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You Can't Become Rich In Your Pocket Until You Become Rich In Your Mind | ||||
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George Soros just makes moneyI Am God Little children harbor fantasies about themselves. They want to distinguish themselves from others, or to lay claim to being superior, or to attract much-wanted attention. The child who is meek, or scrawny, or just plain bashful in dreaming that, with the snap of a finger, he can become a Samson, a Stallone, or-minus the thick accent-a Schwarzenegger. The kid who rarely leaves home, denied the chance to travel to faraway places, wishes he could be an air force pilot, or an astronaut. A psychiatrist, if pressed, can always guess the basis for such fantasies: The child loved his or her mother too much, or too little. The child admired his or her father too obsessively, or not obsessively enough. Yet, what is one to make of a child who believed he was God? What is one to make of young George Soros, growing up in upper middle-class surroundings in 1930s Budapest, an otherwise normal child who had many friends, loved sports, and behaved much like other children his age? How much easier it would be to explain away such grandiose thoughts as the fleeting daydreams of a small child had George Soros, as an adult, shown some sign that he had outgrown these messianic beliefs. Yet, as an adult, he offered no sign, no dismissive gesture, no footnote signifying that he no longer clung to such wild convictions, but only the suggestion of how difficult it was for someone to believe himself a deity. If truth be known, he wrote in one of his books, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me into trouble. One way he controlled those fantasies was to speak about them as little as possible. In one of the rare instances when he did speak about them, he told the British newspaper, The Independent, on June 3, 1993: It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out. And in the longest reference to these fantasies, a passage in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance, Soros disclosed how painful it had been for him as a youngster to carry around such beliefs, a burdensome secret he was disinclined to share with others. It will come as no surprise to the reader when I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance-to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes or, even better, a scientist like Einstein. My sense of reality was strong enough to make me realize that these expectations were excessive and I kept them hidden as a guilty secret. This was a source of considerable unhappiness through much of my adult life. As I made my way in the world, reality came close enough to my fantasy to allow me to admit my secret, at least to myself. Needless to say, I feel much happier as a result. What a startling thought-reality came close enough to his fantasy of thinking himself God. Did George Soros truly mean that the life he was leading as an adult, a successful financier, and a philanthropist somehow approximated the childhood fantasy of thinking himself divine? Apparently, he did. Other than in a few fleeting references, Soros has not elaborated in public on why he believed he was God and what he meant in making such a claim. Perhaps, if pressed, he might have persuaded people that he was just kidding, that he did not believe himself God after all. Here and there, he even joked about his childhood feelings. A journalist once suggested to Soros that he should be appointed pope. Why? he asked. Im the Popes boss now. What one is left with is a man who, even as an adult, was convinced that he had been endowed with traits unique to him. George Soros as God. If it doesnt quite ring true, it at least helps to explain the enormous self-confidence he had as a child and would carry into adulthood. Because George kept his childhood fantasy a secret, it is not surprising to find that none of his childhood acquaintances remembered him insisting he was divine. They did recall that he enjoyed lording it over the other children. Most of his adult associates believed that when he disclosed that he thought himself God, Soros had been deliberately exaggerating, a way of asserting his own superiority over others. Almost as if they were apologizing for Soross hyperbole, they sought to explain away his fantasy by arguing that he had not meant what he said. What George Soros meant, said one, was not that he was God, but that he believed he could talk to God! Another thought Soros was merely expressing a sense of omnipotence: Suggesting that he was God had been his tongue-in-cheek way of comparing himself, as others might do, to a Napoleon. It was as if those who knew George Soros wanted to bring him down to earth, so to speak. It was as if they did not want to have as a friend or colleague someone who actually believed himself to be God. These same people would have dismissed anyone else who muttered such thoughts as certifiably nuts. They couldnt do that with George Soros. He was, after all, someone they held in awe. Who imbued young George with such ideas? Perhaps his parents did. They certainly doted over him. Yet Tivadar, the father, and Elizabeth, the mother, doted over their other son, and there is no indication that he felt godly. George was born in Budapest in 1930. Whenever biographical details appear, whether in press releases put out by Soros-sponsored organizations or in Soross books, the day and month of his birth are omitted. Only the year is given. The reason is not clear. He was born with the Hungarian name Dzjchdzhe Shorash. In time, the name became anglicized to George Soros. Although the name is pronounced Shorosh in Hungarian, George accommodated his American and British acquaintances by pronouncing his last name Soros. His only sibling, a brother named Paul, had been born two years earlier. Whatever his faults, Tivadar Soros served as a forceful role model for his younger son. He was an attorney, who by the time of Georges birth had lived through his most formidable and formative experience. An Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war during World War I, Tivadar then spent three turbulent years in Russiafrom the opening days of the revolution in 1917 to the civil war in 1920. During those civil war years he was on the run in Siberia, hoping to survive. Whatever he had to do to survive, he did, no matter how unpleasant. In recounting those perilous years, Tivadar told the boy that in revolutionary times anything was possible. Though hardly a recipe for survival, these words carried great weight with his son. Gradually, George learned that his father was a clever, even wily man, who, by using his wits, had outsmarted many a person. Young George held him in the highest respect. Ferenc Nagel, a year younger than George, still lives in Budapest. He is a chemical engineer and works for Tungsram, the wellknown Hungarian lighting manufacturer. He met George for the first time in 1936 at Lupa Island, the summer retreat on the Danube River an hour north of Budapest where the Soroses and Nagels had homes. When things went wrong, Nagel recalled, Tivadar had always found a way to cope. He was never seriously beaten. That, said Nagel with an air of finality, was Tivadars legacy to his son. So was being pragmatic. George acknowledged as much: What side of the revolution was he on? Oh, both sides of course. He had to be, to survive. To George what was important was the fact that Tivadar possessed the qualities of a survivor. Survival became an ennobled value in George Soross life. Some of Tivadars character traits appeared admirable in war, but less so in peacetime. Indeed, by the 1930s Tivadar no longer appeared heroic to the inhabitants of Lupa Island. Dark in appearance-black hair, black eyes-he was handsome, had an athletes solid build, and loved sports. He also had a reputation for having a roving eye, for spending excessively, and for displaying little enthusiasm for hard work. My father does not work. He just makes money. So it seemed to young George. Ferenc Nagel retained a sharply defined image of Tivadar Soros getting ready to go to work one summer in the 1930s. Tivadar took the 7:00 AM boat daily from Lupa island to his office in Budapest. When he heard that the boat was coming, remembered Nagel, Tivadar put on his trousers and began shaving. He went out to the boat with the razor blade in his hand, and continued shaving on the way to the boat and during the boat ride. It was all in order to sleep to the last minute. This was very unusual for a lawyer. He was always very, very tricky. Tricky meant not following convention, not playing by the rules, cutting corners. If others held Tivadar in disrepute, George seemed more sympathetic to his fathers lifestyle than did others who recalled Tivadars fondness for avoiding hard work. Sure, George Soros admitted later, his father worked very little after he came back from World War I. That was not, however, all bad. Tivadar was around that much more, and George liked that. He enjoyed the chance to talk with his father and to learn things from those conversations. If others found Tivadar less than careful about his spending habits, George was unmoved. To him, it simply did not matter that his fathers financial fortunes ebbed, then soared, then ebbed again. However unintentional, Tivadar communicated to his son a message that would stay with him throughout his life: Part of what I learned was the futility of making money for moneys sake. Wealth can be a dead weight. To someone like Tivadar, who placed physical survival above all else, having too much money had its drawbacks. It tempted others to try to get their hands on the money of the excessively wealthy. Having too much wealth could make a person soft, making survival more difficult. Tivadar communicated these values to his son and they stuck. Later in life, wealthy beyond most peoples wildest dreams, George Soros exhibited little excitement over the accumulation of so much money. The greatest gift Tivadar bestowed on his younger son, however, was simply paying a great deal of attention to him. He talked to him often, passed along a few secrets about life, as he had come to understand them, and generally made the youngster feel important. Beyond instilling in the boy a sense of his own self-worth, Tivadar bolstered the childs self-confidence, assuring him that, just as the father had, the boy would learn how to overcome great odds, how to handle tumultuous situations. And just as Tivadar had, George would learn that frequently it was best to search for unconventional methods to solve problems. If Tivadar taught the youngster the art of survival, Georges mother Elizabeth passed on an appreciation of art and culture to her younger son. He was deeply attached to her. Painting and sculpture, music and literature were all important parts of Elizabeths life, and she tried to imbue her son with a love of these things as well. George was more inclined toward drawing and painting, less toward music. His later interest in philosophy seems to have stemmed from Elizabeth Soross own interest in the subject. Although the family spoke Hungarian, George eventually learned German, English, and French. Yehuditte Simo, a childhood acquaintance who remembers George as a very pretty little boy, lives today in Budapest. She knew George and his parents from Lupa Island. Elizabeths life was not easy, she recalled. Tivadars free and easy spending habits, and his indifference toward work, proved continuing sources of tension at home, and try as she might, Elizabeth could not prevent the tension from surfacing from time to time. Small, fragile-looking, and light-haired, Elizabeth was a traditional housewife, looking after her two sons, presiding over a home that seemed more Hungarian than Jewish-for, like many upper-middleclass Hungarian Jews, Tivadar and Elizabeth were distinctly uncomfortable with their religious roots. I grew up, Soros told acquaintances later in life, in a Jewish, anti-Semitic home. Because he was blue-eyed and blondhaired-resembling his mother rather than his dark-featured fatherGeorge did not look Jewish, and he beamed when other children would tell him, You dont look Jewish. Nothing made him feel happier than to be told he did not have the appearance of a Jew. So dismissive of Judaism was Tivadar that he would go to great lengths to pose as a member of the Christian community. During World War II, for example, he urged George to beg for cigarettes from the soldiers. Tivadar would then turn the cigarettes over to Jewish shopkeepers. To Tivadar, the whole point of the exercise was to be able to pass himself off as a kind gentile expressing solidarity with them. It seemed safer that way. Despite his efforts to distinguish himself from the crowd, George Soross childhood friends remembered him as less than an extraordinary child. He may have envisioned himself as being divine, but none of his friends thought he possessed any special qualities, even of a nondivine dimension. He was, according to all accounts, no genius, but he was intelligent and often demonstrated initiative. When George was ten years old, he edited a newspaper he called the Lupa Horshina, the Lupa Trumpet. He wrote all of the articles and for two summers sold it to families on Lupa for a small charge. Ferenc Nagel recalled him being somewhat aggressive with older people. When he believed in something, he defended it very strongly. He had a hard and dominating character. The youngster excelled in sports, especially swimming, sailing, and tennis. Lupa had two tennis courts for forty families, an obvious luxury. He disliked soccer, considering it an upper-middle-class sport, and therefore not for him. Games intrigued him, all sorts of games. He was especially taken with one called Capital, a Hungarian version of Monopoly. From the age of seven, he played it frequently with the other children, among whom he was the best. The worst was George Litwin. It was no surprise to Georges childhood friends that George Soros became a master of high finance, and Litwin ... a historian. Winning at Capital all the time proved boring to young George. To liven up the game, he introduced new rules. One was to make the game more complex by adding a stock exchange. When Soros returned to Hungary in the 1960s, the burgeoning financier sought out Ferenc Nagel, who asked him what he did for a living. You remember as children we played Capital? Soros asked with a smile. Well, today I do the same. The children of Budapest had to attend school until the age of fourteen. For poor families, sending their children to school beyond that age was difficult. Miklas Horn, an economics teacher in Budapest, attended primary school with George. They met for the first time in 1940 when both were ten years old. Later that year they moved on to a state school for the upper middle classes. Horn remained Georges schoolmatefor the next six years. In elementary school, George was outgoing. That explained why he and Miklos Horn were not great friends. George was a very audacious, outgoing fellow while I was solid, quiet. He liked to fight with the other boys. In fact, George learned how to box, how to defend himself. In Georges school, all the grades were divided into two classes, Jews in one class, non Jews in another. George and Miklas Horn were in the Jewish class. Horn has a vivid memory of the Jewish and nonJewish youngsters getting into many scraps. While the fisticuffs were not an outgrowth of anti-Semitic feeling, Horn recalled, it was not lost on the boys that the fighting seemed to occur mostly between Jews and non Jews. Horn observed: Underneath you could feel the antiSemitism. The fighting had a sort of political implication as well. Though young George got into his share of fights, his schoolyard violence was not a response to anti-Semitism. Indeed, Miklas Horn suggested, he was careful not to identify himself too closely with either class, keeping on good terms with both Jews and non-Jews. Although the adult Soros liked to think of himself as an intellectual, he was a late bloomer, and his schoolmates do not remember him as an outstanding student. Neither do they recall any subject he particularly liked. According to Miklas Horn, George was not an exceptionally good student. He was somewhere in the middle. But he was somebody who could talk very well. Pal Tetenyi attended the state school at that time and, like Miklas Horn, remembered George Soros as no more than an average student. One incident remained fresh in his mind. It occurred in the spring of 1942 when both he and George were twelve years old. George and Pal were attending a meeting of the Boy Scouts, at which it was announced that an Esperanto Society was being formed. Those interested in joining the society were to write their names on a piece of paper, which had been placed on a certain bench. As a prank, George grabbed the piece of paper, making it impossible for Tetenyi to sign up. George was very sarcastic, Pal recalled, and I was afraid that he would make fun of me. I wanted to get back at him. We began fighting. Locked in heated battle under the bench, the two boys quickly discovered to their great embarrassment that an angry teacher was standing over them. For their fighting, the boys received a written warning. When World War II began in September 1939, George was nine years old. But his life hardly changed, for the Nazis posed no threat to Hungary at that time. Indeed, life for the residents of Budapest remained routine. Sometime after the Soviet army had invaded Finland in that opening year of the fighting, George read a local newspaper appeal for aid to Finland. Rushing over to the newspaper office to respond to the appeal, he made a distinct impression upon the editors, who thought it unusual that a nine-year-old boy would take the trouble to offer aid to people in a far-off land. The editors ran a story on young Georges visit to the newspaper office. As the war progressed, however, the threat of a German invasion of Hungary loomed larger. George Soros and the rest of the Hungarian Jewish community were not to escape the war. Indeed, in the years that followed, the war was to come home to them in an unforgettable way. |
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