[Jack Abramoff] Yes, I could have probably been a lobbyist
who didn't avail myself of the money and the system... things like that.
But I would have lost.
[Professor Robert Prentice] Rationalizations are excuses that we give ourselves for not
living up to our own ethical standards.
Unfortunately, the way it is, if you're a lobbyist,
who's trying to not use money to bribe Congress,
even legally bribe them,
and you're up against lobbyists who are doing it,
you're going to lose.
[Associate Professor Minette Drumwright] I think he had an elaborate scheme of rationalizations
that completely prevented him from seeing the things he was doing that were wrong.
We have two things going on in our heads, pretty much most of the time:
On the one hand, we all want to think of ourselves as good people.
That's a self image that we all desire to have.
On the other hand, we all kind of like the benefits that we can have
from lying a little bit, cheating a little bit, and so
a fairly substantial percentage of most people,
most days, will tell a little lie or cheat just a little bit to get those benefits.
They won't cheat a lot, they won't lie a lot
because then it destroys their self image.
I loved my clients and fought for them, bled for them,
worked day and night for them.
They were up against the bullies of Washington,
the powerful, elite establishment,
the other lobbyists who I disdained,
who I thought lived a lifestyle that was often one of sort of a drunken debauchery, frankly.
The way we're able to live with ourselves,
the way we're able to reconcile our, often times, dishonest actions
with our self-image as being honest people,
is through rationalizations.
So, we were winning victories on important issues,
we were saving our clients billions of dollars,
we were making tens of millions of dollars.
I think it was very easy for Jack Abramoff to see himself
as an ethical person.
He had defined his role as a lobbyist in terms of two factors:
One was that he picked clients whose causes he believed in,
and he did, he picked clients whose causes were in line with his conservative ideology.
And then number two: the second factor was,
was he working as hard as he could to win on behalf of his clients?
And he was.
Once you're the good guy, and your client's the good guy
it gives you quite a bit of leeway to focus on the end result.
"Well, if I get a win for my client, then that's being a good guy because
my client's a good guy."
And once you've done that, then it's kind of easy to rationalize away
the sort of slimy or crooked things that you did to get that good result.
The normal behavior in Washington,
in the business I was in,
was to do the kind of things I did.
I just pushed over the lines, I did more than other people did.
People would buy tickets, say, for a congressman and their staff
for the basketball games.
And they'd buy four tickets to the arena and they'd give them out.
So I would have fifty tickets.
People took folks that played golf, they would go to the country club,
I would put them on an airplane and fly them to Scotland.
So I kind of, again, overdid it.
But it was not— I didn't innovate,
I didn't create new corrupt things, these were all there
and they'd been tried and true for decades.
What I did was probably marshal all of them, all at once.
I would say it's impossible for us to one-hundred percent protect ourselves from
the influence of rationalizations.
But, there are two things we can do:
One is we can talk to other people.
We can have mentors, we can have friends, we can have our parents
we can have other people keeping an eye on us and holding us in check,
and give them the freedom to talk to us and to say,
"Hey, wait a minute, what are you doing? And why are you doing it?"
So we've got to justify ourselves to them.
But I think more importantly, we need to monitor ourselves.
We need to listen to that little voice in our heads.
And I do think that for many of us if we will just practice
monitoring the things we say to ourselves,
we can get ourselves in a situation where a little alarm will go off when we hear ourselves thinking
"Oh, everybody does that."
"Oh, it's just part of the game."
"Oh, well, the end will justify the means."