In a perfectly open society none of the existing ties are final, and people’s relation to nation, family and their fellows depends entirely on their own decisions. Looking at the reverse side of the coin, this means that the permanence of social relationships has disappeared; the organic structure of society has disintegrated to the point where its atoms, the individuals, float around without any roots.
— George Soros
George Soros is a prominent funder of the New School for Social Research. He has achieved fame or infamy in the name of ‘philanthropy’, lavishing patronage on ‘liberal’ causes, and is a significant factor in promoting ‘colour revolutions’ for ‘regime change’, particularly in the former Soviet bloc. His significance is such that the leadership of Hungary and of Russia have acted to eliminate Soros’ Open Society institutes and numerous fronts and offshoots from their societies. In 2018, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán introduced what was widely called a ‘Stop Soros’ bill in response to Soros’ backing of the Third World population shift to Europe. Because Soros is a nominal Jew, albeit secularised and critical of Israel, exposure of him is often condemned as ‘anti-Semitism’. In a feature vehemently condemning Orbán and lauding Soros, Zack Beauchamp, like Soros an alumnus of the London School of Economics, writes in Vox:
This week, Hungary passed what the government dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, named after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The new law, drafted by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, creates a new category of crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration” — essentially, banning individuals and organizations from providing any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants. This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights.
Hungary’s government framed the bill as a check on the influence of Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who funds pro-democracy activism around the world. Orbán has fingered Soros (who is also a favorite villain of the American right) as the source of an international plot to destroy Hungary through migration. He often launches attacks on the billionaire in strikingly anti-Semitic terms.1146
The globalist commentators need only mention key words such as ‘Jewish Holocaust survivor’ and ‘American right’, and that is expected to create a negative reflex. That Orbán is one of the few perceptive statesmen in the world is indicated by his description of the Soros offensive, which is reason enough to be condemned by globalists:
‘We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world’, Orban said in a characteristic anti-Soros tirade in March.1147
In another speech Orbán stated:
We are up against media outlets maintained by foreign concerns and domestic oligarchs, professional hired activists, troublemaking protest organizers, and a chain of NGOs financed by an international speculator, summed up by and embodied in the name George Soros.1148
Orbán describes Soros and oligarchical globalists with precision. The issue is not as to the accuracy of his description, but that one should not speak ill of a ‘Jewish Holocaust survivor’.
In 2020, Soros announced at the World Economic Forum at Davos that he was advancing $1 billion to establish a ‘global university to fight authoritarian governments....’1149 Soros’ Central European University, located in Budapest, was closed by Orbán in 2018. Now Soros has extended the vision to nothing less than the ‘transformation of higher education’ worldwide. The Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations have been influencing and directing higher education through endowments for a century. Soros, with the support of other oligarchs, envisages establishing his own global university network to imbue generations of policy-makers, advisers and educators with his ideology. Soros is overt in the aims:
The network, which will operate throughout the world, is named the Open Society University Network (OSUN). It will integrate teaching and research across higher education institutions worldwide. It will offer simultaneously taught network courses and joint degree programs and regularly bring students and faculty from different countries together with in-person and online discussions. The network aims to reach the students who need it the most and to promote the values of open society—including free expression and diversity of beliefs.1150
Note that the university will:
1) Operate as a worldwide network.
2) Influence other tertiary institutions across the world.
3) Indoctrinate students with an ideology — the ‘open society’ (liberal-capitalism) — hence making the reference to ‘free expression and diversity of beliefs’ nothing but doublethink.
4) ‘Fight authoritarian governments’; that is, governments and statesmen, such as Putin and Orbán, who do not acquiesce to globalisation.
OSUN will seek to promote rigorous education and reach institutions in need of international partners, as well as neglected populations, such as refugees, incarcerated people, the Roma and other displaced groups. OSUN, with the help of its allies, is ready to start a massive “scholars at risk” program, merging a large number of academically excellent but politically endangered scholars into this new global network.1151
Meaning:
1) OSUN will seek to control the direction and politicise institutions in states targeted for ‘regime change’
2) Indoctrinate and manipulate uprooted populations
3) Sponsor those who have opposed targeted regimes
4) Repeat on a larger scale the 1930s Rockefeller programme of sponsoring political agitators in the name of ‘scholarship’
Soros is clear that the OSUN network is designed to globally instil the liberal-capitalist doctrine, and reshape ‘civilisation’ as he sees it.
Mr. Soros said: “I believe our best hope lies in access to an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating critical thinking and emphasizing academic freedom. I consider the Open Society University Network to be the most important and enduring project of my life and I should like to see it implemented while I am still around.”
Mr. Soros, who has given more than $32 billion over the past 30 years to education and social justice causes, added, “We are looking for farsighted partner institutions who feel a responsibility for the future of our civilization, people who are inspired by the goals of OSUN and want to participate in its realization.”
“We can’t build a global network on our own,” said Mr Soros. “I hope that those who share this vision will join us in making it a reality.”1152
The Soros initiative is intended to take over and universalise education, indoctrinate and control future generations of academics, create a leadership cadre that can assume administration in the aftermath of ‘regime change’, and reshape the world from the top-down. OSUN extends what the London School of Economics and the New School were founded to do.
Soros was educated at the London School of Economics, where he encountered his ideological mentor Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, which inspired the naming of the Soros foundations. In 1980, Soros was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New School.1153
Ideologically, Soros sees an historical dichotomy between ‘open and closed societies’, between societies that are ‘changeless’ and those that are continually changing. Soros calls the ‘closed society’ ‘the organic society’. Organic societies are regarded as static. He describes the ‘organic society’ in a manner that accords with rightist thinking: the individual exists for the benefit of the ‘social whole’. ‘The unity of a changeless society is comparable to the unity of an organism. Members of a changeless society are like organisms of a living body. … The functions they fulfil determine their rights and duties’.1154
Where the Right sees the fulfilment of the individual in service to the organic society, Soros — as with the Critical Theorists — sees repression.
However, where Soros errs in his opposition to the ‘organic society’ is in stating that it is ‘changeless’. Again using the physiological analogy, a living organism changes by growth, based not on the importation of pathogens (which sicken and kill) but on organic growth from the elements out of which it arose (inheritance, tradition). From the rightist interpretation, the ‘open society’ is one that leaves the organic society ‘open’ to pathogens. The ‘open society’ destroys the immune system of the social organism, allowing ‘cultural disease’ to enter. It is these cultural, economic, social, and moral pathogens that Soros, and others of the globalist elite, promote. The organic society, so far from being ‘changeless’, unless prematurely killed by war or natural disaster for example, might organically grow to a high culture, such as the West’s early medieval Gothic epoch when, especially during the 13th century, the arts and sciences flourished, and life was far removed from the derisive way it has been portrayed since the Renaissance by ‘progressives’.1155
Where the Right sees a social community, Soros sees restriction. What Soros disdains as the ‘social whole’, his mentor Karl Popper called ‘holism’. When Soros aims to break down the bonds that hold the individual to the ‘organic society’ through the promotion of a myriad of causes that fracture the individual from primary ties, we arrive at the convergence between liberal capitalism and the New Left, Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism. Here one might perceive how Soros and fellow globalists are in accord with the Critical Theorists, and why liberal-capitalists fund ‘socialists’.
Soros frankly stated:
Let me try to carry the open society to its logical conclusion and describe what a perfectly changeable society would look like. Alternatives would be available in all aspects of existence: in personal relations, opinions and ideas, productive processes and materials, social and economic organization, and so on. In these circumstances, the individual would occupy the paramount position. Members of an organic society possess no independence at all; in a less than perfectly changeable society, established values and relationships still circumscribe people’s behaviour, but in a perfectly open society none of the existing ties are final, and people’s relation to nation, family and their fellows depends entirely on their own decisions. Looking at the reverse side of the coin, this means that the permanence of social relationships has disappeared; the organic structure of society has disintegrated to the point where its atoms, the individuals, float around without any roots.1156
Soros and Popper reach convergence with Fromm and Marcuse. Liberal-capitalism synthesises with Cultural Marxism.
Soros explains that the individual will choose what alternative best suits his life by the extension of economics. ‘In a world in which every action is a matter of choice, economic behaviour characterizes all fields of activity. All values, including spiritual, artistic and moral, can be reduced to monetary terms’. ‘This renders the principles of the market mechanism relevant to such far-ranging areas as art, politics, social life, sex, and religion’. In ‘a perfectly changeable society the scope of the market mechanism would be extended to this utmost limit’. The most striking aspect of a perfectly changeable society is ‘the decline in personal relationships’. ‘Friends, neighbors, husbands, and wives would become, if not interchangeable, at least readily replaceable by only marginally inferior (or superior) substitutes; they would be subject to choice under competitive conditions’. Parents and children would ‘presumably remain fixed’, but the family bond ‘may become less influential’.1157
Soros claims that such a conclusion is ‘less than pleasing’, but he has spent a lifetime and a vast fortune promoting precisely those causes that lead to this ‘logical conclusion’. Soros states that the primary obstacles to this universal open society are Islamic and Russian ‘fundamentalism’. The other major challenges are the return of the organic society via ‘an ethnic or religious community’.1158 Hence he expends large amounts against ‘populist’ statesmen, such as Putin and Orbán.
Both Marx on the Left (dialectical materialism) and Spengler on the Right (historical morphology) were historicists; both postulated laws of history and social development. Popper and his pupil Soros reject historicism. There is no intrinsic unfolding of history; only what the individual makes at a given time. If that individual has extreme wealth, then he is in a position to substantially alter society. This seems to be a highly relativistic form of social engineering, and one that proceeds by trial and error. The social engineer becomes responsible for changing institutions as the need arises; changing society in stages. The premise is one of perpetual change, Popper writing:
The politician who adopts this [piecemeal] method may or may not have a blueprint of society before his mind, he may or may not hope that mankind will one day realize an ideal state, and achieve happiness and perfection on earth. But he will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant and that every generation of men, and therefore also the living, have a claim…1159
One of the differences between the Utopian or holistic approach and the piecemeal approach may therefore be stated in this way: while the piecemeal engineer can attack his problem with an open mind as to the scope of the reform, the holist cannot do this; for he has decided beforehand that a complete reconstruction is possible and necessary.1160
Additionally, from a tactical viewpoint, the social engineer can subvert a community behind the guise of addressing some specific humanitarian issue:
In favour of his method, the piecemeal engineer can claim that a systematic fight against suffering and injustice is more likely to be supported by the approval and agreement of a great number of people than the fight for the establishment of some ideal.1161
Hence, the South African economy might be opened up (the open society) to privatisation and globalisation by the destruction of apartheid in the name of ‘social justice’, or the mineral wealth of Kosovo in the name of ‘democracy’.