For the time being, I don’t have enough confidence in my grasp of the problem to suggest anything more than its global outline – which however necessarily contains some attempt at answering it.

[click to enlarge]

The essential problem of freedom-based politics is indeed consent, and the only (perpetually incomplete by definition) answer I’ve found until now of is to work towards consensus politics, as only them can respect both relative inertia and radical change.

A constitution only has true moral precedence over people’s better judgment in very religious countries such as the US. Only through resorting to transcendent authority can some writings (or any kind of traditional symbols) be given such power. Indeed, the very notion of a “constitution” relies on the authority of tradition to trump people’s autonomy.

An apparent counter-argument might be that “even” consensus can lead 99.99% of the people to legitimate pointless coercion. A closer analysis makes it obvious that any constitution is subject to a criticism of the same nature. All sacred principles enshrined in constitutions or whatever sacred scriptures can ever reflect nothing but what a given community of politicians (usually people with authority) agreed on (in other words, consented to) at a given time. And as history shows, in politics, all great fundamentals have been questioned – and improvement often required radical change.

Yes, consensus politics aren’t perfect, and can’t completely prevent coercion of the minority due to the ignorance of the masses. And that is irrelevant. The point of consensus politics is to recognize that ignorance is an inherent part of the human condition, and that learning – that is, change – is the only possible solution. Constitutional politics, on the other hand, rely on traditional authority of historical lawmakers to enforce rules upon people.

It is unwise to pretend to know scriptural truth and use these claims to coerce others. Politics are no exception, and the dialectic of openness and closeness is as essential on a social plane than an individual plane. You might think that your system would imply the least coercive (or otherwise “best”) system, but those claims are never anything but the reflect of the state your own consent.

Nothing but consent should be given sacred status. That is the essential definition of freedom-based politics.

Circumcision has been performed on children, male and female, in many cultures throughout history. The elementary aspects of circumcision are most often that of an initiative ritual where one gender, or both, is/are “purified” through the removal of what is perceived as remnants of the other gender’s reproductive organs. This initiation also served the purpose of reinforcing social links within a tribe and identifying other members of the group.

The Western world has more frequently circumcised boys, while many other cultures have more frequently performed circumcision on girls. Ironically enough, Westerners that circumcise little boys will often call the practice of circumcising little girls, even in its milder forms that exclude clitoridectomy, “genital mutilation”. I see little reason not to use the same expression to describe circumcision of boys.

From an ethical standpoint, it is imperative to take into account the inability of children to give consent. If respect of freedom requires one to accept the right of adults to mutilate themselves, claiming that parents should have the “freedom” to mutilate their children is nonsense. That said, not all surgery is to be seen as “mutilation”.

Two aspects are therefore to be taken into account to determine the morality of a surgical procedure performed on a child: “necessity” and “harm”. Weighing those factors against each other is the key to determining the morality (and potential legality) of surgical procedures on children.

“Necessity” refers, quite obviously, to the fact that surgery is to be considered justified if the life or health of a child is seriously endangered. Although Western science justified male circumcision for a while, modern science has demonstrated that proper hygiene makes circumcision utterly pointless in all non-pathological cases.

“Harm”, on the other hand, refers to the probable physical and psychological wound that the procedure implies – the smaller this wound, the more trivial the required “necessity”. For example, piercing the earlobes of a child leaves only a negligible wound – both physical and psychological – and thus the procedure would be only trivially immoral, assuming no necessity whatsoever.

On the other hand, there is evidence, scientific and anecdotal alike, suggesting that circumcision is likely to be sexually crippling. It indeed strikes many (including myself) as obvious that one that has a significant and highly sensitive part of one’s genitals removed is bound to never experience the sexual experience to its full potential. Furthermore, such surgery is a traumatic experience; the depth of the potential trauma is outlined by, among other things, the special meaning of reproductive organs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Needlessly inflicting physical and psychological trauma upon children is immoral, and should not be allowed if it is likely to cripple them for life. Only a highly problematic conception of sexuality can lead one to believe that routinely cutting little children’s reproductive organs is a healthy procedure.

The debate on property is probably the most fundamental debate among anarchists, and there is no clear consensus on this issue within the anarchist movement. Worse still, I’m not even sure of my own opinion on this topic!

Here is an evaluation grid of your degree of support for “private property”, inspired from this grid on ozarkia.net. Each question contains multiple choices . The higher your score, the more your normative recommendations for a property system resemble historical capitalism. My own positions are italicized.

1. Which mode of “property” should apply to the means of production: machines, factories and other goods used for production?

A) 0 pt = Usus only, through State coercion if necessary.
B) 1 pt = Usus only, through voluntary collective agreements.
C) 2 pts = Possession, through State coercion if necessary.
D) 3 pts = Possession, through voluntary collective agreements.
E) 4 pts = Private property, through voluntary collective agreements.
F) 5 pts = Private property, legitimizing private property acquired in the past through statist coercion (State expropriation) or other forms of violence, but without endorsing violence in the present or future.

2. Which mode of “property” should apply to individual consumption goods resulting from work and production? (Note: in general, anarchists agree that “private property” should apply to personal good such as clothes or a toothbrush.)

A) 0 pt = Usus only.
B) 2.5 pts = Possession.
C) 5 pts = Property.

3. Which property mode should apply to land and housing?

A) 0 pt = Usus only, through State coercion if necessary.
B) 1 pt = Usus only, through voluntary collective agreements.
C) 2 pts = Possession, through State coercion if necessary.
D) 3 pts = Possession, through voluntary collective agreements.
E) 4 pts = Private property, through voluntary collective agreements.
F) 5 pts = Private property, legitimizing private property acquired in the past through statist coercion (State expropriation) or other forms of violence, but without endorsing violence in the present or future.

4. What is your opinion on “work”?

A) 0 pt = Nobody should work.
B) 2.5 pts = Nothing against work, but it shouldn’t be linked to survival.
C) 4 pts = Work is essential to survival, but is not an absolute virtue.
D) 5 pts = Work is essential to survival and is an absolute virtue.

5. What is your opinion on “profit” (i.e. becoming rich off other people’s work)?

A) 0 pt = Profit is a crime that should be abolished by the State.
B) 1 pt = Profit is a crime that shouldn’t exist, but State coercion is a greater crime and shouldn’t be used to eradicate it.
C) 2 pts = Profit is a vice that should be stolen, in part or whole, by the State.
D) 3 pts = Profit is a vice that should be discouraged voluntarily through free-trade mechanisms.
E) 4 pts = Profit is a good thing, but the State should not encourage it.
F) 5 pts = Profit is a good thing that should be encouraged by the State.

6. What is your opinion on “barter” and “money”?

A) 0 pt = Neither barter nor money should be used.
B) 0.5 pt = Money shouldn’t be used, but barter is good.
C) 1 pt = Nothing against money, but it shouldn’t be the main means of exchange; barter is better.
D) 2 pts = Money is not bad, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, without statist control, and should be linked to effort put into work.
E) 3 pts = Money is good, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, without statist control.
F) 4 pts = Money is good, but should have a real value anchored in a tangible counterpart, and with statist control (or without tangible value, without central banking, with fixed monetary mass, such as in Panama).
G) 5 pts = Money is good, but should be closely controlled by the State which can print and control its value as it wishes.

My score = 14/30

Answers to specific questions are more interesting than the overall score, which is a mere indicator. Furthermore, my answers aren’t quite definitive (apart from 4.) and I’m open to new arguments.

On the other hand, the quest for objective coherence remains necessary for any political system to exist, and the only known way to reliably assess theoretical coherence is its inter-subjective acceptance. Two broad attitudes are possible when faced with this dilemma of ideological coherence:

1. Recognizing irrationality: fundamental normative beliefs are too often anchored in the subjective aspects of one’s own reality to serve as Law enforced on everyone.
2. Denying irrationality: claims of knowledge of pure objective rationality legitimize authoritarian legislation.

Now, claiming that pure rationality is impossible in political discourse doesn’t mean that we should give up altogether on rational politics, nor that we should move away from the axioms of democracy. If anything, it means that we should move closer to the underlying principles of democracy. Empowering the People, which I believe to be a commendable ideal, shouldn’t be about empowering 50%+1 of it while the remaining minority obeys to whatever irrational demands the majority – or powerful minority – has.

As theoretical grounds for a “new rationality”, I would echo various libertarian and anarchist thinkers in suggesting that as politics are to be assumed as fundamentally irrational, the only fundamental basis for political “rationality” we have, beyond consensus acceptance, is the maximal possible respect of the individual free will of all. Without this one ethical rule, consensus is worthless. That one ethical guideline is thus a synonym of political rationality if we recognize the fundamental presence of irrational beliefs in political thought. It logically leads to libertarian ideals.

So, if politics are irrational, what did I learn about myself and the Universe during those past 3-4 years of meditations on the topic? Mainly that there are several conflicting paradigms that all make some sense to me for different reasons. My personal aesthetic ideal would be anarcho-communism. My “rational”, ethical ideal would be panarchism, seen as the ultimate libertarian system. The practical means I suggest to get there is an economically centrist but socially radical form of libertarian socialism.

Economic structures throughout history have first and foremost served the purpose of reinforcing existing power structures. But unlike Marxists, I don’t (more precisely, no longer) believe that changing the economic system will magically change the authority structure of society, which until now has simply spontaneously re-instituted itself under different forms. Socialism and eventually communism will emerge from a strongly libertarian society, not the opposite.

I would hypothesize that intuitive knowledge of this is one reason capitalists are overwhelmingly authoritarian. So-called “libertarian” Market fundamentalists are probably deluding themselves when they think their system will ever be anything more than a fringe movement and a literary phenomena. If they care about freedom in large liberal democracies, they should accept compromise on economic issues and join hands with economically centrist and left-wing libertarians. Only then might we be able to counter the authoritarian capitalists – authoritarian socialism mostly died with the USSR – that is so powerful only due to the fragmentation of the libertarians.

This was my last post on the topic of political philosophy (and politics in general) for a while.

The creative failure towards the end is something I have come to expect from from most pieces of fiction that try too hard to sound too deep, even in so-called “literature” – looking at you, Camus. This “creative failure” I am referring to can be illustrated through this hypothetical conversation of actors adhering perfectly to the moral standpoint of Habermasian discourse ethics:

Me: Why do I still not know what the hell has been going on during these many hours I’ve invested in comprehending this story?
Artist: We weren’t sure about what we should explain at the end, so we left the explanations to your imagination! Isn’t that incredibly clever?
Me: No.

Endings that leave most of the plot unfinished are barely worthy of being called “endings”. At best they’re new beginnings (in the case of books and anime, second and third tomes and seasons abound), at worst they’re annoying displays of lack of creative prowess. Artists, if you’re to open an intricate sub-plot, consider that an ending that explains the many questions raised by your story is by far preferable to one that explains little. Fleshing out existing sub-plots is sometimes preferable to opening many that you might leave unclosed at the end.

A bad ending doesn’t make the whole of a creative work bad. On the other hand, a good ending is necessary for any plot-centric work of art to be great. A truly outstanding ending can make a mediocre story into a masterpiece in a few instants. Elfen Lied could have been great if it had a fully satisfying ending. This obviously raises the question: “But just what is a satisfying ending?” I believe there is no better way to illustrate this than through specific examples, two animes to keep in line with me putting this post in the Anime/Manga category. You should possibly not read and will not understand the following if you haven’t seen the two animes in question.

Chobits: a contemporary fairy tale of sorts, Chobits ends with all main characters in a specific and understandable situation, and all important mysteries are untangled. The ending feels like a proper ending, without any character being blatantly left out of the plot’s end for no apparently reason. The pacing remains fairly consistent throughout the whole of the anime, including the last few episodes.

Saikano: the antithesis of the above, its ending is probably the most beautifully sad, the most coherently empty piece of fiction I know of. This is an example of an ending that completely transformed my perception of the preceding story. Not much is explained, but what is indeed explained annihilates the need for any further explanations. The creativity displayed in the last few minutes unravels the plot in a way that puts it in a category of its own.

Two love stories, purely out of personal preference for the genre. They end in near-opposite ways, and have few common aspects. One thing they do have in common is an outstanding ending. The key to good endings doesn’t inherently require a story to belong to one genre or another, or to talk about something specific. It simply requires every important question raised by the story to be answered at the end somewhat coherently, or that the need for any such questions be ultimately undermined by an extremely clever plot device. If you can’t end the sub-plots you start in a satisfying manner, refrain from starting them in the first place.

More precisely, let us assume that if something is right, people will gradually come to see it as such if proper rational education and dialogue happens: irrationality in the modern world originates from authority structures. Now, the current unidimensional capitalist world entraps people, especially the weak and the poor, into such an authority structure, symbolized by a cycle of “work” and “consumption”. Panarchism would undermine this entrapment and free everyone from the chains of any specific economic system.

Let us now take the hypothesis that socialism is right. What can be inferred from this is that – provided socialism is right – the poor and weak would likely massively turn themselves to socialism in a panarchist system. The richest capitalists would lose the workforce that is the basis of their wealth and survival. They would be implicitly forced to either:

- in a utopian scenario, trade amazing services or products to the socialists and keep their wealth afloat;
- in a good-case scenario, sell off their “excess” resources at minimal profit;
- in an average-case scenario, give off much of their resources as “charity”;
- in a worst-case scenario, attempt to survive eating gold bars (the socialist workers don’t want to trade them food or essential services) and die miserably.

Therefore, the rich would be less rich and the poor less poor. Everyone would benefit from this scenario, from both left-wing and right-wing perspectives on fairness. In any case, economic inequalities that people don’t find genuinely legitimate would be largely stamped out. Furthermore, if any magical option emerges in the future that is superior to both socialism and capitalism, panarchism would allow for a relatively easy transition.

In summary, panarchism, being a political meta-system devoid of ideological uniformity, would provide people with enough cognitive freedom that they would freely choose the option that they consider to be fair. Global ethical safeguards, in turn, would be provided through the decentralized social feedback produced as response to the actions of each individual.

I find it a fertile idea to assume that schooling exists to transmit to youths a body of knowledge that cannot be transmitted by the parents, for two reasons:

1. The knowledge that must be passed on to the new generation can no longer be contained within a handful of individuals, let alone the parents.
2. Parents, in an increasingly individualistic world, choose to work full-time rather than raise their children, earlier.

These social conditions lead to the knowledge transmitted to youths being generally both more general (it is relevant to large numbers of people, if not ideally to everyone) and more impersonal (it is less and less tailored to specific individuals). Increasingly impersonal education, in turn, appears to lead to an introspective void, as children are no longer told as clearly who they are by their parents and tutors. Thus, as a greater existential void implies more diverse ways of filling it, the increasing impersonality of education appears to be an essential cause of individuation.

On the other hand, the universality of the knowledge passed on to children implies that it often disregards the child as a unique being and force-feeds him predigested information that generally quickly turns out useless in individual day-to-day life. The average proportion of one’s life dedicated to education is also growing: the knowledge necessary to be socially non-marginal is greater than ever, even though much/most of it will never be of any use outside of exams. This results in individuation exacerbating many of the problems it would be thought to solve: children, more than ever in many regards, seem unmotivated, alienated and hateful.

As I assume that individuation does not inherently unmotivate and alienate children, and can in fact do quite the opposite, I would suggest that the near-identical content taught to all students until they reach their mid-teens is to blame for a great part of the problems faced by contemporary students – and by extension society as a whole. The easiest way out, I believe, would be to apply a modular system similar to that of modern universities closer to all levels of education save possibly for kindergarten. Students should be given maximal control over what they learn as soon as possible, while being as free as possible in the process.

A frequent criticism of this approach is that children would tend to choose the laziest option rather than that most useful to their future or to society. I answer that this mindset is the result of current education paradigms, which miserably fail to instill in children the love of learning, that can otherwise be fostered by a strong sense of identity, and incidentally by some individuation.

Here, I find it important two distinguish between two fundamental “types” of individuation, which I will call negative individuation and positive individuation. The former is the reactionary kind chain-produced by e.g. mainstream education, while the latter is the visionary kind created by e.g. good parenting and the brighter creative side of the Web. Only the latter kind can be a strong vector of both social and individual cognitive freedoms.

To facilitate positive individuation, education should be both impersonal and specific, as opposed to current education that is impersonal and general. The impersonality of education allows for a more individually defined purpose, but only if children actively seek such a purpose. The generality of education as we know it today teaches children that learning has little meaning. Its main goal should be to do precisely the opposite, and transmitting “general information” to the child’s “psychological hard drive” should come only second, after the basics have been mastered. I will come back to the nature of those basics later.

Meta-knowledge has become at least as important as knowledge itself; critical thinking matters more than thought alone as it allows one to sift through the informational chaos that surrounds us. How we educate the adults of tomorrow should attempt to reflect, at least, the world of today and not that of yesterday. This points to what I believe to be the most promising educational tool of this era: the Web (which doesn’t substitute for good parenting, but complements it).

In the Middle Ages, the diversity of information was low as knowledge was still local, and the hegemony of religion was strong. Externalized information in the written form available at the time could be contained within a single or at most a few libraries. It is in such a context that universities were created. With the slow diversification of data available, more universities were created and greater communication between them was made easier. Centuries later, various new types of recording formats as well as a greater creative output (due in part to a larger world population) diversified archives, but only barely and slowly democratized access to it.

Today, smartphones allow us to access, through a device no bigger than our hand, incommensurately more information that ever was contained in any physical library. Material available for free online can be as good as most teachers, provided that the student is given the proper tools to exploit the practically bottomless pool of information that is the Web.

Contemporary education’s purpose should be first and foremost to teach children to learn by themselves, that is, teaching them both the capability and the desire to do so – in a manner creative and unique to themselves. In this line of thought, reducing the amount of time spent passively listening to a teacher should leave place to more creativity and existential satisfaction in students. The role of the teacher, in this new paradigm, would be to guide the children’s individual learning processes and to overlook the exams necessary to provide standardized certification of competence. As much as practically possible, those exams would occur whenever each child feels ready.

Finally, as to the mandatory “basic topics” to be taken by all students, they should remain conceptually close to the four fundamental fields outlined in a previous post: communicational thought, logical thought, social thought and rational thought. The only of the those core fields that is done more or less right in the current system is communicational thought or language in the broad sense. Mandatory logical thought courses would focus more on practical reasoning and much less on abstract mathematics. Social thought (including ethics) and rational thought (including epistemology) are nearly ignored by the current system, while I believe them to be critical aspects of a good early education.

In retrospect, I would therefore suggest implementing four interrelated major changes to today’s education system:

- a modular paradigm similar to that used in modern universities, at all levels, which would consequently be merged into a single non-linear education process (with the possible exception of kindergarten);
- a focus on critical thinking, especially applied to the newest technologies in knowledge management and information in general;
- less time spent listening to teachers in the classroom, more individual, active, purposeful learning, complemented by mentoring-like teaching and exams as individually chosen trials;
- four fundamental fields of knowledge as only mandatory topics to be studied by everyone.

The main purpose of those changes is to provide students with maximal existential satisfaction in school and later in life, in contrast to several reforms suggested nowadays that are intended solely to artificially increase the number of graduates on paper or to produce “tomorrow’s efficient workforce” – two approaches that avoid confronting (and even more certainly, solving) the main issues of today’s education system.

“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”
I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge:
“That is exactly the way I wanted it! [...]”

~The Little Prince, Chapter 2

Beyond this core, political thought can be seen as a system composed of two poles in what can be hypothesized to be a dialectical interaction: descriptive/interpretive “reality” and prescriptive ideals. The roots of this dichotomy can be traced back at least to Platonic idealism, although it should be emphasized that as far as this analysis is concerned – unlike what is claimed by Plato and religion, among others – ideals have, a priori, no existence outside of people’s minds.

First, “reality” refers to the world as it is perceived and interpreted by a given individual or group. This is roughly equivalent to what we could call the context, understood as the sum of “objective” constraints stemming from the natural and social environment. It is however critical to note that these constraints become “contextual” only when we focus on a small part of the global reality and interpret the whole through the nature of that part. By definition, the focus of politics is humans, in all their subjective, irrational glory.

Second, “ideals” refer to how the world should be, according to a given individual or group. Ideals are always different from “reality”, if to varying degrees. Everyone might not wish to change the world radically, but it seems safe to assume that everyone would change at least something – everyone that engages in political thought, that is. These changes are envisioned according to subjective ethics, which led me many times to define the main subject-matter of politics as something like “community ethics”.

We can thus notice that political thought is doubly relative: both context and ideals are subjectively defined, consciously and unconsciously. This is where [] comes into play: one’s perspective is wholly dependent on one’s core self. One’s [] will reflect his satisfaction with the current political system, his natural tendency to empathize with – or to hate, for that matter – other people, his desire to avoid cognitive dissonance… and a myriad of other aspects that make someone a unique being.

But politics aren’t simply the dialectics of reality and ideals, as these dialectics also accurately describe the global mechanics of individual hopes and fears. That isn’t to say that one’s hopes and fears are unrelated to political thought (they certainly are closely related), but rather that politics can’t be reduced to those hopes and fears we have for ourselves. Politics are social, not individual; that is, political ideals are defined as to affect many people by default.

With all the above in mind, we can define politics more precisely as the multidimensional dialectical process of, on one hand, individual reality and ideals, and on the other, collective reality and ideals.

In short, politics are a huge mess of contradictions and uncertainty. That’s also what makes them fascinating.

[image source]

We can thus split “wealth” into two core aspects: the “objective” aspect of materiality and the “subjective” aspect of satisfaction. These concepts can be complemented by those of “exchange-value” and “use-value“, which further relativize the meaning (or, in this case, “value”) of wealth. The materiality of wealth implies that globally, fundamental resources are finite, and – disregarding pseudo-metaphysical notions of “property” – shared between all human beings. It also implies that land and untapped resources within it have inherent “value” because of their potential to be used. And if some “have” them, this naturally implies that others don’t, in an equal proportion: we can’t create land or resources out of thin air.

That brings us to the second aspect of wealth, inseparable from the first: the satisfaction it provides to human beings that have it. Satisfaction is not a linear, logical concept. It is rather subjective and contextual. That said, this subjective side of human reality is what makes life worth living, and thus should be that which matters to the political sphere. Objective assessments of the nature of reality should be no more than tools to provide everyone with the greatest possible (or rationally thought as such) subjective satisfaction.

That said, the satisfaction produced by any given good is not equal everywhere to everyone. More specifically, two inequalities in the way “satisfaction” is socio-individually produced are relevant here. First, it should be noted that although matters of services such as education or health care, or the fulfillment of basic needs, can be assumed to produce purely individually assessed satisfaction, what is known as “material wealth” in modern industrialized societies often produces satisfaction – or dissatisfaction –  mainly through social recognition. As such, a large part of the satisfaction produced by wealth is wholly dependent on the socio-economic context of individuals.

That aspect is however minor compared to that of individually, psychologically produced relativity. The human mind is fundamentally comparative; subjectivity cannot be understood in absolute terms, and therefore neither can be “wealth”. A simplistic example of this would be that a steam room (or hot tub) and a pool are both “comfortable” and “normal” when you’re there, so long as they are within the mechanical limitations of the human body. However, when one suddenly jumps from one state to another, the difference is shocking. In the context of material resources: the more you have, the less satisfaction each hypothetical “unit of resources” your peers recognize your authority over will produce.

Conversely, to those who have very little current resources, a modest increase of resources are expected to produce a relatively enormous amount of satisfaction. This relativity can be illustrated in considering a hypothetical situation where someone on a deserted island, who has no food, is handed (or picked) an apple. Mathematically, this has infinite value over the previous situation. If one gains another apple, one has doubled one’s objective wealth. If one had a hundred apples, and gains another apple, one has increased one’s material wealth less than a percent. To the human mind, after enough objects enter a group, it becomes difficult to comprehend the individual objects as not being “just part of a group”, and thus individually appreciate them.

Additionally, this disregards that any apple that one knows will rot before it can be eaten is of no, or even of negative, value. One may have storage problems after a specific amount. One’s pile of rotting food is likely to attract animals that would eat other food he plans on eating. In other words, the apples that objectively exist – and thus, by the programming Western culture has ingrained in people, should be worth more – instead are a risk or liability.

As long as we play out programming that only makes us unhappy at great waste, those with resources will be miserable; not to mention that “the rich” have also been taught that it is good for other people to have comparatively less. So “the rich” are left paranoid, hoarding things they have no plans of ever using, worrying about other people’s thoughts about them, and overall not enjoying the new material wealth they gain, while “the poor” are left with bad nutrition and no hope of personal control of their own life: for example, “an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption ends up in the landfill.” [1]

Heylighen outlines four main factors correlated with subjective happiness worldwide: wealth, access to knowledge, personal freedom and equality [2]. He says of equality that its correlation is “somewhat less pronounced [...] inequality implies less control for those who are in the weaker position, and more risks of losing their privileges for those in the stronger position”. However, as for wealth:

It is interesting to note that the correlation between purchasing power and happiness becomes less important for more wealthy societies, implying that once the basic material needs of nutrition and shelter are satisfied, further prosperity adds little to happiness.

Thus, the goal of the production of wealth in modern, “developed societies” should not be to produce ever more things, which could end up producing significantly less subjective satisfaction, but rather to maximize the satisfaction that this wealth produces. A zero-growth economy (or close), from this perspective, appears to be the most ethical choice because of its sustainability and the equilibrium of satisfaction that it produces. In any case, it seems obvious that providing free access to an open education and maximising personal freedoms are universal keys to happiness.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.htm?_r=1

[2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HAPPINES.html