The Open society is a society that is characterized by a flexible structure, freedom of belief, and wide dissemination of information. The open society members have a considerable freedom (as in a democracy) type of: society. an extended social group having a distinctive cultural and economic organization. The Open Society Foundations founded by a American billionaire George Soros with a belief to view equal treatment for all—regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, or sexual identity—as a fundamental part of healthy democracies. Open society main aim is Humanitarianism, and considers equality and political freedom as the fundamental characteristics of an open society. George Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations—a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 120 countries.
Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FRS FBA(28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science. Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely “the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy”
Popper’s concept of the open society is epistemological rather than political. When Popper wrote The Open Society and its Enemies he believed that the social sciences had failed to grasp the significance and the nature of fascism and communism because these sciences were based on faulty epistemologies. Totalitarianism forced knowledge to become political which made critical thinking impossible and led to the destruction of knowledge in totalitarian countries. Popper’s theory that knowledge is provisional and fallible implies that society must be open to alternative points of view. An open society is associated with cultural and religious Pluralism. Open society is always open to improvement because knowledge is never completed but always ongoing. Claims to certain knowledge and ultimate truth lead to the attempted imposition of one version of reality. Such a society is closed to freedom of thought. In contrast, in an open society each citizen needs to engage in critical thinking, which requires freedom of thought and expression and the cultural and legal institutions that can facilitate this. Democracies are examples of the “open society”, whereas totalitarian dictatorships, theocracy, and autocratic monarchies are examples of the “closed society”.
The open concept society was originally developed by philosopher Henri Bergson. In open societies, government is responsive and tolerant, and political mechanisms are transparent and flexible. The state keeps no secrets from itself in the public sense; it is a non-authoritarian society in which all are trusted with the knowledge of all. Political freedoms and human rights are the foundation of an open society. In Karl Popper’s definition, found in his two-volume book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he defines an “open society” as one which ensures that political leaders can be overthrown without the need for bloodshed, as opposed to a “closed society”, in which a bloody revolution or coup d’état is needed to change the leaders. He further describes an open society as one “in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions” as opposed to a “magical or tribal or collectivist society”
In this context, tribalistic and collectivist societies do not distinguish between natural laws and social customs. Individuals are unlikely to challenge traditions they believe to have a sacred or magical basis. The beginnings of an open society are thus marked by a distinction between natural and man-made law, and an increase in personal responsibility and accountability for moral choices. (Note that Popper did not see this as incompatible with religious belief. Popper argues that the ideas of individuality, criticism, and humanitarianism cannot be suppressed once people become aware of them, and therefore that it is impossible to return to the closed society. Humanitarianism, equality and political freedom are fundamental characteristics of an open society. This was recognised by Pericles, a statesman of the Athenian democracy, in his funeral oration: “… advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. George Soros was also Popper’s student at the London School of Economics, and credits Popper for inspiring his “general theory of reflexivity”. This is causal theory — the causal mechanisms are in terms of macroeconomic abstractions — is the core of his investment strategy.
Soros has been applying data science to financial markets since long before “data science” was a thing. Unlike most of the billionaire class, George Soros is not an out-of-touch plutocrat, but a provocative thinker committed to progressive ideals. George Soros is accused of being a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth. This antisemitic caricature of Soros has dogged the philanthropist for decades. But in recent years the caricature has evolved into something that more closely resembles a James Bond villain. Even to conservatives who reject the darkest fringes of the far right, Soros is considered as a “globalist billionaire” dedicated to making America a liberal wasteland. Soros unlike most of the members of the billionaire class, who speak in platitudes and remain withdrawn from serious engagement with civic life, Soros is an intellectual. And the person who emerges from his books and many articles is not an out-of-touch plutocrat, but a provocative and consistent thinker committed to pushing the world in a cosmopolitan direction in which racism, income inequality, American empire, and the alienations of contemporary capitalism would be things of the past.
He is extremely perceptive about the limits of markets and US power in both domestic and international contexts. He is, in short, among the best the meritocracy has produced. The decades since the end of the cold war have demonstrated that, without a perceived existential enemy, capitalism tends to undermine the very culture of trust, compassion and empathy upon which Soros’s “open society” depends. Soros recognised earlier than most the limits of hypercapitalism, his class position made him unable to advocate the root-and-branch reforms necessary to bring about the world he desires. The system that allows George Soros to accrue the wealth that he has done has proven to be one in which cosmopolitanism will never find a stable home. Soros has long pointed to academic philosophy as his source of inspiration. Soros’s thought and philanthropic career are organised around the idea of the “open society,” a term developed and popularised by Popper in his classic work The Open Society and Its Enemies.
According to Popper, open societies guarantee and protect rational exchange, while closed societies force people to submit to authority, whether that authority is religious, political or economic. For Soros, and his open society foundation the goal of contemporary human existence is to establish a world defined not by sovereign states, but by a global community whose constituents understand that everyone shares an interest in freedom, equality and prosperity. In his opinion, the creation of such a global open society is the only way to ensure that humanity overcomes the existential challenges of climate change and nuclear proliferation. Soros through his open society foundation concept truly wants to transform national and international politics and society.
Soros’s primary concern was the communist bloc in eastern Europe; by the end of the 80s, he had opened foundation offices in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union itself. Like Popper before him, Soros considered the countries of communist eastern Europe to be the ultimate models of closed societies. If he were able to open these regimes, he could demonstrate to the world that money could – in some instances, at least – peacefully overcome oppression without necessitating military intervention or political subversion, the favoured tools of cold war leaders. Soros set up his first foreign foundation in Hungary in 1984, and his efforts there serve as a model of his activities during this period.
Over the course of the decade, he awarded scholarships to Hungarian intellectuals to bring them to the US; provided Xerox machines to libraries and universities; and offered grants to theatres, libraries, intellectuals, artists and experimental schools through open society foundation. Soros fierce belief is that the ideas, more than economics, shape life, and his confidence in humanity’s capacity for progress. According to Soros, the dogmatic mode of thinking that characterised closed societies made it impossible for them to accommodate to the changing vicissitudes of history. Instead, “as actual conditions change”, people in closed societies were forced to abide by an atavistic ideology that was increasingly unpersuasive. When this dogma finally became too obviously disconnected from reality, Soros claimed, a revolution that overturned the closed society usually occurred. By contrast, open societies were dynamic and able to correct course whenever their dogmas strayed too far from reality. the two major threats Soros believed that beset open society: hyperglobalisation and market fundamentalism, both of which had become hegemonic after communism’s collapse. The open society envisions a world in which everyone recognises each other’s humanity and engages each other as equals. If most people are scraping for the last pieces of an ever-shrinking pie, however, it is difficult to imagine how we can build the world in which Soros – and, indeed, many of us – would wish to live. Presently, Soros’s cosmopolitan dreams remain exactly that. The question is why, and the answer might very well be that the open society is only possible in a world where no one – whether Soros, or Gates, or DeVos, or Zuckerberg, or Buffett, or Musk, or Bezos – is allowed to become as rich as he has.
