Navalny’s untimely death brings to the forefront the age-old Solomon’s wisdom, as distilled in Ecclesiastes 9:4: “But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion” “. In the political arena, under tyrannical rules, the opposition faces a similar dilemma, should they actively fight the tyrant even at the risk of their own life, or spare themselves and live to fight tomorrow?. In our cynical times, the answer seems obvious: Save yourself. However, all sorts of rebels who would later become martyrs, commit themselves to a cause, while preaching from the high temple of honesty, integrity, and freedom and then, if they are true revolutionarys, succumb often to their ideals. Why?. It seems that conviction, integrity, honesty, and similar ethos run deep in some individual’s psychology. Such a set of ideas, as its roots deepen in the individual, become part of their being and often takes the form of a taboo, a ban, a prohibition, an unavoidable imperative that the mind refuses to violate. I explained. By definition, a Taboo is a ban, a prohibition, the last inviolable frontier, nonplus ultra, so it seems that the special few later to be martyrs become deeply, emotionally attached to an ideal or a cause, almost imprisoned by the imperative of such ideals. Their mind can not relinquish it without feeling a deep sense of betrayal, or the sense that an inviolable law has been violated. Thus becomes a Taboo. In the case of Navalny, by seeing the moral bankruptcy of his society, its brutality, and the oppressive suffocation of any aspiration for freedom or democracy, he denounced its corruption and actively preached courage in the face of the tyrant. Then, as many others in his country, he had his life threatened by the obscure, depraved machinery of the state, which controlled by the puppet master Komrade Putin, tolerates no dissent. He survived as we know one serious attempt at his life. While in Germany, still recovering from his almost assured death by poisoning, he was then faced with the martyr’s dilemma, to save his life and live abroad, or to go back to continue the struggle and to succumb to a guaranteed death. Like others before him, he couldn’t violate the imperative of his belief. He climbed his Mount of Olives moment and returned to Mother Russia. His mental economy could not fathom the devastating effect of such a violation. He was deeply convinced that if he stayed in Germany, he would have died a different death. One of shame by being mocked as a coward, when he always preached courage. He paid the ultimate prize. In one of those ironies of life, the Tyrant also struggles, but he is rooted not in his consciousness, ethics, or whenever morality resides, but in self-preservation. To save his life, or perhaps due to his depravity, the Tyrant is obliged to maintain a state of terror. Even if at some level he knows that freedom, integrity, and honesty are the supreme values for any individual to aspire to and invaluable for the benefit of his country, contrary to our Hero, he -the Tyrant- chooses to save his head and violate any norm of morality and civilized living. He knows that any loosening of the grip, any slight opening of the valves, will translate into his certain death. Same as Navalny, who knew would certainly face death if returning to Russia, comrade Putin, by knowing of his certain death, would not relinquish the absolute reins of power for the rest of his natural life. The one is a dead lion, the other a living dog. There lies their fundamental difference. Putin, the Amoral individual, lives by a different ethos, one best stated by the corner drunk: “If the moral principles are going to be the cause of losing a man’s life… fuck the principle”. Or in Spanish: “Para que se pierda el hombre, que se pierda la palabra”.