Lucas Bean Explains

Olbermann tells the story from a friend of his who explained it with a scoreboard analogy.

If there's something about you that you've been trained to think of as wrong and immoral and evil, you can deny yourself that thing for only so long - eventually, it will manifest in your behavior.

So what often happens is you begin to condemn that behavior very loudly and very publicly in order to score points against it. But in the meantime, you're scoring points in favor of it because that's just something you really can't deny always and forever.

So you trick your brain by keeping score. You may have 90 points for it because of what you do, but as long as you make a show of scoring 110 points against it, you're ahead of the game.