Statism, Ethical Thinking, and Ethical Learning

The greatest tragedy of statism is not that it makes its believers act unethically, but that it makes them essentially incapable of serious ethical thinking and thus of serious ethical learning - after all, if one has a deep, instinctive, emotional attachment to the notion that crimes become virtues when they are committed by the biggest, most well-organized criminal entity operating in a given territory, then any sufficiently complex set of ethical propositions that he might entertain is bound to degenerate into fruitless absurdity.