Is George Soros a Villain?

Germany occupied Hungary in 1944–45. György Schwartz (born August 12, 1930), was 13–14 years old. His father obtained forged papers for his family. He arranged for György to live under a Christian identity. His new name was George Soros. An official posed as his godfather. The Nazis ordered this official to help inventory the property of a Jewish landowner. They already seized the Jewish landowner’s estate. Soros accompanied this official (who wasn’t Soros’s father). It was part of maintaining his cover. Soros did not carry out confiscations himself.

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Earlier, Soros worked as a messenger for the Budapest Jewish Council. Other Jewish schoolboys did the same job. It involved delivering notices that were in practice related to deportations. His father told him to warn recipients not to comply and then pulled him out of the work.

In occupied Budapest, Jewish families had to limit the choice set for a 14‑year‑old Jewish boy. It was “hide, comply when forced, or risk exposure and likely death.” His father’s strategy was to bend with events enough to keep the family alive.

In the 1990s there was a 60 Minutes interview where Steve Kroft pressured Soros. Soros explained that he was a teenager in hiding. Soros explained that he felt “no sense of guilt” over that event. The Nazis would have seized Jewish property whether he was there or not. Kroft’s framing (“you assisted in the confiscation”) distorted the situation. Soros was a child when that happened. He was a spectator, not someone directing or profiting from the seizure.

That’s how George Soros survived the Nazi occupation during World War II. In 1947, he left communist Hungary for London. He studied at the London School of Economics. He worked in British and later American finance.

Until 1970, when he founded his own hedge funds. He launched Soros Fund Management and later the Quantum Fund in 1973. The Quantum Fund made significant profits from currency speculation. This included the famous short sale of the British pound in 1992. It has since transitioned to a family office structure. It manages investments primarily for the Soros family.

You might know Soros as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England”. He earned that title shorting the British pound in 1992. It was a famous trade. One that reportedly earned him about 1 billion dollars. This was during the Black Wednesday currency crisis.

He’s written about his theory of market “reflexivity.” That’s the term for his main argument. It’s about investors’ biased perceptions. Which can drive self-reinforcing booms and busts in asset prices.

Soros began organized philanthropy in 1979. That’s when he funded scholarships for Black South African students under apartheid. He used his fortune to build what became the Open Society Foundations. Which is a network supporting human rights and democratic governance. As well as independent media, education, and public health in more than 100 countries. Over his lifetime he has donated more than 32 billion dollars of his personal wealth to these causes.

Soros has been an outspoken advocate of liberal democratic values and “open societies.”

To understand George Soros, it’s helpful to understand the philosopher, Karl Popper. Consider this statement:

All swans are white.

What’s wrong with that statement?

Until the seventeenth century, people could only imagine white swans. All swans ever seen had possessed white feathers. In the seventeenth-century, it was common to refer to impossible things as “Black Swans”.

Until one day in 1697, there was a Dutch explorer named Willem de Vlamingh. He went to western Australia, and what did he discover? You guessed it. A black swan.

This is the problem of induction, or inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is a logical fallacy. It occurs when someone uses specific observations to form general conclusions or hypotheses.

All it takes is seeing one black swan to falsify the assumption that all swans are white.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is a political philosophy book by Popper, published in 1945. In it, Popper defends liberal democracy and critiques historicism. Particularly the ideas of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. Popper argues that totalitarianism arises from historicist thinking. He advocates for an open society. One where individuals have the freedom to think and act independently.

Popper posed a big question about the problem of “who should rule?” Popper’s key move is to treat “Who should rule?” as the wrong question. The moment you ask it that way, you drift toward, “The best, the wise, the virtuous, the experts,” (a form of induction).

That’s when you’re halfway to justifying some form of soft (or hard) authoritarianism.

“Who should rule?”, according to Popper, isn’t an effective question to solve this problem. Instead, a more effective question to this fundamental political problem is:

How can we build institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers can be removed or constrained without violence?

This shifts focus from picking ideal rulers to designing error‑correcting systems.

Systems which serve as checks and balances. Elections can actually change governments. Error-correcting systems allow free criticism, and legal limits on power.

Soros’s “open society” language is Popper applied to large systems.

Which includes markets, states, and the public. He is not asking, “Which party or leader is ideal?”

Instead, Soros asks, “Which institutional setup keeps criticism alive? What prevents any one actor from locking in their mistakes?”

That’s why he funds media, courts, NGOs, and universities.

Nodes that increase the ability of a society to detect errors.

The objective?

Push back on concentrated power.

That is, rather than a single technocratic blueprint for who ought to be in charge.

Before I started writing this, I was hesitant to study George Soros. My impression was that he is a villain. Why? He funds BLM and similar chaotic protestors. The more I thought about it, the more it made me curious about his motivation. My intention is to understand people like him. 

I like you,

– Sean Allen Fenn

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