Erasmus' initial position on human nature had been fundamentally optimistic, in the sense that humans, having free will, can be directed toward moral virtue and piety if they receive the proper education, though he always added that this movement toward righteousness required the assistance of grace.
He has the cash, he has the resources, and he has the sort of blind ruthlessness and self-righteousness that is required for such inhumanity.
As for America's involvement in Cold War proxy wars in the Third World, he wrote, "it requires a measure of self-righteousness to see unilateral measures as an act of collective security".
When we understand that, we might be able to make two existential changes: the first will be to stop hurting others where they live - which requires us to recognize and end our self-righteousness and arrogance.
Genuine understanding requires nuance, and nuance is the enemy of sound bites and self-righteousness.
But satire requires a bit more specificity, and as a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, "Carnage" misses its mark badly.
Hard-eyed realists of fields, streets and classrooms have required him to debunk self-righteousness wherever it shows up -- beginning with himself.
Though cold, self-centred, ungiving, forever suspicious of the ways of the world, he could not descend to the second stereotype; despite a ruthlessness fed by self-righteousness, he never took the pleasure in killing required of the first.
Tying together the film's disparate sections are Christo and Jeanne-Claude themselves; their faces age, like visual emblems of the endurance required to bring about "The Gates," but their combination of righteousness and wonder is a constant.
But some Mohist texts — mainly the triad devoted to the doctrine of "Heaven's intent" — use zhi in a broader sense, in which it is identified with yi (righteousness, morality) and zheng (good governance), which in turn is taken to require a hierarchical political system administered by the noble and wise.
