[OPE] The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros

adsl675281@tiscali.nl

Mr Soros, who exemplifies the high point of the neo-liberal era, is essentially engaging in an exercise of self-justification, which is to say apologetics. 

You can go any which way with the concept of "reflexivity" (the circular relationships between cause and effect), because it means that you can never establish what is objective reality and what is subjective reality in advance, but only after the fact, after you have actually done something and the evidence is in. This is not unlike Hegel saying that "Minerva's owl flies at dusk". Mr Soros would be on much stronger ground if he tolds us plainly what the benefits of speculation really are, compared to the costs, and if he performed a profound analysis of "social power".

Responding to a question about an interview with the Times of London newspaper in which he expressed regret over his rhetoric in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, US President Bush said "I could have used better rhetoric to indicate that one, we tried to exhaust the diplomacy in Iraq; two, that I don't like war". But he said he still believed the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision, adding that "you don't get to do things over in my line of work." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/washington/12prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Leaving aside many distortions and lies about the real course of events, the real point however is that Mr Bush idealistically wanted to "make his idea true" by taking action. He had a moral belief that the fight was right, in advance of knowing much at all about what the main consequences of the fight would be - in truth, he fanatically engaged in the fight, quite irrespective of what the consequences would be. If Mr Blair said "history will prove me right", that was because really nothing proved him right in the present. He was a dyed-in-the-wool opportunist, pretending the greatest principles.

Mr Soros is hostile to Mr Bush, but in fact, Soros's concept of "reflexivity" could justify Mr Bush's and Mr Blair's actions, just as easily as his own.

Jurriaan

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