The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

alliances of everyone against anyone whose behaviour threatened people’s sense of their own autonomy and equality. The suggestion is that these strategies may have developed as a generalized form of the kind of alliances which primatologists often describe being formed between two or three animals to enable them to gang up on and depose the dominant male. Observational studies of modern and recent foraging societies suggest that counter-dominance strategies normally involve anything from teasing and ridicule to ostracism and violence, which are turned against anyone who tries to dominate others. An important point about these societies is that they show that the selfish desires of individuals for greater wealth and preeminence can be contained or diverted to less socially damaging forms of expression.
    A number of psychological characteristics would have been selected to help us manage in egalitarian societies. These are likely to include our strong conception and valuation of fairness, which makes it easier for people to reach agreement without conflict when sharing scarce resources. Visible even in young children, our concern for fairness sometimes seems so strong that we might wonder how it is that social systems with great inequality are tolerated. Similarly, the sense of indebtedness (now recognized as universal in human societies) which we experience after having received a gift, serves to prompt reciprocity and prevent freeloading, so sustaining friendship. As the experimental economic games which we discussed showed, there is also evidence that we can feel sufficiently infuriated by unfairness that we are willing to punish, even at some personal cost to ourselves.
    Another characteristic which is perhaps important is our tendency to feel a common sense of identity and interdependence with those with whom we share food and other resources as equals. They form the in-group, the ‘us’, with whom we empathize and share a sense of identity. In various religious institutions and political organizations sharing has been used to create a sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, and whether we say a society has an ‘extended’ or ‘nuclear’ family system is a matter of the extent of the sharing group – whether more distant relations have a call on each other’s resources. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, de Tocqueville believed that substantial differences in material living standards between people was a formidable barrier to empathy. 23 As we saw in Chapter 4, he thought the differences in material conditions prevented the French nobility from empathizing with the sufferings of the peasantry, and also explained why American slave owners were so unaffected by the suffering of their slaves. He also thought the strong community life he saw among whites on his visit to the USA in 1830 was a reflection of what he called ‘the equality of conditions’.
    A very important source of the close social integration in an egalitarian community is the sense of self-realization we can get when we successfully meet others’ needs. This is often seen as a mysterious quality, almost as if it were above explanation. It comes of course from our need to feel valued by others. We gain a sense of being valued when we do things which others appreciate. The best way of ensuring that we remained included in the co-operative hunting and gathering group and reducing the risk of being cast out, ostracized, and preyed upon, was to do things which people appreciated. Nowadays, whether it is cooking a nice meal, telling jokes or providing for people’s needs in other ways, it can give rise to a sense of self-worth. It is this capacity – now most visible in parent-THE ing – which, long before the development of market mechanisms and wage labour, enabled humans – almost uniquely – to gain the benefits of a division of labour and specialization within cooperative groups of interdependent individuals.
    We have then social