&quot;I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s fine, and that is probably how most of us who aren&#x27;t Ancient Romans think. However, that is also the way that swaths of the German judiciary and bureaucracy thought as it undermined the Weimar Republic, and that is also the way a lot of the hard-core Japanese militarists thought. Either of them would have said, I suppose, that they served the nation while betraying the state; but it comes down to much the same thing in effect.