CHAPTER 2

My Political Philanthropy

“A Selfish Man with a Selfless Foundation”

I am both selfish and self-centered, and I have no qualms about acknowledging it. Yet over the past thirty years I have established a far-reaching philanthropic enterprise—the Open Society Foundations—whose annual budget used to hover around $500 million and is now climbing toward a billion. (Total expenditures from 1979 to 2018 are about $15 billion.) The activities of the Open Society Foundations extend to every part of the globe and cover such a wide range of subjects that even I am surprised by it. I am, of course, not the only one who is selfish and self-centered; most of us are. I am just more willing to admit it. There are many truly charitable people in the world, but few of them amass the wealth necessary to be a philanthropist.

I have always been leery of philanthropy. In my view, philanthropy goes against the grain; therefore, it generates a lot of hypocrisy and many paradoxes. Here are some examples: philanthropy is supposed to be devoted to the benefit of others, but philanthropists tend to be primarily concerned with their own benefit; philanthropy is supposed to help people, yet it often makes people dependent and turns them into objects of charity; applicants tell foundations what they want to hear, then they proceed to do what the applicant wants to do.

Given my critical attitude toward philanthropy, why do I devote such a large part of my wealth and energies to it? The answer is to be found partly in my personal background and history, partly in the conceptual framework that has guided me through my life, and partly in sheer happenstance.

The formative experience of my life was the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. I was Jewish and not yet fourteen years old. I could have easily perished in the Holocaust or suffered lasting psychological damage had it not been for my father, who understood the dangers and coped with them better than most others. My father had gone through a somewhat similar experience in the First World War, which prepared him for what happened in the Second.

As I like to tell the story, during the First World War my father joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a volunteer and was captured by the Russians. He was taken to Siberia as a prisoner of war. In the camp he became the editor of a handwritten literary magazine that was displayed on a plank, and it was called The Plank. The writers of the articles used to gather behind the plank and listen to the comments of the readers. My father brought home the handwritten pages, and I remember looking at them as a child. The Plank made him very popular, and he was elected the prisoners’ representative. When some prisoners of war escaped from a neighboring camp, their representative was shot in retaliation. Instead of waiting for the same thing to happen in his camp, my father collected a group of prisoners and organized a break-out. They built a raft with the intention of drifting down to the ocean. But their knowledge of geography was deficient, and they did not realize that all the rivers of Siberia empty into the Arctic Ocean. When they recognized their mistake, they got off the raft and made their way back to civilization across the uninhabited Taiga. They got caught up in the lawlessness of the Russian Revolution and went through some harrowing adventures. That was his formative experience.

Eventually, my father made his way back to Hungary, but he came home a changed man. When he volunteered for the army, he had been an ambitious young man. As a result of his adventures in Russia, he lost his ambition and wanted nothing more from life than to enjoy it. Bringing up his two children was one of his chief joys. That made him a very good father. He also liked to help and guide other people and had a knack for striking up acquaintances with strangers. He held his own insights and judgment in high regard, but in other respects he was genuinely not a selfish or self-centered man.

When the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, my father knew exactly what to do. He realized that these were abnormal times and that people who followed the normal rules were at risk. He arranged false identities not only for his immediate family but also for a larger circle. He charged a fee—sometimes quite an exorbitant one—to those who could afford it and helped others for free. I had never seen him work so hard before. That was his finest hour. Both his immediate family and most of those whom he advised or helped managed to survive.

The year of German occupation, 1944, was my formative experience. Instead of submitting to our fate, we resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were—and we prevailed. It was an exhilarating adventure like the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others. This left a lasting mark on me and gave me an appetite for taking risk. Under my father’s wise guidance, I learned how to cope with it—exploring the limits of the possible but not going beyond the limits. I positively relish confronting harsh reality, and I am drawn to tackling seemingly insoluble problems.

Helping others never lost its positive connotation for me, but for a long time I had few opportunities to practice it.

After the heady adventures of the war and immediate postwar period, life in Hungary became very drab. The country was occupied by Russian troops, and the Communist Party consolidated its rule. I wanted out, and with my father’s help, I managed to get out. In September 1947, I left for England to study.

Life in London was a big letdown. Aged seventeen, with very little money and few connections, I was lonely and miserable. I managed to work my way through college, but it was not a pleasant experience. All students whose parents were residents in England were entitled to a county council stipend. I was an exception because my parents were not with me. Working one’s way through college was not a well-trodden path, but that is what I had to do.

I had two encounters with philanthropy during that difficult period, and they have colored my attitude toward charity ever since. Shortly after I arrived in London, I turned to the Jewish Board of Guardians to ask for financial support. They refused me on the grounds that their guidelines called for supporting only young people who were learning a trade, not students. Later on, when I was already a student at the London School of Economics, I took on a temporary job at Christmastime as a railroad porter, and I broke my leg. I came out of the hospital on crutches, and I thought this was a good opportunity to get some money out of the Jewish Board of Guardians. I climbed two flights of stairs on my crutches and asked them for temporary support. They repeated their mantra about helping only apprentices, but they couldn’t refuse me. They gave me three pounds, hardly enough to live on for a week. This continued for several weeks. Each time I had to climb the stairs on crutches to collect the money.

In the meantime, my roommate, having heard my story, decided to go to the Jewish Board of Guardians and declare himself ready to learn a trade. He didn’t last long in the jobs they found for him, but they kept supporting him. After a while, they wanted to send me to the Industrial Injuries Board for assistance, but I said I could not go there because I was working illegally and did not want to endanger my student visa. That was not true. My temporary job on the railroad was perfectly legal, but they did not know that. They had sent a social worker to check on me, but he did not find out. So when they refused me further assistance, I felt morally justified to write an impassioned letter to the chairman of the board in which I said that “I will manage to survive, but it makes me sad that the board of which you are the chairman is unwilling to help a young Jewish student who had broken his leg and was in need.” That had the desired effect. The chairman arranged for me to receive three pounds a week by mail without having to climb the stairs. After the crutches came off and after I took a hitchhiking holiday in the south of France, I wrote to the chairman, telling him that I no longer needed his assistance and thanked him for it. Although I had deceived the foundation, I felt morally justified because they had investigated my case and did not find out that I was lying. Under these circumstances, I considered their behavior unjust.

My next encounter with philanthropy was when I was working nights as a waiter in a nightclub while studying during the day. When my tutor found out about it, she turned to the Quakers, who sent me a questionnaire. After I filled it out, they sent me a check for forty pounds without any strings attached. That impressed me as the right way to help people. After the crash of 2008, I was able to arrange for nearly a million New York schoolchildren whose families were on welfare or food stamps to receive a check for $200, no questions asked. I put up 20 percent of the cost on behalf of New York State in order to qualify for a grant from the federal government as part of the economic stimulus package. The Quakers’ generosity bore ample dividends sixty years later, and I felt good about that in spite of the vicious attacks by the New York Post on “welfare handouts.”

After finishing college, I had a difficult time finding my way in the world. I had a number of false starts in England and eventually ended up in New York, first as an arbitrage trader, then as a security analyst and institutional salesman, and finally as the manager of one of the first hedge funds. During that period, I was not particularly philanthropic. The only venture worth mentioning was an attempt to restore Central Park. In partnership with Dick Gilder, a broker and investor, we set up the Central Park Community Fund, but it was not particularly successful. Another organization, the Central Park Conservancy, established a close working relationship with the park administration and made much greater progress in restoring the park. My greatest accomplishment was to dissolve our organization and merge it into the successful one. During the process, I discovered that charitable organizations have a life of their own that is independent of their stated mission, and it is easier to set up a charity than to wind it down.

Starting as a student at the London School of Economics and continuing in New York, I developed the theory of reflexivity, that served to guide me both in making money as a hedge fund manager and, later, in spending it as a policy-oriented philanthropist. For reasons explained in the Introduction, the latest version is available in Chapter 6.

My conceptual framework was not as well developed in my college days as it is today. But the core ideas were already there, and they extended not only to economics but also to politics and human affairs in general. My thinking was greatly influenced by Karl Popper, the Austrian-born philosopher, first through his book Open Society and Its Enemies and then through his theory of scientific method.

I finished my undergraduate courses a year early, and I had a year to kill before I would earn my degree. I chose Karl Popper as my tutor and wrote a couple of essays for him. After college I had to earn a living, but I never lost my interest in the complicated relationship between thinking and reality. I submitted an essay entitled “The Burden of Consciousness” to Popper several years after I left college.

My business career followed a tortuous path, with many false starts and missteps, but eventually I ended up in charge of one of the first hedge funds in New York. I started in 1969 with about $3 million. By 1979, the fund reached $100 million, mostly from retained earnings. About $40 million of that belonged to me. I considered that was more than enough for me and my family. The strain of risk taking on a leveraged basis was enormous. On one occasion, I subscribed to a very large amount of a new issue of British government bonds on short notice without previously arranging the necessary financing. I was rushing around the City of London, trying to find a credit line, and while walking down Leadenhall Street, I thought I was having a heart attack. “I took on this risk to make a killing,” I told myself, “but if I die now, I end up as the loser. It doesn’t make sense to risk my life to make money.” That is when I decided to do something worthwhile with my money and set up a foundation. I thought long and hard about what I really cared about. I relied on my rather abstract conceptual framework for guidance, and I honed in on the concept of open society, which is one of the cornerstones of that framework.

As far as I know, the term “open society” was first used by Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, in his essay “Two Sources of Morality and Religion.” One source was tribal and led to a closed society; the other was universal and was associated with an open society. Karl Popper pointed out that open societies can be turned into closed ones by universal ideologies that claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth. That claim is false; therefore, such ideologies can prevail only by using methods of compulsion. By contrast, open societies recognize that different people have different views and interests; they introduce man-made laws to enable people to live together in peace. Having experienced both Nazi and Communist rule in Hungary, I was deeply impressed by Popper’s ideas. I defined the mission of my foundation as (1) opening closed societies, (2) making open societies more viable, and (3) promoting a critical mode of thinking. That was in 1979.

STARTING UP

The foundation had a slow start. I was aware of the pitfalls and paradoxes of philanthropy, and I wanted to avoid them. I undertook an apprenticeship at Helsinki Watch, a fledgling human rights organization that later became the Human Rights Watch. I attended the Wednesday morning meetings, where current events and activities were discussed. I also went on a fact-finding trip to El Salvador and Nicaragua, which were both at that time in the midst of civil war. I learned a lot but did relatively little on my own. I did get involved with a Russian refugee, Vladimir Bukovsky, who was active in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. But I stopped supporting him when I realized that his activities could result in people killing or getting killed.

Later, I went to Russia on another fact-finding trip, and there I struck up an intimate relationship with a refusenik and started sending him money through a Swissair stewardess for distribution to other dissidents in Russia. Eventually, my foundation became a major source of financial support for dissident movements throughout Eastern Europe.

My first major independent undertaking was in South Africa. I had a Zulu friend in New York, Herbert Vilakazi, who was a university lecturer in Connecticut. He returned to South Africa to take up a post at the University of Transkai—one of the homelands under the apartheid system. I visited him in 1980 and gained an insight into South Africa from an unusual angle. Here was a closed society with all the institutions of a first-world country, but they were off limits to the majority of the population on racial grounds. Where could I find a better opportunity for opening up a closed society? I met with the vice chancellor of Cape Town University, Stuart Saunders, who was eager to open the university to black students. All students accepted by the university had their tuition paid by the state. I jumped at the opportunity to use the resources of the apartheid state for opening it up and offered to pay the living expenses for eighty black students.

I visited South Africa again the next year, but that trip was less successful. I wanted to support African arts and culture, so I asked Nadine Gordimer, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for literature, to arrange a meeting with African cultural leaders to discuss how best to do it. But the meeting was a flop. By then, my cover was blown. Everyone knew that I was a wealthy philanthropist from New York, and the meeting’s participants saw a pot of gold sitting in the middle of the room; all they could discuss was how to divide it up amongst themselves. I decided to abandon my project, disappointing everyone.

I also visited Cape Town University and discovered that the number of black students had increased by fewer than eighty, either because some of the Open Society scholarships were given to students already enrolled or because some students had dropped out. The students I met seemed thoroughly disaffected. They felt unwelcome, discriminated against, and forced into an alien culture, and they had difficulties meeting the academic requirements. I also met with the faculty and found them far less open-minded than the vice chancellor.

I decided to discontinue the scheme; I would, however, see the first cohort through. In retrospect, discontinuing the project turned out to be a bad decision. The vice chancellor engaged a black mentor for the black students—it happened to be my friend Herbert Vilakazi—and subsequently they did much better. It would have been great to have a larger number of black university graduates when the apartheid system was abolished. But at the time I made my decision, the apartheid system seemed firmly established. I tried a few other projects as well, but I came to feel that nothing I did would change the system. The fact that they tolerated my activities merely served to demonstrate how tolerant they were. Instead of me taking advantage of the apartheid state, the apartheid state seemed to be taking advantage of me: by tolerating my activities, they improved their image abroad. Looking back, I wish I had been more persistent. This experience taught me that it is worth fighting for seemingly hopeless causes.

My next major venture was in my native Hungary. In the early 1980s, the Communist regime in Hungary was eager to be accepted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and this offered me an opportunity to bring out a group of Hungarian dissidents to spend a year at New York University: they were allowed to leave the country. That gave me a knowledge base about Hungary on which I could build.

In 1984, I approached the Hungarian government about setting up a foundation there, and somewhat to my surprise, they responded positively. We engaged in protracted negotiations, in which I was guided by my dissident friends. It was agreed that my foundation would support Hungarian culture in general and not only dissidents. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, then under the strict control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, was designated as my partner.

I visited the country repeatedly and selected a group of people in whom I could have confidence and who were also acceptable to the government. Together with the vice president of the Academy, they would constitute the board of our joint venture. So far so good. But then the authorities insisted that the decisions of the board should be carried out by a secretariat staffed by the reliable political appointees controlled by the secret police, and that was a deal breaker. I went to see the cultural czar of the Communist Party, George Aczel, to inform him that we had reached an impasse.

“I hope you won’t leave with bad feelings,” he said.

“I can’t help it, having put so much effort into it,” I answered.

I was already at the door when he said, “What would it take for you to go ahead?”

“An independent secretariat,” I replied.

We agreed to have two secretaries, one nominated by the Academy and one by me. Every document would have to be countersigned by both to be valid. That is how the Hungarian foundation came into existence. I also hired my first employee, a Hungarian émigré, in New York at what eventually became the headquarters of the Open Society Foundations. Until then, the staff had consisted of my second wife, Susan Weber.

The foundation in Hungary worked like a charm. It was exempt from all the pitfalls that beset normal foundations because civil society adopted it as its own. We relied on a simple precept I derived from Karl Popper’s concept of open society: the state dogma, promoted by the ruling Communists, was false; by providing any alternative to the ideological monopoly of the one-party state, we could expose its falsehood to the public. Accordingly, the foundation supported every cultural initiative that was not an expression of official dogma—from zither clubs to farmers’ cooperatives. The amounts awarded were very small because most of the initiatives used facilities provided by the state and the people engaged in them drew salaries from the state. We used the state’s own resources to undermine it.

The Hungarian forints needed for these awards were generated by giving dollar grants to cultural and educational institutions. They were flush with Hungarian forints but devoid of foreign currency, so they were willing to make contributions to the Hungarian foundation at much better than the official exchange rate. Our most successful venture was to provide them with Xerox machines. This served a dual purpose: not only did it secure Hungarian currency for the Hungarian foundation, but it also spread information that was not otherwise easily available. The Leadership Institute of the Karl Marx University of Economics and the Philosophy Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, for instance, used the Xerox machines to print clandestine samizdat literature.

The foundation did not have to protect itself from applicants who wanted to take advantage of it—the way I did of the Jewish Board of Guardians—because it was protected by those whom it supported. If there were any abuses, they were reported by those who regarded the foundation as their own. For instance, the foundation abandoned plans to support a charity for the production and distribution of talking books when it was alleged that the association was corrupt. This network of information made the foundation extremely efficient. With a budget of $3 million a year, it actually could offer an alternative to the Ministry of Culture, which had a much bigger budget; indeed, we became known as the alternative Ministry of Culture. One of our most successful initiatives was to support independent, student-run colleges in state-run universities and an independent students’ union that later became the kernel of one of the main political parties in Hungary, Fidesz, or the Alliance of Young Democrats. The majority of their professors supported the Hungarian Democratic Forum. Being more energetic, the students prevailed over the professors. Their leader, Viktor Orbán, became prime minister in 1998.

Once in office, Orbán changed his spots. He sensed a political opportunity on the right and became increasingly nationalistic. This helped him to get reelected in 2010 and remain prime minister ever since. Orbán also became progressively more corrupt, so that Hungary can now be accurately described as a mafia state. He has also found it politically expedient to wage a media war against me, his erstwhile benefactor. He tried to turn it into a personal conflict between us, but I did not accommodate him. I always kept our differences strictly on a political level.

Coming back to the story of my Hungarian foundation, it was not without its problems. For instance, it developed a clientele that became used to receiving support, eventually making it less open to society at large than it should have been, but it escaped many of the defects that characterize normal foundations. Its success exceeded my expectations. That was the happenstance that gave me the appetite for philanthropy, which in turn provided me with a motivation to keep making money as a hedge fund manager.

In 1986, I set up a foundation in China, but I won’t retell this story here because you read about it in detail in Chapter 1.

In 1987, I tried to replicate the Hungarian foundation model in Poland. I was already supporting a program for visiting Polish academics at Oxford University, and I sent money to the cultural arm of Solidarity in Poland, so we had good connections within Polish civil society. With the help of Zbigniew Pelczynski, who ran the Oxford program, we obtained the permission of the Polish authorities.

Right from the beginning, the board of the Polish foundation refused to follow the Hungarian model. It insisted that the foundation should take a more targeted approach, focusing on selected program areas instead of opening its doors wide to all kinds of proposals. I decided to give them some rope to hang themselves, but they turned out to be right, and subsequently we adopted the Polish model in other countries as well. That also taught me a lesson. I realized that the people living in the countries where I had foundations understood their country better than I did, and from then on, I deferred to the judgment of the local boards. If I seriously disagreed with their judgment, I changed the board.

I also started a foundation in the Soviet Union in 1987. In December 1986, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev made an unprecedented phone call to nuclear scientist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who had been exiled to Gorky (now Nizhni Novgorod). Gorbachev invited him to return to Moscow “to resume your patriotic activities.” I took that as a signal that something had fundamentally changed. If it had been business as usual, Sakharov might have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union but not to return to Moscow. I flew to Moscow as soon as I could.

Not long after my arrival, I identified the newly established Cultural Foundation, of which Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, was the patron, as a potential partner. I visited Sakharov and asked him to be my personal representative on the board, but he refused. “You will be merely lining the coffers of the KGB with dollars,” he warned me. He took me for a naive American, and I was proud to have proved him wrong. Even so, my counterparties at the Cultural Foundation turned out to be associated with the KGB. They informed me about it in confidence when they took me for a stroll in the open air in order to avoid being overheard.

Sakharov did advise me on potential board members. I had already established contact with Tatyana Zaslavskaya, an independent-minded sociologist from Novosibirsk. Sakharov recommended Yuri Afanasiev, the historian, and Grigory Baklanov, the editor of Znamya, a literary magazine. I also identified the writer Daniil Granin; Valentin Rasputin, a Siberian environmentalist, who later on became ultra nationalist and one of Putin’s ardent supporters; Tengiz Buachidze, a philologist from Georgia; and Boris Rauschenbakh, a space scientist and religious philosopher, as board members in whom, at that time, I could have confidence.

I made a deal with the head of the Institute of Personal Computers, who paid me for imported computers at five times the official exchange rate. And that is how my foundation in the Soviet Union, the Cultural Initiative, came into existence.

We started operating right away, without waiting for official permission. I remembered what my father had told me as a child about his experiences during the Russian Revolution: in turbulent times, the impossible becomes possible. Other Western foundations insisted on getting permission from the authorities before they started operating. For the next year or two, the Cultural Initiative was practically the only game in town, so we could make a big impact. Perhaps our most successful effort was to commission and distribute newly written textbooks in the social sciences, history, and law to high schools and universities. We also kept alive almost all the so-called thick journals—famous literary magazines like Znamya—that would have perished without our support.

I came up with a plan to reform the Soviet economy. Instead of geographically defined free-trade zones, I proposed freeing up a particular segment of the Soviet economy, namely the food-processing industry. I envisioned it as the embryo of a market economy embedded in the womb of the planned economy. I brought in a group of Western economists led by Wassily Leontief, a Nobel Laureate of Russian origin, and Romano Prodi, who later became president of the European Commission.

To my amazement, Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the Council of Ministers, ordered the heads of the various state agencies to attend our first meeting. This shows how eager the authorities were for Western assistance. I was little known at that time, yet the heads of the most powerful state agencies were lined up to meet the experts I brought. The discussions went on for a while, but it soon became clear to me that the planned economy was too diseased to support a healthy embryo.

We also brought in Western legal experts to help with the establishment of a civil code. But my ability to influence Western policy did not keep pace with the impact my foundations had in the Soviet empire. That may be attributed to a cognitive dissonance between East and West. The East was in the midst of a systemic collapse; in the West it was business as usual. When I proposed a new Marshall Plan for the Soviet empire at an East-West conference in the spring of 1989 in Potsdam, which was then still part of East Germany, I was literally laughed at. (The proposal was greeted with amusement, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported.) And that was not my only attempt to influence Western policy that fell flat.

The Soviet system was rapidly disintegrating, and it was beyond the capacity of the foundation on its own to lead the transformation from a closed to an open society. Instead, the foundation itself got caught up in the process of disintegration. We discovered that some officials of the foundation were corrupt, and we lost valuable time reorganizing the leadership. We will never know what we could have accomplished had the foundation functioned properly.

I was at the very heart of the political turmoil at the time—a strange position for a foreigner. I was intimately involved in the power struggle between rival groups of economic reformers. I became very close to Grigory Yavlinsky, who tried to put into practice my father’s precept—that in revolutionary times one must attempt the impossible. He was the real force behind the Shatalin Plan and the 500 Days Program, which sought to replace the Soviet Union with an economic union modeled on the European Common Market. When I brought in a group of Western economists, they were captured and practically kept prisoner for a day in a rural retreat by a rival group of reformers. I ended up taking Yavlinsky and his team to the annual meeting of the World Bank and IMF in Washington, where I helped them fight for recognition in competition with the rival team. Although I managed to get them a hearing, they went home empty handed, and Gorbachev rejected their program in favor of the less radical one. Shortly thereafter, Gorbachev himself was removed from power.

In the meantime, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet empire disintegrated. As the various Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed, I followed close on their heels and established foundations in one country after another. I went to Prague with Prince Schwarzenberg, a human rights activist, just before Christmas 1989, at the height of the Velvet Revolution. We learned from the Communist Party’s Marián Čalfa, who was then prime minister and acting president of Czechoslovakia, that he was determined to peacefully hand over power to Václav Havel. This came as news to Havel.

I arrived in Bucharest in early January 1990, shortly after the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu was executed. The road from the airport was lined with gun-toting soldiers, and the city itself was under siege-like conditions. I identified an opposition group and appointed the only member I could find in Bucharest as provisional president of the foundation I wanted to establish. Later on, the police infiltrated the organization, and we had to make different arrangements. From there I went on to Sofia, where an enterprising official of the US embassy had made advance arrangements for opening a Bulgarian foundation. I also traveled around in the constituent republics of the Soviet Union and established local foundations even before they became independent countries.

My visit to Ukraine was particularly memorable. I attended a meeting in Kiev with the cultural elite of the country, and they proposed all kinds of ideas for the foundation. I found all of them impractical and said so. At the end of the meeting, I apologized for responding so negatively. But they did not mind at all. “You don’t realize how refreshing it is to have someone say no outright; our authorities always say yes and then they don’t do anything.” That was a lesson for me. From then on, I had no hesitation in rejecting proposals I found impractical.

These were hectic and euphoric times. I had a peculiar understanding of far-from-equilibrium conditions that I derived from my father’s stories about his adventures during the Russian Revolution and my own experiences during the German occupation of Hungary. This enabled me to take advantage of the revolutionary moment.

I moved my family to London so that I could be closer to the scene of action. I distributed funds without any coherent plan. I saw open society as a more complex form of social organization than the communist system that was collapsing. Achieving a systemic transformation required a helping hand from the outside. Everything needed to be done at once. So when I received a proposal that seemed to be backed by an ability to deliver, I usually approved it. That is how the expenditures of my Open Society Foundations ballooned from $3 million to more than $300 million in the space of a few years. It could not have been done according to a plan. We operated without a budget, and eventually the entire foundation network was running out of control. We were mired in the chaos in which we flourished. We urgently needed to introduce some order into the chaos.

A FIRMER FOOTING

I was fortunate to be able to recruit the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, to become president of the Open Society Foundations in 1993. And he took charge. I was not allowed to travel on my own anymore; somebody had to accompany me and take note of all the commitments I was making; otherwise, they would not be honored. That is when the foundation network started to take on its present shape. We established foundations under local leadership in practically every country of the former Soviet empire; these came to be known in our parlance as the “network of national foundations.” We also established what we called network programs that cut across national boundaries and covered specific areas such as criminal justice, public health, education, and human rights. This created a matrix that combined local knowledge through the national foundations with professional expertise through the network programs. The matrix was open ended: national foundations could have projects outside the fields covered by network programs, and network programs could be active in countries where we had no national foundations. The Soviet system continued to disintegrate, but our organization started to become more cohesive. The chaotic years had served their purpose. The foundations had been first on the scene and earned a reputation for their willingness to attempt the impossible. Now their work became more professional.

About a third of our budget was spent on education—bringing a child-centered approach emphasizing critical thinking to a region used to authoritarian methods and rote learning. I established the Central European University, a postgraduate institution, first in Prague and then in Budapest, with a branch in Warsaw. Its history is detailed in Chapter 3 of this book. I also set up a Higher Education Support Program, which spent about an equal amount of money on other newly established educational institutions, reforming the curricula of state universities, and providing fellowships to faculty at public universities to enable scholars to go for study trips to the west and additional salary to motivate them to return to their home universities. In addition, we supported systemic reform both in higher and general education. And we introduced Step by Step for preschool-age children, which was a modification of the Head Start program for kindergarten.

Another third or more of our budget went to support civil society in the broadest sense, with particular emphasis on civil rights and the protection of vulnerable populations. We identified the gypsies—or Roma, as they are now called—as the worst case of social exclusion on ethnic grounds in Eastern Europe, and we devoted increasing amounts of money and energy to deal with the problem—at first supporting their culture and then their education. Our greatest achievement was to raise a new generation of educated young Roma who were proud to be Roma.

As the disintegration of the Soviet system continued and the suffering of the population increased, so did our budget. I devoted $100 million to establish an International Science Foundation whose objective was to preserve the best of Soviet science from destruction. It distributed emergency grants of $500 each to the most eminent scientists in the former Soviet Union. Due to runaway inflation, that was enough to support a family for a year. Selection was based on a simple and objective criterion: three citations in an internationally recognized scientific journal. More than thirty thousand scientists qualified. The rest of the money was spent on research programs selected by an international jury of scientists, using the peer-review system. The scheme was an outstanding success: the entire amount was committed within a year.

My objective was not only to save the best of Soviet natural science, which I considered one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect, but also to demonstrate that foreign aid could be administered efficiently. In a Wall Street Journal article in 1992, I proposed that the aid offered by the IMF should be administered along the same lines. Instead of providing budgetary support to the Soviet government and its successors, the aid should be earmarked for the payment of pensions and unemployment benefits and its distribution closely supervised. The idea was a good one, but it did not go anywhere. Generally speaking, when I implemented an idea on my own, it worked; when I tried to influence public policy, I did not get very far. This has changed with the passage of time: more recently, I have been more successful in mobilizing public support.

I firmly believe that if my Wall Street Journal proposal had been followed, history would have taken a different course. The people of the Soviet Union would have seen some practical and tangible benefits from Western aid, and their attitude toward the West would be quite different. Europe is paying a heavy price today for having failed to come to the assistance of the Russian people in their hour of need.

I also matured a lot in the course of these adventures. At first, I was carried away by the almost unlimited opportunities opened up by the collapse of the Soviet system, and I was so eager to play a role in history that I did not hesitate to attempt the impossible. Gradually, I learned to discern between what could work and what could not. I became more discriminating and concerned with achieving something worthwhile. I remember a visit to Moscow when two of the most important people I was supposed to meet canceled their appointment with me because of some statement I made. Earlier, I would have been upset; now I felt good about the stand I took. More recently, when people asked me whether I have met Putin, I could honestly say I did not want to.

The year 1992 brought an important change in my status as a public figure. When sterling was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, I became known as “the man who broke the Bank of England.” This happened because I did not deny that my hedge fund had played a role in the event; the media then exaggerated my role. I deliberately allowed it to happen in order to establish a platform from which I could speak out on other issues. And it worked. Suddenly I had a voice that could be heard.

That year Yugoslavia was caught up in civil war, and I used my platform to announce a $50 million fund for humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of war-torn Bosnia. My announcement at Christmastime drew attention to their plight. The original idea behind my donation was to get aid workers into the war zone, which in turn would compel the United Nations troops to adopt more aggressive rules of engagement to protect them. That is not what happened. UN troops did not intervene to prevent the massacre at Srebrenica. But a genius of humanitarian assistance, a Texan named Fred Cuny, used the money to provide gas, electricity, and water for Sarajevo as well as seeds for growing vegetables. The idea behind my contribution didn’t work, but the way Fred Cuny used my money did. It may not be an exaggeration to say that it helped the people of Sarajevo to survive. Shortly thereafter, Cuny was killed in Chechnya in circumstances that were never clarified, and his body was never recovered.

I visited Sarajevo in November 1993 when the city was under siege. I did it reluctantly because I was not eager to put my life at risk. It was a pretty scary trip, flying in an Ilyushin Il-76, one of the world’s largest planes. We were sitting next to stacks of gas pipes lying on the floor. The Ukrainian crew was tightening and loosening the straps that held the pipes together as the plane was banking and landing. Then we had ten minutes to clear the airport.

I went to Sarajevo for a ceremonial opening of the water plant that Fred Cuny had built. It had been flown in by plane in modules and installed into a road tunnel in the side of a mountain. But the local authorities did not give permission for the water to be turned on. We never found out why. Either somebody was making a lot of money selling water or the government wanted to continue having people killed by snipers while waiting for water in order to have pictures on TV generating sympathy for the city’s plight. Or both. I had to threaten to go public with my protest before permission to turn on the spigots was granted.

The task of putting a semblance of order to the foundations that had sprung up across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was an arduous one but not as all-absorbing or enjoyable as the revolutionary period. Our annual spending peaked around $600 million before we started introducing fiscal discipline. The goal was to cut spending in half, but it was never reached because new opportunities arose elsewhere. But before starting that story, let me first finish my story about the Soviet Union.

CHALLENGES

When Putin came to power in 1999, our foundation in Russia came under attack and was effectively chased out of the country. We had rented a building with an option to buy. However, the Russian mafia managed to replace the contract deposited at the court with a forged one from which the option to buy was removed. We had to leave our office when the lease expired. At the time, I was not sure whether this was the work of the Russian mafia, but in retrospect I am more inclined to believe that it had the connivance of the authorities.

One of the reasons why President Putin came to regard me as a personal enemy was my support for Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia in the early 2000s. That is a sad story as far as I am concerned. During the presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia became very corrupt. A major anticorruption campaign was launched by a group of reformers led by Saakashvili, who was the minister of justice at the time, and Zurab Zhvania, who was president of the parliament. It was supported by my foundation, and I became personally involved. It was also supported by President Shevardnadze, whom I considered a decent person but burnt out. The anticorruption program itself was well formulated and ambitious, but it could not get off the ground. Every time I visited Georgia, President Shevardnadze made a gesture of support, but he could never deliver because the main source of corruption was the Ministry of Interior, and his life literally depended on the security services. Eventually the reformers lost their patience. Saakashvili and Zhvania left the government and formed a political party in opposition to President Shevardnadze. I expressed my support for them by giving them the 2003 Open Society Prize on behalf of the Central European University. The opposition was successful at the polls in November. An independent exit poll, supported by my foundation among others, gave them a clear majority, but the official results declared the government party as the winner. The people believed the exit polls, not the official results, and there was a revolution. Saakashvili became president in January 2004.

I was elated and did whatever I could to help him succeed. I donated several million dollars to a capacity-building fund set up by the United Nations Development Program that paid supplemental salaries of a thousand dollars a month to members of Saakashvili’s cabinet and a hundred dollars a month to the police force. This allowed Saakashvili to impose discipline on the police and order them to remove the road blocks where they extorted bribes from the passing traffic. This was a tangible anticorruption measure that greatly enhanced his popularity. But the situation deteriorated when the Saakashvili administration arrested a large number of prominent businessmen on corruption charges and extorted large sums of money from them for their release. The monies went into a slush fund that was used for the purchase of arms to defend Georgia against an expected attack by Russia. Being a slush fund, it eventually became a source of corruption.

My foundation in Georgia spoke out against this lawless behavior, and in the absence of a parliamentary opposition, it became the most vocal critic of the new government. I personally was at first inclined to be more tolerant of the government’s excesses, arguing that in revolutionary situations, the normal rules don’t apply, but when they did not cease, I also became more critical. Saakashvili in power turned out to be much less of a paragon of open-society values than he had been in opposition.

In the meantime, I was accused by the Russian media of being Saakashvili’s pay master, and Putin advised the rulers of the Central Asian republics to close down my foundations. Fortunately, most of them decided against it, but the foundations felt the pressure, and there were adverse repercussions in other parts of the world as well. This was a painful lesson that taught me to keep a greater distance personally from the internal politics of the countries where I have foundations.

That conclusion is easier to reach in theory than to implement in practice. The strategy we have developed to deal with individual countries greatly depends on internal political conditions. We take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we help civil society to hold governments accountable. On the other, we try to work with those governments that are willing to accept our help. We can be more effective if we can exercise both functions, and we can be most effective at times of democratic regime change when a new government is eager to establish a more open society but does not have the capacity to do so. Strengthening their capacity is often our greatest contribution. That is what we did when the Soviet system collapsed. We brought in foreign expertise and provided financial support to qualified nationals of the countries concerned to return from abroad. And that is what we did a decade later in Georgia. When I look back on that difficult experience, I am not sure whether I would want to do anything differently.

The real lesson I learned in Georgia is that helping countries in transition is a difficult and thankless task. We have had similar experiences elsewhere, where systemic reforms introduced by one government were systematically undone by the next one. Russia is the prime example. The freedoms that prevailed during the chaotic Yeltsin years have all but disappeared under Putin. Still, there is a more subtle lesson to be learned. It is dangerous to build systemic reforms on a close association with one particular government. Systemic reforms need broad public participation and support. That is what makes them irreversible.

There was another reason why Putin considered me his personal enemy: I published a long article in the New York Review of Books in 2000 in which I revealed the way Boris Berezovsky helped elect Putin as president. He allegedly hired some Chechen terrorists to blow up entire apartment houses in Moscow, killing some three hundred inhabitants in their sleep. In the panic that followed, fear and anger were directed against the Chechens, assisted by a carefully orchestrated campaign in the press and on television. The invasion of Chechnya and the Duma elections were held in an atmosphere of war hysteria. Very few presidential candidates dared to oppose the invasion. Those who did were wiped out. Yevgeni Primakov, who had been considered the favorite candidate for the presidency, was decisively defeated. Using the momentum generated by the victory in the parliamentary elections, Yeltsin, who was under Berezovsky’s control, announced his resignation on New Year’s Eve, and Primakov withdrew from the contest, assuring the election of Putin as his successor. Reading my article made Putin very angry. But he did not feel secure enough to attack the foundation directly because it was very popular. He found the round-about way I described earlier. Later on, Putin chased Berezovsky out of the country; he took refuge in London.

Berezovsky claimed that he had incriminating evidence against Putin: one of his underlings allegedly had participated in blowing up the apartment houses in Moscow. Berezovsky spirited the eye witness out of Russia and presented him at a press conference in London. But the event was ignored by the media and by heads of state, who did not want to acknowledge Putin’s guilt. (Who would want to shake hands with a president who had the blood of his compatriots on his hands?)

I decided to wind up the Russian foundation in 2003. Clearly, the Russian government did not deserve our continued assistance and did not tolerate our presence. We found other ways to support our grantees. In 2015, we were declared to be an “undesirable” organization and any Russian citizen dealing with us faced penalties ranging from fines to a maximum of six years in prison.

It was a rather sad ending to a valiant philanthropic effort, but I have no regrets. It is obvious that we failed to help Russia make the transition from a closed to an open society. But at least we tried. I continue to believe that if the Western governments had followed my advice, history would have taken a different course. I also believe that in philanthropy, one should do the right thing, whether or not it succeeds. That is the big difference between philanthropic and business investments. I am certain that the work of the foundation was appreciated by the Russian people at the time, and it will have a positive influence in the long run in spite of all the adverse propaganda directed against us by the Putin regime.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Let me now turn to the new opportunities that prevented us from reducing our global spending. In 1994, the apartheid system was abandoned in South Africa and Nelson Mandela became president. Given our history in South Africa, I felt obliged to set up a national foundation in South Africa. From there we branched out to other parts of Africa, and our network programs also started to reach out to other parts of the world. Also in 1994, the Duvalier regime was overturned in Haiti and American troops occupied the country; I felt this called for establishing a foundation there. Aryeh Neier knew just the right person, Michèle Pierre-Louis, to run it. Later, Aryeh also knew a good person for Guatemala, where the long civil war ended in 1996, offering an opportunity for a transition to democracy. We set up a foundation there whose board had a unique character: it combined urban liberal intellectuals with leaders of indigenous communities from the countryside.

By 1995, I felt that we had done enough on the first point of our agenda—opening up closed societies—so that we could pass on to the second: making open societies more viable. The activities of the Open Society Foundations were concentrated in foreign countries; it was time to do something at home. I reflected on the deficiencies of open society in America and developed a strategic plan that I then submitted to a select group of social philosophers for critical examination. They included Seyla Benhabib, Leon Botstein, Aryeh Neier, David Rothman, Alan Ryan, Tim Scanlon, and Bernard Williams.

Two ideas were novel. First, market values had penetrated into areas where they did not properly belong; most notably they had undermined professional values. Liberal professions like medicine, law, and journalism had been turned into businesses. The primacy of professional values needed to be reaffirmed. Second, in certain areas fear stifled the critical process and gave rise to false dogmas characterized by prejudice and intolerance, which undermine the principles of open society. I identified two such areas: the American attitudes toward death and to drug policy. They have something in common: both drug addiction and death constitute insoluble problems, and there is an understandable inclination to look for false solutions. Many of the solutions make the problems worse than they need be. In both cases they involve a refusal to accept the existence of an insoluble problem: doctors prolong life at all cost, and drug warriors advocate zero tolerance.

The rest of our programs in the United States were the outgrowth of our programs in the rest of the world: social justice, vulnerable populations, civil rights, and the criminal justice system. The strategy passed critical examination, and we started implementing it. I concerned myself mainly with the two new ideas I had introduced. I was happy to delegate the other areas to Aryeh Neier, who knew a lot more about them than I did.

The Project on Death in America was perhaps our most successful domestic program. It gave life to a new field: end-of-life care. The American attitude of denial applied both to the medical profession and to the general public. We found a group of experts who knew how to deal with dying patients, and they transformed the care of terminal patients into a medical discipline by establishing fellowships at various medical institutions. They helped enlighten the general public more indirectly. The most effective effort was a five-part television series on public television by Bill Moyers. That was not financed by the Open Society Foundations, but Moyers drew heavily on work sponsored by us. Dying ceased to be a taboo subject. We celebrated our success by withdrawing from the field when other foundations moved in. But more recently we reentered the field by cosponsoring a second generation of projects that were spawned by the first one.

With drug policy, we faced a much greater challenge because the United States remained in the grip of drug-war hysteria until President Obama became more of an ally than an opponent of drug-policy reform in his last years in the White House.

I was convinced that the war on drugs did more harm than drugs themselves, but I was reluctant to advocate legalization as a solution. It would have helped the drug warriors who wanted to present drug policy as an either/or issue. We therefore embraced “harm reduction” as our guiding principle, aiming to reduce the harm done both by drug use and by failed prohibitionist policies. Even so, the drug legalizers tried to paint me as a legalizer.

Just as the war on drugs had driven mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s, so drug-policy reform became the cutting edge of efforts to reduce incarceration. We concentrated on marijuana, which accounted for half of all the arrests. I supported, with other philanthropists, a successful medical marijuana initiative in California in 1996. We followed it up with another ballot initiative, in 2000, to require treatment instead of incarceration for low-level drug offenders. That temporarily stalled the rapid growth in the state’s prison population and created a model that other states began to emulate. Other victories followed, notably reform of New York’s draconian Rockefeller drug laws and other mandatory-minimum drug-sentencing laws. By 2008, America’s incarceration rate began to fall at last. Public support for legalizing marijuana for all adults steadily increased. When Colorado and Washington voted in 2012 to legally regulate marijuana, they became the first jurisdictions in the world to do so, which was all the more remarkable because the United States had for so long been the chief promoter and enforcer of the global war on drugs. Now marijuana is legal for medical purposes in over thirty states and for all adults in ten, with others sure to follow. Our focus has now shifted to ensuring that those people and communities who were most harmed by the drug war receive a fair share of the benefits of legalization.

Progress on the public health aspects of harm reduction has been steady but all too slow. Ensuring legal access to sterile syringes is crucial to reducing HIV and other infectious diseases, which is why we became the principal private supporter of programs and advocacy efforts in this area in the late 1990s, both in the United States and abroad. This was supplemented some years later by efforts to stem the rapidly growing epidemic of overdose fatalities involving pharmaceutical opioids, heroin, and, now, fentanyl. We focused on increasing access to naloxone (the antidote to an opioid overdose), passing 911 “Good Samaritan” laws to protect drug users who call 911, and, more recently, supporting advocacy for opening “safe consumption rooms,” which reduce risk of fatal overdose, infections, and other health problems.

The drug problem has changed dramatically since the early 2000s, when opioid misuse and overdose fatalities began to rise precipitously. Producers and distributors of legal opioids—notably including the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma—have been severely criticized, but unscrupulous doctors have also promoted their distribution. Attempts to discourage over-prescribing—including forced tapering of patients dependent on opioids, changing medicine formulations to prevent injection, and tracking and limiting prescriptions—are backfiring, driving too many users to illegal street drugs containing fentanyl, which is far more powerful than heroin and responsible for most overdose increases.

In contrast with previous spikes in overdose deaths, whose victims were mainly African and Hispanic Americans, the current crisis has also hit rural white populations. Since they constitute Trump’s heartland, he has an incentive to bring the epidemic under control, but he is following misguided policies. He has failed to crack down on the perpetrators and to take effective measures to help the victims; imposing coercive treatment and prosecutions for fentanyl distribution don’t work.

On the health side, increasing harm-reduction measures—including many used in Europe but not permitted in the United States—ought to be the focus. We must think creatively about the interplay of multiple factors, such as pharmaceutical business interests, extremes of over-prescription and over-control, economic hardships caused by overpriced drugs, and a black market for drugs.

On the criminal justice front, my priority going forward is to build support in the United States for decriminalizing drug possession as Portugal and some other European countries have done. And eventually, having learned from cannabis regulation, we will tackle the challenge of regulating other drugs in ways that minimize the harms of prohibitionist policies without inviting significant increases in drug-use problems.

The project to reaffirm professional values had mixed results. In the legal profession, we have been very successful in establishing individual fellowships for practicing public-service law but much less successful in promoting professional standards in the selection of judges. The process has become even more politicized. In journalism, we sponsored several initiatives in investigative journalism, but otherwise we made little progress in addressing the problems of a profession that is essential to an open society and is in the midst of a technological transformation. In medicine, we established an institute for protecting the medical profession from the enticements of the pharmaceutical industry, but we have not been able to modify the mercenary attitude prevailing in professional associations and among some doctors. The recent debate on healthcare legislation has demonstrated how little public understanding there is about the meaning of healthcare. The American system provides payment for medical procedures, not for preventive healthcare. The national healthcare systems of Europe and Canada do a better job in spite of their imperfections, but universal healthcare remained a nonstarter in America until the midterm elections in 2018. Universal healthcare became an important plank in the Democratic platform for 2020, although there is a sharp division between progressive and moderate Democrats, and it continues to be denounced by Republicans as socialism.

My interest in the shortcomings of America as an open society and my concern about the failure of the West to provide assistance to the former Soviet Union led me to study the deficiencies of global capitalism. In February 1997, I wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Capitalist Threat” that questioned the precepts of the Washington consensus. After the emerging market crisis of 1997, I expanded it into a book under the title The Crisis of Global Capitalism. In 2000, I wrote another book, On Globalization, where I advocated a set of reforms, but they were not taken seriously. One of these reforms, namely the use of Special Drawing Rights, was actually adopted, but only after the crash of 2008.

A GLOBAL NETWORK

In the twenty-first century, the Open Society Foundations went global. It would have been unwieldy to establish national foundations all over the world, so we started establishing regional foundations—one for Southern Africa, covering the nine countries belonging to the Southern African Development Community (SADC); one for the eighteen countries in Western Africa belonging to the Economic Union of Western African States (ECOWAS); and one for Eastern Africa, covering first Kenya and slowly expanding to the neighboring countries.

When Suharto fell, we established a foundation in Indonesia in 2000. After the invasion of Afghanistan, we established a foundation there as well as one in Pakistan. The Afghan foundation grew strong, but in Pakistan our fate depends on which government is in power. Our legal registration has been withdrawn and our continued functioning hangs on a thread. We had a small number of grants in Iraq as well. In other parts of the world—notably the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America—our initial efforts were less formal, but as our engagement grew, it resulted in the establishment of regional foundations.

In addition to the open matrix that combines national foundations with network programs, we also opened up a new dimension that I call “the network of networks.” This involves establishing independent organizations with their own governing board, leadership, and staff with whom we maintain close cooperation. This has become my favorite formula for entering new fields of activity because their ability to raise funds from others establishes a quasi-objective standard of performance that we lack in our wholly owned foundations network. Our financial support ought, in theory, not to exceed one-third of the total budget so that they maintain their independence. In practice, it usually takes several years to reach that target. This approach has been very successful. It has spawned organizations such as Global Witness, the International Crisis Group (ICG), and, more recently, the European Council of Foreign Relations (ECFR), and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). There are many other less well-known or more recent ones.

In 2011, when I first published a version of this essay, I surveyed the foundation network. I was, on the whole, satisfied, but I had two big concerns. The first was what would happen to the foundation when the president, Aryeh Neier, and I were no longer around? Second, and more importantly, what more could we still accomplish during my lifetime?

When I established the foundation, I did not want it to survive me. The fate of other institutions has taught me that they tend to stray very far from the founder’s intentions. But as the foundation took on a more substantial form, I changed my mind. I came to realize that terminating it at the time of my death would be an act of excessive selfishness, the equivalent to burning an Indian Maharajah’s wives on his funeral pyre. A number of very capable people are devoting their lives to the work of the foundation, and I have no right to pull the rug from under them.

More importantly, we have identified and specialized in a sphere of activity that needs to be carried on beyond my lifetime and whose execution does not really require my presence. That niche consists in empowering civil society to hold governments accountable. In the United States, there are some institutions, like the American Civil Liberties Union, devoted to the task, but in most other countries, there aren’t any. In many countries, wealthy people are too dependent on the government to be able to provide such support, nor are they motivated to do so. Hence the niche for us. I have also identified some other activities, such as protecting vulnerable populations and providing legal protection for the poor, that fall in the same category. These are worthy objectives, and the foundations ought to be able to serve them beyond my lifetime.

What will be missing when I am gone is the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that has characterized us. I have tried to deal with problems as they arose. I was able to move fast and take big risks. The governing board that will succeed me will not be able to follow my example; it will be weighed down by fiduciary responsibilities. Some of its members will try to be faithful to the founder’s intentions; others will be risk averse, but the founder, who spends the money he made, is anything but risk averse.

The original structure of the Open Society Foundations was far too complicated to be preserved in its existing form. As I noted before, our growth had been entirely unplanned. During the period of explosive growth, when our spending went from $3 million to $300 million, we didn’t even have a budget. Then Aryeh Neier came on board and brought some order into the chaos. He established a very elaborate budget process that takes a long time to prepare and has to start much in advance. I never took much interest in it; I was much more interested in rising to the occasion when an opportunity presented itself. As a result, Aryeh and I had two very different types of foundations combined in one: the initiatives in which I was directly involved continued to run on a very elastic budget, and the organization headed by Aryeh ran on a very tight budget. As the initiatives matured, they passed from my hands into his. By contrast, the human and civil rights and criminal justice areas had been fully in his hands since inception.

Ours had been a very productive partnership, but it had resulted in a very unruly structure that would have been unmanageable in our absence. We felt we must reorganize it while we were around. A new president would have had to spend several years just to get to know the organization. As it turned out, the task of reorganization has fallen to the new management that took charge in 2018, and they are making good progress in getting it done.

I couldn’t give a proper accounting of the far-reaching and varied activities going on inside because I am not aware of all of them. When I was younger, I used to travel around the foundation network all the time, and I was greatly inspired by what I saw. The activities of which I was not aware were often the best; it was the problematic ones that were brought to my attention.

The foundations have grown organically by responding to needs and opportunities as they arose. In my opinion, that is the right way. Many other foundations are engaged in meeting their own institutional needs. We try to resist that. We pride ourselves on being a “selfless foundation,” and that has been a source of strength for us. We have been able to cooperate with other foundations, and we have accomplished a lot more by not claiming ownership of the projects. Other institutions need to produce successes in order to raise funds; we are satisfied by actually accomplishing something, whether or not it is recognized. Paradoxically, this has gained us more friends and allies than beating our own drum. But there is a downside as well: since we don’t advertise our successes, others don’t do it for us either.

We have been successful in moving where the action is. In each country, we start with supporting critical thinking or dissident activity, and we move in quickly when a new government comes to power that has good intentions but lacks the capacity to deliver. And we have been more persistent than official aid agencies in maintaining a presence long after they have moved on to greener pastures. The same is true of issues of global governance: we are not always the first to recognize them, but once we become aware of them, we remain committed to them, be it climate change, drug policy, or the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

Our main difficulty has been in keeping our network of national foundations and “legacy” programs from going stale. That requires almost as much effort as starting new ones, yet my preference has been to focus on the cutting edge. Going forward, I favor the “network of networks” format.

THE FUTURE

Having decided to allow the Open Society Foundations to survive me, I have done my best to prepare them for my absence. But I realize that I am bound to fail because if I fully succeeded, it would contradict my principle of fallibility. Therefore, I bequeath my successors the task of revising any of the arrangements I shall have left behind as long as they do it in the same spirit in which I have made them.

I see great opportunities open to the foundations. It is true that we have many enemies and detractors in many parts of the world, and there is a whole industry engaged in demonizing me. But we have established a solid track record of being genuinely concerned with the well-being of humanity, and we have an active involvement with many of the burning issues of the day. I am ready to contribute when we have something valuable to offer, even if that requires invading the principal of our endowment.

On a personal level, I’m very proud of my enemies. When I look at the list, I feel I must be doing something right. Still, I wish the list would be shorter; I and my foundations will do our best to shorten it.

In conclusion, let me return to the question I raised at the beginning: A selfish man with a selfless foundation—how do the two fit together?

Here is the explanation.

I formed a rather negative view of foundations when I was a supplicant, and I have not changed my mind since I became a philanthropist. There is something inherently self-contradictory in altruism, but most foundations see no need to recognize it and even less to resolve it. When you are giving away money, the recipients flatter you and do everything they can to make you feel good, so the contradictions are obscured by a thick layer of hypocrisy. That is what makes me leery of philanthropy. The foundations set the rules, and others have to live by them. Applicants can, of course, have their own way. They can tell the foundation what it wants to hear and then proceed to do what they want to do. Remember my encounter with the Jewish Board of Guardians?

Well, I have resolved the seeming contradiction between a self-centered philanthropist and a selfless foundation. It is my consciousness that has made me self-aware, and it has also made me aware of how inadequate my mortal self is as the sole beneficiary of my consciousness. In other words, I have a very big ego—far too big for my mortal self. I can find sufficient scope for it only by identifying with something more enduring. Helping a few people around me as my father did is not enough for me; what he did retail I want to do wholesale. I aspire to make the world a better place by enabling people to change it. That is where my conceptual framework comes into play. It is both the product of my inflated ego and the source of the systemic reforms I advocate. If I have gained some special insights, then I am under a special obligation to put them to good use. The fact that I am rich adds to my sense of duty. There are people who are rich, people with insights, and people who care about humanity, but rarely are the three qualifications combined in one person. Only that combination satisfies my ambition.

I also need to explain the relationship between my philosophy and my ego. At first, they were entangled in a knot. When I first started writing about reflexivity, I was inseparably attached to the idea because it was mine. I could not part with it. I kept on getting more and more convoluted in trying to articulate it until one morning I couldn’t understand what I had written the night before. It took me most of my life to separate my ego from my philosophy, and both have benefited from it. Today, my philosophy finds expression both in my writings and in my foundations, and my ego can sit back and enjoy them.

Since my philanthropy is a source of ego satisfaction, I feel I do not deserve any thanks for it. Indeed, I used to be embarrassed by expressions of gratitude. I felt that the enlarged ego responsible for my philanthropy would not have been socially acceptable if I had flaunted it; therefore, it was embarrassing to be thanked for it. But I don’t feel that way anymore. I realize that I have in fact helped a large number of people. That is what people see, not my enlarged ego. Therefore, it is natural that they want to thank me. I have learnt to accept their gratitude. At the same time, I no longer see any reason to feel ashamed of having such a large ego because it turned out to be beneficial not only to me, but also to many others. But a large ego is difficult to satisfy. Having seen through the hypocrisy that surrounds philanthropy, I cannot be satisfied by praise and flattery. They leave me cold. I need to see actual accomplishments. That is how a selfish man came to have a selfless foundation.

I still find the large gap between who I am and how I am seen by others both fascinating and disturbing. That is why I feel driven to go through with these explanations. I regard altruism and philanthropy not as a duty but as a pleasure and a source of satisfaction. It is a luxury that rich people can afford. I much prefer philanthropy to, say, collecting art. It has connected me with other people and allowed me to break out of my isolation. An art collection could not do that for me. The day I had a panic attack on Leadenhall Street I did not think it was worth dying for the sake of amassing wealth. Since then, I have been occasionally exposed to mortal danger in connection with my foundation activities. I do not seek such danger, but I am willing to accept it. And it gives me a sense of satisfaction to be engaged in an activity for which it would be worth dying.

I occupy an exceptional position. My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people. This allows me to take a stand on controversial issues. In fact, it obliges me to do so because other rich people are often hindered by their business interests from taking controversial positions. The success of my hedge fund has made me independent of my investors. This gives me the added satisfaction of feeling that I enjoy an exceptional position.

In short, my philanthropy has made me happy. What more could one ask for? I do not feel, however, that I have any business imposing my choice on others. That is why I did not join Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in their campaign urging rich people to give away half their wealth, especially as I believe that the value of philanthropy lies not in the amount of money devoted to it but on how it is spent.

Clearly, I am not a saint, nor do I aspire to be one. I cannot think of anything more unnatural and unrewarding than to be selfless. By contrast, I consider a selfless foundation extremely valuable. Most people participate in public affairs with selfish motives. They tend to cling to whatever power and influence they have attained, and it is often difficult to remove them when they stand in the way of a satisfactory solution.

There are two obstacles to finding the optimum arrangements: one is imperfect understanding; the other is the influence of special interests that are in conflict with the common interest. A selfless foundation is subject to the first limitation but is exempt from the second. And that gives it great scarcity value.

I have made it a principle to pursue my self-interest in my business, subject only to legal and ethical limitations, and to serve the public interest as a public intellectual and philanthropist. If the two are in conflict, I make sure that the public interest prevails. I do not hesitate to advocate policies that are in conflict with my business interests. And I firmly believe that our democracy would function better if a few 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 do so. Even a few people could make a big difference. They would help make the world a better place.