The World According to George Soros

One of the questions I have about the modern world is about George Soros. He says he believes in the "open society" described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies. And Soros was actually a student of Popper back in the late 1940s while a student at the London School of Economics.

My problem is that I don't see how a genuine follower of Karl Popper would be funding lefty activists and "Soros DAs." For instance, according to La Wik:

Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.

So why then does Soros finance so many lefty activists, followers of Marx? I don't get it.

Anyway, George Soros gave a speech on May 24 at the gathering of the private jets at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland and he has thoughtfully provided the text at georgesoros.com. Do his remarks help me understand him? Maybe. He begins thus:

Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening.

Really? The EU was intended to stop Russian aggression? I thought that was NATO's job. He continues.

The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. 

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

Jolly good show, old chap. Then he continues:

Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. 

Oh really. Notice what he is saying? He just said that the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual, but then tells us that "fighting pandemics and climate change... maintaining global institutions" are almost as important.

Now I would say that if protecting the freedom of the individual is the role of the state then all the fun stuff like fighting pandemics and climate change is a buncha baloney. Because if you are in a fight against a pandemic or against climate change it means that the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to the prosecution of the war. And of course, if we good chaps of the open society are necessarily committed to fighting the closed society -- Russia and China, according to Soros -- then the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to that armed struggle as well.

Soros was there in the 1980s with his Open Society Foundation to help end communism, and the 1990s was a heady time. But then came 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. 

But why? Digital technology and AI. "AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies." You mean like social media censoring anything that challenges the ruling class "narrative" as disinformation and misinformation and the abortive Disinformation Governance Board right here in the good old USA?

And yet, AI is not turning out so well in China, as President XI has locked down the whole country to fight the COVID Omicron variant. Why did he do that? Soros says:

Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. 

 Really? But guess what. The whole Ukraine thing is giving Europeean leaders an idea. They see an opportunity to bind their nations into a federated Europe.

They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. 

Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. 

In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.

Really? Well, bless my buttons. And imagine how the freedom of the individual will fare in this new federated European state. I wonder if there will be elections for the capo di tutti capi in this new federated state.

But it gets worse. Guess what is suffering as a result of the Ukraine war?

While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. 

"Experts," you say? 

Well, this has been very helpful for me, in my quest to understand the mind of George Soros. It seems to me that he experiences himself as the monarch of the Open Society. And that this Open Society is, or ought to be, a federated Europe.

This ties with another feeling I have about George Soros, as a Hungarian Jew that grew up in the hell of Nazism and World War II. It is the "never again" idea that we must never allow nation states to have the power they had in the heyday of fascism and Nazism. Thus the EU, thus globalism. Because never again Hitler.

But I am a student of Karl Popper, who went on to develop his Three Worlds theory of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

World 1: the realm of states and processes as typically studied by the natural sciences. 

World 2: the realm of mental states and processes.

World 3: the realm of the 'products of thought' when considered as objects in their own right.

For Popper the "products of thought" are both scientific theories and actual products of scientific theory and technology like jet airplanes and nuclear plants. And, I suppose, the poltiical theories about open societies and closed societies and their actual implementation in actual states.

I have a real problem figuring out how the real Popper aligns with the Soros idea of Popper. But who am I to say?

But, all in all, it looks like Soros is just an ordinary globalist that has signed onto all the "world's gonna end unless we..." stuff. And, when you think of it, any top-down narrative these days needs the lefty activists to enforce the will of the overlords. So therefore Soros DAs to keep the peasants from stepping outside their lane.

What Does Soros Want?

Over a century ago, it was Oscar Wilde (no, Freud) who worried about "what do women want." Now, the question is what does billionaire speculator George Soros want? And why?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and was prompted to focus my mind on it over the weekend when I read a piece about Soros and his Open Society operation: "Mapping the Open Society Network on Soros’s 90th Birthday." Hayden Ludwig dismisses Soros thusly:

Each group in the Soros Network is a cog in the larger “open society” machine, so named for Soros’s affinity for the philosophy of the communist-turned-lefty-libertarian Karl Popper, Soros’s professor and personal mentor during the young man’s time at the London School of Economics...

Their vision of an open society is globalist and utopian, rejecting both objective truth and established tradition in favor of technocracy: rule by the “experts.” The net result is open borders, supranational governments such as the European Union, enforced secularism, and dissolution of the U.S. Constitution by a new American Revolution designed by plutocrats to wipe away the republic and replace it with socially engineered tyranny.

OK, I decided, let's check out Karl Popper and George Soros and try to understand them. I have several of Popper's books and my rough feeling is that Popper isn't quite as eager to pull down the USA as George Soros. 

But there is this. Both Popper (b.1902) and Soros (b.1930) are assimilated educated Jews from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These folks all tend to be anti-nationalists and supra-nationalists. Like Stefan Zweig (b. 1881) in The World of Yesterday, they believe in Europe. It makes sense, of course, especially when you consider the opposing view of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ethnic Germans were getting the shaft in multi-cultural Austria-Hungary before World War I. The supra-national Austro-Hungarian Empire worked well for assimilated Jews, until it didn't.

You can see this attitude working out in Soros's equivocal attitude to Israel. His Jewishness wants to support it, but his anti-nationalism wants to deplore it. So he kinda sits on the fence.

I've always been a bit flummoxed about Soros and his anti-nationalism because I didn't read Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies as an indictment of the nation state, but as a broadside against totalitarianism from Plato to Marx and Marxist historicism, that "history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws." Popper believes in the transition from

the magical or tribal or collectivist society [that] will also be called the closed society, [to] the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

So he believes in the opposition between magical thinking and logic and reason. But, of course, so do Plato and Hegel and Marx.

And I'm sure so does George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. But then, you might ask, why does the Open Society Foundation support the "trained Marxists" of Black Lives Matter?

I suppose because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." If Soros experiences nationalism as the enemy, then the Marxist enemies of the nation state are his friends.

Yes, but can't Soros see that the trained Marxists are just taking him and his money for a ride? It's a good question. I answer it by invoking my idiot theory of conspiracy. Don't think that there is a dark conspiracy out there that is cunningly planning the destruction of all we hold dear. The conspirators are probably bumbling idiots; they imagine themselves a lot smarter than they really are. I suspect that Soros, like the rest of us, has not really thought through exactly what he wants, and is reluctant to change his plans in the light of mistakes and new information. Plus, the guy is 90. His sons, that are already in charge of the Soros empire, seem to be ordinary woke members of the educated Gentry.

It comes down to this. Soros, like many of his generation in the educated Gentry, thinks that nationalism is the foundation of all our miseries. For him, the lesson of World War II is "never again." And I get it, for central European Jews like him, that the nation state is problematic.

How about another idea? The rule of the educated supra-national Gentry is problematic? That, to me, is the meaning of the populist nationalism of which we've heard tell. It is saying: hey wokies: you may think that you chaps are the first and the last in human wisdom and ordained by Gaia to bend the arc of history towards justice, and you may be right. But meanwhile, we Commoners think we are getting screwed.

See, what is going on right now is that the educated Gentry is just dismissing the critics of its rule as far-right, or white nationalist, or systemic racist, or whatever pejorative comes to mind. You can see this in its Three Layer theory of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Who says that the "allies" really have the interests of the "oppressed peoples" at heart? Oh, the "allies" say that. Could it not be that the "allies" are interested, first of all, in their power and status and vanity? Just sayin'.

And that's the problem with George Soros. He's concocted this Open Society notion from his understanding of Karl Popper. But suppose that his understanding of Popper is mistaken and that his notions would lead to a closed society of lefty neo-tribalism and magical thinking? How would we know? How would he know?

Is all the "mostly peaceful protesting" and liberal prosecutors that Soros is funding going to lead to the political destruction of Donald Trump and systemic racism? Is the current Thing about mail-in voting and protests at the home of the Postmaster General really going to advance the Democratic cause? Or will it inspire a counter-movement?

Does George Soros really know what he is doing? Does Nancy Pelosi? Does anyone?

I'm reading Desperate Sons by Les Standiford about the Sons of Liberty in the ten years leading up to the American Revolution. It suggests to me that the opposition to British rule was deeper and wider than I had previously understood. One of my takeaways is that the Brits in London -- that were passing Stamp Acts and Quartering Acts and banking laws that resulted in severe deflation in the colonies -- really had no clue about what was going down in the colonies.

Same thing applies to George Soros and our global elite. They know they are the good guys, the evolved and educated guys, but they really do not know what is going down on the ground. They do not know whether their policies help or hurt. They just know that they are the good guys, so shut up, peasant.

Geroge Soros Doesn't Get It

George Soros is a remarkable man, a Hungarian Jew that escaped the gas chambers of Hitler's Germany and then lived to become a wealthy speculator and a follower of Karl Popper and his idea of an Open Society.

And so he has spent tons of money over the years promoting what he believes to be the idea of the Open Society.

Now he has written a kind of manifesto, telling us what he thinks, and why, and what has gone wrong and what needs to be done. Here is the center of his political system.

I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers’ interests. Under Popper’s influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.

OK, he writes, that is too simplistic. But when the EU was founded he supported it.

Which means that George Soros supports the idea of an unaccountable elite whose rulers could seek "to manipulate their subject to serve the rulers' interests." Which is what the EU elite has done.

Just a thought, George. I would say that an open society is one in which -- never mind how it is elected -- the government is limited and the intellectual elite labors night and day to create a national culture that marginalizes the eternal yearning in everyone to live at the expense of others, through government free stuff.

And now Germany has become the hegemon of Europe, and is doing a bad job at it, according to Soros. Meanwhile the whole of Europe is coming under the influence of Vladimir Putin, "whose concept of government is irreconcilable with that of open society." Writes Soros:

I hope that Europe’s leaders and citizens alike will realize that this endangers their way of life and the values on which the EU was founded.

And of course, Donald Trump is a real problem. Under him, "the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer."

So now we know why Soros is anti-nationalist and pro Black Lives Matter, as I wrote in the American Thinker. He's all worrited about "targeted minorities." You mean like the white working class, George, marginalized since the 1970s by liberals like Norman Lear in his All in the Family?

The fact is that George Soros is a man of his time and class, and bows to the false gods of the global elite, just like an Obama or a Kerry. His idea, like the rest of his buddies, is that a wise, evolved elite will rule the world as a kind of transnational cabal.

But the truth is that government, all government, is a shambles. Above all, politics and government are a problem because they attract people that are interested in power and the use of force.

But the notion of social animals, and humans as social animals, is how to limit force and its destruction. How do you slow down the chaps and the chapettes that are interested in power? How do you arrange institutions so that people are encouraged to serve their fellows with products and services rather than guns and bullets?

The overarching fact of the last century or so is that rich kids all over have fallen for the notion that the peace of the world depends on people like them getting political power to fight against the bourgeoisie and lead the marginalized into safe channels by bending the arc of history towards justice. And they have made the biggest mess of things ever every time they have been given that power.

George Soros is, no doubt, a clever man, and a successful speculator. But when it comes to government and politics he is a fool, blinded by the ruling-class shibboleths of the age.

He just doesn't get it.