Episode 264: The Rule You Follow (The Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men")

Published: July 11, 2023, 6:45 p.m.

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David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers\\u2019 bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy\\u2019s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What\\u2019s the underlying philosophy that animates Anton Chigurh? Does he have a code of any kind, or is he just a ghostly symbol of human brutality and a pitiless indifferent universe? Does he represent a new kind of evil or is Sheriff Bell just getting old? What elements, if any, in the film are more dream than reality?

And speaking of moral decline, a new Nature study claims that we have the illusory belief that people are getting worse - but can they really establish that it\\u2019s an illusion?

Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 1-8.

Mastroianni blog post about the illusion of moral decline

No Country for Old Men (movie) [wikipedia.org]

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