Why more Americans are learning to pick locks, bust out of handcuffs, and avoid surveillance.

Driving the growth, in part, is a fear that resonates from the wealthiest consumers to blue-collar workers: that with the global financial crisis dragging on, life as we know it is undergoing a radical change. Looking forward, pundits say that at best we will no longer be able to subsist on the diet of credit we have so ravenously consumed for the last decade. At worst, our future looks like something out of a Mad Max movie.

What this has to do with breaking out of handcuffs or picking padlocks requires a rather Hobbesian leap. It assumes that if the government can no longer provide for or protect its citizens, there will be a complete upending of the societal order. It assumes that humans will act to the worst of their capacity. It assumes that if, in fact, the financial crisis is just a mile marker on the highway to hell, we could soon be facing a very different, very violent world. So, beyond the novelty element of being able to pull a Jack Bauer-like escape, there is a sense that these skills are a necessity as our society becomes ever more precarious.

"I think everybody [who takes the class] wants to feel a little bit more secure. For some people it's just a hobby, but there are a number of people who look at the world, and say, ‘Things are probably not getting better,' " Reeve says.

Each escape-and-evade class has 15 to 20 slots, and there's one held each month in a different city across the country. Last month it was in Nashville, Tenn., the month before that, in Chicago. When I attended, it was split between the sleepy town of Medford, N.J., and the downtown region of Philadelphia. Soon, Reeve will have a mobile training team that will be able to set up shop in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. He is also restructuring the company to include Kelly Alwood, a lead instructor, as partner, and is now adding to his bench. Currently, Reeve employs about six instructors, most of them ex-military, to teach the courses alongside him on a contract basis. OnPoint offers several courses in urban and wilderness survival, tracking, and scouting, but its escape and evade is by far the most popular—by tenfold, Reeve approximates.

Increased exposure has also helped propel onPoint closer to the mainstream. Neil Strauss, who is best-known for his 2005 book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, attended Reeve's class in 2007 as part of a larger quest to prepare himself for an impending disaster. In March, the diminutive writer and veritable god among sexually frustrated males published a book about his experience, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, which spent 12 weeks on the New York Times' best-seller list. More than half of the people in the class I attended were there because they had read it.

Although escape and evade was but a small part of the book, it seems to have awakened the Jason Bourne—or even the Neil Strauss—wannabe in countless readers. One student, a chef, had recently come from a seminar in Los Angeles given by Strauss on how to be a pickup artist, his third such class. Strauss is intelligent, funny, and completely relatable. Not only do his readers want to hear about his experiences, they want to have them.