
Criminals Explain How They Justified Their Crimes to Themselves (2016) - cmurf
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gqmz4m/how-criminals-justify-crimes-psychology-gangsters-uk
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_" Next up was former armed robber Frank Prosper, now an actor, who said he
purposefully avoided thinking about the rights and wrongs of what he was doing
while he was an active criminal."_

This is the mental process, in various forms, that criminals use to do what
they do. Rand identified this as the "blank-out" and the root of all evil;

 _" Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed.
And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which
all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the
willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think — not
blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know."_
[1]

The error is in the title, the criminals don't justify their actions to
themselves and all the other justifications in the article are how criminals
justify their actions to others when called out to explain what they did, i.e.
rationalization.

[1]
[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evasion.html](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evasion.html)

