When Smart People Start Looking for the Door

Thanks to Carlos Diaz Éric Larchevêque Kelly Massol Fabrice Epelboin Jade Dousselin Sixtine Moullé-Berteaux Pierre Gaubil for the discussion in the latest Festin podcast. I watched it last Saturday—a raw conversation on freedom of speech that started with sharp ideas but ended in a suffocating feeling. The discussants circled a question that hit hard: why do so many entrepreneurs quietly leave France? It took me four days to connect the dots back to Tocqueville... and to that LAX moment.

There is a moment some people remember with the precision of a photograph. For me, it is 2001, walking out of LAX into the California light, on the way to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Not my country. Not my language. Yet, somehow, home.

This is not a story about France‑bashing or American worship. It is about what a country chooses as its operating system—and what that choice does to entrepreneurs, citizens, and, eventually, to the very texture of freedom.

Equality as atmosphere, liberty as currency

Democracies, Tocqueville observed, are torn between two great passions: liberty and equality. The twist is that equality usually wins. People will accept “equality in servitude rather than inequality in freedom,” he warned, because equality feels more immediate, more total, more reassuring.

Here is the step beyond Tocqueville: Countries do not just love liberty or equality; they denominate themselves in one or the other.

• Equality is an atmosphere. It is a climate you breathe: school is free, healthcare is universal, protections are thick, the safety net is wide. You do not hold equality in your hand; you float inside it.
• Liberty is a currency. It is something you can hold, lose, trade, reclaim: starting a company, changing jobs, criticizing power, moving capital, choosing risk over protection. You might not feel liberty every second, but you can spend it.

The crucial asymmetry is this: When you build a system on an atmosphere, you make an all‑in bet on stability. When you build it on a currency, you accept volatility as the price of adjustment.

France chose equality as atmosphere. The United States chose liberty as currency.

Everything else follows—including that suffocation feeling from the podcast, and why some of us walk away.

The French all‑in bet

Post‑war France built one of the most impressive equality atmospheres on the planet: social security, healthcare, pensions, public education, strong labor protections. During the trente glorieuses, this was a brilliant bet. High growth meant you could have both: generous equality and individual upward mobility.

But an atmosphere has a hidden feature: you cannot trade with it. You are in it, or you are not.

• High taxes are not just a policy; they are the price of oxygen. You pay because “that’s how the country works.” In return, the state becomes mom and dad: it educates, heals, compensates, stabilizes.
• Exit becomes expensive. When the state pays for your health, your kids’ schooling, your pension, leaving the system—geographically or psychologically—feels like tearing out your own organs, not just changing jobs.
• Responsibility flows upward. If you cannot realistically leave, you must demand that those above you “do their job.” Disappointment turns political: the government is always failing you, because it has taken responsibility for you.

Inside this atmosphere, a peculiar aristocracy grows.

Not the aristocracy of old titles, but of fluency in the system: the people who know which schools matter, which concours count, which forms to file, which networks to cultivate. They game the rules of equality without ever really living inside it. They are equal on paper and superior in practice. Tocqueville feared this: a centralized, egalitarian society that quietly manufactures a new administrative nobility.

To the majority, the system says: “You are safe, if you stay.” To the fluent aristocrats, it whispers: “You are free, if you understand.”

This is not a caricature. It is the logic of an equality‑atmosphere once growth slows. What once felt like solidarity begins to feel like "anesthésie générale": you are held, but you are also sedated.

Riots, periodic explosions, sudden waves of anger are not irrational outbursts. They are the natural shock of people who discover that a promise of equality, taken as an entire environment, can still leave them motionless. And for entrepreneurs? That sedation becomes a quiet suffocation—the podcast's unspoken truth.

The American volatile currency

Now, contrast that with the US, where liberty was older than equality. Local self‑government, associations, juries, a free press: the architecture Tocqueville admired was built to exercise liberty, not just to proclaim it.

In a liberty‑currency regime, everyone is always trading:

• Trade some safety for the chance to start a company.
• Trade some taxes for a social program.
• Trade some privacy for convenience and better services.

Nothing is final. That is the point.

Presidents come and go; regulations swing; courts push back; states experiment; entrepreneurs build workarounds. It is messy, unfair, and often brutal. But because liberty is understood as a denominated value, people think in margins, not absolutes: “How much freedom am I giving up? How do I get some back?”

Volatility is not a bug; it is the price of reversibility.

From the outside, this can look naïve or cruel. From the inside, it feels like this: you land at LAX for the first time, walk into a city you do not know, with people you do not know, and yet something in the air says:

“Nothing is guaranteed. But nothing prohibits you either.”

That sensation—of being allowed to move, to try, to fail—is not reducible to tax rates or business law. It is the lived experience of a liberty‑currency culture.

Did it “make” me successful? No. People fail in the US spectacularly every day. But did it speak the same moral language as my inner sense of how life should work? Clearly, yes.

I am French by education and culture, and deeply at peace with that. My inner library is Descartes, Galois, Fermat, Cauchy, Pascal, Curie, de Broglie, Pasteur, Berthollet, Hugo, Camus—a republic of minds, not borders. But the first time I walked out of LAX in 2001 to work at JPL, I felt something I had not felt before: not comfort, not safety, but permission. France gave me my mind. America gave me a sense of what my mind was allowed to do.

From soft to hard despotism: the algorithmic lever

That permission is fragile. Tocqueville worried about a new kind of despotism: not the iron fist of a tyrant, but a “soft” tutelary power that “sees to their enjoyments and watches over their fate,” reducing citizens to “a flock of timid and industrious animals.”

He also feared the “tyranny of the majority,” where public opinion becomes so overwhelming that dissent feels almost impossible.

The podcast's speech conversation flowed naturally into "leaving France" because freedom of speech is the first casualty of an equality-atmosphere under pressure. When the air gets thick, you cannot just speak louder—you start looking for the door. And that door leads straight to the next threat.

I add the 21st‑century twist:

• Public opinion is no longer just a crowd feeling; it is algorithmically produced.
• Soft despotism is no longer just a slow accretion of bureaucracy; it can be instrumented.

The steps are chillingly simple:

1. Billions of voices pour into platforms.
2. Algorithms rank, filter, amplify, bury.
3. What people think others think becomes more real than what they actually think.

At that point, someone who controls the algorithms does not just have influence; they hold a lever on perception itself. The “everyone” of Tocqueville’s majority becomes, in practice, the “someone” who sets the parameters.

Soft despotism builds the machinery: the habit of letting systems decide what you see, how you work, who you hear. Hard despotism only needs to seize the on‑switch.

The same is true for states. In an equality‑atmosphere, where citizens are accustomed to being protected and managed, it is remarkably easy to justify more algorithmic control: for safety, for misinformation, for public health. In a liberty‑currency system, the resistance is louder and more chaotic, but the tools are converging.

The danger is not that Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are cartoon villains. It is that anyone who gets their hand on the lever—platform owner, regulator, populist, technocrat—can turn Tocqueville’s diffuse, soft pressures into something more concentrated, more deliberate, and much harder to escape.

How to tell this story without bitterness

There is a risk that talking this way sounds like personal frustration: “I left; I succeeded; therefore, France is broken.” That is not my point.

The angle that keeps it powerful and not petty is this:

“This is not a story about which country is better. It is a story about how different founding choices shape the lives of people like me—and millions unlike me—without ever asking us explicitly.”

If entrepreneurs leave France, it is not because France is unlovable. It is because an equality‑atmosphere, magnificent in its protections, can become anesthetic to those whose working material is risk. If some of us feel at home in the US, it is not because the US is just. It is because a liberty‑currency regime, brutal and unstable, still recognizes the trade and sacrifices we want to make: more responsibility, less anesthesia.

The real question is not whether we should be more French or more American. It is: what do we want our children to hold in their hands—an atmosphere they cannot trade, or a currency they can learn to spend?