The Citizen’s Code

Foundations, challenges and solutions
for an equitable society

Understand your rights, act as an informed citizen, and together build a future where justice and freedom prevail.

Welcome to the Citizen’s Code. This site is dedicated to exploring the fundamental rights of the citizen and the essential freedoms that guarantee a just society. We discuss key principles, current issues and the means of action available to every citizen.

The definition of citizen

Being a citizen is not a title you acquire at birth and then it’s over.

  • Being a citizen is a position you hold when you’re part of a country. Whether you like it or not, being part of a country will strongly influence your level of opulence and success.
  • This position of citizen implies actions to maintain this position in the best possible conditions for long-term operation. Participating is better.
  • This means achieving visible results in improving group conditions. It requires methods and resources, rules and actions, and objectives.

Exchange: the Nº1 rule that determines the longevity of all societies.

The golden rule of society, the stable data on which everything is based: the rule of exchange on which everything can be evaluated.

I’ll start with this law, which I’m placing on the home page of this site to preface this code.

If you only read this first chapter, you’ll have understood everything about how things work, or why too many things go wrong in our country.

The exchange

It’s the keystone of society, of living together, of the success of a couple, a company, a group, a country.

It is the most precious and ultimate stable data on which everything can be evaluated.

Want to know why something is wrong with the company? You’ll automatically come across a violation of this one and only law.

Do you want to know if a law is fair, if decisions are right, if society’s participants behave fairly?

With this law, you hold the key to assessing every situation.

All complaints, all rejections, all situations where hair-raising decisions are made in the family, in business, in society at large, in governments and in any group are in violation of this rule.

Example of a violation of the law of exchange

Illustration of the consequences of an exchange violation
  • Droit du sol is all well and good, but what happens when individuals take advantage of it to extort money from social organizations?
  • Social insurance is all very well, but what happens when it’s used up and stolen?
  • A tax is fine when it doesn’t exceed 15/20% of your people’s production. Beyond that, if you really start to analyze, without preconceived ideas or prejudices, you’ll soon discover that it’s all a swindle.
  • A law may not respect this exchange if, for example, a squatter can stay in your apartment because it’s protected by law. Even if you pay credits on it.
  • Or if a law protects a thief who injures himself in your home, where he has no business being.
  • The same applies to a car thief, who can claim damages if he is injured while stealing your car.
  • Or when a person who has crashed into your car cannot be held responsible, even though a witness has seen him, because he doesn’t respond to your reminders.

It gets worse. Our judicial system has gone haywire.

Know your function

In the world of everyday business, it’s obvious that if someone you hire doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do, or doesn’t even know they’re supposed to do something, it’s really going to fail, and it’s really going to go wrong.

If a citizen doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do and how he can do it, and if he doesn’t have the leverage to do it, the function of citizen disappears. Meanwhile, the foxes are prowling around, stealing everything they can get their hands on.

I don’t want to hear about the political world

I often hear people, citizens who don’t know themselves, declare that the world of politics doesn’t interest them and that they don’t want to participate or even think about it. This is somewhat normal, because when you lose all your time in one area, things become unpleasant and you turn away. The problem is that everything has been done by the organized gang who run us to disgust us with the world of politics and political life.

The only problem with this situation is that all citizens participate in the mismanagement by being fleeced and cheated, whether they agree with it or not.

Rule:

A citizen who doesn’t know his role is a time bomb. We found ourselves in the same boat. We’re sinking together.

A civil servant who doesn’t know he’s serving his fellow citizens is cheating them. But what should be the exchangeable result?

When you talk to a La Poste employee, you can clearly see that they have a mission. Mail is delivered on time, people are happy.

I’ve often seen this spirit of service at SNCF in the past too. It’s not all doom and gloom. I’ve also often seen this state of mind in dedicated civil servants.

Examples of services (and their observed degradation) :

 

La Poste

Mission clear (before). Degradation of sense of responsibility noted.

 

 

SNCF (Past)

Spirit of service existed. Similar degradation observed.

 

Unfortunately, with the problem generated by group agreements *see group agreement glossary* and the surrounding environment, I’ve seen a clear deterioration in this spirit of responsibility in their departments over the last few years.

This deterioration is now spreading in the same way to citizens in the private sector.

It’s clear, then, that if citizens don’t set the record straight at all levels of government, the country will fall by the wayside.

Why I wrote this code: Common sense.

The citizen’s code is simply a code based on common sense.

Common sense is what makes anything work. But common sense depends on sound thinking.

Rule:

Only an individual can show common sense. A group cannot. A group doesn’t think. Its members react individually.

An example of individual common sense versus groupthink

It is now obvious that the laws drawn up by the National Assembly, which is a group after all, do not respect the good practices necessary for the recovery of our country, and this will lead us all into endless problems.

This is normal, as this group is not designed to enforce effective, common-sense operating rules.

If you want a healthy way of thinking, you need healthy rules of operation.

This first rule of the laws of exchange is a fundamental one.

My experience with managers

In the past, I’ve worked closely with managers to help them increase their company’s profitability.

A manager’s everyday reality is :

  • “But how are we going to unlock these sales as quickly as possible? “
  • “Why doesn’t this department work anymore? “
  • “Why is this guy who was working great last month not working now? “
  • ad infinitum

When this type of problem arose, the pressure was so great to keep employees and the company employed that we really had to find a solution.

  • real problems,
  • real solutions and
  • real actions to be implemented immediately to get the company’s profitability back on track.

The target was very broad, touching every area of the company.

  • human,
  • market approach, market evolution,
  • management style,
  • his teammates’ way of thinking,
  • fashions and new ideas, innovation, etc.

And,… there are an infinite number of ways to block a company’s operations.

Managerial skills

That’s why the manager’s job is a complex one, as he or she has to deal with a very large number of skills.

The skills of a public leader, politician, mayor, deputy, senator, etc.

The skills of public managers must be superior to the skills of an executive. It is therefore unacceptable to have someone in this type of position who has not run a successful business in the past.

These people must be capable of creating jobs, attacking new markets, turning around a company and generally having merits far superior to what is usually expected of a politician in our country.

 

Results

 

Merit

 

Turnaround

 

Growth

The Chinese have understood this; they make 2,400 billion in profits a year and only appoint managers on merit. The Americans have understood it with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Hungary with Viktor Orban, El Salvador with Nayib Bukele and Argentina with Javier Milei. They too are behaving like leaders and turning their countries around. And at high speed, please.

It doesn’t take long to put a country back on its feet. Thomas Sankara, in extreme conditions, was able to feed his people in 6 years.

Anyone who can do the job has a violently fast impact.

Okay, but in order to function, a person needs to have a good foundation, good practices.

To be able to function or think properly, you need to know how things work at their best. That’s the only way you can compare with what you’re doing right now.

Rule:

Without a comparison, no reflection is possible.

  • If you want to increase a country’s foreign trade, you’d better go and copy what’s happening in China, because in just one year they produced a 2400 billion foreign trade surplus, which is roughly the deficit we’ve managed to accumulate in France over the space of 50 years. They only appoint managers on merit.
  • If you want to turn around a plant and save jobs, go and talk to the plant turnaround specialists in a group that manages plants. There are some, and it’s with people of this caliber that I got my start.
  • If you want to put a poor country back on its feet, it’s best to analyze and copy precisely and without misinformation what Thomas Sankara did.
  • If you want to turn Argentina around, take a close look at Javier Miley, as he seems to be getting the job done at the moment and making all the right decisions to get it done.
  • If you want to know how to turn a company around at high speed and make it profitable, take a look at what happened with Elon Musk and Twitter/X.
  • If you want to know how to turn a country around, take a close look at what’s happening in Hungary, Argentina or the Trump administration.
  • If you want to know how to turn France around, take a close look at what de Gaulle did right from the start, during his 10 years in power. As soon as he came to power, he demanded the purging of the rules that had plagued France in previous years.

He was also the person who left France debt-free and with world diplomacy at its peak at the time.

The most important rule in the administration of a country. The increasing level of responsibility required to succeed in public office.

If you want to know how to turn around a company, you must already know how to create, manage and turn around a household, a soccer team, a company, a town, a county. And in that order. AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

If you don’t know how to create jobs and wealth in a small company, you’ll probably never be able to create wealth in a big company, or even in a country. Everything is learned gradually.

Elon Musk started an online bank before creating Tesla and SpaceX.

Rule:

Perfect knowledge of a subject leads to maximum simplicity.

Illustrating the simplicity of mastery

I remember a company director who made belts and wanted to delegate his skills to retire.

There was only one person who could do the quotations because it was a position of great responsibility to maintain the company’s margin.

After analyzing this manager’s way of thinking, because it was the manager who was stuck on this function, we jokingly realized that all it took was a single factor and a rule of three to define the price of each of the belts on sale to keep the company’s margins at a decent level.

Practically the same was true of all the positions I was able to analyze and delegate.

Simplicity

Generally speaking, to make something work in the real world of business, if you go and see a professional in the field, he’ll give you in 3 minutes, half an hour or a few hours the operating codes that work.

One of my specialties has been, and still is, to identify a manager’s individual best practices and pass them on to each member of the team or to the new owner.

I’ve done this for a number of entrepreneurs who wanted to sell their business or pass on their skills.

I realized that these best operating practices were always the same, unchanging rules from one company to the next.

Rules :

These best practices are based on natural laws.

I soon realized that there were things that worked and things that didn’t.

These are immutable rules. They ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS work.

ZERO EXCEPTIONS and I’m going to tell you all about it.

If you break them, you sink. It’s black or it’s white.

You apply, it works, you fail to apply, your business, your couple, your sports club or your town council sinks.

Here are just a few of the rules, to give you an example and a better idea of reality:

  • Whatever you put your energy into will grow. When you reward one person for doing nothing, all the others will follow suit.
  • When you reward someone for job creation, you get more.
  • In our country, we take money from companies to manage unemployment for them. It’s companies and their managers who create jobs.

Why do we do the opposite?

Illustration:

if you pay the unemployed, you’re sure to get more and more of them. Unemployment only dates back to 1976, and was promoted by Giscard D’Estaing. The state was undermining the full employment established by General De Gaulle during his presidency.

Since then, this arbitrariness has become a reality accepted by all French people. Especially by those who have made it their profession.

  • If you reward the wrong person, you install injustice and block all the goodwill of people who should have received this reward instead.
  • Chance doesn’t exist. Nothing happens unless someone makes it happen. The state of things always depends on the creation of someone, or someone who directs the ideas of a group.
  • A group doesn’t lead. Only an individual can lead. There’s no such thing as a decision-making group. So ask a commission run by an Énarque to turn a country around.
  • Groups easily agree on collective thinking and destructive ideas. The role of a true leader is to organize a group of people around coordinated outcomes, and to overcome collective thinking/group agreement to achieve exchangeable results that lead to prosperity.
  • A group will succeed if a manager is able to keep it out of the collective mind and keep each member focused on the results to be achieved and their responsibilities.
  • When a person is managed, he or she will take on the ideas of the person in charge, and will reproduce the same mistakes and successes as that other person.
  • Etc.

These are rules that, if and when properly mastered, lead to success.

A real-world solution for the group.

All these years of consulting have been a fantastic learning experience for me. Finding the real solution means getting the system up and running again.

Not finding the right solution equals failure and no results.

No one can escape the facts.

Rule:

Once you’ve identified the real problem, the real blockage and the real solution, if you act on it, you’ll see improved results.

Rule:

If not, you haven’t found the bug, the problem. Things just keep falling.

Rule:

You can always dream that you’ve found a solution, but if it doesn’t produce concrete results in terms of efficiency, results and profitability, then it’s wrong.

In fact, during all my years as a consultant, the target was clearly to give to these companies,

  • a clear definition of the results to be achieved by each individual,
  • clear concepts that worked,
  • a simple vision of responsibility and
  • the joy of working in a group to improve results and succeed.

The result was always a marked improvement in the atmosphere.

It’s simple: a good atmosphere equals results.

Rule:

It’s because there are results that the atmosphere is excellent. The results achieved come before the satisfaction of having succeeded. Not at all.

One day, I was with a team of managers in charge of running factories in the Pechiney group.

During a round-table discussion, I put the question to everyone.

“What drives you when you’re managing the plants, what’s very important to you?”

Out of 9 factory managers, 3 clearly told me that when the factories are no longer there, famine enters the country and that it was clearly their mission to maintain them. They had experienced previous years of famine in France. Those years were not so far behind.

Who I am

With this in mind, there were only two possibilities for my activities

  • or I was efficient
  • or I didn’t have a job.

Right from the start, I had a very precise set of management techniques in my toolbox.

I did this job because I love companies and the business world, and I get on very well with my friends, the managers.

Creating jobs, keeping jobs, increasing the number of jobs, as in the case where I made a major contribution to growing a company from 80 to 280 people, was a job I really enjoyed.

Why I wanted to write this code

Illustration of a thought or a piece of writing

In the early 1990s, I was listening to the radio one morning when I heard a Parisian politician (I won’t name her, as I don’t want to give her any publicity) declare on the radio, with phenomenal aplomb, I’d even say exceptional:

Propaganda:

“but you should know that you can’t run a country like a business or a household”.

Warning: this rule is totally false

My day had started very badly.

That was the day I really told myself that we were facing a major problem and that we had to do something about it.

This law of operation is totally false. It was promoted by Keynes, who was a financier promoted by his peers to the rank of “specialist” in a country’s economy. (This way to the borrowed money, please, because bankers know all about these rules – it’s what lines their pockets).

How could someone so close to the head of a country’s government declare such nonsense?

  • Obviously, this person had never worked to manage a company, create jobs and pay salaries.
  • This person was obviously managing other people’s money for other people, not his own (I’m referring to Javier Miley’s statement).
  • Inevitably, this person was thinking in terms of groupthink. The one who doesn’t give a damn about his production.
  • Of course, this person had never created a job except his own, which was well-paid.
  • Inevitably, she was out of touch with reality.

How could this person have been placed in such a position of responsibility without having previously proven his ability to generate wealth and employment?

How could this person even declare such nonsense on the radio and thus educate an entire population on the road to collective economic suicide?

She had just ruined my day.

The only thing I could do to regain my composure was to tell myself that I’d have to write a book to educate and participate with my skills in spreading the message of the rules of economics to all the citizens who make up my economic group, France.

I wrote a draft of this book that outlined the nonsense that politicians spout on a daily basis, and the solutions to it.

And then I continued to observe for quite a few years all these government decisions that were meticulously destroying the economy year after year in a methodical, efficient, determined, totalitarian way.

It took me a while to realize that this was intentional, deliberate, and that these people who were put in key positions over all these years had been chosen for their total inability to analyze the facts and get out of group agreements, or outright for their intentional or bought malice to destroy our business environment.

Hence the code I finally wrote.

The facts are stubborn

I’m only going to tell you the facts.

During the 1980s and 1990s, administrative pencil pushers lost 200 billion francs a year, the equivalent of euros today.

Even today, after 25 years of Europe, the euro has been devalued to such an extent that it has been divided by at least 6. (The year is 2025).

Whose fault is that?

A perfect understanding of language leads a person to action. All the professionals I’ve known in the corporate world no longer think, whatever their profession. They act. They also master their business vocabulary perfectly.

What is a citizen?

He’s first and foremost a member of a team in which he plays the citizen’s game.

Well, it’s obvious that if citizens don’t know their role, or if they don’t know the most important rules to follow to avoid disasters when they vote, we’re going to end up with leaders who don’t apply them either.

(It would still be necessary for the elections not to be falsified, but that’s another problem).

All this is a problem that should have been dealt with by the French education system, which did away with all the subjects that had an impact on the economy.

Among the first subjects to be axed, even before marketing, sales and management, were Latin and Greek, which provided a solid understanding of the vocabulary and actions involved.

This precipitated illiteracy and slavery long before we realized it.

Rule:

We, the citizens, now only have the result of what we tolerate every day.

And to begin with, whose fault is it? Well, it’s the fault of each and every citizen who doesn’t know the essential rules of basic management and who tolerates the mistakes made every day in our country by its leaders, who sing the same song from the heart.

Rule:

And let me reassure you, it can still be straightened out quickly. You just need to know the basics. The very ones I’m putting on this site: the citizen’s code.

The first rule to re-establish is that :

Rule:

A state is managed in exactly the same way as a good father, a good housewife or a good manager. The State is no more than a group of small businesses, all of which depend for their success on a responsible leader who is aware of the need to respect the laws of exchange.

Group ideas

The main skill of a good leader, a good mistress of the family and a good father is to disagree with the collective ideas of a group.

Illustration of group thinking vs. individual decision-making
  • No, a family isn’t going to eat French fries and Coca-Cola with Nutella every day because all the kids voted for it.
  • No, we’re not going on vacation all the time because all the children (the majority in a family with 3 children) have decided to go on vacation all the time.
  • No, we’re not going to increase salaries without taking into account the money in the bank because we can “always pump into a company’s account” without any consequences.

Propaganda:

Or that a healthy group must borrow more than it earns to invest if it is to survive. This rule was introduced by Keynes.

Keyne worked in the world of finance. He was a senior civil servant and a prince of state interventionism in the economic world. What the State absolutely cannot do without robbing its citizens and reducing them to misery.

He was pushed forward and was one of the main precursors of state indebtedness in the Western world. Keynes, Monsieur Le Loup, was one of the main promoters of the right way to behave for a sheep in the Western world with public finances.

And therein lies the problem.

It has been chosen to be taught in all management schools, and this is a real boon for international bankers. The same bankers who are most certainly responsible for its rise to the pinnacle in our education systems.

His teachings shouldn’t even be quoted, they’re so out of touch with the realities of the business world.

But no, with Collective Thinking anything is possible.

There are group agreements, and of course there are also misconceptions.

Managing group agreements and enforcing the use of common-sense laws are the key skills our country’s self-proclaimed leaders lack to be capable of running a successful business that creates jobs and generates wealth.

This is just a taste of what this site has to offer.

The citizen’s code of survival

If you want solid management techniques, check out the books by Frédéric Bastiat, who died on December 24, 1850. http://bastiat.org/

You can also consult the books of an economist called Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman, born in Brooklyn on July 31, 1912 and died in San Francisco on November 16, 2006, was an American economist considered one of the most influential of the 20th century. An ardent defender of liberalism, he was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in 1976.

These are real references that should be taught at school.