] Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding
] serve to establish the open society as a desirable form
] of social organization? I believe it could, although
] there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must
] promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status
] that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth.

Decius's comments:

Wow, this might be the most important thing I've read since MemeStreams started. [ I agree 100% with Decius here. I was planning to respond directly to his comments and this article, however its going to have to come connected to something else. I just don't have the time right now. Way too much to go into and/or comment on. - nick ]

First off, despite the title, this is not an anti-capitalist screed. George Soros is an investment banker and the 38th richest man in the country. In fact, this article isn't really about capitalism. This article is about everything. The title is so poor that I almost changed it.

What Soros is saying about Capitalism is that there are people who accept the concept of free trade in a ideological way, in an absolutist way, and that is a problem. The problem with religious states, which requires the separation of church and state, is that when laws are the product of man, they are open to debate, but when laws are the product of God, to question is heresy. If you have a society in which the law cannot be questioned, you have a totalitarian society. It is only a matter of time.

The thing that Soros is saying here is that any absolutist ideology can be abused in this manner. It doesn't matter if your ideology is based on the Bible, or the writings of Marx, or the writings of Adam Smith. If you have a nation of people who believe that their principals are beyond question, ultimately you have a totalitarianism. It is only a matter of time before the inconsistencies your absolutism forces you to ignore cause fissures which break your society down.

Reading this essay caused me to think back across many of the discussions that I've had on this site over the past two years. My instinct that Fukuyama's belief in an ultimate solution was flawed. Being able to see great tragedies of history reflected in the idea of pre-emptive military action and being unable to demonstrate that its not "ok" if you're doing it for Democracy. In our worries about the state of the IT industry. In my various discussions about politics with people from various perspectives.

I've had a really hard time deciding where I fit in the political spectrum. I know what the tests tell me, but somehow I'm never comfortable with the answers. When I talk to conservatives they think I'm a liberal. When I talk to liberals they thing I'm a conservative (or at the least that I've been duped by them). One thing I've come away from years and years of these conversations with is the idea that people usually intertwine their identity and their perspective. They are a certain thing. They believe that thing is right. So they think a certain way. The way they think defines what group they see themselves in, which defines who they are, and we repeat. After years they get quite locked into a certain way of looking at the world.

When I was much much younger I thought that the internet was the answer to a lot of our political problems. I figured if people had access to better information and the ability to discuss things with each other in a meaningful way that they would learn to think critically and this would enable them to make better political choices. Unfortunately what I've discovered is that by the time people are really ready to take advantage of this tool it is already too late. They've formed absolute ideas about what the right answers are based on their identity, and they are not prepared to compromise those ideas regardless of what information they are presented with, as doing so means compromising their identity, and therefore their self esteem.

Information is not going to solve the problem. What we need to learn to do is accept that we don't know the answers. This is what "having an open mind" used to mean before the term was hijacked by the left and bent to mean agreeing with them. Having an open mind and identifying with a particular ideological group are mutually exclusive.

George Soros (and Socrates before him) has an answer that can succeed where information fails. It is a meme. And that meme is: You know nothing. If that meme has the opportunity to root in enough heads and rewire their circuitry we might finally have a society that is immunized against absolutism.

Thats something I'd be willing to fight for.

The Capitalist Threat - George Soros