When you work in a corrupt system, your own corruption becomes invisible to you. You know yourself to be an essentially good person. Your friends like you. You’re nice to your wife. You have professional accomplishments. And if you take a bribe now and then or lie or otherwise abuse the public trust, well, you’re a cop in 1960s New York, you’re a Soviet bureaucrat, you’re a Chicago Democrat – everyone around you is doing the same thing, and the only people who complain about it are the others, the non-cops, the counter-revolutionaries, the Republicans, the bad guys. You don’t have to listen to them. They’re beyond the pale.
Occasionally, this leads to moments of mordant humor, when the corrupt person is brought outside of his system and the corruption he can’t see suddenly becomes starkly visible to everyone else. This happened when the dirty Tammany Hall political boss George Plunkitt tried to publicly explain the difference between honest graft and dishonest graft. What was the problem? “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” Plunkitt famously said.
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