed society into lawlessness. And it is this scenario for which they must prepare: a Darwinian dystopia in which men will do battle with each other—in which only the strongest have a fighting chance.

—Mathieu Burgalassi

Mathieu Burgalassi’s fascination with survivalism is rooted in his own experiences of poverty and violence. He knows what makes him susceptible to the movement: disenfranchisement, privation of bare necessities, and trauma. His psyche was in pieces after a brutal attack in Lyon that nearly killed him and his friend. In years afterward, his mind was haunted by his own voice pleading for his life; he was unable to sleep, and he was barely able to leave his house. A friend then told him about a martial arts technique used by Israeli soldiers called Krav Maga, and it is in one of these classes that he meets his first survivalists.

As various survivalists describe the ethos to him, Mathieu finds himself intrigued and even identifying in turn with what appears to be foundational to the movement: the idea of self-reliance, of having food and supplies on hand for emergencies, of acquiring the know-how to live off the land or make rudimentary tools. His preliminary research and conversations reveal that survivalism can be traced back to a zeitgeist of panic after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and was further exasperated by the Cuban Missile Crisis. As he continues to retrace, backtrack, and question, we see the survivalist movement intersect with back-to-the-land movements of the 1970s, Mormonism, Boy Scouts . . . until it more firmly becomes folded into white supremacist fantasies of “us versus them.”

Mathieu becomes close to several survivalists in France, and then California, where he conducted research on survivalism at University of California, Berkeley, as a doctoral candidate at Aix-Marseille Université. His studies revealed the culture of fear and hate. We see over the course of Fear and Hate him becoming disillusioned, realizing how completely the rhetoric of fear—that the world is one to be constantly “scanned” for threats, that any situation is filtered by the “threat level”—is enmeshed with hatred toward minorities and marginalized communities.

Part autobiography, part anthropological analysis, part introspection, this many-sided narrative offers an unprecedented study four years in the making—a study that again and again placed him in harm’s way—exposing a culture of fear that pervades the Western world’s ideals of “self-reliance” and “masculinity.”

Born in 1991, Mathieu Burgalassi is an anthropologist specializing in political thought, issues of security, and violence. Fear and Hate is his first book.