The Face of Rage

(Graph from BBC article about air rage in the USA)

Last month I had a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong, not worth writing about.

While checking out my wrong hypothesis, I saw that something jawdroppingly extreme is happening in the USA. Media coverage seldom shows how extreme it is, how unusual the nature of it is, and how much it affects society and workplaces. I’ve been reluctant to write about it, keeping my thoughts to myself for a few weeks, but keeping silent is not going to make it go away.

Prevalence

Most people and businesses don’t like insecurity, instability or uncertainty. We’ve had a boatload of all of that in recent years. We’re all ready for smoother sailing. But in both of my countries, a storm seems to be rising instead of cooling down.

Road rage. Air rage. Nastiness, hostility, venomous shouted insults, violence… All of that and more seems to be dramatically on the upswing in the USA. Not that long ago, someone assaulting flight attendants or trying to storm the cockpit of an airliner was shocking. Terrorists did that, not ordinary passengers. Recently it is more and more common in the news, and so is support for at least some of the hostility. Eight Republicans in the U.S. Senate wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Valentine’s Day to oppose the creation of a no-fly list of passengers who attack or threaten airline employees for trying to enforce face mask rules. (There is something especially perverse in using a day normally used to express love as a day to support violence.)

Does it only seem to be surging because I hear more about it, or is it really increasing?

That question led me to look for data, starting with USA statistics from Statista about violent crime such as aggravated assault, normalized to show the rate per 100,000 in the population.

In the USA, it saw an uptick with the radical swing that the GOP began to take in 2015-2016, then a surge in 2020. The rate of murder and non-negligent homicide showed a similar pattern. That’s despite so many people staying home as much as possible during 2020, not being out and about at their usual places. If these big new numbers were driven almost entirely by domestic violence, we could think people blew up at each other after being cooped up together so much. But people weren’t out as much as usual. Opportunities for violent crime other than domestic violence went through the floor, and the rate of violent crime still went through the roof. That’s mind boggling.

Look at the graph of USA air rage incidents at the top of this post. The BBC labeled it Unruly passengers on US flights but it’s only a subset of the most serious episodes. It bumps along in the range of about 100 to 200 per year for a decade, then explodes to 400 in 2021.

The number of air rage incidents serious enough to get FAA investigation is much easier to wrap our heads around than most other statistics about violence. It doesn’t involve many separate police departments with different thresholds and standards. It’s all in one type of environment. It’s a raw number from one federal agency covering one industry, and the data extends into 2021. It’s an easier focus, and it turns out to be even more extreme.

The FAA data at the top of this post, as graphed by the BBC, is only a count of incidents so severe that laws may have been broken. Another way to look at FAA data is by all recorded incidents of unruliness, which Yahoo Finance graphs nicely.

Neither graph tallies episodes per passenger mile. In 2020, flights were dramatically curtailed. In 2021, flights began to resume but passenger counts did not match pre-pandemic levels, as charted by the St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve.

The raw count of incidents in 2020 may not seem high compared with 2021, but when we compare it with the pitifully low number of passenger miles flown that year, it’s dramatic too.

Articles about this in mainstream media don’t begin to show the scale of what is emerging in front of our eyes, and explanations being trotted out in those articles are too wimpy for such a huge and abrupt surge.

Not Street Crime

This is not simply ordinary street crime. It isn’t mainly a surge in muggings. It isn’t pumped up with a wave of murders by crime syndicates. It affects workplaces, commuting, business travel... It seems pervasive and spontaneous, but with a spike this dramatic, it has to be driven by something or someone.

National or Global?

Is this bigger than the USA?

A spot check of other countries produces a mixed bag. I especially focused on those with high COVID infection rates, thinking that could be destabilizing and cause distress to spill over into violence. Lithuania’s murder rate quickly doubled in the pandemic. In Peru, women especially caught hell. But in Romania? Crime of all types stayed approximately level. Murder in Mexico? Both a spike and a drop, at different times.

Naturally, I also want to know about the UK where I live. My wife’s job is no longer primarily a matter of health care admin work. It’s full of angry people shouting at her and her coworkers over the telephone. If you haven’t lived in Britain this may sound ho-hum, but it isn’t. Let your voice harden a little or let a bit of frustration come through in your tone, and customer service people tell you off for getting huffy or even announce that they don’t have to take such offensive abuse (so you’re at risk of being completely cut off from any resolution of your problem). Yes, occasionally someone loses their cool… but it isn’t occasional any more. It’s much of the time. Sometimes it’s all day long, call after call. Very un-British.

But nobody tracks that. Violence gets tallied. Is there more violence, too? Not just more shouting?

I looked at violent crime reported to police in England and Wales. I live on the border between the two. The UK and USA share considerable historical linkage and are undergoing similar political, economic and societal-division stresses. The USA is more freewheeling about its societal upheavals. Britons are more reserved. Aside from that, if we were going to see matching curves, we might expect them here.

It has felt like property-related crime surged in Britain, but not violent crime. From what we hear in the news, it seemed like an increase in domestic violence was counterbalanced by a reduction in violence outside the home, especially in light of spending much of 2020 in lockdowns. Not so! I found this.

Statista shows an increase in violent crime for England and Wales that doesn’t relate to the pandemic timeline nearly as well as it relates to Brexit and hostility stirred up by the conservative/right end of the political spectrum against immigrants, non-whites and Muslims.

A Nothing to Lose Factor?

At first I thought the UK and USA violent crime graphs don’t resemble each other. Then I looked again and realized they do, up to a point. Both start to trend upward around the time of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 campaign cycle in the USA. The climb is more pronounced in the UK until the 2020 election cycle in the USA when the USA’s statistics explode.

Politically, in the UK, Tories continue to be in power, but Republicans lost the trifecta at the top of federal government in the election of late 2020 and therefore power changed hands in early 2021 in the USA.

I have seen smaller versions of the USA’s breathtaking spike before on a state by state basis. It led to one of my personal guidelines about politics and extremist behavior.

The safest states to be in had evenly split politics. Consider Colorado in the 1980s and 1990s. (I was there on contracts during some of the 1990s and up to 2001. It was fascinating.) Both sides of the divide put contentious issues on the ballot in statewide referendums. It was common for these heated issues to win or lose by the skin of their teeth, a margin of about one vote per precinct. Even the hottest of those campaigns didn’t spark much violence.

Each side knew it had a good chance of winning the next round, but only if it continued to present itself as reasonable. The backlash against anyone who did something extreme could lose the next referendum or election.

Things got more violent elsewhere in states where either side of the political divide was distinctly dominant. That surprised me. I expected it to be worst where the more aggressive, intolerant side held power because they would feel they could do anything without repercussions.

To my surprise, it was also dangerous where power was firmly held by the more peaceful, tolerant side. The pattern is distinct. In states like that, the more aggressive and intolerant end of the spectrum felt they could not advance their causes through normal channels and had nothing to lose by doing whatever they wanted to intimidate their opponents instead.

That’s where the USA appears to be now, as a matter of perception more than a matter of facts. In reality, the GOP holds and wields power in plenty of states and apparently now has the Supreme Court’s weight. But the story being pumped to its supporters is that Democrats are in control in D.C. and are using that to block what the GOP wants. It’s introductory psychology: If you drum a story at people enough, eventually they will believe it, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.

Magnifying Factor

Having found that violence really has increased tremendously, particularly in the USA, I wondered whether it is being magnified by environmental factors.

When leaded gasoline was phased out in the United States, after a lag of roughly 20 years (a generation) rates of violent crime began to fall considerably. Europe got around to the same ban several years later. After the same lag, rates of violent crime began to fall there too. We thought we knew what lead poisoning does and the level at which it becomes a problem. We were wrong. At much lower levels which we thought were safe, lead had been fueling violent behavior.

What if something in today’s environment is physiologically promoting more aggression and weakening self-regulation of behavior, like low exposure to lead apparently did?

Guess what? As of about two years ago, perhaps something is.

The media likes to blame the surge in violence in both of my countries on frustration with the pandemic, economic stresses, mixed messaging from people in authority and political stirring-up of hostility against particular demographic groups. Media reports focus heavily on people who don’t want to wear face masks in confined spaces with other people.

I have an unhappy suspicion that the way the pandemic is involved has a physiological component the media completely overlooks. I don’t have the expertise to prove or disprove that suspicion, but here’s the reasoning behind it.

Take another look at a UK biobank study comparing pre-pandemic 2019 brain scans with scans of the same people after COVID infection. It’s pre-print, but the methodology is simple and solid. The first time I saw it, most of the medical terms didn’t fully register. I saw a long list of areas of the brain where the researchers found damage, but I didn’t know what those areas do. For a doctor, a blanket description of longitudinal abnormalities in limbic cortical areas with direct neuronal connectivity to the primary olfactory system means a lot. To me, it just meant damage to the limbic system at places that connect with the nose.

Limbic system is a big red flag. After a while, the holes in my understanding prodded me to study. I went to the paper again and made a spreadsheet of the areas, noting the type of damage found. Then I looked up and read about each of the affected areas. In this snapshot I’ve included at least one link for each brain area that gives a reasonably clear picture of what it does.

Much of the damage affects cognition (thinking), memory, and processing of eyesight, hearing and smells. (Effects on the autonomic nervous system have more to do with damage to the brain stem, which is examined in other studies. That’s a separate topic.) I’ve expressed concern before about the effect of this on the workforce. It keeps affected people from being able to perform at their accustomed levels. It sometimes gets mentioned in the media.

The rest of the damage found in the biobank study involves areas with these responsibilities:

• Managing the fight-or-flight response, fear and aggression

• Empathy, emotional awareness and social interaction

• Decision-making, goal-directed behavior, reward seeking, value-guided learning and constraining decisions to available options

• Integrating prior and current information to anticipate choices

Such injury could cause affected people to be more easily frustrated, frightened or angry… and less able to channel it appropriately. It could also make them more susceptible to being manipulated by those who were already promoting aggression as part of a push for authoritarianism.

This isn’t getting mentioned. It isn’t limited to people who got severe COVID or people who develop Long COVID. Damage in the brain is being found even in people whose case felt like a common cold or even was asymptomatic. Not everyone gets the full sweep of injury. Each person gets their own mixture in their own amounts, and some get little or none.

Even if only a small percentage are affected, a small percentage of a very large number is a big number… and study results suggest the percentage isn’t small.

Putting this on top of the nothing to lose sentiment being driven by a political drumbeat must surely be like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Behind the Divergence Between USA & UK

Now I have some sense of what may be behind why the USA has such a huge spike in violence where the UK has a smoother curve.

A political drumbeat has split the USA and conditioned the most susceptible people to open themselves up fully to this brain damage.

Vaccination rates in both countries are lower in disadvantaged populations, for complex reasons rooted in historical experience. But in the USA, a politically defined segment of the population refuse vaccinations, face masks and other pandemic protections at a much higher rate than everyone else. They are dying of COVID at a much higher rate than the population average. Among those who survive it, that segment had already demonstrated its openness to irrational beliefs and decision making. Such a mindset is fertile ground for damage to brain centers that manage fear, aggression, social interaction, empathy and decision making.

A lot of how we cope with challenges is a matter of what we have practiced the most. A society that highly values reserve and restraint in personal behavior, such as the UK, may be better positioned to cope than a society that has long emphasized individuality and has primed the most susceptible for pandemic injury that is damaging to the societal fabric. Interaction with the public in the UK now gets a lot of furious shouting, which is no longer unusual in Britain. Having the fury become physical assault is statistically much more likely in the USA.

For both countries, we can expect more road rage, air rage, angry screaming customers, venomous passersby, coworkers flying off the handle, nasty fellow shoppers, people trying to open airplane doors at 30,000 feet, etc. It means we could see the face of rage in more places more of the time, with some of the usual self-restraint shredded in the brain.

It means so much of the population is affected that organizations have to figure out how to handle this on a repeated basis among both workers and customers. Health care personnel have to handle it in patients. Police have to handle it in domestic disputes.

Urgently Needed

First we need researchers to find out whether there’s any merit to this suspicion that COVID may be making some of its survivors more emotionally volatile, more susceptible to manipulation when their psychological hot buttons are pushed, and more inclined to become violent.

Then, if that is indeed happening, we need to find a way to heal people’s brains. We’ve never before come up with anything quite like what we would need to do it. But we had never come up with a vaccine against a novel virus within a year, either, and now we’ve done that.

In the meantime, the most valuable hire may be the person who is intuitively adept at coping in the face of rage.

I’ll gather together some of what I’ve seen done in the past to cope with out-of-control behavior jeopardizing people in a company. I don’t know whether such approaches can still succeed when a significant portion of the population has physiologically become more emotionally labile and less able to manage their own behavior.

What we’ve done before is what we have available right now, so that’s where we have to start.