George Soros on the road ahead, part 1

Soros working on Wall Street, 1962,
from the NYRB article

On his role in his "exceptional position"
"I have made it a principle to pursue my self-interest in my business, subject to legal and ethical limitations, and to be guided by the public interest as a public intellectual and philanthropist. If the two are in conflict, the public interest ought to prevail. I do not hesitate to advocate policies that are in conflict with my business interests. I firmly believe that our democracy would function better if more people adopted this principle. And if they care about a well-functioning democracy, they ought to abide by this principle even if others do not. Just a small number of public-spirited figures could make a big difference."

On the threat to U.S. democracy
"The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect. After September 11, the Bush administration exploited the very real fear generated by the terrorist attack, and by declaring "war on terror" was able to unite the nation behind the commander-in-chief, lead it to invade Iraq on false pretenses, and violate established standards of human rights in pursuing and interrogating terrorists."

"I thought I had a convincing argument in favor of the truth. Look at the results of the Bush policies: they were designed to demonstrate America’s supremacy, and they achieved the exact opposite; American power and influence suffered a precipitous decline. This goes to show, I argued, that it is not enough to manipulate perceptions; it is important to understand how the world really works. . . . That is the additional requirement I put into my definition of open society, but obviously it did not have an effect on the public that reelected Bush in 2004. . . . [Bush's reelection] convinced me that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership. The American public was unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems."

On the need to confront the manipulators
"The electorate showed little appreciation of Obama for moderating the recession because it was hardly aware of what he had done. By avoiding conflict Obama handed the initiative to the opposition, and the opposition had no incentive to cooperate. The Republican propaganda machine was able to convince people that the financial crisis was due to government failure, not market failure."

-- George Soros, in "My Philanthropy,"
in the June 23 New York Review of Books

by Ken

According to the NYRB author's note, "The essay in this issue is drawn from [George Soros's] introduction to Chuck Sudetic's The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies. There's a lot in it that's important to the essay and clearly important to Soros which I'm not going to go into much, at least not now, because there are some other things that are of such considerable interest to me.

He talks early on about a major change in his thinking about his public-policy work, centered around "the worldwide network of Open Society Foundations," to which he says he has contributed more than $8 billion over 30 years, working with the foundations' president, Aryeh Neier. His original thinking was that the foundations shouldn't outlast his and Neier's passing. "The fate of other institutions has taught me that they tend to stray very far from the founders’ intentions." But he became convinced enough of the importance and ongoingness of their work, and of the commitment and abilities of the people working with them, that he decided that pulling the plug on them "would be an act of excessive selfishness." There is, he thinks, a wide range of tasks that need to and can be carried on without them. He talks too about steps he has taken to try to ensure the continued freshness and innovation and "entrepreneurial spirit" of the work, including setting up a School of Public Policy at the Central European University in Budapest.

In his second section Soros talks about the importance of continued work on economic matters, "to break the monopoly of the efficient market hypothesis and rational expectations theory enjoyed in academic and official circles." He insists, "We must reinvent a global financial system that has broken down," and believes that his own theory of "reflexivity," once scorned by conventional economic authorities but receiving increasing attention in the wake of the financial crisis, though not in all quarters. ("I had many more discussions with Larry Summers before he became the President's economic adviser than I did afterward," and his "greatest disappointment" was "being unable to establish any kind of personal contact with President Obama himself.") He is working to ensure the funding of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, with a board chaired by Joseph Stiglitz.

All of this, as I said, is clearly important both to Soros and to the world that stands to benefit from these ongoing initiatives.

AND THEN HE COMES TO THE PART THAT GRABBED ME

The war on terror forced me to reconsider the concept of open society. My experiences in the former Soviet Union had already taught me that the collapse of a closed society does not automatically lead to an open one; the collapse may be seemingly bottomless, to be followed by the emergence of a new regime that has a greater resemblance to the regime that collapsed than to an open society. Now I had to probe deeper into the concept of open society that I had adopted from Karl Popper in my student days, and I discovered a flaw in it.

And remember, that concept of "an open society" that he adopted from Karl Popper is so important to him that the principal vehicle for his world-improving activities has been that international network of Open Society Foundations.

Popper had argued that free speech and critical thinking would lead to better laws and a better understanding of reality than any dogma. I came to realize that there was an unspoken assumption embedded in his argument, namely that the purpose of democratic discourse is to gain a better understanding of reality.

Unfortunately, people don't just use their brains for trying "to gain a better understanding of reality." There is also "a manipulative function."

it may not be necessary to gain a better understanding of reality in order to obtain the laws one wants. There is a shortcut: "spinning" arguments and manipulating public opinion to get the desired results. Today our political discourse is primarily concerned with getting elected and staying in power. Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the "Enlightenment fallacy."

As it happened, the political operatives of the Bush administration became aware of the Enlightenment fallacy long before I did. People like me, misguided by that fallacy, believed that the propaganda methods described in George Orwell’s 1984 could prevail only in a dictatorship. They knew better. Frank Luntz, the well-known right-wing political consultant, proudly acknowledged that he used 1984 as his textbook in designing his catchy slogans. And Karl Rove reportedly claimed that he didn’t have to study reality; he could create it. The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.

"Deliberately misleading propaganda techniques can destroy an open society," Soros writes. He cites the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda methods in destroying the Weimar Republic in Germany, and argues,

Different but in some ways similar methods have been used in the United States and further refined. Although democracy has much deeper roots in America than in Germany, it is not immune to deliberate deception, as the Bush administration demonstrated. You cannot wage war against an abstraction; yet the war on terror remains a widely accepted metaphor even today.

Regular readers will note that this is a them I've harped on: that it can't be good for our society when we have an entire political movement totally divorce itself from any obligation to or even expectation of reality or truth. It occurs to me now that there's a reason why extreme right-wingers now talk about the First Amendment and in particular free speech in ways that would once have elicited rage and derision from, well, people like them. They've come to understand that "free speech" isn't. It's a game they can rig, both through manipulation and through the application of sums of money that sure make a joke of the word "free."

Inevitably, then, comes what we might call the $30 billion question --

"HOW CAN OPEN SOCIETY PROTECT ITSELF AGAINST
DANGEROUSLY DECEPTIVE ARGUMENTS?"

And I want to pursue Soros's thoughts on the subject in my 6pm PT post.

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