Mistakes Vs Crimes

Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes. --Confucius

When I read that quotation by the great Chinese sage, Confucius, I had to think about it a long time. I wasn't sure what he meant by it. How could shame cause a mistake to become a crime?

I finally realized that shame can cause you to choose your action rather than admit your mistake, and then you have to conceal it.

Here was an example I thought of.

Say you're at the grocery store, and you check out, pay, and leave. You're loading your stuff into the car, when you realize that a can of pears is in the corner of the cart, not bagged up with the rest of your things. You don't remember putting it on the conveyor belt. You check your receipt, and sure enough, you didn't pay for it. How could you have missed it? It was right there in the cart!

You feel kind of stupid for missing the can, but you'd feel even more stupid going back in. I mean, how much can a can of pears cost? Eighty-nine cents? So what do you do?

At this point, you've made a mistake, right? But if you're too embarrassed to go back in and make a huge deal over an 89 cent can of pears by admitting your mistake and insisting that you pay for them, your mistake becomes something else. You'll have chosen to leave with that can of pears that you didn't pay for. Only THEN will you have stolen them. That's when you've done what Confucius warns against--you've let your shame turn your mistake into a crime.

I can think of more examples, but this was the first one I thought of and I kind of liked it. Can anyone think of any situations in which someone might let their shame turn a mistake into a crime?