I have to believe that somewhere in Karma-space there is a ledger of items given and stolen, earned and cheated. It is a comforting chimera that prevents me from imploding.

I do not mean this in a Judgment-Day-Gates-of-Heaven way, but rather, in a sense that is wholly pragmatic: memories are not always conscious, but they probably do not go away. Thus, there may well be certain file directories in the individual consciousness that store all the Bad Things that said person has done.

This is how I picture, for example, the delusion of O.J. Simpson. In fact, I was reading about a recent Simpson interview that intimated strongly that (at least the writer believed) he had committed the murders, but that he had then convinced himself that he had not. Knife-and-hand bloodfests of two people most likely create pretty heavy shock and shame -- unsettling enough, most likely, to conflict with the common tendency of humans to think of ourselves as "good people."

When we cannot change what we did, we can change our memories. For reasons that might be even evolutionary in origin (after all, the species would die quickly if we killed ourselves off) no persons seem easier to defraud than ourselves.