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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. What's up with us? From the slap, and you know which one I mean, to the freakouts on airplanes, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert outbursts during the state of the union address, even just that they were there having been elected to Congress maybe.

We seem to be embracing rudeness and more often crossing a line into outright violence. Everyone is acting so weird as Olga Khazan puts it in the first sentence of her recent essay in The Atlantic. Her beat for The Atlantic is science and health, and she knows a thing or two about Weird. It's the title of her first book. That's just out in paperback.

She's here to share some theories about what's going on with us. Us meaning our society as a whole. We want to hear your theories and your stories. Are you finding yourself behaving worse? Are you seeing it in others? Why do you think that is? For our older listeners, do you remember ever going through a similarly crazy time as a society, and how did that end, or is this unprecedented in your experience? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we welcome back to the show Olga Khazan from The Atlantic. Hi, Olga. Thanks for coming on today.

Olga Khazan: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting article, very thought-provoking, and I threw the politics in there. When you wrote everyone is acting so weird, what egregiously antisocial behaviors did you mostly have in mind?

Olga Khazan: The slap at the Oscars was obviously the thing that everyone was talking about. You basically can't open social media these days without seeing another viral video of someone screaming at a flight attendant, or a gate agent about a mask, or some other reason. There were even some viral videos of people freaking out at ski resorts.

On top of that actually, more serious incidents like violent crime is on the rise, in particular, the murder rate. Anecdotally I'm hearing from a lot of people that disruptive behavior in classrooms and in healthcare settings is also up. I just got the sense that everyone is freaking out.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned your book whose full title is Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. I guess weird in that context is more strange and out of step. Not really the mean, rude, raised by wolves, which is probably unfair to wolves, type of behaviors that we're seeing, right?

Olga Khazan: Yes. My book is about social norms so it is a little bit-- My book is about how being weird is a good thing, but these people are behaving weird in a bad way. The similarity is social norms and how I think social norms have really just changed in recent months. Somehow people got the idea that all bets are off and the rules don't apply.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start unpacking some of what the experts you consulted suggested might be behind this, the pandemic, and why. There are many strands to follow there starting, I guess, with masks and just the physical effect of not seeing all of someone's face.

Olga Khazan: I don't want to overstate things here. I'm not an anti-masker, I've worn a mask the entire past two years. There are some drawbacks to not being able to see someone's face just like a lot of people who are on social media know that it's much easier to yell at someone. If you're just seeing a picture of them on Facebook or if you are just texting with them or whatever else.

It's a lot easier to express rage at someone when you're not seeing their full face. One thing that one of the experts that I spoke with suggested is that you're not really seeing someone's full humanity. You're only seeing their eyes. You might not be how exactly your actions are affecting them. That might be part of why people are behaving in this very antisocial way.

Brian Lehrer: Then the fact that someone isn't going to let you on the plane or in a store without one, that can be provoking?

Olga Khazan: Yes. Again, not defending people who are easily provoked by mask mandates, but as one of the psychiatrist, Keith Humphreys put it to me the pandemic has created a lot of high-stress, low reward situations. There's just a lot of things that were already stressful like getting on a flight and boarding a plane, and putting your thing up on the carry-on area and everything.

Now it's even more stressful because you have to remember your mask, and if you're flying internationally you might have to get tested for COVID. People just have all of these extra stressors on them that are pushing them a little bit closer to their breaking point.

Brian Lehrer: High stress, low rewards. We pay huge cost and not bending our lives just to not get sick, not to end up better than before.

Olga Khazan: Yes, exactly. A lot of the ways that we would relieve stress or that we still do relieve stresses by hanging out with friends, or taking vacations, or going out to eat. All of those things are harder now. You're going to encounter that someone may be in your friend circle wants to eat outside, you have to find a place with outdoor dining. If it's raining, do you have to find a new restaurant? There's just all these extra hoops to jump through. I feel like a lot of people are just teetering a little bit closer to the edge than they were before.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners are definitely reacting to this. Our lines are full. People are tweeting. One word that a listener tweets is pressed. A listener writes, "I've noticed people have been pressed. I attribute it to folks being locked up in COVID for two years and warming temps because of climate change, shortening fuses, and simmering tempers." Then you write that one word that describes this behavior is antisocial.

Which brings up another pandemic effect, our being untethered, another word that you use, untethered to the social by lockdowns, not going to school, to the office, to the church, synagogue, mosque, mass transit. You quote Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson is saying, "When we become untethered, we tend to prioritize our own private interests over those of others or the public." That makes us ruder, you think?

Olga Khazan: Yes. Robert Sampson has studied why some neighborhoods are thriving and functional and why some have high crime rates. This is speculation on his part, but he thinks that when people are off on their own, they're not interacting with anyone else. They tend to mostly think about themselves and what's suited for them, and how do they maximize their own well-being?

I think that's true. I think that if you're not seeing anyone, if you're not out and about, if you're hold up in your house, you do start to get in me versus them mentality. Suddenly when you go to the airport, you're not thinking about, "How can I make this flight just smooth for everyone." You're thinking about, "Well, I don't want to wear a mask so I'm not going to." I could see how that would happen.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear a few stories. People are calling in. Mabel in Trenton you're on WNYC. Hi, Mabel.

Mabel: Hi, I'm glad that you asked this question because I had a big snap-down yesterday at a place where I went to get blood work done for my rheumatologist so I could continue to get my prescriptions. Now in a lot of these places like Labcorp, whatever, they have these flat screens that you have to sign in on. Now, my problem is I have bad eyes and the screen is kind of a glare for me.

I went to the window and asked the person behind there if they could sign me in. They said, "Sure, sure, just take a seat." I have a rollator that I use because I'm disabled. I was sitting there for a while and two other people came in behind me. I asked the girl again. I said, "Hey, could you sign me in please?" She goes, "Yes, we know you're here, just take a seat." I said, "You don't even know my name."

I said, "Two people have come in. They're going to sign in. Now, I'm back two people in front of me even though I was here before." I feel that we're being forced to use these screens and there's less and less human contact. I think that's very stressful that we're not being able to behave towards each other like human beings anymore because everybody's interacting on these screens.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Mabel. Thank you very much. Do you bring up screens? Of course, this is pre-pandemic that people started talking about how we're isolating ourselves into our phones and everything and disconnecting from humanity in that way.

Olga Khazan: Yes. Definitely, we've all been relying a lot more on technology over the past two years, but people out of necessity have just been socializing less. For good reason, because we had these surges and it was really important to not socialize indoors, but that has a cost too. When you interact less with other people, you get worse at it. It has a deleterious effect. I do think that even now if you go to a restaurant you do the menu on the QR code and all that. I feel like that's sticking around. I feel like some of these changes are here to stay.

Brian Lehrer: Christina in Manhattan wants to bring up

another variable that I think you also touch on in your article. Christina, you're on WNYC, hey there?

Christina: Hey Brian, how are you? I think that the pandemic has no doubt created stress for a lot of people, but I also believe that's a big reason people feel entitled to be rude is because of Donald Trump. He opens up this Pandora's box of criticizing people, disabled, poking fun at immigrants, and just basically allowing people to follow his example and be rude. Again, I don't believe that the pandemic is solely to blame for this, I do think it adds stress, but I don't think we're looking at the big picture. I really don't.

Brian Lehrer: Christina, thank you very much. Olga, do you get to this in your article at all? Maybe the arc that we're talking about started in 2016 not with COVID-19.

Olga Khazan: So many people emailed me with this exact comment after the article came out. Obviously, Donald Trump was a non-normative president. He would often say very rude and outlandish things on social media, and I do think that especially among politicians, he sort of reset the bar on how you're supposed to treat each other.

Now when you see politicians accusing each other of crazy things, I definitely think that he had a role to the play in that. I will point out though that he hasn't been president for a while now. Some of this stuff has continued to go on even though he's longer in office. I don't think he can totally be blamed for what's happening.

Brian Lehrer: He may be a reflection of things that were already taking place in society more at the grassroots level. People get elected because people find a resonance and the candidate and if he had that personality. Remember when he was running at first,, there were so many moments where most of the media thought, "Oh, well now he's disqualified himself."

He said Megyn Kelly from Fox News, that thing about her bleeding. That was going to be the end of him. He said that thing about John McCain not really being a hero, people just think he was a hero because he was captured in Vietnam, despite all the suffering that McCain went through being tortured and everything and people thought that was going to be the end of him. Yet those things only wound up making him more popular. They must have resonated in some way with something that was out there.

Olga Khazan: I think that's possible. I was interviewing a Trump supporter, someone who continues to support former President Trump the other day. She was saying, she likes that about him. She likes that stuff that he says. I do think that he didn't inflict this on society that he's in some ways a reflection of society too.

Brian Lehrer: He said that thing about the disabled reporter, people thought that was going to be the end of him. Remember when [inaudible 00:13:19] and it was like, "Oh, that is so gross, that's got to be disqualifying." No, Kevin in Bridgeport is I think calling to respond to the part of my call invitation where I said, if you've lived for a while and you think you may have seen a time like this before, give us a call and compare or tell us how it ended. Kevin you're on WNYC, thanks for calling from Bridgeport today.

Kevin: Hey Brian, thanks for having me. I'm 61 and so I just remember in the late '60s and early '70s of being young, it was a scary time. There was a lot of upheavals, the draft and I didn't know if the draft was going to continue, if the war was going to continue. I had friends being drafted and older friends obviously brothers and stuff like that of friends. Then pollution and drugs and it just seemed a like it was a great time for music and stuff and I'm a musician, but I just was like "Man, I don't know."

There was some scary moments and I was talking to my stepdaughter about those times and saying that, because she was getting a freaked out in the beginning of the pandemic and everything that was going on, but we made it through, we got to the other side of it. This time does feel a little different in terms of, I certainly didn't live through a pandemic before, so it's different in that regard. I also notice there are people that just and I think it's probably been happening as you were just saying, this has been building for a while.

I don't think it just got like a light switched on because of the mask and maybe it's probably a little bit of everything, social media and the things that people are finding that divide us more than what we have in commonality. I was telling the [unintelligible 00:15:20] I noticed that for a long time now. People all of a sudden they're like driving through red lights, they're going left on red lights, it's like it doesn't matter. Also driving down the highway and seeing somebody on a motorcycle with a shirt on that said, "embrace violence."

I was talking to somebody, a friend of mine, "Oh my God like I can't believe that." In 2016 being [unintelligible 00:15:47] and this very tall, strong, healthy-looking guy with fatigues on had a shirt that said, "F Obama," but the whole word just proudly [unintelligible 00:15:57] and I'm like, "Man." There's been some tension that's been going on but I don't want to blame anybody in particular, but I just think it's been pushing what divides us more than what unites us. I assume that isolation and not being around other people in an office setting or just in a--

Brian Lehrer: Kevin, thank you so much for your call, we really appreciate it. You're thinking anything Olga, as somebody who I think is younger than the caller, maybe different generation than the caller. Does he spark anything in you?

Olga Khazan: Yes, it's actually interesting that he brought up the late '60s because I wrote another article about this, which is that this period of time is like very similar to the late '60s. I do think that for whatever reason we're seeing almost like an echo of that period. I wrote this article where I interviewed a former member of the weather underground which was like this, basically like terrorist group that was [unintelligible 00:17:12] bombing things for people who don't know in the late '60s.

They took credit for 25 bombing including at the Capitol and at the Pentagon. It was also just driven by this ambient rage at what was going on in society at the time. I do think that it's very similar to that period of time. Indeed eventually that was an unusually violent and chaotic time, but then things settled down and we saw before the pandemic things were pretty chill and not very violent. I don't know, I'm not totally sure what accounts for certain periods in history being more chaotic and others less.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us is Olga Khazan from The Atlantic. She usually writes about healthcare. Her latest essay in The Atlantic is called Why People Are Acting So Weird and her book just out and paperback is also called wait--, I'm looking for your book title. It's called Weird and I don't have the rest of the title, you could say it.

Olga Khazan: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

Brian Lehrer: That's a good part of weird, you said that at the beginning. What the caller raises, Kevin in Bridgeport, oh actually what you brought up about the '60s bringing up the weatherman group. That violence was political, I think what we're seeing with the crazy driving that Kevin brought up with individual acts of violence. I don't know that everybody figures out so easily why is the murder rate? Why is the shootings rate up in the pandemic?

What's really the relationship between the isolation, the sickness, the stress, the loss, if it was as easy as saying, a lot of people lost their jobs during the pandemic and these were all hold-ups at stores to get stuff, it would be more straightforward. The relationship between driving crazy or shooting people more than before the pandemic, I have trouble connecting the dots?

Olga Khazan: I have two more data points for you that might clarify those two in particular. Gun sales spiked in 2020 and in 2021

and something that I learned that was interesting was that in 2020 police started recovering more firearms within a year of purchase which it's called a time to crime window. Essentially people were buying guns in 2020 and then almost immediately using them in crimes.

You had huge spike in gun purchases and guns don't make you go out and commit crimes but if you have a gun you are more likely to be successful, if you try to murder someone so that could explain the murder rate. The other thing I want to point out is that drinking has gone way up during the pandemic so alcohol deaths are up and then people are also drinking more days per month than they were before. A lot of these car accidents and things and even some of the unruly passenger incidents might just be people being drunk behind the wheel or when they get to the airport.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear what a Buddhist nun thinks. Maybe she's got the response to stress that we all need to hear. Mary who identifies herself as a Buddhist nun is calling from Morris county. Hi Mary you are WNYC.

Mary: Hello, Brian, how are you? I've been listening to you. You've helped a lot of people through the pandemic. I want to thank you for that.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Mary: I came over here in '65 and I went through the riots and everything that happened in America. I understand what you were talking about, the political issues that were going on and the frustration that people were feeling due to the war but is very, very, very different today, very, very, very different. People are feeling intense fear.

I think between the situation that we're hearing, that we know is there with global warming, all of the effects of the pandemic and having no personal resources, very few people know that they can go within and do breathing meditation, simple breathing meditation to change their chemistry, to change their mind.

In the end, that's all we have is to develop a calm and peaceful mind and because those techniques, as simple as they sound are not available, they're not being promoted very often to be a source that we can go to. Especially for instance, if you have rage while you're driving, learning how to breathe through the rage that trips you while you're driving, learning how to pause before you yell at someone.

Taking three breaths before we make a phone call. Taking three breaths before we recognize anything that's disturbing our mind because the thing we need to protect the most is the quality of our mind. All of us want to be happy. All of us want to be free from suffering. Nobody wants to be this way. Even the people that are committing the crime, even the people who are drunk in airports, all of those people, nobody wants to be like this.

It's just an expression of their pain. I think that if we're looking at the other and saying this person's wrong or that person's wrong or whatever, we're missing the boat. People are in pain and they're full of fear, and they don't have the tools to work with, to calm their mind down and to know that they can find inner peace if they want to.

Brian Lehrer: It's wonderfully put Mary and I'll note that the new mayor of New York, Eric Adams is a meditator and talks about being a meditator, but what's the connection as you see it, if you think about this Mary, between the individual and society? Sometimes there's a criticism of people who practice Eastern religion, meditation techniques.

As well, it's easy to feel enlightened if you're sitting by yourself on the top of a mountain, but we have to engage in society and with people and make society better. Individual relaxation techniques aren't ultimately the answer we have to engage. Do you think about the intersection between what you were saying before and that kind of thinking?

Mary: People get this impression that meditators go up to a mountain, but the practice in Buddhist meditation practice, for instance, in my tradition which is a Kadampa tradition is to practice Lamrim [foreign language] and mahāmudrā. Lamrim meditations are-- The Buddha gave 84,000 teachings of how to work with the mind. It's a way of life of learning how to develop loving and kindness. [Foreign language] is how to train the mind and to see how distorted our thinking is and how we can work with like Budhist psychology.

Then mahāmudrā are the higher trainings you could say to enlightenment. I know people who are doing all of this many, many people throughout the world who are doing all of this. I think that people have a misunderstanding of what Buddhism is. Buddhism teaches you how to be compassionate, how to see that we are one cell in the body of life and that what we do, what we think, what we say affects everyone else. It brings us to a place of deep awareness of our own behavior and how that behavior affects the world.

Brian Lehrer: Once again, well said to tie to connectedness rather than disconnectedness in our personal practices. Mary thank you so much for your call, call us again.

Mary: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Olga, you thinking about anything, listening to Mary?

Olga Khazan: Yes, I wish I was better at meditating. I agree that meditating could help the world. I'm really awful at it. I really have a hard time doing it. I've tried and tried, I still can like make myself do it sometimes but I also hold my breath a lot. I don't know if that's an issue for other people, but I agree that if we breathed and didn't scream at each other, it would probably be a better world.

Brian Lehrer: Hold your breath. I think the breathing technique would be to make sure you fully exhale before you take that next breath.

Olga Khazan: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go on a very serious note, I wondered if you want to talk about the weirdness that you must be experiencing now as a Russian immigrant who grew up in west Texas, the atrocities that Russia is being accused of in Ukraine or obviously beyond what we've been discussing here. We've touched certainly on gun violence and things like that, but the level of atrocity that we're seeing in Ukraine is in its own individual category and certainly nothing to be laughed off as people are acting weird.

Like some of the conversation we've been having. I just want to put a bracket around that, but if anything demonstrates for us once again, the terrible cost of unleashing that level of violence and mayhem it's what we're seeing on television emerge. Even as the Russian troops withdraw from some of the places that they had occupied, what's this like for you as a Russian immigrant?

Olga Khazan: It's horrifying. I really honestly never identified strongly as-- I obviously am Russian. It's not really a matter of identifying or not but I never really felt like a strong kinship with Russia, I guess and I feel even less of that today. I can't believe what's happening. It's awful. It's just, every new piece of news is awful to me. I have family, there's a lot of ties between Ukraine and Russia and I have extended family who has friends and family in Ukraine. It's just horrifying. I don't know what else to say.

Brian Lehrer: Olga Khazan usually writes about science and health in the Atlantic. Her latest article is called Why People Are Acting so Weird. Her book now out in paperback is called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. Thanks very much for leading a really interesting conversation.

Olga Khazan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer in WNYC more to come.

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