From Domination to Partnership: Riane Eisler's Call to Action

By Roger Briggs

Originally posted in the Planet Project Community on November14, 2024

A core premise of the Planet Project is that, working together, we have an extraordinary opportunity to co-create a flourishing Earth. But embracing this opportunity requires a global transformation in culture and consciousness. In this blog, we present a distillation of the seminal work of Riane Eisler, the world’s foremost authority on the essential transition from Dominator to Partnership culture—a shift at the heart of our mission and the focus of Eisler’s enduring scholarship.

How can we understand authoritarians like Hitler, Putin, and Saddam Hussein who execute their rivals, murder their own people, and commit war? How was the Holocaust possible, when millions of “undesirables” were methodically exterminated? Is oppression and violence against our fellow humans “hard-wired” into us – is this “human nature?” Will it always be this way, or is a better world possible?

These are the questions that haunted Riane Eisler and drove her to a lifetime of research, writing, and speaking out about the culture of domination and violence we inherited, and how we can build a new world based on partnership and caring. As a Holocaust refugee – she and her parents barely escaped Nazi-occupied Austria – she saw first-hand the brutality of the Nazis and the “othering” of antisemitism, even after arriving in the United States. The trauma of these experiences brought dark times for her, but also shaped her life purpose. Her message is right on time today as we still struggle to answer these same questions, and urgently need to build that better world.

The Back Story

Riane Eisler excelled in school and got a degree in sociology from UCLA. After one year in law school, she quit and entered into a conventional marriage. She had two daughters, but as Eisler recounted in a 2023 Interview in Scientific American:

I’d always thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t fit into this role of the little woman behind the successful man. We’d go to cocktail parties, which was the thing you did in those days, and they’d ask you, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “I’m just a housewife and a mother,” as if this were nothing. I thought of myself that way until the late 1960s, when I suddenly woke up.

She went back to law school at UCLA and got her law degree. Then, following a divorce, she founded the Los Angeles Women’s Center Legal Program to stand up for the rights of vulnerable women and children.

But she was still dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust and the ongoing wars and atrocities of our times. After a trip to Dachau, followed by the death of both parents, she slid into a deep depression and gave up her law practice. Still, seeing how no-fault divorce laws were driving women and children into poverty, she wrote Dissolution, which predicted what was to be called the feminization of poverty.

When she met David Elliot Loye, they fell in love, and spent the next 45 years together, inseparably, until his passing in 2022. With David’s encouragement and support she completed The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future in 1987, which remains her best-known work. It was an immediate success, now having sold 500,000 copies, and she and David co-founded what is now called the Center for Partnership Systems where she is still active today at age 93. After The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler went on to write many more important books and hundreds of articles. Her most recent book from 2019 is Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, co-authored with Douglas Fry, and she was featured in Scientific American in 2023. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu called Chalice “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species." Its message, and Eisler’s work since then, are now essential for our survival.

Dominator Culture

To understand why some societies are violent and war-like while others are peaceful, Eisler developed a whole-systems methodology known as relational dynamics. This inclusive approach focuses on relationships, both how we relate to each other and to nature. Her whole-systems approach includes the whole of humanity (including women and children), the whole of history (including “prehistory”) and the whole of our lives (including families and caregiving).

Drawing from the work of archeologists such as Marija Gimbutas, she recognized that a profound transition occurred in human societies during our prehistory. For millions of years our ancestors were nomadic hunter-gatherers, embedded in nature. As the last Ice Age ended around 11,000 years ago people began to live in large permanent settlements, growing small gardens and domesticating animals.

In the early part of this transition period known as the Neolithic, large settlements like Çatalhöyük emerged in the Middle East. Archeological studies like those of Stanford’s Ian Hodder show that these early farming societies were largely peaceful, and they honored women, espoused equality, and revered the Earth goddess. There were no haves and have-nots, and no violence or organized warfare in these early Neolithic societies.

But all this changed drastically by about 5,000 years ago when a new social structure emerged: a shift from what Eisler calls partnership-oriented to domination-oriented societies. With the notable exception of Minoan Crete, where a partnership orientation survived longer, domination was the orientation of most of the other first “high civilizations” with highly organized cities and monumental architecture, like temples, palaces, pyramids, where armies of slaves did most of the work, and the enslavers at the top of the social pyramid were in charge. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, stratified societies appeared, maintained by top-down, male-dominated systems of power. Abundant weaponry and armor, as well as fortified walls around cities, are evident for the first time in these early civilizations. This means organized warfare had been invented. The ruling elites used their armed soldiers to control their own people through violence and terror, and also to expand their territory through conquest. City-states grew into empires.

With the shift to domination, women and the “feminine” were suppressed and vilified, and the male “God in the sky” displaced the divine feminine. The domestication of animals and large-scale agriculture created the sense of “man over nature”, while indoor living in rectangular spaces furthered the disconnect from the natural world. Humans had gone from being embedded in nature to being at odds with nature, and most people now lived under violent authoritarian rule. Public torture and execution were used to ensure top-down rule.

This dominator paradigm has continued unabated right up until now. “History” as we learn it in school is a 5,000-year story of domination, told by the dominators as a glorious parade of wars, conquest, and subjugation – “civilizing” the heathens. The dominator culture has thrived in modern times with the genocide of Indigenous people and the decimation of their cultures, the slave trade and plantation culture in the U.S, the World Wars and the Holocaust, more recent genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, … and today there are wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as terrorism and the threat of force, from families to the family of nations.

Slavery Images, Creative Commons

While there are still islands of isolated partnership-oriented cultures and many global trends in a partnership direction – from the global women’s, anti-racism, and peace movements to attempts to change our economic systems to value and reward caring and caregiving – most of us have inherited behaviors and worldviews that support domination.

Dominator culture is not limited to physical violence. It exists wherever we have one group of people who look down on another group as inferior, as the other, and this manifests as sexism, racism, antisemitism, caste, classism, and the like. We see it with in-groups and out-groups, and with bullies on the playground. It shows up in classrooms and workplaces as abusive teachers and bosses who want to intimidate and wield power. We find it in marriages where the man is in charge and the woman is subservient. It’s found at home as family violence and in abusive intimate relationships. It’s there in some of our most popular entertainments, where violence is celebrated. It is so ubiquitous and ever-present we fail to recognize it, let alone call it out.

Eisler identified three main characteristics of domination systems (quoting her):

First, all institutions, from the family to religion, economics, and politics, have authoritarian, top-down structures.
Second, the male human form is ranked over the female form, with rigid gender stereotypes and a gendered system of values in which anything associated with masculinity in domination systems (e.g., conquest, winning, violence) is superior to the stereotypically feminine (e.g., nonviolence, caring, caregiving).
Third, abuse and violence are built into domination systems (from child-and-wife-beating to aggressive warfare, from torture and witch-burnings to pogroms and lynchings).

This has been the story of civilization for 5,000 years and is all too familiar today, but what may finally lead to our demise on this planet is our attitude of domination over Mother Nature. Since the great separation that began 5,000 years ago, we have viewed the natural world as something to conquer and plunder, just like people. Whether of nature or people, domination arises from a deeply rooted view of the world as being made of dead objects we can manipulate and exploit. We lost the sacred regard for life and our planet that Indigenous cultures embrace, and now here we are, confronting global ecological collapse. Dominator culture is literally killing us.

Partnership Culture

Riane Eisler gave us much more than a dark critique of civilization and its inherent systems of domination. She created a new way to understand and classify societies, with domination at one end of a continuum and partnership at the other end. The domination-partnership spectrum is a powerful lens for understanding all social systems, whether nations, organizations, businesses, families, or personal relationships. It also points the way to that better world we want, where peace prevails, and all people can thrive and contribute on a healthy planet.

In contrast to domination systems, Eisler identified these characteristics of partnership systems:

First, they are democratic and egalitarian – power is empowering rather than disempowering, so there are hierarchies of actualization rather than hierarchies of domination.
Second, the female and male forms are equally valued, and qualities such as nonviolence and care are valued in women, men, and in social and econ
Third, while there is some abuse and violence, these do not have to be built into institutions – they are not required to maintain rankings of domination.

Partnership culture is not radical or new. Neolithic societies 9,000 years ago were based in partnership, many Indigenous cultures operated in partnership for thousands of years, and the Scandinavian countries today are largely partnership-oriented societies. There are businesses and organizations with partnership cultures rather than top-down command structures where orders flow downward. The best teachers in our classrooms create a partnership culture for learning. The best leaders act in partnership to empower and bring out the best in others. It’s out there, but how can we make partnership the main operating system of humanity?

Connecting the Dots

Nearly forty years after The Chalice and the Blade was first published, Eisler’s work now focuses on “connecting the dots” between family violence and violent societies. Neuroscience shows that what children experience and observe in their first five years shapes their brains permanently. Vladimir Putin connected these dots in 2018 when he substantially reduced the penalty for family violence as a way to perpetuate dominator culture in Russia. But when children are raised in a partnership environment, it reflects in the larger society. As Eisler says, peace starts at home.

This becomes the first of four Cornerstones Eisler proposes for building a partnership-oriented world. They are:

Childhood and Families: We must shift globally to what childcare experts advocate: caring for children, not through fear, but by modeling and acting with respect, and leaving behind domination traditions of spanking and other violence in families. Scandinavian countries regularly top annual happiness reports, largely because they pioneered caring policies such as universal healthcare, high-quality well-paid childcare, and generous paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers.
Gender: The ranking of male/masculine over female/feminine and the accompanying rigid gender stereotypes are foundational to authoritarian, top-down, violent societies. This is a template for all other forms of othering such as racism and antisemitism. Valuing the masculine and feminine equally and in balance is essential. Men are beginning to wake up and enjoy their own “feminine”!
Economics: The current argument between capitalism and socialism is a distraction. Both originated from more rigid domination systems in the 1700s and 1800s. Eisler points out that there is always money for prisons, weapons, and wars, but there isn’t money to care for people (starting at birth) and to care for our natural environment, our Mother Earth. Leaving behind these skewed valuations is essential to move to a caring economics of partnerism.
Story and language: We have many stories, whether original sin or selfish genes, that present violence and domination as normal and inevitable. We are flooded with media that glorifies dominator culture. Instead, we need new stories and language that model partnership culture, and we need a major media campaign that does this.

The future of humanity on this planet hangs on whether dominator culture continues to be our main mode of operation or if we can move at large scale into partnership culture. Can we become a partnership species that values and cares for all people and all life? It’s up to us, and Riane Eisler has given us the blueprint, right on time.

Posted by By Roger Briggs - 11/22/2024