MASTERING FATE AND MAKING LUCK FOR MANY:
VIKTOR FRANKL AND GEORGE SOROS

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When Dr. Viktor Emil Frankl, neurologist and psychiatrist from Vienna, Austria, ceased to be a human being and became number 119,104 in a Nazi concentration camp called Auschwitz-Birkenau, merely nine months after he got married, he still had a treasure no one could take away from him: his free will and his mind.  
Victor Frankl owned the power of choice and the freedom of thought.
"... most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunity of life had past.
Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge.   One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did the majority of the prisoners.   Man's unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden.   Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way"
Frankl's camp experience between 1942 and 1945, before Auschwitz in Theresienstadt, after Auschwitz in Turkheim, had made it clear to him that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of outside influences alone.   The captive owned another treasure: spiritual freedom, the power of inner life, the power of inner riches.
"The way in which a man takes up the cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life.   Or in a bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal."
When he arrived in Auschwitz Frankl had to file past a senior SS officer who decided on life or death with the ever so slightly move of his finger. "Then I was face to face with him.   He was a tall man who looked slim and fit in his spotless uniform.   What a contrast to us, who were untidy and grimy after our long journey!   He had assumed an attitude of careless ease, supporting his right elbow with his left hand.   His right hand was lifted, and with the forefinger of that hand he pointed very leisurely to the right or to the left.   None of us had the slightest idea of the sinister meaning behind that little movement of a man's finger, pointing now to the right and now to the left, but far more frequently to the left.   The SS man looked me over, appeared to hesitate, then put both hands on my shoulders.   I tried very hard to look smart, and he turned my shoulders very slowly until I faced right, and I moved over to that side."
As it turned out left meant gas chambers and right meant work camp.
It was one of many times that Dr. Frankl waited for things to take their course, in general deciding to be the master of his fate through surrendering to it.
"Man's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. ... facing a fate he cannot change, he may rise above himself or grow beyond himself, and by doing so change himself.   It is a changing for the better."

Providence provided George Soros with a father who knew how to survive the worst of humanity.
As a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian army Tivadar Soros had lived through the battle of the First World War and a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp.   He survived an escape attempt and the long trek from the Russian border near Manchuria, all the way to his home land of Hungary, down wild, artic rivers, through dense forests and the maze of Moscow bureaucracy, all the while exposed to killing sprees and other perils of the aftermath of the Russian revolution.
The odyssey from enlisting to freedom had taken nearly seven years.
So when the Nazi killing machine entered Budapest, Hungary in 1944, he, though much older and knowing full well that the danger he was facing was different from anything known to mankind before, still knew what to do and how to help his family and many other Jewish people.
He also saw the opportunity and challenge. "Life is beautiful ... But luck must be on your side. Nonetheless, as a lawyer I understood the principles of necessity and self-protection"
Back then in Russia, Tivadar Soros had made the choice to view every day's challenge as a lesson and use the lessons to master his fate.   He would apply the same tactic again and save the lives of his family through giving up their Jewish identity, going in hiding, playing a game of cat and mouse with the Nazi's, constantly changing living quarters, trying to dance their way around death.
Paul the oldest son would live by himself, mother Erzebet would move to the country and George the younger son would live with a friendly family.   George's money making skills thus surfaced when he was a fourteen year old boy contributing to the family's precarious money pot in 1944.
"Making money was purely avocational.   It was tied to survival, or rather to the family tradition of managing and coping in the sense of the French word débrouiller, you know, trying to come out on top no matter what happens around you.   Imagine a child of fourteen, coming from a middle class background, suddenly confronted with the prospect of being deported and killed just because he is Jewish.   I learned the art of survival from a grand master.   That had a certain relevance to my investment career."
False identity cards were created, jewelry was traded, money exchanged and the fourteen year old gained a broad insight in politics, economy and the value of risk taking and trial and error.
"For an adolescent to be in real danger, having a feeling he is inviolate, having a father whom he adored acting like a hero and having evil confronting you and getting the better of it, I mean, being in command of the situation, even though you are in danger, but basically maneuvering successfully, not only to survive but to emerge victoriously because we were able to help so many others, what more can you ask for?  It was high adventure, like living through Raiders of the Lost Ark.   None of the risk taken as an adult, none of the bets made on currencies or market movements, were greater than the ones in the war."
The mark of war-time followed by the Russian occupation with equally menacing dangers, and the natural defense, self-preservation, became deeply embedded in George Soros modus operandi.
For a long time it worked extremely well for him.   Soros used his extraordinary sixth sense and his chronic sense of insecurity to establish Quantum Fund, the world's first private hedge funds using a unique combination of leverage, macro-investing, a three dimensional approach and fitting the conditions.   The Fund reached a one hundred million dollars size by the late seventies.
By that time he had also reached mid-life and he began to realize that he was stuck on a money-making merry go round.   Something was missing.   "Here I was, extremely successful, but I made a point of denying my success.   I worked like a dog. I felt that it would endanger my success if I abandoned my sense of insecurity.   And what was my reward?   More money, more responsibility, more work - and more pain.   I was close to a breaking point.   It did not make sense."
Having inherited the gift of introspection from his mother and believing that all wisdom starts with critical thinking and self-reflection, Soros began to work with a therapist.
He discovered that fighting the issues from his youth had become inappropriate given the security and wealth he had build.   The theme of survival had become obsolete.
The very defense, the very coping mechanism that saved him, had turned against him.
"I made the decision that I had to get off the treadmill.   I refused to remain a slave to my business. I established that I am the master and not the slave.   It was a big change in many ways, because I began to accept myself as someone who is successful; I overcame fear of the misfortune that might befall me if I admitted my success.   Perhaps I was about to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but what was the point of laying those golden eggs if my life kept getting more miserable?   I had to start enjoying the fruits of my success; otherwise the whole endeavor did not make sense"
Soros dared to go counter reason and habit.  "I had been too self-critical and self-controlled.  My style of management was too tight and too cramped.  And so, now, I let it rip."
After a "wild period" he came to terms with his war-torn past and settled into an even more prosperous present.   While at it, he decided to reflect on his family history and the relations with his parents. "Once I had a stone in the salivary gland in my mouth, which was extremely painful.   The doctor took it out in an operation, which was also very painful.   The stone was a round, hard ball.  
I wanted to preserve it because of all the pain it had caused me.   In a few days, I looked at it and it had turned into dust.   It was pure calcium, which becomes powder when it dries.   This is what happened to my hang-ups.   Somehow they resolved when they were brought to light."
The next move set him apart from the herd: fully emerging from the smaller, limited world of self-serving into a larger world of purpose.  
No longer a moneyman he became a maker of meaning and luck.
"What really mattered to me was the concept of an open society.   An open society protects freedom in the sense of availability of alternatives.   An open society is one in which a person like me can live and prosper.   It allows people to learn to think for themselves, to decide what they want and to translate their dreams into reality."
As a servant investor and servant leader, Soros became one of the richest men in the world, touching the lives of many people.   Money was not the end, however, just a means.
What mattered was full life and liberty for all.   What mattered was the freedom for everyone to fulfill a vision of one's own choosing, instead of one that is forced upon.
He established Open Society Foundations in twenty five countries on every one of the five continents, backing reform and human rights movements, giving out more than four hundred million dollars a year, some very successful, some not so, depending on how autocratic the government of the respective country is.
From his experience with Fascism and Communism Soros began to recognize a dangerous trend in American society: the tyranny of unrestrained self-obsession.
For years he warned about false economic premises and self-delusion, seduction and deception of the Cheney-Bush government, consisting of troubled, self-serving men aligned with a troubled, self-serving U.S. financial sector, men out of balance with themselves and everyone and everything. 
Their behavior is akin to an out of control addict in an inevitable downward spiral or a man on a (self) destructive binge of vengeance and cruelty.  Both medicate against heartbroken despair and rage from childhood, one with a substance, the other with power. 
Cheney literally has had heartproblems since his late thirties. Yet instead of understanding the underlying emotional issues, a "hardening" of the heart, enormous stress, a deep sense of insecurity and a general lack of happiness, he over and over, like a broken record, acts out like the same Grinch who stole his Christmas when he was young.
Instead of developing consciousness and entering self-reflection, self-work and self-knowledge, he relies on acting out, the easy way out - reflex, strike, attack, show of strength, display of power, whipping up fear...
The lower human instincts and the universal repetition-compulsion, sadly, had gotten the better of him. 

Aristotle Onassis too was such a man.   As a teenager he witnessed the unspeakable atrocities the Turkish soldiers and the Moslem mob inflicted on the Greek and Armenian population in 1922 in Smyrna, now called Izmir.
He had lived a prosperous life untill the massacre took his beloved uncles, imprisoned his father Socrates and exiled the woman who had stepped in, when he lost his mother at age six, his grandmother Gethsemane, whom he loved more than anyone in the world.  
Left the only "man" in the family he desperately tried to save his father's life, mansion and business empire, through cunning and catering to the enemy, getting a passe-partout and an identity card in turn.   Father and grandmother did not survive the inhumanities.  
Aristotle Onassis did, but he never recovered.  Over the years he would repeat the navigation tactic, catering to people in power, offering pleasure, often on his opulent yacht "Christina", while expecting favors in turn, repeating the conditional merry go round like a luring mantra, never rising above it.  On the contrary, survival slowly degenerated in a lethal combination of excess and paranoia, in the words of his fated lover, opera diva Maria Callas; "He was a very hardworking man with an amazing drive - he felt that something vital was eluding him.  ... How can a man be so dishonest?  So - I don't know - so crazy?  Poor man!"
And in the words of his equally fated daughter Christina; "When he hated, nobody was spared.   It destroyed us all in the end."
Christina did not just refer to the premature dead of her mother Tina and brother Alexander and her own suicide attempt(s), but also to the pain Onassis caused Callas, who said at the end of her life:  "There are people born to be happy and people born to be unhappy, I am just not lucky." 
In her despair Callas seemed to have lost the connection with free will and inner powers, as she suffered Onassis' betrayal, his doomed marriage - at once revenge, trophy and business arrangement - with the widow of John F. Kennedy.  A marriage of which Robert Kennedy had said, that it would only take place "over his dead body" (!).
Like Napoleon or Onassis, the men of the Bush administration never came to terms with their personal histories.  Not brave enough to work through the layers of denial and anger, not strong enough to acknowledge underlying pain, they never rose above the impotence of their childhoods. 
Thus they - like broken records - acted out the betrayal of their pasts over many more dead body's...
Sadly the lower instincts and the universal repetion-compulsion had gotten the better of all of them.

Soros knew the threat does not come from the outside but from within. 
He foresaw the current financial meltdown years ago, contrary to many other "experts", including a Nobel prize winning economist too stuck in his familiar box to recognize the wisdom of Soros' experience and self-important enough to demean the experience and it's owner.
The ridicule reminds me of another George on the set of the very first Star Wars movie, the quiet, brilliant filmmaker, who endured relentless ridiculing from actors, who simply did not understand.
It is the same old, ages old attack on the light-bearer.
It is so much easier to belittle or butcher the messenger than to wrestle with truth or the pain of our past and our imperfections.   It is so much easier to stay stuck in vengeance and frailty, than bravely take on cross, patiently listen to fate and doggedly learn the lesson, like Victor Frankl, George Soros and George Lucas did, creating better self, and thus better luck and a better world.

Quotes from:
* Man's Search for Meaning. Viktor E. Frankl, Austria 1946 and New York, 1959
* Masquerade. Dancing around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary, by Tivadar Soros, 2001
* Transcript Bill Moyers Journal, A Conversation with George Soros, October 10, 2008
* Soros on Soros. Staying Ahead of the Curve, with Byron Wien and Krisztina Koenen, 1995
* Greek Fire.  The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis, by Nicholas Gage, 2000
* Nemesis. Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys, by
   Peter Evans, 2004
* Soros. The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, by Michael T. Kaufman, 2002
* The Money Man by Jane Mayer, article in The New Yorker, October 18, 2004
* The Age of Fallibility. Consequences of the War of Terror, by George Soros, 2006
* The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, by
   George Soros, 2008