More incidents of road rage. People are now smoking on the subway. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents in airline history, according to the FAA. It seems people are acting stranger than ever. But what’s behind all of this? Olga Khazan, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote about this very topic. She joins WITHpod to discuss the role that the pandemic has played in increased disruptive behavior, why mental health issues aren’t the only factor to blame and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Olga Khazan: Christine Porath, who’s this one business professor that I talk to, who studies just rudeness mostly in the workplace, but it kind of applies elsewhere. So she has found that the number one reason why people behave in a rude way or in an uncivil way is because they’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed. So it’s not just that like someone is rude to you and you’re rude back directly to them. It’s just that you feel crappy. You feel overwhelmed. We’ve all had those days when you’re like, I can’t take one more like freaking thing, and suddenly, one more freaking thing happens and you snap. And so, that is part of what’s happening.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes.
So I have a unified theory of life in the late COVID pandemic, I call it the late pandemic because I don’t think it’s post pandemic because people keep getting COVID. I don’t know what stage we’re in now. I do think that the immunity while it’s been built up through vaccination boosters and prior infection means that it is considerably less severe and acute risk to individuals than it was a year ago, but definitely not gone. There are a lot of immunocompromised people.
There are some interesting studies happening around long COVID. A big NHS study just came up. So there’s a lot we don’t know. I think the level of risk we’re all exposed to now is considerably less than it was a year or two years ago, and yet it still is there. It still produces disruption in life. Me and my whole family got COVID a little while ago, and I was out of work and the kids were out of school, and all that. We were fine, thank goodness, vaccine boosted. Our youngest, who’s four years old, wasn’t vaxxed, had a high fever for a day or two, but fine. So knock on wood.
That said, I think that human beings are very good at acclimating to vary wildly different circumstances. It’s the human superpower. It’s why it’s the only species that lives in the Amazon and the Arctic. And we’re also really good at just like denying what’s going on and rooting ourselves in normalcy.
I mean, I’ve been really obsessed, I don’t know if you guys have watched the subgenre of social media of people living through war in Ukraine, but it’s totally fascinating and also like incredibly sort of inspiring, and also really funny. But it’s like teenagers in bomb shelters like making fun of their dad and making jokes about like how their dad tells them to clean up their cot in the bomb shelter. And there’s crazy surreal combination of like normalcy and abnormalcy.
And I think that all comes around to my unified theory, which is we’ve gone through the biggest disruption to ordinary life since World War II, at least probably in a hundred years. It’s had profound and deep consequences in almost every way we can imagine. We’re not really reckoning with them as a whole, but rather we are seeing the emanations of that in individual statistics and experiences.
So anecdotally, like I take the subway every day to work. I’m a New York City lifelong person. People act wild in subway sometimes. But in the last six months, I’ve seen like several, like numerous times, I see people smoking on the subway. Now, that has seriously almost never happened in my life. I mean, maybe like 2 a.m. someone drunkenly lighting up. And it’s one of these weird things. It’s a weird category of action. It’s not violent. But it is like aggressively antisocial, like it’s this real sort of taboo violation.
And I think you will agree, people are acting wild out there. Like, they’re getting real mad at each other in line. People are real impatient. We are seeing this show up in a bunch of statistics. So passenger incidents, right, you’ve seen all the viral videos, people losing their minds, being asked to put on masks, whatever. Well, it turns out the actual incidents of passengers are like way up during the pandemic. Youth sports incidents, there’s an article in The Boston Globe about how you can’t find a youth hockey league referees because parents are acting so crazy. Auto fatalities, here’s a really concrete one, right?
Auto fatalities went up in per miles traveled in 2020, partly because the roads were very empty and people were speeding. So there’s sort of a story to tell there, right? So fewer people on the road, people driving faster and getting more accidents per mile traveled. But then everyone came back and it still was a yet another record-setting year, which means people were just being more reckless on the road. The regulatory regime didn’t change. There weren’t some big policies. It’s like behavioral changes at scale. Homicides up 20%.
Something is going on, throughout all these different layers of American life. And the only person I’ve seen write about this, as a unified theory, is staff writer for The Atlantic named Olga Khazan, who wrote a piece, the headline of which is “Why People Are Acting So Weird” And it’s about exactly this thesis and I thought I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this, but want to talk about it. So Olga, welcome to “Why Is This Happening.”
Olga Khazan: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: How did you come to write this?
Olga Khazan: I, too, have been seeing people acting strangely. I guess I started seeing the viral videos of people on planes, for the most part. And so, you’ll have people kind of screaming at flight attendants, refusing to put on masks, but also just refusing to do other things, it seems like. And then it kind of seemed to like trickle out from planes to other places. Like, I started to see similar videos from ski resorts, where there was like this guy, I mean, I described it in the article, you really have to watch the video, but he has like one foot strapped into a snowboard, and he’s sliding all around the easement area of a ski lift and punching and flailing at the security guard. And it’s so bizarre and it’s like, wow.
Like, I don’t know, just like all these situations that you were in, quote-unquote, “before times” that seemed totally chill and like everyone kind of knew what to do. And it was basically without issue. Suddenly, we’re becoming these very charged and kind of scary. What could happen? Anything could happen, sort of events, school board meeting. Like, there was an incident in my little team, little like homeowners’ association pool. I don’t know, I’m sort of like, what’s going on? And then I saw some of the same statistics that you did and wanted to figure out what was happening. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes. So there’s the anecdotal level that I think. So one aspect at the anecdotal level, I think, because we’re going to get to sort of a broader theory and talk about some of the statistics. But just at the anecdotal level, so one thing I think that’s happened, Aziz Ansari, has his Netflix specials, I think 30 minutes. He just showed up at Comedy Cellar and did a bit. And he’s kind of funny where he talks about like, basically, service people were taking for granted for a long time. Then they were forced to work through this pandemic, and then a lot of them were like, “Screw it, I’m out.”
And we all sort of realized, as a society, there was a recognition of like how much they’ve been taken for granted. And there’s sort of like really, I think, well-earned and righteous worker’s rebellion around it. But it also is reduced, like the number of service workers. And he said, like, “And then everything just got a little shittier.” And it just is the case like the daily level of frustration in waiting just seems higher.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, if you’re renting a car, like you’re going to wait for 90 minutes, not 10 minutes. If you’re getting a cup of coffee, like everything takes longer. And I do think part of what’s happening is there’s that like frenetic hubs and competitive drive that happens when like a flight is canceled and everyone rushes towards the same airport desk, right?
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I feel like that feeling is much more common now. Like, that’s a very specific thing that I’ve encountered, I think we all have. You’re on a flight, it gets canceled. Holy crap, all of these 200 people need to rebook. I need to be at the front of the line, so that I’m on that list. That ethos now seems precedent, like so many interactions.
Olga Khazan: Yes, I think you’re right. So first of all, things are just more inconvenient. There’s like a scarcity element to things. I think that has a big role to play in things like flights and everything. But also, since we’re talking pop culture and bringing pop culture into this, there was like an SNL sketch that was like “Is my brain broken?” And it was people not knowing how to interact socially anymore, basically, which is definitely something that I’ve noticed. Like, I’m like, “Wait. After you say how are you, what do I say?” And it’s like after a while of not doing that, you’re kind of like, “Wait, what’s the normal thing to do here?” And I think people have also gotten out of practice of doing that.
Chris Hayes: You used this in your piece. Like, to me, no one is talking about this anymore, but it was all anyone have talked about for a week, and again in the grand scheme of things we’re going to talk about. Like that Will Smith moment with Chris Rock, it felt like an individual moment of a person breaking. But it also, I think, kind of took on the life it did because it also felt like part of this broader pattern, that like people just snapping or people just acting in ways that are just completely contrary to what social expectations are.
And everyone was sort of stunned. But then I think that part of being stunned of watching this is like we’ve all had some small version of this on the playground, or in the airport, or in the coffee shop, or in some space where someone just snapped in front of us and we all watched it.
Olga Khazan: Yes. So one of the experts that I talked to you called this high stress, low reward situations. I don’t think being at the Oscars meets this definition, but you are, you’re more stressed out. There’s more rules about everything. You have to figure out, are you eating inside? Are you eating outside? Oh, does this restaurant even have outdoor seating?
There’s just like a lot more like little hurdles you have to cross for everything. And then whenever you actually do those things, it’s like always slightly less rewarding because there’s like the threat of COVID. Maybe someone did get COVID and had to cancel. Like, it’s a little bit crappier when you actually do it, and I think that that is adding a lot of stress to people.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That phrase stuck with me because there’s sort of model here I’d like you to talk about it, right? There’s kind of like a stress battery that can get filled up, or a threshold we cross, right, that we’re carrying a certain load of stress. And when you just turn everyone stress up, you are going to get more aberrant behavior. You’re going to get more acting out. But there’s actually just a pretty neat Occam’s razor theory of what’s happening here.
Olga Khazan: Yes. So Christine Porath, who’s this one business professor that I talk to, who studies just rudeness mostly in the workplace, but it kind of applies elsewhere. So she has found that the number one reason why people behave in a rude way or in an uncivil way is because they’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed. And so, it’s not just that like someone is rude to you and you’re rude back directly to them. It’s just that you feel crappy. You feel overwhelmed. We’ve all had those days when you’re like, I can’t take one more like freaking, and suddenly, one more freaking thing happens and you snap. And so, that is part of what’s happening. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And I think about it in the parenting context. And there’s a bold Louis C.K. who obviously, subsequently, has revealed to have been acting really in gross and awful ways after he told this joke. But it’s a joke I always think of about like before you’re a parent and you watch like a parent yelling at a kid in a public space, you’re like, “What’s wrong with that parent?” And then when you’re a parent and you watch a parent yelling at a kid in a public space, you’re like, “What did that kid do?”
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Because you don’t until you’re carrying around that low level of parental stress, just a stress of maybe you’re sleep deprived, you’re just constantly worried about where your kid is and what their safety is, and blah, blah. You don’t understand this sort of snapping. And then when you see it in someone else, and you’re not subjectively exposed to it, it looks so harsh and nuts. Like, we’ve all had that experience of watching a parent lose it on a kid. And I’m not talking violence, I’m just talking to like yelling, where you’re like, whoa.
And then I think a lot of parents have had the experience of being the one yelling and being like, right? It just comes from cumulative stress. And the pandemic has produced not just in terms of the stress of the worry of getting it, but just the level of hassle, logistical. Even cognitive load has gone way up.
Olga Khazan: Yes. So with like daycares closing, schools, kids having to be out of school, I don’t have kids so I’m totally riffing here and I’m sorry, parents, if I get this experience wrong. But I think that’s just like a level of childcare and like logistical stuff that parents didn’t have to deal with in the “before times.”
And so like, one of the other people that I talked to just said that anger, it’s a matter of how many provocations you encounter, and your mood when you encounter them. And so people are just encountering a lot more of those provocations, whether it’s someone refusing to wear a mask, or if you’re an anti-mask and they’re making you wear a mask, and also your mood when that happens. And like, in a lot of cases, you’ve just been like sitting in your house or doing not very preferable activity when you’re being provoked. So yes, people are naturally getting angrier.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s one level, right? So this is the level of like rudeness that we’re talking about, people snapping, angry and yelling. Then there’s like the really big high stakes stuff. Here are the things that I think fit in that category. Homicides have gone up, have spiked. Auto fatalities have spiked, like I said, even after sort of traffic levels normalized a bit. Overdoses have spiked.
These are all different kinds of destructive in some cases, self-destructive, or destructive, or reckless, or high risk-seeking dangerous behavior under very different kinds of places and regimes, like once in a car, in public. Overdoses tend to be in private. Homicides are not individual, but necessarily intrapersonal. So they have different features. But they do have in common danger, recklessness, risk, destructiveness, and I wonder what you’re reporting or you’re thinking about this real high stakes category says.
Olga Khazan: Yes. So there’s a number of things going on there. So it’s all the ones that you mentioned, plus actually also aggravated assaults, road rage, shootings, car thefts, and in some cities carjackings. So basically, yes, like all of the kind of scary crimes where like often a gun is involved or going up. So one, really big one is just that people bought a ton of guns in 2020, in particular. It’s now leveled off a little bit, but there’s one figure that there’s about 15 million more guns in circulation now than there would have been, had there not been that big increase in gun purchasing during the pandemic.
Chris Hayes: And that was driven by this kind of “Holy crap, the end is near, zombie apocalypse.” Is that our best understanding of the motivation there?
Olga Khazan: Yes. So gun purchases, as people probably know, often go up during, honestly, like times that you wouldn’t expect. So even after like mass shootings, gun purchases go up. So yes, I think a lot of people had this feeling like “I don’t actually support this,” but they felt like they had to like protect their home and protect their homestead, or whatever. And so, they kind of armed up. And also some people are afraid that the government will pass laws that will restrict them from buying guns in those moments. So they will kind of arm up in order to kind of already have their guns in place.
Chris Hayes: Right. So there’s the first person fear of society is going to crumble as the zombie apocalypse pandemic happens. And also, the tyrannical Fauci regime is going to come in and ban guns, so I better stock up now.
Olga Khazan: Yes, exactly. Yes. And so, once you have those guns, obviously, that doesn’t like make you go out and kill people. But it just increases the likelihood of homicides. And indeed, like, a lot more guns with a short time to crime window were recovered in 2020 than previously.
Chris Hayes: Say more about that stat because that jumped out at me as well, because I’m thinking a lot about it in the context of the homicide situation and gun availability, that time to crime statistic.
Olga Khazan: Yes. So time to crime is guns recovered within a year of their purchase. And this was kind of new to me, so this is not new to people. It’s a little bit niche. But it just basically means that the speculation is that if they were recovered soon after purchase, they were almost immediately kind of used in crimes. So you also had more guns being used in murders in 2020. So it kind of implies that it’s also causing crimes, and not just people kind of keeping a gun in their home.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And the thing about guns is it’s a little like molecules of carbon, which is that once it gets in the atmosphere, they stick around for a while. I mean, the thing about guns is unlike many of the things you purchase these days which break very rapidly, like, the 9.99 juicer that you may have gotten off Amazon, which will maybe last you three months or whatever, like there’s so much disposable junk that we purchase.
Guns are unbelievably durable. And so when a gun gets manufactured, and then it gets purchased, it stays in circulation for a very, very long time and can have many different lives, many different owners. It can pass through family members. It can pass through black markets. It can pass through private sales. There’s a lot of lives that gun can take on. And the statistic, the time to crime that we saw at an all-time low was like people buying guns and then being used in crimes almost right away.
Olga Khazan: Right. So in 2020, 77% of murders involved firearms, compared to 73% in 2019. So I know that doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but it does imply that more of those guns are being used in homicides.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And we’ve also seen a little bit of untethering between non-gun homicides and gun homicides, which usually rise and fall roughly equivalently. In the last year statistics, we saw those become untethered a little bit, which also suggests that like, again, one of the forcing mechanisms here is a ton of guns got introduced to America in the pandemic year, and we’re still reckoning with that.
Olga Khazan: Yes. And I think, unfortunately, I mean, yes, we saw like three awful kind of mass shootings in a row just recently. And I think, yes, so just like what you’re saying, we’re kind of still seeing the aftereffects of this huge burst in gun purchasing.
Chris Hayes: What about the other areas, so auto fatalities and overdoses?
Olga Khazan: Yes. So this is another thing, people have been coping with the pandemic through self-medication. In particular, drinking, Americans have been drinking 14% more days a month. And binge drinking has increased by 21%. So honestly, what some of these experts told me is that people are getting drunk and driving, or they are getting drunk going to the airport. And some people when they get drunk, they get really aggressive. So some of these kind of like crazy passenger videos that you’re seeing is just someone who’s really, really drunk. And if you’ll notice, a lot of airlines stopped serving alcohol.
Chris Hayes: Yes, they did during the pandemic. In fact, they did during the pandemic. At first, it was really interesting. This was like in 2021, travel was super restricted, right? Very, very few flights happening. There’s not a lot of people flying around. Initially, they’re like, “We’re restricting drinking on airports because you have to pull your mask down and this is a sort of infectious disease issue. And then a few months later, they brought it back and they’re like, “Oh, no, no, no. Like, you can’t be trusted with booze. You maniacs.” And then they kept that for a while.
Olga Khazan: Yes. I mean, honestly, it’s maybe not the worst idea because, I mean, what I do, I do have occasional drink. But a lot of this stuff can be attributed to substance abuse. And also getting help for things like drug and alcohol addiction became harder for parts of the pandemic because things like AAA meetings and stuff like that, obviously people couldn’t gather. So a lot of this was just like kind of a rampant kind of people drinking and using drugs at home, kind of thing.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: The part of your article where like people are just drinking a lot more and that explains a lot of it, really clicked for me for a few reasons. One is I definitely drink more during the pandemic. During the depths of it particularly, I was definitely drinking more. I mean, I was never drinking at a problem level. But I was drinking more than I normally do, for sure. And have now since subsequently gone back to like the previous amount, but like I definitely drank more during the pandemic.
And again, I think high levels of stress, people tend to use substances to alleviate it more. Again, this is like pretty Occam’s razor stuff. But then the other thought I had was just like, what you’re talking about, like maybe just a lot more people are drunk in public, that the vibe that you’re getting, when I’m describing this weird vibe of like fraught public conflict, it’s the vibe of like the street at 2 a.m. when the bars let out.
Olga Khazan: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, that’s the kind of vibe. Because in those contexts, you’re prepared for it because people are drunk and they’re acting out and they’re wiling out. And there’s like maybe a confrontation between a bouncer and someone who’s like completely faced. It’s that, what you’re used to, in that context, showing up at like kid’s little league game, or the coffee shop. But I never thought of it of like, oh, maybe people are just a lot drunker, until I read your article.
Olga Khazan: Yes. I mean, yes, my colleague Kate Julian wrote a good article about drinking rates, and she’s kind of more the expert on this. But yes, she kind of talks about how like alcohol, it can actually be great for socializing, and like bringing people together. And like, it makes people a lot happier when they’re together as a group. But like drinking a ton by yourself, while not talking to anyone for months is like generally not considered great for mental health.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a similar story, I think, with drugs. I mean, part of what’s happening we should say with the overdose situation is that there’s been a replacement of synthetics for other opioids. So fentanyl is just way deadly. It’s way harder to manage doses of. It’s producing way more overdoses. And a huge part of what’s happening here isn’t necessarily behavioral, it’s chemical. But there’s a behavioral component, it seems to me too, which is that in the same way that people were using alcohol a lot more, they were using other drugs a lot more during the pandemic.
Olga Khazan: Right. And just a lot more of those, like especially in the early part of the pandemic, when it was harder to get to doctors for other non-COVID kind of help, I think it also became harder to get addiction treatment too, especially the kind of addiction treatment that relies on groups, and people actually coming together and sharing their stories. A lot of that kind of shut down for a while.
Chris Hayes: Right. So you’ve got the complete absence of support mechanisms that go away. And then what I think is an important point to think about here is that reverberates afterwards, right? Because I think that one of the things we’re struggling with now, as I speak to you in the spring of ‘22, is like everything shut down really suddenly. Like, the pandemic started incredibly suddenly, right?
Like, there were the health beats from China, and then from Lombardy, Italy, and then before you knew it, it was like, “Well, wait, we’re just canceling everything. We’re all staying in our homes.” I think people want that to be the case on the other end. Like, opening day, like we’re closed and now we’re open.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things I think that we’ve seen is that the disruptions create these kinks that take a while to get out. So like, even if it was the case, that you’re someone who was cut off from your support system, whether through AAA, or drug treatment for five or six months, two years ago, that might reverberate for a long time.
Olga Khazan: Oh, yes, totally. And I think that it’s really hard understanding people who are behaving in all these antisocial ways. But it is really hard to just go from “It’s a deadly disease, like avoid it at all costs. Everything is shut down” to like, “It’s totally fine. You don’t need to wear a mask anymore. Like, just come back to this bar and act totally normal.” And I think, yes, there is going to be like this weird gray zone where people are kind of like readjusting back into society.
Chris Hayes: And to get back to that, so we’ve talked about higher levels of stress, higher levels of substance. There’s also just social isolation itself, which obviously went up dramatically. And part of the thing that you say is that that changes us too and creates its own aftereffects even when the social isolation is removed.
Olga Khazan: Yes. And this is the most nebulous one that is the hardest for me to say in like a statistical way. But there’s just something about social isolation that is bad for people. And sociologists will just kind of tell you that when people are kind of forced to be by themselves, they start to think a lot more about what’s best for themselves and their own private interests and not what’s best for our society.
And so a lot of what you’re seeing is like just people prioritizing their own self-interests over everyone else, and kind of what’s most convenient for me, what’s best for me, how do I protect myself and my family, as opposed to, how do I act like a normal person? And I think that’s the crux of a lot of it. Because like a lot of this stuff is not like someone killing someone else, hopefully. A lot of it is just like someone behaving in a really rude way or in a really unacceptable way. But that’s because you kind of got out of practice of like how to treat other people with respect.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And I think also, just to your point about social isolation being, I mean, a lot of people were alone. Like, I was with my family during that period. But a lot of people were alone, a lot of people in America living alone. In fact, Eric Klinenberg has written about this. He wrote a great book about people living alone, which reached all-time high levels in the U.S. He’s a sociologist.
Rebecca Traister actually has written about women and women living alone, which are higher levels again for sort of different reasons. There’s kind of different parts of the age spectrum that people are living alone. And some people are living alone willingly, and some are doing it against their will and are lonely and wish they were around other people.
But for this, I’m writing a book right now. And for a chapter of the book, where I’m writing in part about boredom. I’ve been reading accounts of solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is the most extreme version of social isolation that exists in American life, basically. And it’s just unfathomably destructive to the human soul. Like, this is just a social fact about us. Like, it’s bad to be alone for extended periods of time, particularly against your will. I mean, if you’re going to go and do a retreat, or that’s what you want to do and you’re choosing it affirmatively. But to be alone in social isolation against your will is rough on humans.
Olga Khazan: Yes. I mean, so this is where this sociologist from the early 20th century, who I really like, Emile Durkheim comes in. And he talks about how we are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings. And essentially, he has written a lot about how, when there’s a lot of change in society and the rules become unclear, people kind of stopped feeling connected with each other and they kind of stopped following the rules of society. You kind of behave in these kind of unusual ways and in some of the ways that we’ve been seeing, unfortunately.
So I don’t know, I think there is something to that. And especially like in the early part of the pandemic, I really felt for my friends who were single because the message really was like if you go on a date, you might die. So you had no choice. I mean, you could do Zoom happy hours, I guess. But that was sort of the closest approximation.
Chris Hayes: There’s also something you said about mental illness, because I think we should talk about mental illness. Because I think there are higher rates of mental illness during the pandemic. But mental illness is a very amorphous term, it gets thrown around a lot. It’s such massive. If you talk about like physical illness, and physical illness includes everything from like allergies to terminal cancer. It’s not really a useful category.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: If you’re just like, “Well, he has physical illness.” And you’re like, “Well, does he have allergies or pancreatic cancer,” right? So when we say like, well, mental illness, it’s like, well, I have mental illness. Like, I have diagnosed anxiety. I’ve been taking Lexapro for 15 years. Like, if someone is like, “Well, Chris Hayes is mentally ill,” like that has a connotation that’s very different than like, “Oh, yes, he’s on Lexapro.”
So I think that category, and particularly the category that when it gets wielded in the wake of mass shootings, or increases in violence, interpersonal violence, can be really destructive. So you speak about that specifically in the piece. Like, what do you want to say about that? What did you find about that?
Olga Khazan: Yes. So this is a very, very tricky one because I have to like validate a lot of experiences, but also be really clear about what the data shows. So it’s true that anxiety and depression went up during the pandemic. I think that’s a surprise to no one. People who are anxious and depressed don’t tend to like commit a lot of crimes. Like, they kind of sit at home by themselves.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I just want to stress this, anxiety and depression are not very good predictors of criminal activity, or we should say crime is another fuzzy category.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about like interpersonal violence, particularly, right?
Olga Khazan: Sure.
Chris Hayes: These are not predictors of interpersonal violence in any sort of reliable fashion.
Olga Khazan: Right. So some people who got COVID did develop psychosis for the first time in their lives. But that was also a very small percentage of the population. There’s like some evidence that people who have untreated psychosis can be violent. However, it’s still such a small percentage of the population that people with psychosis are thought to commit only like 3% to 5% of all violence in society. So they can’t really explain all of this increase in outbursts and violence that happened. So I just want to be very clear.
Chris Hayes: Correct. Right. So certain forms of mental illness went up, anxiety and depression. The forms of mental illness that went up are not at all predictors or drivers of interpersonal violence. There’s some small, very small in a relative sense, number of folks that may have gotten psychosis, which could be more directly related to predictive of interpersonal violence from COVID. But that’s just too small a number to mean much in either way.
Particularly, we’re talking about a 20% increase in homicides. There’s enormous jumps. So it just doesn’t pencil out —
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like what’s driving the things we’re seeing, particularly these big things like auto fatalities, and interpersonal violence, aggravated assault and homicide that’s happening from an increase in mental illness.
Olga Khazan: Yes, exactly. And so for what it’s worth, according to the FAA, most of these unruly passenger incidents on planes were mask-related. So if you think about it, like, that’s someone who’s just saying, “I don’t want to wear a mask,” not someone who thinks that like someone invisible is chasing them, which is like something you’d consider to be psychosis. So that again suggests it’s more just like someone’s personal preferences rather than mental illness.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Don’t sleep on being a jerk as a category of human behavior. That’s distinct from mental illness as a diagnosable pathology among humans. So now, we’ve talked about like a bunch of this stuff, right? You don’t talk about this in the piece, but I want to talk about it, and so I’m just curious to get your thoughts on this because you spent time thinking about this.
So I think there’s also a lot of really interesting positive antisocial behavior, and I think it grows out of the same set of things. So antisocial behavior can be personally good or even morally good. So let me give you an example. There’s a period of time 1950s, for instance, right, where a woman leaving an abusive husband would be like antisocial behavior.
Olga Khazan: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, it would be profoundly contrary to social expectations and social norms to leave a husband who was abusive, because the social expectation is you stay. But in hindsight, we think like that was the correct thing to do. There are two categories of activities that I think fall in this today, which is forming a union and quitting jobs, where they’re antisocial in the sense of like they are a kind of rebellions against social expectation. They aren’t kind of rebellions against existing norms and authority structures. But I think often, to the good.
But we’ve also seen a huge uptick in that, right? Like, the Great Recession, job quits, union organizing, I think in some ways, that’s the happy side of a similar coin of people just being like, “Screw it. I won’t do what you tell me.”
Olga Khazan: Yes. And I don’t want to take this podcast over for like DSM definitions. But usually when psychiatrists talk about antisocial, I know it sounds like, “Oh, you’re someone who likes to stay inside and play video games.” But they actually mean it’s against society. So you’re like hurting people, basically. Like, maybe not violently, but you’re like doing something to harm others. So what you described, yes, it’s more like rebellion.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes. Right, antisocial not in the DSM sense.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I should say, I don’t mean it. I mean, right, rebellion, like subverting social expectations about what is and isn’t done, what is and isn’t taboo, and who you should listen to and who has authority over you, right? And I think we’ve seen lots of that as well.
Olga Khazan: Oh, totally. Yes. And so, with that, I completely agree with you that we’ve seen a lot more people kind of reevaluating almost like their day-to-day routines and thinking about, is this really the job I want? Are these really the job conditions that I want? Is this really how I want to be spending my time? Like, anecdotally, I’ve heard from people that they’ve had a lot of like friend shakeups. Like, they’ve both made new friends, but they’ve also kind of disrupted friendships.
And I think some of that can be okay. Like, you kind of want to think about like, it’s a pandemic, who do I want to be spending my time with, and how do I want to be spending my time? So I would say that that is all on the positive side of people kind of rethinking their lives.
Chris Hayes: Yes. I should also say that union organizing is incredibly pro-social in the sense that is a social activity. It’s not an individual activity. It requires bonds of trust to be formed among people who are struggling together. And that’s all like really hard to do, and really hard to forge, and a remarkable thing. I mean, I’ve covered labor for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this moment. So there is something going on. And I want to say, in some sense, it’s also related to the disruption that we face and the reverberations after it, but in a kind of, to me, inspiring, pro-social way. That’s the kind of flipside of auto fatalities.
Olga Khazan: Oh, I totally agree. Yes. But I think that kind of thing requires a lot of like actually caring about other people and like thinking about other people because like, The Atlantic has a union. That’s not a secret. And like, it involves a ton of like, “Well, what do you think?”
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s the opposite of social isolation.
Olga Khazan: Yes, exactly. Yes. All we do is like talk to each other. So yes, I agree that that’s been a positive side of this.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I think too, like the other thing that I’ve been thinking about and this doesn’t quite show up in the piece that you wrote. But like, I think Betsey Stevenson is an economist who worked in the Obama administration. And she’d had a conversation with Ezra Klein about this, about calling it like the life is too short economy. But there’s a kind of genre of inspirational talk from a person who had a near death experience, whether they survived cancer, or they were in a car accident, or they had some near death tragedy, where they come out, and I find these quite gripping actually.
This genre, I like reading these or listening to these accounts, where they say, like, “Yes, I was in the hospital bed and almost lost it all. And I thought about what really matters, and what really matters isn’t working 16 hours a day, what really matters isn’t the kind of I sports car drive, yada, yada, yada, whatever version of that is. That like, everyone in the society kind of had an attenuated version of that.
Like, the idea of your physical health. I mean, I will say for myself. People will ask me some times now, I’m 43 years old, in the pandemic, they say, “How are you doing?” And I say a thing that old people in my youth used to say. I always thought I was like a very old person to say, which is like, “We’re all healthy.” That’s my first response. People say, “How are you doing?” I’d say like, “We’re healthy. The kids are healthy. Kate and I are healthy. We’re happy. We love each other.” Like, I’ll say these, as opposed to pre-pandemic, I’d be like, “Oh, I mean, I’ve launched new podcast. We’re doing some live shows. Kate is going to go give this paper at this place.”
And I was very particular about like what the goals and projects and work product was, when people would ask me how I’m doing or how I would assess my life. And now, I really do think of like, wow, another day, I’m healthy and I can draw breath. And my kids are healthy. Serious.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And it makes me feel super old because that is such a like grandma answer to it. But I do think the pandemic had a bit of that effect on all of us, of like encountering your own mortality, ordering things of value, thinking about like what really matters in life. And I do think that there has been a social aspect to that as well.
Olga Khazan: Yes. It’s funny. So I also have a podcast and for it, we interviewed this researcher who focuses on regret. And so, first of all, you’re right. Like, most people, when they think back on life, they regret like not spending more time with loved ones. Basically, they have more like relationship-oriented regrets than they do work-oriented regrets. So that’s one point for like going and hanging out with your friends.
But the other thing is that like the way people start to reframe their regrets is like, it could always be worse, basically, which is like I always thought was really simplistic. And it’s like what your grandma tells you when you’re in a bad mood, like, “It could be worse.” But I think a lot of people are thinking that now. With the pandemic, it’s just sort of like, well, at least, I don’t have COVID. At least, I didn’t die of COVID. At least, I have a house. Maybe some level of that is like actually protective and actually good.
Chris Hayes: But then, listen, that relates to like the larger macro question here, right? So I think just to establish, I think, what’s clear and what’s not like more and more. So what’s clear is that there was a social disruption that was unprecedented in our lives, maybe really in history, honestly, because things didn’t shut down like this for the flu pandemic. World War II or World War I are probably the closest, but those are very different. They’re society-wide, but not quite in the same way because there’s this real distinction between people fighting abroad and those who are not.
Maybe there’s a little bit of that with healthcare workers in our own experience in the pandemic. I think you can make that analogy. So whatever you want to say, it’s a level of social disruption that really hadn’t happened in 40, 50, 60 years. That has consequences and effects. There’s all kinds of data we can point to, showing that all kinds of forms of behavioral distress, right, and antisocial, in the technical sense, behavior increase, right? And we can measure that in violence and homicides, and auto fatalities and in overdoses.
There’s also all kinds of social disruption that happened, right? Like all kinds of crazy things happen, like remote work happened, people not being in school, kids not being in school, huge patterns of behavior, commutes, all this stuff got affected. And now, there’s this thing of like the vibes, which is like the macro sense. Like, I saw that there’s polling the other day, that was like right track, wrong track numbers, and the 75% wrong track, at 16% I think is right track.
And I’ve been thinking about this because at one level, it’s like, I kind of feel that too, which is that I feel like personally more grateful for my health and happiness and family than I ever had. But I probably also feel more bummed about the state of the country than I have ever. I don’t know like what you think about that. Is there a connection between the kind of stuff you’re seeing at the micro level, right? Like, people are drinking more. People are more socially isolated. Are people having more social conflict? Are people having more violence? And the macro sense of like the country’s destiny or the vibes.
Olga Khazan: Yes. That’s an interesting question. So one thing that I looked at last night and thought was interesting was that trust stuff is really low in the U.S., which is like similar to right track, wrong track. And there’s this criminologist who found that the murder rate ever since World War II has tracked really closely with the number of Americans who say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right. It’s like very closely correlated. I think that people just like do not trust each other right now.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Olga Khazan: And you’re seeing that kind of play out in all of these different ways. And I do not know how to grow the trust again. It’s like very complicated and challenging. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes. So I think the high trust, low trust is actually the skeleton key for all of American socio-political life right now, actually. First of all, I think high trust, low trust explains variance in COVID response. Generally speaking, high trust countries did well, and low trust countries did poorly. And we’re a low trust country.
Also, high trust, low trust, the country is polarizing between high trust and low trust. Increasingly, Democrats are the high trust party and Republicans are the low trust party in terms of people’s level of trust. Trust is polarizing around education. So people who are college educated tend to be high trust. People that are not, tend to be low trust. And that’s one of the sorting mechanisms of American life is trust and education polarization stacking on top of each other, to produce.
And when you get back to that mask question, when airlines are saying like, “Actually, a lot of this was about masks,” that, to me, is where the rubber hits the road on these trust questions —
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — where like, do you trust other people to not give you an infectious disease, to take precautions, to respect your personal autonomy? Like, whatever the question is, that, to me, is the thing that got exposed in the pandemic that we haven’t put back together, which is that we are a low trust society with declining levels of trust, and that the pandemic, which is an opportunity to stitch it back together ended up rendering it further asunder.
Olga Khazan: Yes. I mean, I totally agree with you. Yes. I think on the Republican side, it’s like a very, very low trust there. Every time I interview Republicans, I do feel like there was just a lot more kind of distrust of journalists, the whole media, just any kind of institution of institutions.
Chris Hayes: All institutions, public health, education. I mean, literally, the deep state, the CIA, the woke Pentagon, the education, teachers, I mean, the level of distrust is like almost omnidirectional.
Olga Khazan: You got to hate the woke pentagon. But I also think that liberals, because of that, I think when there was like a mass refusal to wear masks or to get vaccines, I think a lot of liberals felt like, “Well, hey, wait a minute. I don’t really trust you to not have COVID right now, or to protect me and my family from COVID before we had the vaccines.” And so I think it did kind of push people further apart on trust, and also make both sides less trusting.
Chris Hayes: The thing that I’ll also say is that trust, Durkheim actually writes a bit about this, but others too, it’s hard to run a low trust democracy. I mean, this is where the stakes get very high and where the rubber really hits the road. Democracies are built on trust. And it’s very hard to run low trust democracies and to self-govern with low trust. And that’s really where we’re at right now.
There is a relationship between the decline of trust and low trust, and democratic decline, in my humble opinion. And this touches back to a book I wrote a decade ago, my first book called “Twilight of the Elites,” which is about the crisis of authority in American life and declining trust in institutions. But all this stuff to me, like they’re unraveling why people are acting so weird. It’s like a micro story.
And the macro story, to me, that’s like along the same continuum. When you aggregate up the micro stories of the coffee shops, and the hockey leagues, and the airplanes is the state of American democracy being what it is. And I think those two are on an aggregate continuum.
Olga Khazan: Oh, absolutely. It’s interesting. I actually wrote another article about vaccine rates and what explains like different vaccine rates in countries and its levels of trust. It’s basically like very low trust countries have very low levels of vaccination. And Russia, I mean, is now in the news for something else.
Chris Hayes: It’s us and Russia.
Olga Khazan: Yes. Russia is like a very low trust society. And even though it had a vaccine that people didn’t trust for obvious reasons, but very few Russians have taken it because they don’t trust their government. They don’t trust Putin, probably for good reason. But you kind of see where that kind of spirals out too in a very low trust society.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And in fact, I saw one statistic which shows us and Russia are sort of in our own category in vaccination rates, among sort of similarly grouped countries, which is striking, because I think that there’s also an enormous trust issue. I mean, I’m going to ask you to make a prediction which is just like we’re just talking here, just as chickens, but like I’m of two minds, right?
One is that like there’s a phase shift happening here in a bunch of different ways. There are all sorts of things that are going to change and stay changed. The other is that like time heals all wounds and disruption goes away. And in the latter category, I’ve been looking back recently in 1946 and just reading stuff about ‘46. And you would think like 1946 would be a happy time in American life. Like, you just beat Hitler. The war is over. The boys are back. Bailey was on the front and now he’s back. Here’s his baby boy he’s never met. And the iconic Times Square kissing scene, right?
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that’s ‘45 obviously. But like a year later, like ‘46 is actually like a horrible year in America, like really dyspeptic, disgruntled year, very wrong track numbers, huge on inflation, big recession. Democrats get wiped out in the midterms. People think Truman is a dead man walking.
Going into ‘48, huge backlash politics, it’s the end of the New Deal Coalition, yada, yada, yada, yada. And the story is that like there was a lot of disruption. And it didn’t all just like snap back happily in 1946. Like, things felt disrupted. There weren’t enough homes for all the soldiers that came back.
Olga Khazan: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Housing inflation, like, there was all these women had been working in the factories. Now, they weren’t. Now, who’s going to get those jobs. There was racial strife over the fact that like black folks had been in those factories, and now they’re getting kicked back out. Like, it didn’t all just snap back to the way things were in the before times.
And yet, if you go forward to ’49, ’50, ‘51, that’s when you start getting the like picturesque 1950s Cold War America vibes, which again we’re shot through with racial hierarchy and gender hierarchy. But I do wonder, like, which of those two we’re in, right? Like, is this like the stuff is going to work itself out? And a year or half from now, it will sort of feel like, oh, yes, that was weird. Then we had that period, remember during pandemic? Or we’ll be like, “Yes, no one goes to the office anymore.” I don’t know which of those two it is.
Olga Khazan: Yes. I mean, I don’t know, because I think the other thing that is layered on top of that, that makes it even worse than 1946 is just media fragmentation.
Chris Hayes: Good point. Yes.
Olga Khazan: I think like the people who are listening to this are not reading Gateway Pundit and vice versa. And I —
Chris Hayes: Oh, but you don’t know my listeners. How dare you. How dare you.
Olga Khazan: I’m speculating here. And I do not know the answer to this. But I worry that the types of facts and information that people are getting are so wildly different, that we do not share a reality anymore. And so it’s like very hard to even talk to someone and say, “Hey, here’s what I think is happening. Like, can you try to agree with like 30% to 40% of this?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Olga Khazan: Like that is, to me, increasingly hard.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And maybe that’s the sort of Rossmann answer. Like, there’s no single answer to what it will go back to or what it was, particularly as things balkanize.
Olga Khazan is the author of “Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.” And she also wrote a great piece for The Atlantic called “Why Are People Acting So Weird?” I guess you’re a weirdness expert, is your calling card. She hosts “How to Start Over,” an Atlantic podcast. You should check that out. That was a delightful conversation, Olga. Thank you very much.
Olga Khazan: Yes. Thanks so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Olga Khazan. That was a fascinating conversation. You should send us your thoughts on this, how you’ve experienced this kind of social disruption, whether in first person or things you’ve observed. I’d love to hear them. Maybe we’ll share some in the podcasts. So tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. And be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion, Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.