Reflections about power relations and the russian-ukrainian war: authority, leadership and possessor of power. The human person versus the individual person

Abstract

We are living through a crisis of authority, alternately presenting itself around the world, sometimes in excess and sometimes in absence. Authority is commonly confused with some form of power or violence, since it always demands obedience. This article aims to elucidate this confusion through the recent attitudes that have been taken in the war between Russia and Ukraine. However, authority excludes external means of coercion; where force or violence is used, authority itself has failed. Violence should be the ultima ratio in relations between nations, and of domestic actions the most shameful, and is always considered the salient feature of tyranny. This study will demonstrate that extreme polarization, a worldwide phenomenon, unfolds and influences terrible acts, among them, the culmination of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which only proves how much sectarianism has weakened democracies around the world. One might even say that the numerous swings in public opinion, which for more than one hundred and fifty years have swung at regular intervals from one liberal mood to another conservative one, and back again to a more liberal one, have only resulted in a further undermining of both, blurring the distinctive lines between authority and freedom, and ultimately destroying the political significance of both, from the political polarization we are currently experiencing, and especially from this climate of Cold War nostalgia we have seen.