Tivadar was a leading proponent of Esperanto, the invented trans-European language promoted by those who desired a world free of nationality. When George and his older brother Paul were still young, his father changed the family name to the Hungarian-sounding but actually Esperanto Soros. It means “soar” (in the future tense). Anti-nationalism is embedded in George Soros’ name as well as in his character.

As a child, he felt he had extraordinary powers, of even being “God-like.” It developed into an adult sense of messianic personal destiny.

The family was well-off until 1944 when Hitler sent Adolph Eichmann to oversee the extermination of Hungary’s Jews. Tivadar obtained false identity papers for his family and they each fled to separate homes, hidden as Christians. All four survived the Holocaust.

With the Soviet takeover of Hungary in 1947, the impoverished Tivadar sent George, then 17, to stay with cousins in London, where he worked odd jobs and studied at the London School of Economics (LSE).

While pursuing his economics degree at the Fabian socialist LSE, Soros met the man who changed his life: Prof. Karl Popper, philosopher of science, teacher of logic and scientific method, towering intellect, and author of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. His technical concept of “falsification” as the test for validating scientific theories brought him wide recognition.

Popper was also a distinguished social philosopher whose passionate denunciation of all forms of totalitarianism in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) gave Soros a personal idol, a lifetime belief system, and a brand name for his future charities. Soros took the open society idea to extravagant heights: for him it transcended all other standards of civic virtue.

Soros never studied under Popper, but read his works and submitted essays to him for review and comment. In 1982, when Soros named his first foundation the Open Society Fund and informed the philosopher, Popper was not sure he recalled Soros, but was pleased by the honor.

Although a mediocre student at LSE, Soros was intensely intellectual and felt he was meant to be a philosopher, fancying himself Popper’s successor. However, in midlife he realized that he had no talent for it, and, after years in psychotherapy, resigned himself to making large amounts of money for his messianic mission to promote Popper’s open society concept worldwide.

Popper’s two-volume Open Society and Its Enemies focused on closed societies that suppressed reason—ones he condemned as “magical, tribal or collectivist”—but didn’t say much about the open society itself, beyond freedom of scientific inquiry and the freedom to dissent. Ironically, Soros donations go largely to collectivist dissent. The logical disconnect between Popper’s concept and Soros’ implementation has been noted by critics.

Soros's network of associations is mapped on Muckety.

Read Ron Arnold's book
Freezing in the Dark: Money, Power, Politics and
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.