In 1953, a criminologist named Donald Cressey went into prisons to interview men convicted of embezzlement. More than a hundred of them. He went in expecting to meet thieves.
He couldn’t find any.
Not because they were innocent (they weren’t, at least, not to a judge and jury) but because almost none of them used the word steal to explain what they had done. In their own words, they had borrowed. For most there had been a problem, a private one, the kind you can’t take to your wife or your boss. And there had been money sitting right there. Then (of course) there had been a plan, always a plan, to put it back before anybody noticed. Cressey sat through a hundred versions of the same sentence and built an entire framework out of it, and the load-bearing piece turned out to be the story. The thing a man says to himself in the second before he reaches.
But here’s what makes that finding hold up seventy years later. The rationalization doesn’t just happen to be something people cook up afterward in the interrogation room to look better. It arrives first. It has to. A man who believes he’s stealing can’t reach for the money. Something in him locks up. So the story shows up early and unlocks the hand. The lie gets told to the guy in the mirror long before anyone tells it to an auditor.
And now the uncomfortable part, because you’re probably running this exact software, today, at a smaller scale.
You have a whole story about the thing you did that you wished you hadn’t. The hours you rounded up. The expense that was technically work-adjacent (the dinner was, in fairness, near a client). You didn’t lie about it, exactly. You just quietly arrived at a version where you come out reasonable, and you arrived there so fast you never noticed traveling. Everyone does this. It’s automatic, it’s instant, and the speed is precisely the problem.
Because here’s the thing that should genuinely rattle you. Chances are, you have never once (or very rarely) in your entire life, been the villain of a story you told about yourself. If you have, statistically, you’re an outlier and that is a remarkable run. Play it back. Every argument you’ve re-litigated in the shower, you were being fair and they were being unreasonable. Every job you left, they were the problem. Across thousands of episodes, the protagonist came out justified. Because history is not an objective truth. You have a narrator. We all do.
So when the fraud turns up in the news, and the man in the tie says he never really thought of it as stealing, resist the urge to file him under a separate species. He probably just got handed a bigger opportunity than you’ve been offered, or a worse private problem than you’ve had to sit with, and the same helpful narrator you’ve got running right now. Maybe the gap between him and you is character. Sure, it might be.
Or maybe it’s just the size of the number that happened to be sitting within reach.
What should scare you is how gently, and how well, all of us lie to ourselves, in a voice that sounds exactly like our own.
You’ve never been the villain. Of course not.
Neither had he, right up until the morning the auditors walked in.
See you next week.