What makes good people do bad things?

 Attorney, professor, and Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig recently wrote about forms of corruption, and how it can insidiously take hold.  His remarks provide unique insight into what might be happening here in Eastmoreland.  Our neighborhood is full of good people but some have become tragically corrupt.

“It's a very interesting, and terrifying, psychological truth that the more convinced you are of your goodness, the more license you will give yourself to behave badly.

One dimension is this feeling or license to behave badly because you've behaved well. The other dimension is that to the extent you're talking about smart people, they are best able to avoid the consequence of the facts. 

In studies of how facts may influence people's views on say, global warming or GMOs, they didn't find that dumb people are persuaded overwhelmingly and smart people aren't. To the contrary. They find that ordinary intelligence leaves you open to the facts, but super-intelligence leaves you really empowered to defend yourself against the facts. 

So you can rationalize almost anything that's thrown at you if you're a smart enough person. But if you're not that smart, you hear the facts and are kind of made amenable to it.

Put those two things together - smart and moral license - and what you find is that certain people (who live in the zip code that I'm in right now), ought to spend a lot of time reflecting on just how likely they are to be misleading themselves about what's right and what's wrong. And also just how likely it is that their certainty about what think they should do or other people should do might be affected by one of these two kinds of psychological weaknesses.

And the consequence of that is not to do nothing, but to constantly criticize, be self-critical, in ways that leave yourself open to changing your mind. That's the hardest thing for people to do, especially for people in the world I live in." 

"Why good people are easily corrupted", Ezra Klein Show podcast, Vox Media, 5.27.2019 

https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/why-good-people-are-easily-corrupted-with-lawrence-lessig/id1081584611?i=1000439443091