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| The Mind of George Soros | |
| 2004-03-03 | |
| Meet the Esperanto enthusiast who wants to save the world from President Bush. by Joshua Muravchick, Wall Street Journal. Also appears in the March issue of Commentary. EFL and to emphasize the juicy parts. "I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life," announced George Soros in January. "I am determined to do what I can," he added, to assure that President Bush is not re-elected. Coming from someone else, such statements might be written off as delusional, but Mr. Soros is a man with a record of achieving outsized goals. A financier who began with a stake of a few thousand dollars, he traded and speculated his way to a fortune of many billions, making him one of the world’s richest men. . . . Mr. Soros has declared his intent to devote similar energy and single-mindedness to his new "project." . . . According to reports last November, Mr. Soros had already pledged $18 million to three liberal anti-Bush groups of this kind, announcing that "If necessary, I would give more." As he sees it, "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is." . . . A recent ruling by the Federal Election Commission (discussed in entertaining detail here) may invalidate those donations, but we digress . . . . To paraphrase: Soros was born in Hungary in 1930. His father was Jewish, his mother Catholic. The family escaped Hungary in 1944 when the Horthy government was overthrown and the Germans and their Hungarian fascist allies began rounding up the Jews of Hungary for extermination. The Soros family ended up in London; George later moved to the U.S. and made a fortune in international finance. As late as the early 1980s, Mr. Soros was telling interviewers that he did not believe in philanthropy, [but charitable activities] eventually became his main passion. Turning over the management of his investment funds to deputies, he threw himself into charitable work with the same zeal he had once devoted to trading. His gifts made a big impact in the countries in Eastern Europe in transition from communism. In some of them, his largesse apparently exceeded the aid received from the U.S. government. But then he gave in to the dark side . . . Nevertheless, it is neither for his charitable work nor for his financial wizardry that Mr. Soros wishes most to be recognized. Rather, it is for his intellectual accomplishments. From early on, as he would have it, he fully expected to become another Keynes or Einstein. At the London School of Economics, he studied economics but was fascinated by philosophy. He was especially taken with the work of the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who was then on the LSE faculty and served, at least formally, as the young refugee’s adviser. Mr. Soros likes to say that Popper’s ideas about the "open society" and the fallibility of human knowledge have been the starting point for his own philosophical contributions. These begin with the theory of "reflexivity"--his term for the notion that in human affairs, unlike in the world of inanimate nature, the observer is himself part of the universe that he is attempting to observe; thus, the very act of observation may influence the reality being analyzed. Werner Heisenberg, call your copyright lawyer! This insight has been, in turn, the basis for Mr. Soros’s theory of history, which revolves around "boom-bust cycles." When a social enterprise of some kind--a business, a movement, a nation--is doing well, Mr. Soros argues, this creates a bandwagon effect that leads inevitably to overvaluation or overreaching, producing an artificial "bubble" that must eventually burst. Alas, for all his aspirations, Mr. Soros has met with disappointment as a philosopher. He spent three years weaving his ideas into a book titled "The Burden of Consciousness" but left it unfinished when, as he confessed to his biographer, he himself could not understand on the morrow what he had written the day before. In lieu of that volume, he has presented excursuses on reflexivity in most of the half-dozen books he has published. These passages have repeatedly evoked exasperation from reviewers, who have found the idea both obscure and commonplace. But Mr. Soros has shrugged off these criticisms, commenting that his theory is "not yet properly understood." . . . "If you were smarter, you’d agree with me!" Nor, indeed, is it easy to detect the influence of Mr. Soros’s philosophy on his philanthropic activism. One might assume that an understanding of "reflexivity"--that is, our supposed inability to stand apart from social phenomena and judge them in a dispassionate light--would demand a certain modesty in the rendering of practical judgments. But Mr. Soros has never hesitated to advocate sweeping change or to pursue grand political strategies, serenely confident in his own ability to discern the needed remedies for the ills of dozens of different societies and indeed for the world as a whole. A wealthy megalomaniac devotes himself to reforming the whole world along the lines of his crackpot utopian vision . . . where have I seen that before?
[standard "mobilization against globalization" rhetoric omitted] And what remedies did Mr. Soros suggest? As a first step, the creation of an international central bank; in the long run, nothing less than a transformation of how the world itself is governed. "To stabilize and regulate a truly global economy," he wrote, "we need some global system of political decision-making." Though it was neither "feasible nor desirable" to "abolish the existence of states," Mr. Soros conceded, nevertheless "the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions." . . . A world of globalized economics, he insisted, required something akin to globalized government. Stunningly unoriginal, that. Given this set of predilections, it is not hard to see how Soros would have been driven to paroxysms of frustration by the notoriously "unilateralist" Bush administration and the war in Iraq. As he explains in his new book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy," the United States has now fallen into "the hands of a group of extremists" whom he identifies as "neoconservatives" or "social Darwinists" and who espouse an "ideology of American supremacy." ". . . and black helicopters . . . and fluoridated water . . . and UFOs . . . ." The only element missing from the "master plan" they hatched well before arriving in office in 2001 was a suitable pretext for action. For them, according to Mr. Soros, the attacks of 9/11 were therefore a godsend. "Communism used to serve as the enemy; now terrorism can fill the role." ". . . but I have an answer . . . or is that A.N.S.W.E.R.?" As an alternative to the arrogance of American supremacy secured by means of military power, Mr. Soros proposes the "Soros doctrine." Through the good agency of the United Nations and our own foreign-aid efforts, he writes, we need to answer our enemies not with force of arms but with "preventive action of a constructive nature." Is he writing speeches for John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich, or do all What explains this surpassing faith in the efficacy of international governance and institutions, especially in light of the record of such institutions in recent years, not to say over the past century? Here one can only speculate, Was it the drugs he got from Ginsburg? but at least part of the answer would seem to lie in biography. It is surely not incidental that Mr. Soros’s father was a devotee of Esperanto, with its grandiose and naive strategy for overcoming the fraught nationalist divisions of Europe. . . . No less pertinent in this connection is Mr. Soros’s problematic relationship to his own Jewishness. Though he often claims authority for his views by invoking his experience under the Nazis--he confided to the Washington Post that some of the things President Bush says "remind . . . me of the Germans"--he is strikingly aloof from his Jewish origins. None of his vast philanthropy has been directed toward Israel, and his coldness toward the Jewish state has on occasion shaded into outright hostility: in a speech last May to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Mr. Soros likened the behavior of Israel to that of the Nazis, invoking some psychological jargon about victims becoming victimizers. It is not only Israel that Mr. Soros abjures but Jewish charities in general, an attitude he attributes to his observations of the Judenrat, or Jewish council, that the Nazis created in Budapest, for which he worked as a courier, and by a rather weird experience with the Jewish Board of Guardians during his years in London. If blaming Jewish organizations--or Israel--for the works of the Nazis is hard to fathom, his attitude toward the Board of Guardians is no more explicable. It seems he appealed to it for financial support after breaking a leg, but the board arranged instead for him to receive a British government stipend. When he wrote an aggrieved letter deploring this as a tawdry way for "one Jew [to] treat . . . another in need," the board backed down and provided him with a cash allowance for the duration of his recovery. Later, he would confess insouciantly to his biographer the reason he had been so angry: He had already arranged to receive the government payment and had hidden this fact from the board in the hope of receiving duplicate benefits. It was, he said, "a double-dip," and one that "solved all my financial problems." Great Wharks! More remarkable still in this connection is Mr. Soros’s frequent comment that 1944 was "the best year of my life." It is easy to see how a boy of 14 might have been "excited" by the "adventure" of evading the Nazis with an assumed identity, as he says he was. But 70% of Mr. Soros’s fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year. They were dying and disappearing all around him, and their numbers no doubt included many whom he knew personally. Yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect. Essay question (5pts): Compare and contrast George Soros and Raoul Wallenberg. Whose reaction to the deportation of Hungarian Jews was more admirable, and why? "My Jewishness [does] not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty," Mr. Soros explains. About this he is certainly correct. "I [take] pride in being . . . an outsider who [is] capable of seeing the other point of view." About this he is correct as well, if by "other" we understand "adversary." In any event, this flight from Jewish particularism into a willed universalism is itself a familiar reflex, if not a full-fledged syndrome, among many Jews in the modern era, one of whom, a Yiddish-speaking philologist, was sufficiently inspired by it to invent Esperanto. In Mr. Soros, it has been taken to a startling extreme. Cold as he is toward the Jewish people, Mr. Soros is not much warmer toward his adopted country. "I had never quite become an American," he once said. Now he complains that today’s America "is not the America I chose as my home," as if, by turning conservative and electing George W. Bush as President, the country has failed to live up to him. The egotism of the remark is revealing. Mr. Soros has admitted to having "carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble." Having made his mark, he now seems to give them free rein. He told one interviewer that he had "godlike, messianic ideas," and another that he sometimes thought of himself as "superhuman." To still a third he explained that his "goal is to become the conscience of the world." My God! He thinks he’s Dennis Kucinich! This self-imagined messiah has now come to save the world from the America of George W. Bush and its war against terrorism. He is convinced that this is an unjustified war, contrived in response to events (the attacks of 9/11) that "should have been treated as crimes against humanity . . . requir[ing] police work, not military action." Ever notice that you never see George Soros and John F. Kerry in the same place at the same time? To say the least, it is a strange idea, and an even stranger role, for one who owes not only his immense fortune but also his freedom and even his life to America, and in particular to its willingness to confront those who have committed crimes against humanity with enough military force to defeat and stop them. Were Mr. Soros to succeed in his quest, the Wahabbis would likely not treat him with gratitude. Is Mr. Soros smart enough to notice this? | |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #8 karl popper's theories lead straight to the moral and ethical relativism of the deconstructionist pomo homos derrida and foucault--totally against a natural rights strausian perspective that most on this board would adhere too--we really can't know anything for sure has no application in the practical world--this pseudo atomist mishagas is highly dangerous and leads to the fallacy of cultural relativism which is anathema to real world action based on a hierarchy of [relatively] absolute values--if you can't know everything for sure you can take a really really good guess based on probability--i.e. that the sun will rise tomorrow morning--he wants to fight a war with miranda warnings--he wants to play checkers while his opponent plays football- a really dangerous man who is only listened to because he made a couple of bucks--resurrect hayek, von mises and strauss to kick his self hating jewish double dipping ass |
| Posted by: SON OF TOLUI 2004-3-4 4:31:58 AM |
| #7 It demonstrates the power and reach of a free economy in a republican democracy when a certified idiot and pedantic asshole, who can't remember what he meant in a direct quote the day before, rises to this level of affluence, arrogance, and condescension. I stand vindicated.... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-3-3 9:07:30 PM |
| #6 Tokyo Taro - Because he's not interested in other people's freedom, except their "freedom" to do what he says. He knows what's best for everybody, and if they don't agree, he'll just spend money until they're crushed under his heel. I'm with .com, except not so conflicted. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-3-3 8:30:27 PM |
| #5 Why doesn't this guy devote his energy and resources to pushing his Open Society in the Middle East the same way he did in Eastern Europe and the Caucuses? Why not donate money to liberal democratic opposition groups and organize free press and radio stations in the region of the world that needs them the most?! |
| Posted by: Tokyo Taro 2004-3-3 7:55:55 PM |
| #4 but left it unfinished when, as he confessed to his biographer, he himself could not understand on the morrow what he had written the day before. I must confess a certain sympathy, as everyone at RB knows... I've been there. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-3-3 7:39:15 PM |
| #3 In case anyone here thinks Soros is somehow a protege of Karl Popper, he is not. Karl Popper is MVHO the most important thinker of the twentieth century and is still very influential is some right wing and Libertarian circles. Karl Popper's great insight was that science and liberal democracy are driven by essentially the same mechanisms of disputing and questioning issues, inquiry and intellectual speculation. Both work because they encourage dissent and diversity of views. Hence my occasional railing against the uniformity of opinion in the mainstream media which I consider profoundly illiberal (in the European meaning of the word). Everyone should read the Open Society and Its Enemies and then Conjectures and Refutations. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2004-3-3 6:46:52 PM |
| #2 .com, So I guess you don't like him, do you? ;-) |
| Posted by: Mike 2004-3-3 6:13:54 PM |
| #1 Absolutely great post, Mike! This article, in a very clear manner, describes why I always derisively refer to Soro's delusion of being an American. This, by far, is the most dangerous twit in the LLL. Only the Wahhabis and Nayef are more directly dangerous to the security of the West, in general, and the US, in particular. A singular destructive and devisive idiot savante. His arrogance and self-delusion that he's an intellectual are only exceeded by his obvious schizophrenia, exemplified by his characteristic self-hatred and contradictory beliefs. I am, in contrast, only conflicted by whether or not he should be assassinated. And, for those who can't or won't admit to having similar feelings about certain people, bite me! ;-> |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-3 6:06:02 PM |