Partnership Studies 10: Partnership Systems, Caring Economics, and Human Rights

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/16

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for The Chalice and the Blade, she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She received the Humanist Pioneer Award, and in conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler emphasized the urgent need for humanists to focus on values-based systems and the transformative power of caring economics. Drawing on neuroscience and history, she argues that peace begins at home and calls for a shift in worldview to build more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate societies rooted in connection rather than control. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade—now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler advances her partnership–domination framework as a whole-systems lens for social change. She argues that peace begins at home, that childhood caregiving and gender equity shape brains, policies, and democracies, and that caring economics measures real wealth beyond GDP. Drawing on neuroscience, history, and Nordic and other examples (including thousands of partnership-oriented prehistory), Eisler critiques fragmentation across religion, politics, and academia, urging the development of updated categories and relational dynamics. She addresses backlash against equity, contrasts partnership and domination, and invites participation in the Peace Begins at Home Summit to accelerate humane, sustainable, and connection-centred societies.Interview conducted October 4, 2025, in the afternoon Pacific Time.Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hello, and welcome again to Partnership Systems with Dr. Riane Eisler, attorney and founder of the Center for Partnership Systems. We have a global virtual conference on October 29, 2025. Please sign up! You can sign up for the Peace Begins at Home Summit.Riane Eisler: Registration is at peacebeginsathomesummit.org. Please sign up, because it is going to be fabulous.Jacobsen: It is the most wonderful time of the year outside of Christmas.Eisler: It addresses the root causes of our problems rather than simply the symptoms. The alternative to domination systems is partnership systems. It is essential to discuss ontology (how we see the world) and epistemology (our method or lens for seeing the world) because the categories we are taught often fragment reality—such as religious versus secular, East versus West, and left versus right—leaving us with a fragmented picture of realityIf we are asking what we know and how we know it, we need better lenses. That has been my work: connecting the dots, including how the roles of women and men (the two basic forms of humanity) are structured in society; how children are raised; and how exposure to punitive, violent domination patterns—whether in families or religious settings—normalizes violence. As usually framed, ontology and epistemology can be of limited practical use because inherited categories divide our consciousness and marginalize most of humanity— women and children. From a deeper perspective, we need updated language and social categories to understand reality. My calling has been to clarify the underlying realities of two human possibilities: the partnership and domination ends of the social continuum.Jacobsen: People who come from domination-oriented upbringings—especially religious backgrounds—are often taught to focus on the other world rather than what is right in front of them. Their way of experiencing the world, their existential reality and epistemology, becomes frayed or dissociated from immediate meaning. How does that connect to partnership studies?Eisler: It comes down to trauma. If we grow up in domination-oriented families—usually highly punitive, often violent—families that both care for us and hurt us, families we depend on for life, food, and shelter, we have to deny that they cause us pain. Denial then becomes a habitual part of how we perceive reality. Religion plays a part in this, though I always emphasize that at the core of most world religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism—there are profound teachings about caring. I also distinguish between the biblical Judaism of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Judaism of the Diaspora, which emphasized mutual care; that is the tradition in which I was raised as a Jew.But if we return to the central question—what is reality, and how do we know it?—We cannot understand society by looking only through the rigid categories inherited from more rigid domination times: religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, Northern versus Southern, capitalist versus socialist, right versus left. These fragments our consciousness and make us focus narrowly. Partnership and domination studies instead focus on two questions: what kinds of relations—whether interpersonal or international—does a culture support or inhibit, and what is the relationship between the key components of a social system? Two pillars are especially critical: how gender roles and relations are constructed, and how caregiving in families is structured, since most of us grow up in families.This is why I am interested in root causes rather than symptoms, and in strategic interventions to shift societies from domination toward partnership. Otherwise, we end up constantly putting out fires caused by domination systems, which keeps those systems intact.Jacobsen: Much of science is stereotyped as looking only at particular parts of the world, ignoring the larger story. There is fragmentation across subfields, but then findings often begin to converge across disciplines—an ongoing multidisciplinary convergence. Where does partnership studies orient itself within those trends?Eisler: Partnership studies are more concerned with the construction of social systems than with ultimate cosmological realities, such as string theory. Not that I’m not fascinated by those, but at best, they remain abstract. Interestingly, two physicists have recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement and its applications at the subatomic level. That reality is often ignored, and in fact, we are conditioned to ignore it by myths—religious myths like original sin or secular myths like selfish genes.Take societies that have moved closer to partnership, where gender equity is greater, fathers share caregiving responsibilities, gender roles are more blurred, women hold 40–50 percent of parliamentary seats, and public policies are oriented toward care. In Sweden, Finland, and Norway, for example, these societies not only support their own citizens but also invest a significant portion of their GDP in helping people elsewhere in the world, even those with no genetic ties to them.This is why I am deeply skeptical about applying knowledge from other species directly to humans. Human evolution has brought with it the capacity for empathy—unless people are traumatized into suppressing it or restricting it only to their in-group, particularly to men positioned as controllers.Jacobsen: How are you applying those foundations? I don’t mean physics, but rather the social sciences—psychology, or perhaps cognitive developmental neuroscience—disciplines that can incorporate a partnership orientation into understanding social reality. You are really identifying the fundamentals of how people relate to one another along the partnership–domination social scale.Eisler: The reason this scale is so important in understanding our cultural and social contexts is that psychology, and now neuroscience, have long made an assumption not supported by the evidence: they focus almost exclusively on individual families. But families do not arise in a vacuum.  Families are profoundly shaped by the norms and ideal norms of their culture or subculture. You cannot truly study them without whole-systems analysis. Studying different aspects of behaviour in isolation, or institutions in isolation from their context, fragments our consciousness. This is why there is such a need—both epistemologically and ontologically—for new categories. We cannot see reality clearly without holistic, whole-systems categories.Jacobsen: Why is there a backlash now against partnership epistemology?Eisler: It is a backlash against many organized social movements that have accelerated over the last 300 years, disrupting domination systems and creating disequilibrium. I draw on new theoretical frameworks that examine how living systems are organized and how they change. Societies are complex living systems. If we only examine isolated institutions, such as the family, we cannot fully comprehend them. The family must be understood in its larger cultural context. Of course, some families don’t conform, but if the ideal norm in society rejects equity and denies the value of diversity, that cultural framing shapes everything. These are not just family questions but deeply cultural ones. And when it comes to religion, I always return to this: at the core of most religious traditions are teachings of interconnection.The first point I want to make about both ontology and epistemology—about what we know and how we know it—is that they are culturally constructed. They depend primarily on the categories provided by language, especially social categories. That is crucial to keep in mind. Due to my background and life experiences, my calling has been to discover, through whole-systems analysis, an alternative perspective on societies that transcends conventional categories, such as right and left, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, and capitalist and socialist. All of these categories were inherited from more rigid domination times, rather than partnership times. They fragment our consciousness, focusing on separate aspects—geography, faith, economics—and force us constantly to jump between them. This fragmentation does not serve us well.The first point, then, is that ontology and epistemology are culturally influenced, shaped by language and the categories available to us. The second point is that when we look at social reality through a non-fragmenting, whole-systems lens—the partnership–domination social scale—we begin to see patterns and connections that would otherwise remain invisible. To do this, I developed a methodology called the Study of Relational Dynamics, which focuses on a fundamental question neglected by earlier categories: what kinds of relations exist? Are they punitive and violent, or are they caring and mutually respectful? Does a particular social system support or inhibit such ties?A second crucial question—again often ignored in conventional approaches—is: what are the key elements of a society that must be considered in analyzing its fundamental character? How do they mutually reinforce one another, either sustaining or shifting a society toward partnership or toward more rigid domination? These elements include areas that conventional frameworks often marginalize: first, the structure of gender roles and relations between men and women; and second, childhood and family life. Neuroscience tells us that what children experience and observe—primarily within families—shapes nothing less than the brain itself, influencing how we think, feel, act, and even vote. Yet our inherited categories largely ignore this knowledge.Much of it comes down to those first five years of life, when our brains—still forming at birth—rapidly grow, develop synapses, and build connections. You do not need to be particularly clever to grasp this, but you do need a different worldview, one that connects rather than fragments.Jacobsen: Who would you consider your intellectual predecessors, individually? And which cultures were most oriented toward partnership in pre-contemporary millennia?Eisler: That’s a serious question. To start, cultures that deny climate change are cultures in deep denial of reality itself. Consider Russia, for example: its economy depends heavily on fossil fuel exports, so there is little incentive to acknowledge the crisis. The Soviet Union was similar. Lake Baikal was severely polluted, and of course, there was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The pattern was to exploit nature as quickly and as fully as possible.By contrast, many of the Nordic nations that have moved toward the partnership side demonstrate a different pattern. Their legislatures are 40 to 50 percent women. Fathers take active roles in caregiving. There is a greater gender balance in politics, parenting, and family life, as well as recognition of climate change and efforts to address it. Norway is an interesting contradiction—it relies heavily on oil exports, yet its broader social principles are firmly rooted in partnership values. At some point, the oil will run out, and we will see whether partnership principles ultimately prevail.Partnership also includes harmony with nature, rather than the domination worldview we inherited from religious traditions that taught “dominion over nature.”Jacobsen: Returning to individuals, then, who do you consider your intellectual predecessors? Who fills the acknowledgments in your books?Eisler: Well, there are many intellectual predecessors, half of whom I disagree with completely. Take St. Thomas Aquinas. In his attempt to understand reality, he said some absurd things. For example, in accepting hierarchies of domination, he claimed that questioning your social status would be like a nose wanting to be an eye. That isn’t very smart. He also argued that original sin is caused by sex, which is equally irrational. Yet people are taught this. Parents take their children to see violence without concern, but if there is any sex, then it is considered immoral.I wrote a whole book on this called Sacred Pleasure, where I introduced the concept of the erotization of domination and violence. As in James Bond—007—we’ve seen sexuality either vilified, treated as sinful, or equated with domination. For instance, the missionary position enshrines the man on top. Or sexuality is linked to violence, as in pornography. In Sacred Pleasure I make a clear distinction between erotica and pornography because they are not the same.You also asked about the epistemology of religion. In epistemology, you can have subjective or so-called objective criteria. But the so-called objective criteria are always socially conditioned. What shapes society? It’s ideal norms. Suppose society insists that men are superior to women. In that case, you end up with “scientific knowledge” that perpetuates the myth that woman contributes nothing to reproduction—that she is merely a container.Jacobsen: What you’re getting at is more about the orientation of the findings themselves, rather than a rejection of the conclusions.Eisler: What findings? They only ever found what they wanted to believe was true.Jacobsen: Well, positive accidents happen—like penicillin, or LSD. Eisler: But look, it’s not science versus religion. At the core of all religious scriptures are teachings of partnership—caring, caregiving, nonviolence, and the empathic principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Then you get the dominator overlay: myths blaming Eve for humanity’s ills, Pandora in Greek mythology, or the Iliad and Odyssey, which are pure propaganda for domination. I plan to write more about this because once you examine it closely, it becomes fascinating.The broader point is that humanity is awakening from a state of domination. For the past 5,000 to 10,000 years, societies have shifted toward domination, embedding it in categories, myths, and norms—such as the paterfamilias as the head of the household. This is our cultural inheritance, and changing it is our task.Jacobsen: What about how science is being applied in the humanities, too?Eisler: What were the humanities? They were traditionally defined by the works of long-dead, primarily white men. But that is not the totality of the humanities. Even if we accept the term “human” in humanities as inclusive, the truth is that human rights concepts affecting everyone, including women, should be part of the humanities. The “emancipation” of women should be part of the humanities. Children’s rights—to be raised without violence and trauma—should be part of the humanities. Not everything Aristotle said should be canonized. Much of it was harmful. For example, he claimed that women and enslaved people were “born that way” and therefore naturally subordinate. That is deductive logic misapplied.Jacobsen: Surprisingly similar to some Hindu traditions. Eisler: You asked me earlier why there is currently a regression to domination. Let me answer that directly. We rarely consider this regression in the broader historical context. Over the last 300 years, as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, it created profound disequilibrium. During the same period, organized movements emerged to challenge the same thing: domination traditions.The Enlightenment and the Rights of Man movement challenged the supposedly divinely ordained right of kings to rule over their “subjects.” The feminist movement challenged the supposedly divinely ordained right of men to rule over women and children in their homes. Abolitionists, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter challenged the supposedly divinely ordained right of a “superior” race to dominate an “inferior” one. The environmental movement challenged the tradition of “dominion”—the idea that man alone counts, with the right to rule over all living things.The peace movement challenged violence itself, which is central to domination systems because they rely on fear to maintain power. The movement for economic and social equity—not sameness, but equity—challenged domination economics, whether in the form of emperors, sheikhs, tsars, feudal lords, or neoliberal “trickle-down” economics. In every case, those at the top claimed divine or natural justification, while those below were told to content themselves with the scraps. This system even encouraged the oppressed to identify with their oppressors, living in denial of their own subordination.Today, we see regression in renewed efforts to reassert male dominance, impose rigid gender stereotypes, and deny the existence of gay and transgender people—even though LGBTQ+ people have existed throughout history. We also see renewed attempts to tighten control over children, including what they are taught, as part of maintaining domination.Jacobsen: Next time, we had governance and political theory on the agenda, and how Machiavelli melded fear, like Trump. Do you have any preliminary thoughts on that before we proceed?Eisler: Well, someone teaching at a religious law school in Southern California used my work and contrasted it with Machiavelli’s theory of power. Power can be viewed in two ways: chalice power and blade power. In other words, domination power or partnership power.Jacobsen: It’s not a one-to-one mapping between Machiavelli and Trump. Machiavelli was a legitimate political strategist. Trump is more like a bull in a china shop.Eisler: Well, he’s a circus barker.Jacobsen: Yes, that’s a good way to put it.Eisler: And he really is skilled at manipulating people—especially evangelicals—pretending that he cares about them, when in reality he is deeply traumatized and unstable, frankly.I wrote in Sacred Pleasure that deconstructionism is a very conservative way of looking at the world. If there are no standards, what do people fall back on? The old domination standards. But there are standards—human rights standards.It really comes back to that: we have not yet found universal acceptance of human rights standards. That is still a developing field. Remember, the concept of children’s rights is a relatively recent development.Jacobsen: That’s the most signed-on-to convention. 192 of 193 member states have ratified it. The last to sign was Somalia. The only one that signed but never ratified, more than three decades ago, is the United States.Eisler: The United States is a country that consciously or unconsciously believes in domination.Jacobsen: It’s a human rights pariah in specific domains.Eisler: I wouldn’t put it that way. It is a country with a complicated mix of partnership and domination. There are countries, like Afghanistan, that have long traditions of domination, of huge gaps between those on top and bottom, of authoritarian rule and violence, where gender inequality is paramount. Or fundamentalist Iran, same thing: much more domination. They throw gay people off cliffs, hang them, kill them, and burn them. And now the United States is in the midst of a regression toward domination, but I don’t think it can last—not with the damage it’s doing and the suffering it’s causing.Jacobsen: This huge category of  angry and concerned people. There are also more educated women than ever before, and that is not a rising tide you can sink.Eisler: You really can’t, and, interestingly, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman.Jacobsen: Well, that transition had more to do with stepping down in shame over failures with the sexual abuse scandal, right? So that’s one thing. This was a PR move. The stronger case is Iceland: three of the four major parties are led by women. The Prime Minister, the President, and the head of the national church are all women. That’s a more direct case.Eisler: I agree that some of it was politics of convenience, shame, and PR. But the whole winner-loser two-party system of the United States is a disaster.Jacobsen: It’s a weird system where even when one party wins, both sides of the population lose. The Democratic Party, in many ways, is a center-right party. In the U.S., they’re considered left, but in Europe, they’d likely be regarded as center-right, because they’re still a party of war.Eisler: In Europe at least, the system forces theparties to work together, since coalition-building is required to form a government.Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s true.Eisler: So the system itself is not a good one in the United States, and every attempt to establish a third party here has been a total failure.Jacobsen: Bernie [Sanders] fell.Eisler: Yes.Jacobsen: But he was torpedoed by the Democrats. That’s the thing.Eisler: With both parties, the first step forward would be to abolish this notion that money is speech.Jacobsen: Right, Citizens United, too.Eisler: And to change the First Amendment, because hate speech is very, very powerful.Jacobsen: That second proposal is implausible to happen in the United States.Eisler: Well, it may. It has happened elsewhere—for example, in Canada, where certain restrictions on pornography were upheld, though they weren’t here.Jacobsen: But you’re dealing with a much different culture in Canada, too, a much more British culture in Canada.Eisler: It may be a more British culture. However, the United States was founded by men of their time—men who were enslavers and excluders of women, and most men, men without a certain amount of property. That’s the story of the country. Still, it was the first nation not to have a monarchy and not to idealize it.Jacobsen: Well, I think you’ve gone back to the time of the Orange King.Eisler:  Look, there were attempts.. Anyway, I’m glad I found the Fibonacci numbers, because they tell us something about both ontology and epistemology—that our focus has been very selective. These numbers, as we will discuss separately,  connect us to epistemology and ontology—how we know what is true and what is or is not a cultural construct, to the partnership-domination scale. We have not had the lenses to understand how different these questions and their answers are in partnership versus domination systems, or in societies where the two are in conflict. That is what we need to understand. It is not about blame or shame. We inherited these domination worldviews from earlier, more authoritarian, male-dominated times. Remember what I said about St. Augustine? He was a spokesman for his time.But it isn’t religion. It isn’t faith. The fact is, there is so much we cannot understand through “objective” observation. We do not have the necessary equipment to understand some things, such as the Fibonacci numbers. Why does this ratio appear? Is Einstein right that “God does not play dice with the universe,” whatever that means? I’ve never figured it out. But it suggests that Einstein suspected some design in the universe.

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