**Happiness** is a description of mental or emotional states, including
positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.
It is also used in the context of life satisfaction, subjective
well-being, eudaimonia, flourishing and well-being.

## Happiness and Libertarian Socialism

Happiness is largely dependent on both negative and positive freedom.
Whether or not a libertarian socialist society would make people more
happy is unknown, however, data and testimony provide some clues, for
example, [George Orwell](George_Orwell "wikilink") said of
[Revolutionary Spain](Revolutionary_Spain "wikilink"):

> I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any
> size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in
> capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón
> one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely
> of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on
> terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in
> practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be
> true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by
> which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of
> Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness,
> money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist.
> The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent
> that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there
> was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned
> anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not
> last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game
> that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it
> lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it.
> However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one
> had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been
> in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism,
> where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most
> countries, for humbug... Human beings were behaving as human beings
> and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.\[1\]

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull, after living with a
[Mbuti](Mbuti "wikilink") band, remarked, "They were a people who had
found in the forest something that made life more than just worth
living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and
tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of
care."\[2\]

1.  [George Orwell](George_Orwell "wikilink") - [Homage to
    Catalonia](Homage_to_Catalonia "wikilink")
2.  Colin Turnbull - ''The Forest People, ''page 28