{"id":194280,"date":"2026-06-20T22:53:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T06:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194280"},"modified":"2026-06-20T17:02:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T01:02:24","slug":"the-hero-system-of-george-soros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194280","title":{"rendered":"The Hero System of George Soros"},"content":{"rendered":"

Budapest, the spring of 1944. A boy of fourteen carries papers that name him someone else. His father, Tivadar Soros (1894-1968), has bought the documents, split the children among separate households under separate names, and taught them the one rule that holds in an occupied city: the man who clings to a single fixed identity dies of it. Survival belongs to the man who holds his self loosely, who treats the name on the page as a wager and not a fact. The Germans want Jews who answer to their names. The boy learns to answer to another. He watches his father move through the catastrophe the way a card player moves through a bad hand, folding here, bluffing there, never confusing the cards in his fist with the truth of the game.
\nGeorge Soros<\/a> (b. 1930) spends the rest of his life building a cosmology out of that year.
\nErnest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) argues in The Denial of Death<\/em><\/a> that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot stand it, so he enrolls himself in a project larger than his body, a scheme of meaning that tells him he counts for something the grave cannot cancel. The scheme is the hero system. It tells a man what courage is, what contribution is, what a good life adds up to, and it pays him in the only currency that answers death, the sense that he is an object of primary value in a universe that will keep him. In Escape from Evil Becker adds the dark half. We buy our significance at a price, and someone else pays it. The men who carry our terror for us become our scapegoats. The man who threatens our scheme threatens our life, and we treat him the way men treat a plague.
\nMost hero systems answer death with a fixed thing. The nation that does not fall. The God who does not change. The race that endures, the canon that stands, the revolution that arrives and stays. The promise is permanence, and permanence reads as certainty. You know the truth, you serve the truth, the truth outlives you, and so you outlive yourself through it.
\nGeorge Soros<\/a> builds the rare hero system that answers death the other way. His permanence is the permanence of the open question.
\nAt the London School of Economics after the war he reads Karl Popper<\/a> (1902-1994), and Popper hands him the word for what his father practiced in the occupied city. No theory holds the final truth. Every theory is a conjecture that stands until something refutes it. The closed society freezes one answer and kills the men who doubt it. The open society keeps the answer revisable, keeps the doubt legal, treats fallibility as the price of staying alive. Soros carries this into markets as what he calls reflexivity. The trader’s belief alters the thing he means to predict, so certainty is foreclosed, and the man who admits this beats the man who forgets it. In September 1992 he sells the pound short against the conviction of the Bank of England and takes roughly a billion dollars from a government that thought it knew what its own currency was worth. The trade is the philosophy in one motion. He wins because he treats the official certainty as a conjecture ripe for refutation, and he is right.
\nThen the fortune turns to the work. The hero system acquires a budget, more than thirty-two billion dollars over four decades, poured into the Open Society Foundations: scholarships for Black students under apartheid, fellowships for East European dissidents, money for the open question wherever a state tries to slam it shut. A man who began by surviving a closed society spends his old age trying to refute closure on every continent at once.
\nHere the trouble starts. The word at the center of his life, “open,” means one thing to him and the opposite to almost everyone he funds against.
\nFor Soros, open means revisable. The door you keep ajar so the next correction can come through. For a Hong Kong bookseller watching the colophon of a banned title disappear from his own shelves, open means the shop not yet padlocked, the page not yet pulled, one more month of trading before the men come. For a Salafi preacher, the open society is fitna, the flood that follows when the fixed law dissolves, and openness names the disease, not the cure. For a Hindutva organizer in Delhi, open is the solvent that eats dharmic order, the profanation of what should stay bounded by caste and rite, and the foreign foundation that funds “openness” funds the dissolving of a sacred form. For a hesychast monk on Athos, openness is the world’s noise pressing on the cell, and the shut door of the cell is the open gate to God, so the two men use one word and point it in reverse directions. For a quant at a London fund, open is an open position, raw exposure, the thing you close before the weekend so the risk cannot eat you overnight. For a Texas pastor preaching to four thousand on a Sunday, the open society is open borders and the open marriage and the unguarded door the enemy walks through. For a retired Stasi file clerk drawing his pension in Leipzig, open is the Western word for the acid that ate his country, his work, his sense that his life had served a structure, and he hears “open society” as the name of the thing that erased him. For a Singaporean administrator who delivers housing on schedule to five million people, open means disorder, the society that cannot keep its promises because it keeps reopening its own decisions.
\nFive letters. Eight men. Eight sacred charges, several of them aimed at his throat.
\n“Speculation” splits the same way. For Soros it names a discipline of humility, the practice of a man who knows he cannot know and sizes his bet to his ignorance, who treats every position as provisional and gets out when the world refutes him. For the English pensioner whose savings thinned the autumn he broke the pound, speculation is theft that wears no mask, a foreigner taking money out of the air and out of her account in the same stroke. For the men who later build a worldwide story about him, “speculator” hardens into a code word, the rootless money that owes no flag, the wealth that comes from nowhere and answers to no nation. The discipline he is proudest of becomes the proof of his crime.
\nSo he draws the oldest assignment a hero system hands out. Becker calls it the scapegoat, and the casting is exact. Picture the rally in a small European capital, the posters with one old man’s face blown up and lit from below, the chant, the man near the front who has lost his factory job and cannot say why, who turns to the man beside him and says the financier did this, the financier wants no borders, no nation, no church, no us. The financier is everywhere and nowhere, has no homeland, melts what is solid for profit. Tell me his name and I will tell you what is wrong with the world. The man feels his terror find a shape, and the shape has an address.
\nThe story is the ancient template with a checkbook drawn into it: the Jew as the agent of dissolution, the cosmopolitan who unmakes the nation from within. The conspiracy about Soros is the product of a hero system, the defense thrown up by men whose immortality rests on fixed forms, on the nation and the bounded people and the unchanging law. Their scheme cannot survive a world that keeps reopening, and rather than mourn the world they are losing, they locate the loss in one financier and tell themselves that removing him restores the solid earth. Soros funds groups that fight antisemitism and has become the century’s chief object of it. Becker read this coming half a century ago without knowing the name. The man who carries your terror gets treated as the cause of it.
\nThe apostle of fallibility cannot be fallibilist about fallibilism. A man who says no one holds the final truth, and then spends thirty-two billion dollars advancing one vision of the good society, has built a fortress and called it a clearing. The open society arrives with a roster of approved outcomes attached, and the openness stops at the edge of the roster. His critics are not wrong to notice the program inside the procedure. Becker might say the trouble is not Soros and not hypocrisy. No man lives inside pure doubt. Doubt cannot hold the terror, cannot answer the grave, cannot get a man out of bed against the certainty of his own death. So even the doubt-hero smuggles in a certainty, names it openness, and defends it the way men defend a god. The most honest fallibilist alive still needs a floor to stand on, and the floor is a faith he does not examine, because if he examined it he would fall through.
\nIn December 2022 the board of the foundations elects his son chair. By the summer of 2023 Alexander Soros<\/a> (b. 1985) holds the controls, and the father, in his nineties, hands down the project the way a man hands down an estate. Consider what this does to a hero system built on the open question. The open question becomes an inheritance. The thing whose whole virtue was that it stayed unsettled gets settled on an heir, with a name fixed to the building and a fortune fixed to a board, which is among the most closed things a man can do with anything.
\nThe boy who survived 1944 did it by holding his self loosely, by treating his name as a wager he could fold. The old man leaves behind an institution that has fixed his name to the wall for as long as the endowment lasts. He spent a life proving that the loose self lives and the fixed self dies in the occupied city, and he ends by building the most fixed thing he could afford, so that the proof might outlast him. That is the wager underneath all the others, and the grave does not let anyone fold it.<\/p>\n

Attitude to the USA<\/strong><\/p>\n

His attitude toward the United States runs two ways.
\nHe owes the country a debt and says so. America took him in, let him build a fortune, and gave him the base from which he funds his work across the world. He treats it as the strongest open society on the map and the power best placed to lead others toward the same. He has said the U.S. occupies a hegemonic position and sits in a better place than any other country to reform international institutions. The hope under the praise is that America might choose to lead a global open society rather than rule as a lone superpower..
\nThe criticism grows from the same root. He fears America the empire even as he backs America the open society. In The Bubble of American Supremacy<\/em><\/a> he argued that the administration of George W. Bush (b. 1946) built its foreign policy on unilateralism and military might over international law, and that the approach failed. He told audiences that the Iraq war weakened the United States. He warned that preemptive war claimed by America alone strips American power of its legitimacy, and that branding protesters unpatriotic eats at the foundations of the democracy..
\nOn the economy he is as blunt. He calls market fundamentalism a threat to the open society greater than communism or socialism, because of the faith that free competition cures every ill. By 2008 he was arguing against market fundamentalism and for more government involvement in the American economy..
\nThen there is the money. He stands among the largest donors to the Democratic side of American politics. He spent heavily to defeat Bush in 2004 and funded groups such as MoveOn. He warned his own supporters against Donald Trump (b. 1946) and Ted Cruz (b. 1970) at the end of 2015. Later he put money into local contests, district-attorney races among them, to push criminal-justice reform from the bottom up.
\nHis critics read the whole record as hostility to the country. They see a man who treats America as institutionally oppressive, funds open borders, and works against national sovereignty. He reads himself the other way, as a patriot of the open society who attacks America hardest where it betrays its own promise, the refugee who loves the place enough to tell it hard things about its power.
\nThe short version of his view: America is the best hope for an open world and the largest danger to one, depending on which America shows up.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If David Pinsof wanted a single man to stand for the misunderstanding myth, he might pick George Soros. No one has spent more money on the premise that the world’s troubles come from closed minds.
\nThe open society is the misunderstanding myth with an endowment. Popper’s idea, which Soros took as his life’s text, holds that the closed society freezes one answer and the open society keeps the question alive, that dogma and false certainty are the enemies, and that inquiry, a free press, education, and deliberation are the cure. Read Pinsof’s catalog of intellectual complaints next to the program of the foundations and you find the same sentence written twice. Polarization is misunderstanding. Authoritarianism is closed-mindedness. Disinformation is a virus to inoculate against. Bigotry is ignorance of the ordinary humanity of the other group. Soros funded the cure for each of these, on six continents, for forty years.
\nPinsof’s wager runs the other way. Humans are savvy animals who understand what they have an incentive to understand. The trouble is not bad beliefs but bad motives. People are not confused. They are competing, mostly over the coercive apparatus of the state, the thing that puts men in prison at gunpoint. Run Soros through that lens and the open society stops reading as an error-correction project and starts reading as what Pinsof says all such projects are, coalition-building with a mission statement bolted on top.
\nLook at where the money goes. Progressive NGOs, immigrant-rights groups, the press, and, closest to home, district-attorney races and criminal-justice reform. The part of his giving that sounds most high-minded, the reform of who gets prosecuted and who walks free, is the part aimed at the coercive apparatus of the state. Pinsof says this is no accident. The district attorney decides who goes to prison. A man who funds district-attorney races is not curing a misunderstanding about justice. He is competing for the lever. The stated goal is a fairer system. The actual goal, on this reading, is the lever, and the stated goal is the thing a man says while reaching for it.
\nThen fallibilism. Soros says no one holds the final truth, himself among them. Pinsof reads the humility as a signal and a weapon. The bias bias: I am less biased than the closed-minded men I oppose. The posture lets a man push a definite program while disclaiming dogma, a stronger spot than open dogma, because it puts the opponent in the wrong for being certain while you advance your certainties under cover of doubt. Thirty-two billion dollars is a strange sum to spend by a man with no settled view of the good.
\nReflexivity, the market theory, reads as self-serving in Pinsof’s plain sense. Overconfidence helps a man make money and convince people he knows what he is doing. Soros’s theory holds that markets run on the fallible beliefs of their participants, that consensus is often wrong, that the man who spots the flaw cashes in. This is the theory of a man who got rich betting against the Bank of England. It flatters the speculator and supplies a built-in excuse, because when the world refutes him, fallibility was the premise all along. Self-serving going up, self-serving coming down.
\nIf effectiveness means a more open world, the scoreboard for Soros is mixed. Hungary, his birthplace, drove out his university and ran against his name and won elections doing it. If effectiveness means status<\/a>, a permanent name, a global coalition, and a seat among the men who decide what counts as legitimate opinion, the giving worked well. Actions over words. The thirty-two billion bought a great deal of what he was after.
\nNow the enemies. Soros treats the hatred against him as a misunderstanding. If only they read Popper. If only they saw that an open society threatens no decent man. Pinsof says bigotry is not a brain-fart and partisan hatred is not a senior moment. The men who hate Soros are not confused about him. They have noticed, correctly, that he funds their rivals, that his money flows to the coalition trying to take the lever from theirs. They are fighting, and demonizing the competition is what men do in a high-stakes fight. The antisemitic story they tell, the rootless financier melting the nation, is false as history and useful as a weapon. The hatred is strategic. So is Soros’s reply that the hatred springs from ignorance, because calling an enemy ignorant is a move in the same fight.
\nThen the layer that keeps this from a cheap shot. Pinsof does not need Soros to be a liar. The frame works better if the man believes every word. We deceive ourselves about our motives because denial is a weapon, and the sincerest believer carries the strongest cover. Soros, on this reading, is a savvy animal who understands what he has an incentive to understand and no more, who feels the warmth of saving the world and does not feel, because he has no incentive to feel, the coalition war running underneath. The mission statement is no cynical cover he keeps in a drawer. It is the thing he sees when he looks in the mirror, and that is what makes it work.
\nSoros spent a fortune studying the hole the species is stuck in, the closed minds, the bad information, the failures of reason, and called the study a rescue. Pinsof’s answer is that there is no rescue and no misunderstanding, that the men fighting Soros understand the stakes, that Soros understands them too at the level where it counts, and that the open society is the most expensive mission statement ever printed.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) wrote The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a> against a type of man, and the type is George Soros.
\nPolitical liberalism, in Mearsheimer’s account, is individualist at the core. It treats people as atomistic actors carrying a set of inalienable rights, and because the rights are inalienable they are universal, the same for every human on the planet. That universalism does not sit still. It pushes the liberal to remake the world in its image, to carry the rights abroad, to pursue an ambitious foreign policy on behalf of mankind. Mearsheimer thinks the project a delusion, because man is not the rights-bearing atom liberalism imagines. Man is a social animal, tribal at the root, formed by his group long before he can reason, and the deepest of the social forces, nationalism, beats liberalism whenever the two meet.
\nSoros is liberalism with a checkbook and no country. The open society is political liberalism stated as a universal destination. Every people, everywhere, is entitled to the open question, the free press, the civil society, the rights. Popper supplied the creed and Soros supplied the foreign policy, thirty-two billion dollars of it, run from a foundation rather than a state but aimed at the same target as American liberal hegemony after the Cold War: democracy promotion, dissident scholarships, the rule of rights, the world made open. A private man behaving as a liberal great power.
\nMearsheimer’s quarrel begins with the atom at the center. Soros’s ideal citizen is the man who thinks for himself, doubts his tribe, holds his identity loosely, revises his beliefs against the evidence. Reflexivity is a theory of that man’s mind. The open society is built for him. Mearsheimer says he barely exists. People do not come into the world as lone wolves choosing their values off a menu. They are born into a group that stamps them in childhood, before the reasoning faculty wakes, and by the time a man can reason the value infusion of family and nation and faith and tongue has already set. Reason, Mearsheimer ranks last of the three sources of what we want, behind innate sentiment and well behind socialization. Soros bet his fortune on the faculty Mearsheimer ranks last.
\nWatch what this does to the open society’s tools. The free press, the funded university, the human-rights NGO all assume a man who updates his beliefs when you hand him better information. Give people facts and arguments and access, the theory runs, and they reason their way toward openness. Mearsheimer says the value infusion got there first. A Hungarian or a Russian is a Hungarian or a Russian before he is a reasoner, and the open society arrives to argue with something childhood already wrote. Soros funded inquiry against socialization and lost, because socialization had a thirty-year head start in every head he hoped to reach.
\nThe defeats line up with the theory. Hungary, his birthplace, is the clearest case. Viktor Orb\u00e1n (b. 1963) built a career on the figure of the rootless cosmopolitan financier who would dissolve the nation, drove Central European University out of Budapest, ran against the Soros name in election after election, and won. Russia branded the foundations undesirable and threw them out. Across Europe and in America the nationalist right made Soros the face of everything it meant to defend the nation against. Soros reads the resistance as authoritarian backsliding, as a failure to grasp what an open society offers. Mearsheimer reads it as nationalism doing what nationalism does, the thick old loyalty defending the bounded group against the thin new universalism that wants to open it. The backlash is no misunderstanding and no bigot’s accident. It is the deeper force surfacing against the shallower one, on schedule.
\nHere Mearsheimer turns the frame on Soros. The universalist is socialized too. Soros’s open society did not descend from pure reason. It grew from a particular boy in a particular city in 1944, a Jew who watched a closed, tribal nationalism try to exterminate his people and built his life’s creed against the tribe. His cosmopolitanism is the survival doctrine of a man from a hunted minority, a social-group identity and not a view from nowhere. Mearsheimer’s law holds even here. The values came from the catastrophe and the community, not from a syllogism. The open society is the history of a hunted people turned into a program for all peoples. That origin gives the creed its moral weight and also explains why the nationalists sense tribe under the universalism and why the universalist cannot sense it in himself.
\nSoros believed, as the liberal must believe, that his values are universal and exportable, that the open society is where all men are headed once the closed regimes blocking the road are cleared. He spent a fortune clearing the road. The road did not lead where he thought. Nationalism rose in the places he funded most, and it rose in part by pointing at him. Mearsheimer might say Soros could not have seen this from inside his creed, because liberalism cannot admit that man is tribal without ceasing to be liberalism, so it keeps crusading and keeps drawing the backlash and keeps calling the backlash a misunderstanding.
\nThe boy survived 1944 by holding his identity loosely. He spent the rest of his life trying to teach a tribal species to do the same, and the species, Mearsheimer says, was never going to learn.<\/p>\n

30 Useful Concepts About Bullshit<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Pinsof’s eleventh concept is the sacred value<\/a>, a cover story for status-seeking<\/a> built to keep a status game from collapsing. We deny we want dominance and claim we want honor, wisdom, equality, the betterment of mankind. The open society is that, almost to the letter, and it is the strongest sacred value a man can hold, because no one can cash it out. No one can say when a society is open enough. The work never ends, the funding never stops, and the status the work confers never has to settle a bill.
\nCompare the weaker covers. A man who fights for democracy can be embarrassed by an election, by the wrong party winning fair and square, by Hamas at the ballot box or a nationalist with a supermajority. A man who fights for equality can be handed a chart. Openness takes no chart. It names a direction and arrives nowhere, so it can never be falsified, never be completed, never be caught failing. The genius of the cover is that no one can check it. Soros chose, or was chosen by, the perfect sacred value, the one with no settlement date.
\nNow the game under the cover. Money by itself runs low-status among the people Soros wanted to impress. The intellectuals, the editors, the men who decide what counts as knowledge, hold the vulgar rich in quiet contempt. A speculator who broke the Bank of England is a sharp operator and nothing more, and sharp operators do not get invited to lecture at the LSE or publish theories of history. The open society launders the fortune. It converts money, which buys contempt, into moral seriousness, which buys a seat. The man who might have stayed a clever gambler becomes the philosopher-philanthropist, the financier with a conscience, the funder of the good. His books, which no house takes from a billionaire with opinions, become required reading from the patron of open society. The sacred value bought him the one thing the money could not, a place among the people whose seriousness he craved.
\nFold in the eighth concept, anti-status, the status you draw from looking like you chase no status<\/a>. Fallibilism is the polish on the apparatus. The line that no one holds the final truth, himself included, is the highest posture a man of his wealth can strike, because it disarms the envy that great money draws. The humble billionaire is harder to hate than the proud one, and the humility advances the program while disclaiming the ambition. He pushes a definite vision of the good and calls it doubt.
\nSo far this reads as the frame on a man who is winning. The richer part is the tenth concept, status-game collapse, and it explains the thing that puzzles Soros most, the hatred.
\nPinsof says a status game collapses when the players gain common knowledge that it is a status game. They see each other all at once as vain, self-serving, hiding dominance under virtue, and the sacred value stops working in the room. The nationalist right reached that common knowledge about the open society years ago. They stopped arguing with its content. They named it as a move. They said the benevolence is a cover, the universalism a flag, the philanthropy a bid for power dressed as a bid for the good. Once a coalition sees the halo as a move, it does not debate the halo. It shoots at it.
\nThe shape of the attack follows from the collapse. When you collapse a sacred value, you charge the holder with seeking dominance under cover of virtue, with pursuing his own tribe’s power while claiming to serve all mankind. That is the form every collapse takes, and it is the exact form of the antisemitic libel thrown at Soros, the rootless cosmopolitan whose talk of humanity masks a hidden particular interest. The libel is false as history and true to the template. The attackers did not invent a new charge. They reached for the oldest one and found it fit the slot the collapse had opened, because the collapse always alleges the same thing, that the saint is a striver in disguise.
\nSoros cannot concede the collapse, because conceding it ends his game. If he admitted that the open society is a status move, the move dies, since a sacred value the holder sees through is a dead value. So he reads the attack as bigotry and confusion, as men who fail to grasp what an open society offers. He has no choice in this. The twenty-second concept, the social paradox, holds that the signal stays hidden from the signaler as much as from the audience. The virtue signaler does not know he is signaling. Soros does not experience the open society as a bid for status. He experiences it as the good, and the experience is load-bearing. The sincerity is no flaw in the cover. The sincerity is the cover. A man who knew his halo was a tool could not wear it convincingly, so the species built minds that believe their own press.
\nWhen a game collapses, Pinsof says, the players scramble to a new game, and the scramble drives cultural change. The right built its new game on the rubble of the old one. The points now go to the man who sees through the cosmopolitan, who is not fooled by the benevolence, who knows the financier’s real designs. Soros became the sacred value of one coalition and the sacred scapegoat of the other, the positive totem here and the negative totem there, and the two are the same engine seen from opposite ends. Both tribes feed off his name. One sells salvation through him and one sells salvation against him, and neither sale clears, because the value at stake on both sides cannot be cashed any more than openness can.
\nThe open society holds as a sacred value because it never settles, and the proof sits on both sides of the war over Soros. He cannot lose the open society, because no defeat counts as its defeat. His enemies cannot finish him, because no exposure counts as his exposure. The believers and the haters are bound to the same uncashable thing, drawing status<\/a> from it for as long as they live, and the man in the middle, ninety-five years old, funds the believers and feeds the haters with the same dollar, and the dollar never comes due.<\/p>\n

Dark Idealism <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Pinsof’s nineteenth concept is dark idealism, the heartfelt conviction that we are pure and noble and benevolent, which fuels dark morality by blinding us to our own biases and making the men who reject our ideals look evil or subhuman. Soros is the hardest case the concept faces, and the most revealing, because he built his life on doubt. Dark idealism feeds on certainty of one’s own goodness, and here is a man whose whole creed holds that no one owns the truth. So how does the apostle of fallibilism end up the purest case of dark idealism alive?
\nHe exempts one thing from the doubt. He doubts every empirical claim, every market call, every theory of history, his own among them. He does not doubt that he means well. Fallibilism runs across the whole board and stops at the door of his own benevolence. The purity has to live somewhere, and in a man who disclaims certainty it cannot live in his beliefs, so it migrates to his intentions. He no longer says I am right. He says I want the good. Wanting the good is the purest claim a man can make and the one that blinds him hardest, because doubt cannot reach an intention. A man can be shown his facts are wrong. He cannot be shown his heart is wrong, not from the inside, and Soros lives inside.
\nWatch the blinding to his own biases. He funds one coalition, the progressive NGOs, the reform candidates, the editors and lawyers and activists of a single political family, and he experiences none of it as partisan. He experiences it as funding the open question, civil society, human rights, the neutral goods of mankind. The idealism turns a side into a service. The man who pays for one side of every fight believes he pays for no side, only for openness, and the belief is sincere, which is what makes it dark. An ordinary partisan knows he is a partisan and can be reasoned with on those terms. Soros cannot locate his own tribe, because his creed has told him he rose above tribe into humanity. He funds his allies and calls them civilization.
\nNow the men across from him. Run the Soros vocabulary for his opponents and you find no opponents in it. You find authoritarians, demagogues, the closed society, the forces of reaction, the illiberal, the backsliding, the fearful, the manipulated, the not-yet-open. Never a rival coalition with interests as real as his own. Always a moral category. Once a man’s cause is mankind, the men who block him are not blocking a man, they are blocking mankind, and that licenses him to treat them as defects rather than parties, as the unenlightened rather than the opposed. The Soros register runs softer than Pinsof’s word subhuman. He does not call the Hungarian villager an animal. He calls him afraid, closed, misled, a man who would choose the open society if he understood it. The softer charge does the same work and lasts longer, because it denies the opponent a legitimate interest while sounding like compassion. The man is not wrong. He is benighted. He does not disagree. He misunderstands.
\nDownstream sits the dark morality the idealism feeds, Pinsof’s eighteenth concept, the conviction of doing right that fuels censorship and bullying and contempt. The funding of campaigns against disinformation, which is the funding of one coalition’s power to name the other coalition’s speech a disease. The branding of arguments for national sovereignty as bigotry. The pouring of a fortune into the elections of other countries, felt by the giver as help and by the country as intervention. Soros opposed the Iraq war and funded democracy promotion, and could not see that the two share a spine, the conviction that one’s values are universal and that carrying them abroad is a gift. He saw the war as dark and his own work as light. Dark idealism is the inability to see that they run on the same engine.
\nThe fallibilist’s blind spot is worth standing on, because it inverts what people expect. We assume the dangerous man is the one sure he is right. The more dangerous man is the one sure he is good while professing to doubt that he is right, because the doubt buys him innocence and the goodness sanctifies whatever the doubt permits. Soros built the maximum version of dark idealism, a purity that survives his own skepticism, because he parked the purity in his motives where skepticism does not go. A man certain of his benevolence and uncertain of all else is the purest specimen of the thing alive. The uncertainty is real and wide, and it certifies the one certainty that poisons.
\nThe frame turns on his enemies in the same stroke, and on me. The nationalists run their own dark idealism in reverse. They are the defenders of the nation, the pure, the rooted, and Soros is the demon eating the homeland. Two idealisms face each other across Europe, each sure of its own light, each casting the other as evil, neither able to see its own coalition as a coalition. Pinsof says this is the ordinary human condition and no special failing of either man. The symmetry is the point. The writer does not escape it. To file Soros under blinded by idealism is a moral judgment, and moral judgment is the ground dark idealism grows in. The cynic who exposes the idealist feels the clean pleasure of the undeceived, a purity of its own. I sort Soros the way he sorts his Hungarian, and the sorting feels right to me the way his feels right to him, and that match is the concept at work on the man who wields it.
\nThe open society promised a man who could doubt his way out of the tribe, who could hold his beliefs loosely enough to see his enemies as men and not monsters. Dark idealism is the proof that no creed sells that exit. The surer a man grows of his good will, the blinder he goes, and the apostle of doubt kept one article past all doubting, his faith in his own light. That faith is the thing that makes the dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Budapest, the spring of 1944. A boy of fourteen carries papers that name him someone else. His father, Tivadar Soros (1894-1968), has bought the documents, split the children among separate households under separate names, and taught them the one rule … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42701],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-george-soros"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t