You're last paragraph is so insightful. It may not be happiness, so much as self-satisfaction, that makes people feel they have the right to be judgemental. Thomas Merton (the monk and poet) once wrote: "If you call one thing precious and another vile, if you praise success and blame failure, you end up filling the world with soldiers, politicians and businessmen." Unfortunately, those are exactly the people who are running things--Thomas Pynchon's "Them." Schools teach the lesson that winners "deserve to win," and those lessons are reinforced throughout society. One of the early religious leaders in colonial America used to tell his followers that among the chief delights of heaven was the ability to enjoy the spectacle of the suffering of the damned in hell!

Chicha, you and Annemarch are so on it. Smug is the word that comes to mind. People who think they have their ducks all in a row and take pleasure in seeing others scrambling or suffering. It is all about making them feel better in comparison. I always go back to the desiderata which says if you compare yourself to others you become vain & bitter for there will always be people better and lesser than yourself. For me, the sign of a great human spirit is one who has compassion both for the struggling and for the smug. That they can see how it is all a piece of the same thing-- that desperate attempt to connect with the world to feel safe by whatever means they can. Where once you understand that life is painful, lonely, messy as well as everything else-- you just let go of it and be with who you are where you are and not in comparison to anyone else.

That could explain a report I'm sure I saw but couldn't begin to attribute properly that residents of Northern Ireland during its worst years of conflict ranked very high on some measure of personal happiness.

My guess would have been to attribute it to an enjoyment of conflict and a strong sense of community, but the prejudice thing fits, too. Maybe they're all related attributes. (If the elusive report is even true.)

The relationship between happiness and prejudice appears intuitively correct.

But perhaps the word happiness might be misleading. It seems to me that what it is referred to in the paragraph might be a form of comforting integration in a given environment, which goes with blind total acceptance of the dominating vision. But while some perfectly integrated people might appear with very 'happy mood', even euphoric, this could be at the expense of fundamental needs of their individuality. In turn, this might determine aggression and destructiveness (Arno Gruen has written on this aspect) directed towards others, and built-up because of insatisfaction. So maybe they are well-integrated, "happy", but only because they have given up something. Their aggression betrays that there is something wrong.

More simply, but not necessarily more banally, one could aso note that probably it si true to an extent that "ignorance is bliss" as knowledge raises problems.