Exactly. Responsible leaders encourage people to reason with clarity toward positive goals. Irresponsible leaders encourage people to react emotionally and disregard reason (or use it only very selectively in service of their own prejudices)...usually with very negative results for someone, if not everyone. The South and the North in the 1860's could, with a measure of goodwill and reason on both sides, have avoided fighting the Civil War, for instance, but instead they got very emotional and punitive, and fell right into the gaping abyss. Five years later, could anyone have asserted that it was "a good idea"? Slavery would have died a natural death in any case, not too far down the line.
Now, a philosophy that asserts that all ethics are simply arbitrary and that life, in effect, has no meaning opens the door to the most destructive and disastrous actions imaginable....like, for instance, creating atomic bombs or even hydrogen bombs, and atomizing cities full of people with them.
Of course, fanatics who think life does have meaning (according to their particular religion) sometimes do such things too, in the name of their religion.
It comes back to the basics. Are you building and assisting life in a general sense or are you destroying it? If one is destroying life wholesale in the name of liberty, freedom, or Christ I suspect that there is a massive exercise in hypocrisy going forward under the usual patriotic banners.
The real game in such cases is not the establishment of liberty or freedom nor is it in service to Christ...it's merely "winning" an insane competitive game that should never have been played in the first place.