All the great (Western, but not only) thinkers come to the same conclusions from first principles : a just, harmonious and SUSTAINABLE society can only exist in conditions of relative economic equality.

Rousseau, as pointed out by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything , was undoubtedly influenced by Amerindian thinking. Their main thesis in the book is that, contrary to the precepts of the sciences of anthropology and archaeology (which sciences were formulated in the very hierarchical 19th century), egalitarianism has always been one of the basic principles of human social organisation, in perpetual competition with competitive, exploitive and hierarchical social organisation.

They also point out (using the North American anthropological record, but also in reinterpreting old-world archeological research) that hierarchical/exploitive and egalitarian societies have often existed side by side, in fairly close proximity.

An example of recent archeological finds in Turkey, documented in their book has captured my imagination : a village composed of a hundred or so circular beaten-earth houses, of identical size, existed (with reconstruction of each house every 100 years or so...) for a thousand years (about 8000 years before the present). Sustainability!

Interesting detail : artifacts from the site indicate that it was a matriarchal society. Not a coincidence, I think.

I have recently started writing a novel set in this neolithic environment, exploring the interactions of this village with other contemporaneous forms of social organisations.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}