Rothmus 🏴@Rothmus
The open society and its enemy, Soros.
While he named his Open Society Foundations after Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” his project stands as a philosophical inversion of everything Popper defended.
Popper’s open society rested on critical rationalism, the recognition that no one possesses final truth, that institutions must remain open to criticism and piecemeal reform, and that democracy functions as a method for removing rulers without bloodshed.
He rejected historicism, the belief in iron laws of history that justify sacrificing present generations for a utopian future, and warned that such thinking inevitably produces closed, authoritarian societies.
Soros has repurposed the label to advance a grand project of engineered demographic transformation.
Through mass immigration, multiculturalism as official policy, and diversity mandates that prioritize group identity over individual merit and assimilation, his foundations actively dissolve the cultural continuity and social trust that make rational criticism and incremental change possible.
Popper understood that openness requires a stable framework, a shared language of reason, basic cohesion, and institutions citizens feel they collectively own.
Soros treats those foundations as obstacles to be overcome in the name of an abstract, borderless openness.
The concrete results are visible. Parallel societies that operate under different norms, public spaces where debate on the scale and selection of immigration is treated as illegitimate, and the rise of identity based hierarchies that close off dissent in the name of equity.
These are certainly not expansions of the open society, but new forms of closure, tribal in character, enforced through institutional capture rather than overt dictatorship, yet hostile to the very critical spirit Popper placed at the center of civilized life.
Philosophically, Soros replaces Popper’s falsification and humility before reality with a new historicism, the conviction that global multiculturalism and open borders represent inevitable moral progress, and that resistance from actual existing communities constitutes the new enemy.
The machinery funded in the name of openness does not test its own assumptions against evidence, it suppresses the questions.
Those who still value the ideal of an open society should read Popper on their own terms.
They will find that Soros has not extended the open society, but has supplied its most sophisticated contemporary enemies.
