The importance of George Soros’s Open Society https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/george-soros-indian-democracy-modi-remarks-open-society-8454825/ an open society is that in which any one group neither claims to have all the answers nor gets the power to push through those ‘answers’, crushing all opponents along the way....in the 20th century the most serious contest was not between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ or capitalism and communism. It was between open and closed societies.
Market fundamentalism, Soros argued, is a mindset which reduces virtually all human interactions to transactional, contract-based relationships that must be valued in terms of a single common denominator, money.
Original Article: Open Societies By Rajni Bakshi
The spotlight on George Soros could not have happened at a better time. There is an urgent need to demonstrate that the real contest or conflict, in our times, is between a commitment to ‘open society’ and any specific ideology which enforces its vision of society on the basis of might-is-right.
In order to see just what this means we must, for a moment, move away from the immediate context in which Soros has become headline news in India.
‘Open society’ is a term that is usually unfamiliar to people outside academic and formal intellectual circles. Fortunately, knowing the term itself is not a pre-requisite to living the values it represents. Essentially, an open society is that in which any one group neither claims to have all the answers nor gets the power to push through those ‘answers’, crushing all opponents along the way.
Interestingly, George Soros’ personal history is itself proof that even in the 20th century the most serious contest was not between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ or capitalism and communism. It was between open and closed societies.
Soros was born into an affluent Jewish lawyer’s family in Budapest in 1930. His father saved the family from the Nazi death camps by adopting false names and a Christian identity. After the war Hungary fell into the Soviet camp and as a teenager Soros experienced yet another form of authoritarianism – that of Soviet communism.
At the age of 17 Soros migrated to England and put himself through the London School of Economics. There his future outlook took shape under the tutelage of Karl Popper, the philosopher whose most famous book was “The Open Society and its Enemies”.
Encountering Popper helped Soros to identify the fundamental flaw common to fascism and Soviet communism. Both regimes laid claim to an ultimate truth, which they pushed through ruthlessly, and thus were enemies of an open society.
In the following decades, as Soros made his mark in the financial world, he built his life around the idea that since our understanding of the world is always inherently imperfect no one ever has access to the ultimate truth. This means that a perfect society is unattainable but we should remain free to constantly work for successive improvements through diverse approaches.
Soros decided that perhaps history has no inherent meaning – so what! We can still give it meaning through practical action to build a more free and equal society.
Once he had made a fortune, as a hedge fund manager, Soros quietly began supporting dissidents behind the then ‘Iron Curtain’. The string of Open Society Institutes that Soros created in the Eastern bloc played a role in the transition out of communism and into a market economy.
But Soros did not stop at seeing repressive communist regimes as enemies of an open society. By the mid-1990s, Soros began speaking out against what he called ‘market fundamentalism’. He reformulated his understanding of open society when he realised that excessive individualism and lack of social cohesion are as dangerous as excessive state control. While Popper had limited himself to critiquing communism, Soros used his knowledge as a leading market player to bust myths about the ‘free market’.
His articulation of the malaise was precise and clinical. Market fundamentalism, he argued, is a mindset which reduces virtually all human interactions to transactional, contract-based relationships that must be valued in terms of a single common denominator, money.
Soros was widely ridiculed for taking this stand. “He’s seen the enemy” wrote the New York Times, “it looks like him.”
However, Soros was not alone. Many other voices, both in the West and East, helped to puncture ‘market fundamentalism’. They argued that when free market ideology is treated as an ultimate truth this destroys social good and eventually undermines an open society by insisting that ‘There Are No Alternatives’, commonly known as the TINA effect.
This is why, in India today, the division between ‘left’ and ‘right’ is unhelpful to grasp what is most urgently at stake.
It is not only by sending opponents and dissidents to death camps or the Gulag that open society is destroyed, as it was under the Nazis or Soviet Union. Open society begins to shrivel when any criticism and dissent is treated as ‘anti-national’ or ‘anti-progress’.
It is not the nation but open society which is threatened when publishing any information that is inconvenient or embarrassing to those in power is projected as a conspiracy.
If enough citizens, who enjoy wealth and power, go along with this formulation instead of demanding a free, open and transparent enquiry – then open society is hanging by a thread.
In India this is a strong thread because, until recently, living with differences came naturally to us. And, however distracted we maybe by the controversy of the day, old mental habits cannot evaporate so easily. We know that reality is made up of competing, sometimes contradictory, yet co-existing truths. Open society lives on as long as this is the anchor for a large enough number of people and they dare to speak out.