In It to Win - Jack & rationalizations

[Jack Abramoff] Yes, I could have probably been a lobbyist who did not 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 are a lobbyist, who is trying to not use money to bribe congress even legally bribe them, and you are up against lobbyists who are doing it, you are going to loose. [Associate Professor Minette Drumwright] I think the had an elaborate scheme of rationalizations that completely prevented him from seeing the things that 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 is 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 will not cheat a lot, they will not 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 lobbyist who I disdained, who I thought lived a lifestyle that was often one of sort of a drunken debauchery, frankly. The way we are able to live with ourselves, the way we are able to reconcile our, often times, dishonest actions with our self-image of 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 aligned 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 are the good guy, and your client is 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 than that is being a good guy because my client is a good guy." And once you have done that it is kind of easy to rationalize away the sort of slimy or crooked things 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 for say their congressmen and their staff for the basketball games. And they would buy four tickets to the arena and they would 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, over did it. But it was not, I did not innovate. I did not create new corrupt things, these were all there and they have been tried and true for decades. What I did was probably marginal all of them all at once. I would say it is impossible for us to 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 have 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 for many of us if we would 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 is just part of the game. Oh well the end will justify the means."