When big money is used to promote an ideological agenda you get epistemically closed networks featuring 'citation cartels' promoting an utterly paranoid and false axiology. By contrast, ordinary political give and take- which involves stealing the intellectual clothes of your opposite numbers- leads to open epistemic economies. In general, this is good for everybody.
Two of the most influential people who used big money to create closed epistemic networks are the topic of this post. Did they personally suffer as a result of their success?
At the end of the Sixties, George Soros- a devotee of Karl Popper- was already becoming a titan on Wall Street with his own hedge fund, while Finkelstein was a less educated, more brash, Ayn Rand spouting, computer geek doing grunt work for the NYSE.
Soros- from the British, old Labour, point of view- was like the 'gnomes of Zurich' who had forced devaluation down the throat of an island which had lost an Empire and was yet to find a role. But, at Soros's alma mater, the LSE, there were already people who could see that such arbitrageurs might be the storm troopers who liberated the world from the Bretton Woods strait-jacket which perpetuated a neo-colonial global stasis. Soros could be viewed as similar to Sir James Goldsmith- a billionaire blowing up the bastions of the post-War regulatory State. However, Soros- in some muddled manner- was probably on the other side of that particular fence. Yet, like the scorpion hitching a ride on the back of the frog, he bit the frog because that was his nature. The result was both perished.
Soros's support for the Democrats became a liability for them. It was foolish of him to compare Dubya to Hitler. It was silly to launch a covert operation against the Israel lobby. They stomped the cretin but good. Obama came to see that the woke nutters in Soros's stable were part of the Democratic 'circular firing squad' which proved so toxic to the Party and so helpful to Trump. As for Netanyahu- he flourished as never before.
Soros's own ideas, back in the Seventies, were not particularly crazy. Monitoring the Helsinki accord re. human rights compliance, he was rightly suspicious of detente and, I imagine, rejected the 'convergence hypothesis' of Tinbergen, Galbraith etc as well as the Samuelson-Kantorovitch notion that mathematical economics could equalize outcomes without regime change in the East. Soros's big but vacuous idea could plausibly be said to have to do with a type of 'reflexivity' only available in 'Open' not 'Closed' Societies. But this simply means Tardean mimetics and leadership based negotiations in a 'repeated game'. It wasn't some stupid shite about Civil Society always being on a slippery slope to Nazism or Stalinism or whatever. Put simply, openness isn't something that can be created by big money- rather, it is what happens when people figure out a way to get a little richer together. Big money can certainly find ways of enhancing productivity through scientific research and, as such, is welcome to contribute to openness. But pouring money into clamoring deafly for more openness does not itself create openness. The thing is a nuisance. It must be curbed.
I should point out that Soros's views were not typical of England. Few British trained intellectuals believed the West really was 'Open' or would ever become so. Rather, it was self-interested. The East wasn't 'Closed'. It was hypocritical. The nomenklatura believed one thing and said another but actually did something else entirely. Most British public intellectuals saw no great difference between the West and the East. AJP Taylor, for example, felt Budapest was just as good or better than London in terms of effective Social Democracy. Le Carre, but also Graham Greene in the 'Human Factor', depicted the British Secret Service as just as brutal and stupid as the Bulgarian Secret Service. Soros, a naturalized American, was more similar to Thatcher and Reagan in this respect but, back then, this was not obvious on the Continent. He was seen as a Hungarian with a British education who had made good in high finance.
The truth was quite different. Soros, like Finkelstein, saw that Communism must fall. Detente was a blind ally. Interestingly, the Fink's first success was getting 'Chairman Bill' Buckley's elder brother elected on the Conservative ticket. However, from the point of view of Eastern Europe, Soros would still have looked like a British trained Economist who, like Maxwell, would have a cozy relationship with existing regimes. In other words, Soros had potential as a Trojan Horse for both sides. Meanwhile the Fink had been one of the first to see the importance of 'Independent Expenditure' campaigns. From the mid Seventies onwards, big money became politically autonomous. On the one hand, this meant agendas mattered more than leadership or negotiating skills. On the other hand- this was 'Fink think's' golden rule- attacks had always to be wholly personalized. Indeed, there is a story that the Fink got Orban to demonize Soros so as to get re-elected. This proved very effective. Suddenly every nutjob and anti-semite had a pet conspiracy theory featuring Soros- a man already in his Eighties whose entire life had been spent in the abstract and arcane world of high finance, not the Mafia.
Both Soros & Finkelstein appear to have had a big impact on modern politics. But, it was an impact of a self-defeating sort. Finkelstein was gay. He was a libertarian rather than a Bible bashing conservative. Yet he delivered up his party to the Christian Right. Soros can't be happy about the way things have turned out in Hungary and the UK and the US and so forth. He is now also targeting Modi's India- much to the delight of the BJP. He has spent 36 billion dollars to turn himself into a bogeyman, a scapegoat and an International pariah. Everything he touches turns to shit. Why?
The answer, I'm afraid, is that he just wasn't and isn't very bright. He didn't get that Popper had a second class mind. Brouwer and Godel and Turing and even Tarski are important. Kripke is important. But Popper isn't important. Clamoring for better Scientific Method does not itself produce better Science. Shrilly denouncing Totalitarianism by telling stupid lies about Plato does nobody any good. True, Popper's polemics impressed adolescents. But adolescents are easily impressed. Some fell for Ayn Rand.
America had always had a pragmatic philosophy which it could easily adapt to reflect the latest advances in mathematical logic or category theory- though nobody seems to bother. But America would go on to build a new type of Economic theory which featured uncertainty and regret minimization and machine learning and ideas about concurrency and complexity and computability. Soros's domain knowledge was ideographic. He hadn't kept up with the literature and couldn't express himself in a manner that might impress smart young people. Moreover, not having built up a bricks and mortar business- nor being a Sciency type- his management skills were for shit and his Foundations' employees despised him as a cretin. Thus his charities recruited hypocrites or woke virtue signalers who looked down on their Sugar Daddy. In the East, this was par for the nomenklatura course. Still, most people would have thought that Soros's Central European University would be a mathematical powerhouse which would spin off Fintech and I.T unicorns. I mean, Hungarians are hella smart, right? Instead you had Doctorates in Comparative Gender which, presumably, is a case of you show me yours and I'll show you mine if you promise not to laugh.
Soros is not associated with anything smart the way Gates or Musk are. He is merely a speculator. True, he did back Sachs's 'Millennium Promise' with 50 million. That was unusual. But he didn't follow through with more substantial subventions and so all that Sachs was able to show was that when a stupid project runs out of money it starts to look like a shitty project by its own lights. But the same thing can be said of any money pit. It is only seen as a money pit once everybody knows they are throwing their money away and quietly resolve to stop doing so. This is equally true of Ponzi schemes. They collapse when no new suckers can be found.
Soros needed, like the Ford Foundation and the Rockerfeller foundation or the Gates foundation, to show he had done some good in the Global South- i.e. enabled people to eat better and be healthier through a 'Green Revolution'- so as to join the pantheon of the genuine philanthropist as opposed to an opinionated rich guy riding a white elephant of a hobby horse.
Better yet, had Soros invested in an arcane sciencey Research Institute he'd have secured an intellectual halo. He went the other way. Instead of producing 'first order good'- e.g. alethic research- he subsidized 'second order' goods (i.e. clamoring for more first order goods) which actually turned out to be a nuisance. Banging on about Human Rights gives ordinary citizens the impression they will be last in the queue for judicial remedies available in the ordinary way.
It has been suggested that the Open Foundations problems are largely organizational and similar to that of other multi-national behemoths of a bien pensant type. But other Foundations aren't fronted by a senile shithead who periodically babbles paranoid nonsense while playing the Holocaust card. The various publications he funds- though they probably also get money from other similar libtard Foundations- reflect badly only on him because they are abysmal in quality and too obvious in their biases. In other words, they reflect the stupidity of a senile speculator.
Paying people to write lazy paranoid tosh is bad for your cause. Still, at least Soros can feel superior to the scum he patronizes and vice versa. Perhaps that's what Arthur Finkelstein got off on as well. A shame, but there it is.
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