"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 h

"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