Alexei Navalny died February 16, 2024. An international scientific panel working with samples of his tissue, has concluded he was poisoned with a toxin that only vast resources could have created. Resources such as the Russian government had. Whether Navalny’s Nemesis Putin explicitly ordered his murder or not, he was ultimately responsible for it.

The War in Ukraine – Putin’s most far-reaching outrage, which Navalny challenged vocally – suggests how Alexei can be seen as, forever, as good an example of what people should aspire to be, as Putin can be seen as a specimen of what we should strive to transcend.

The war is the act of vicious, venal, cynical men understanding nothing but self-interest and blunt force. Equally contemptuous and bewildered by anyone who doesn’t see the world the same way, instead, looking through a filter of human morality.

As Navalny did.

Perversely, Putin may end up presiding over the breakup of Russia, the opposite of his megalomaniac dreams for his homeland, a backfire of near cosmic scope. In addition to his delusional overreach, he will accomplish this by treating his people, as Stalin did, as ‘little cogs’ to be deployed at the whim of an utterly callous ruler. And to be sacrificed, as we are seeing in Ukraine.

Incapable of winning by civilized rules, men like him act in accord with jungle reflex. They can do nothing else, actual human reason being seemingly beyond their abilities. Crude compulsion is the only tool they’ve got, or at least clearly their preferred one.

Such a mindset cannot suffice for the 21^st Century, cannot meet the needs of economies and societies that depend on order, technology, complex social interactions, etc. Russia’s inability to shake her Medieval Mongol worldview would be just her own domestic problem, but that she is vast enough to disrupt the whole world with it. Thus, her anachronistic, kleptocratic Oligarchy is not a local concern; like gravity, it can influence almost anything, almost anywhere.

The complex poison used to kill Navalny is a testament to human sophistication put at the service of primal instinct: here, a ruler’s lust for domination. The Russian state’s ability and inclination to do such must not be mistaken for ‘modernity.’ No more than assassination as a legitimate tactic at the court of the Borgias.

It may be too late for Russia to escape the destruction that Navalny, and other noble souls like him, have tried to rescue her from. But it is not too late for the rest of us to be inspired by his example. And further, to ponder what can happen when we suffer events to be controlled by brutes in suits.

Wherever they are. Their legacy will be shame, disgrace, and serving as eternal examples of how Not to lead.

Whereas Navalny, whose physical life was cut short, can live on, perhaps forever, as an emblem of where we, as a species, should try to go.

A far better, grander legacy than that his Nemesis is likely to face.