The Evil Is Too Much

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He really is I think deeply distressed at the at confronting the evil and maybe he's imagining Shagur waiting in the shadows for him it's a powerful image in his mind there's one thing in the book that is not part of the movie which you get a backstory of him being in World War II. He got a bronze star for essentially like ditching his unit and he has never like lived that down so protecting Moss was going to be one way of tryinglike maybe making up, says McCarthy.

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]