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

Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2023

⏱️ 131 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers’ bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What’s 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’s 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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro,
0:05.9	having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics.
0:09.3	Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say,
0:13.6	and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
0:17.1	There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human
0:21.9	emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.
0:51.9	They think they've lost and with no more brains than you have.
0:58.3	They do our attention.
1:00.3	Come on, man.
1:01.9	Anybody can have a brain.
1:06.7	You're a very bad man.
1:10.7	I'm a very good man.
1:13.1	Just a very bad wizard.
1:15.9	Welcome to very bad wizards.
1:17.1	I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston.
1:19.6	Dave, a Penn State professor was charged recently for having sex with his dog near the restrooms
1:26.8	at Rothrock State Forest.
1:29.4	Wait, so that's illegal?
1:33.5	Dude, I forgot about this.
1:38.6	Yes, it is illegal.
1:39.4	I mean, I'm sure there are Peter Singer-style arguments that it shouldn't be as long as like
1:44.0	eating meat is.
	...

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