"We have this unstoppable, energetic, self-righteous drive that's innate in us, but which has been reoriented by limitless consumption.
Not bad for a righteous cause.
We feel driven, righteous, or like a failure.
And are they driven by righteous missions of exposure or by a desire to get credit for them?
And if UBS and Julius Baer have highlighted anything, it is that the source of the secret documents may not be driven by righteous indignation against offshore banking.
When dealing with people who gratuitously cause the innocent to suffer, no retribution seems too extreme, and the history of movies is full of good men (and a few women) driven to righteous brutality against predators, kidnappers and abusers.
I am afraid that self-satisfied and self-righteous western nationalism will drive the rest of the world into defiantly contending that two plus two equals five, like Dostoevsky's underground man.
From ancient Rome ("Gladiator") to colonial America ("The Patriot"), from late-20th-century Maine ("In the Bedroom") to mid-21st-century Washington ("Minority Report"), to be a dad is to be tormented by guilt, menaced by grief and, more often than not, driven to righteous, murderous violence.
Delphine, whose passivity mutates into a steely, almost self-righteous determination, is driven by her own hunger for experience.
I think we'd have to recontextualise that decade – the decade that saw Britain reborn – as a weird one off, a strange moment to be regretted and NOT, as it's currently understood, as the beginning of a long drive towards the righteous liberal party state called The United Kingdom.
Or Petilian or Priscillian or Julian of Eclanum, other victims of Augustine's pen, driven by the righteous certainty that he knew best.
