The Art of Survival

Before he was a financier or a philanthropist, George Soros was a fourteen-year-old on forged papers in occupied Budapest. This is the method his father taught him, and it never stopped running.

A course on the thought of George Soros.

Course outline

1. The Name — The family that forged its papers in 1944 had already changed its name once, half a century earlier, for reasons that had nothing to do with an emergency. Assimilation was a technology this family…
2. Siberia — Tivadar's founding story is not a story about being right. He organised an escape from a Siberian prison camp on a premise that was wrong in its most basic geographical fact, discovered it weeks in…
3. The Decumulation — Between the wars, Tivadar systematically sold off what he owned. His son cannot decide whether this was the wisdom of a man who had learned what possessions cost, or the retreat of a man who had…
4. The Papers — Ten months of forged identities, and a working theory of what a document is for. Hannah Arendt supplies the reason the paperwork mattered: rights are not carried in the person, and a family that had…
5. The Happiest Year — George Soros calls the ten months of the occupation the happiest of his life, and knows how that sounds. The module sets out the shape of what he learned — and then closes on him at sixty-nine saying…

Part of the Symposium course library.