Partnerships Studies 9: Partnership Science, Human Rights, and Caring Economics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/09

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). 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Riane Eisler on applying a partnership, whole-systems lens to science and economics. Eisler argues that science reflects cultural bias—invoking Galileo and gender myths—and notes that biology has corrected errors related to the ovum and fertilization. She critiques GDP for counting harm and ignoring caregiving and the value of nature, advancing Social Wealth Economic Indicators that prioritize care. Families and childhood are culturally embedded; punitive norms normalize violence, as recognized by the APA on spanking. She favours a universal basic income, plus caring policies, and Nordic legislatures. Rejecting “anything goes” relativism, Eisler grounds inquiry in human rights, caregiving, and environmental stewardship, urging a shift to partnership.

Interview conducted on September 27, 2025, in the afternoon.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are with the world-renowned Riane Eisler, lawyer and founder of partnership studies. We have a long list of topics, including science, philosophy of science, epistemology, ontology, and the intersection of science and the humanities. We will see if we cover them all or continue in another session. The plan, ambitiously, is to solve all the world’s problems in 45 minutes.

Partnership studies take a whole-systems approach to science. I want to distinguish this from the term “holistic,” which is common in the United States and often carries vague or non-technical connotations. “Whole systems” is preferable because it points to a more analytic framework. From a whole-systems perspective, how can partnership studies provide a much-needed facelift to scientific methodology?

Riane Eisler: We have all been taught certain assumptions, consciously and unconsciously—including scientists. Despite claims of objectivity, scientists are influenced by their cultural backgrounds. Viewed through the partnership–domination social scale, modern science shows cultural biases. People who perceived reality differently from the scientific establishment—Galileo Galilei, for example—were punished. His defence of heliocentrism led to a trial by the Roman Inquisition and house arrest. That illustrates how institutional power can police “acceptable” reality.

Dogmas, including those of the church, influenced intellectual life for centuries, especially regarding gender. The Adam and Eve narrative is one example. In earlier Mediterranean traditions, serpents were often linked to wisdom and renewal. At Delphi, the priestess known as the Pythia delivered oracles at a sanctuary mythically tied to the serpent Python. In Minoan Crete, figurines of a “snake goddess” depict a female figure holding snakes—symbols of power and cult practice. In that context, Eve consulting a serpent signified access to knowledge, not sin.

Later theocratic frameworks reinterpreted this symbolism. Eve’s exchange with the serpent became disobedience, punished by an omniscient male deity. Early natural philosophy and later scientific theories echoed cultural biases about women. Following Aristotle, many Western thinkers held that the male provided the “form” or active principle, while the female contributed only passive matter. Well into the 19th century, some scientists still assumed women contributed little beyond the womb. The human ovum was identified by Karl Ernst von Baer in 1827, and fertilization, as the fusion of egg and sperm, was demonstrated in the 1870s–1880s. These discoveries overturned the idea that women were merely containers.

Science, therefore, cannot be seen as a pure source of salvation. It has perpetuated, and continues to perpetuate, certain cultural dogmas. Not all science—ecology and environmental science, for example —recognizes Earth as an integrated system, but much of science still reflects the biases of its time.

The natural environment is the foundation of life; yet, human activities—such as carbon emissions from modern industrial technology—are accelerating destruction at a pace that the Earth cannot tolerate. In other words, we are destroying our natural habitat.

To evaluate these patterns, we need the partnership–domination social scale. Science, until recently, has done very little to examine family and childhood. Moreover, when it does, in psychology and neurology, it often pretends that families exist in a vacuum. However, families are embedded in cultures and subcultures.

Whether a family is violent and punitive or whether it avoids conflating caring with coercion depends on where it falls on the partnership–domination scale. This is linked to cultural norms—such as punishment. For example, when the American Psychological Association issued a statement condemning spanking, saying it harms children and normalizes violence, that was a significant step.

At our Peace Begins at Home Summit—and yes, you can still register at peacebeginsathomesummit.org.org—we emphasize this. Science must begin to uncover the biases we all carry. This is not about blame or shame. We have all inherited domination myths. Our task is to recognize them, because story and language are cornerstones of our work. Science tells stories, just as religion tells stories, and these stories shape what people think of as human nature.

Jacobsen: What about metrics like the Social Wealth Economic Indicators—ones that value care?

Eisler: At the Center for Partnership Systems, we launched the first iteration of such metrics. It was an early attempt, but it shows that care can and must be measured scientifically. For more information, please visit our website.

You can go to centerforpartnership.org, search for Social Wealth Economic Indicators—or SWEIs—and see our findings. Did we really make a difference? I believe we did. These metrics originated from my book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics.

That book emphasized that both capitalism and socialism claim to be based on economics as a science. However, whether economics truly qualifies as a science is questionable, as some of its assumptions—such as the “rational man” model—are flawed. Neuroscience shows that people do not make choices as isolated rational actors. Our decisions are profoundly shaped by experiences and observations, especially in childhood. How we feel, think, act, and even vote is influenced by where our families, cultures, and subcultures fall on the partnership–domination scale.

We are in the process—though it is difficult—of recognizing that much of what we have been told is false. Stories about human nature, particularly those concerning male and female natures, are myths inherited from more rigid domination times. These myths have also influenced economics.

This brings me back to why new metrics are important, particularly those that account for the economic value of caring and caregiving. Capitalism and socialism both omitted these three life-sustaining sectors from what was considered “economics,” these are the natural economic sector, the household economic sector, and the volunteer community sector. Both capitalist and social theory dismiss them as reproductive rather than productive. This omission has made GDP, which perpetuates this spurious distinction between “reproductive” and “productive,” a highly problematic measure of economic health.

One of my favourite examples is the tree. In GDP terms, a tree in the natural economy is counted only when it is dead, when it becomes a log that can be bought and sold. As for caregiving, Adam Smith and Karl Marx—founders of the theoretical bases of capitalism and socialism—were products of their time. They assumed the work of caring for children, the elderly, the sick, and everyone else would be done for free by women in male-controlled households. That again was a highly problematic way of defining productivity.

GDP also counts harmful activities as “productive.” It includes the production and sale of fast food or cigarettes, and also accounts for the health costs and mortuary expenses associated with these products. This is why GDP is not only misleading but destructive as a measure of well-being. GDP cannot be used as an indicator of the harm we are inflicting on nature, our Mother Earth. Environmental disasters are intensifying, yet the damage they cause—as in the repair work they require—all count as GDP.

Jacobsen: Traditional frameworks, such as those from Adam Smith or Karl Marx, treat only “productive” labour as a component of GDP. The so-called externalities, such as environmental damage, are only included as the market costs for repair or mitigation. We have been taught to think of all this as logical, but fundamentally, it is illogical. It is like a bad insurance policy—superficially balanced but deeply misleading.

Eisler: The reality is that the human and material costs of not caring for our natural environment are immense. Social Wealth Economic Indicators address this by incorporating education for caregiving and offering rewards for caregivers. In current systems, caregiving only counts if it is in the market. The same work of caring for an ill person counts in GDP if you pay someone to do it, but not if a family member does it. That makes no sense.

Jacobsen: So let us take the science of care and calculation as an index. What is the approximate value, on average, in a standard advanced industrial economy with modern infrastructure?

Eisler: We have not entirely done the numbers, but a rough estimate would be immense. Organizations such as AARP have studied the economic value of family caregivers, and the contributions are enormous. The issue is not a lack of data but that our systems—accepted as measures of economic health—are entirely irrational.

Jacobsen: At ground level, or perhaps one stratosphere out, this connects to the philosophy of science. We are dealing with methodology and the assumptions embedded in it. How would a whole-systems approach to scientific methodology, in the same way that we incorporate care into the economy, make science more robust? For example, by acknowledging methodological errors or recognizing the integrative nature of systems, it is possible to improve a whole-systems model of philosophy of science. It first requires recognizing that the current system is irrational and misleading. It excludes the work of caring for people or nature unless that work is monetized for a profit. What is the mitigating approach?

Eisler: That was a perfect statement, by the way. There are several approaches to this problem. One is a universal basic income. I have changed my thinking on this. In The Real Wealth of Nations, I argued that it should be tied to caring, but the bureaucracy required would be overwhelming.

We published an article in the International Journal of Partnership Studies—a peer-reviewed online journal from the University of Minnesota, inspired by my work—about this issue. The bureaucratic burden of tracking and verifying family caregiving was too much. So I have concluded that a universal basic income is a good idea. It would set a minimum standard, and alongside it, we would need caring policies, such as universal healthcare, well-paid childcare, and intense training for caregivers.

This is not a fantasy. The Nordic nations have moved further toward partnership by ensuring that women make up about 40–50 percent of legislatures. Gender construction is a fundamental distinction between domination and partnership systems. Today, we see a regression toward domination in reaction to the advances of the past 300 years, as evidenced by movements for women’s rights, children’s rights, racial justice, anti-racism, environmental protection, Peace, and economic and social justice.

In domination systems, gender definitions are rigid and inflexible. Masculine is ranked above feminine, and anything in between is not tolerated. This enforces in-group versus out-group thinking. A whole-systems approach, by contrast, includes family and childhood, which are central. However, we receive information about these realities in fragmented pieces, without a unifying framework. Those pushing us back toward domination, however, use a coherent frame—one that includes controlling children and restricting their exposure.

We must not normalize violence and in-group versus out-group thinking. A partnership approach values diversity. Gender is central to the current regression. Economically, we see an incredible accumulation of wealth at the very top of the scale.

Language and story are also crucial. In a domination system, those in charge will not tolerate any narrative that undermines their control. This is all part of whole-systems analysis. It requires examining domination and partnership systems across childhood, gender, economics, story, and language.

Jacobsen: We should close with a favourite quote or a summary statement on science, philosophy of science, and partnership studies.

Eisler: We must re-examine everything. At the core of our religions, for example, are feminine teachings of caring, but overlaid with domination. In science, too, we must become aware of what truly matters in a whole-systems analysis. That analysis must include the whole of humanity—both its male and female halves—the whole of our lives, including family and intimate relations, and the whole of our history, including our prehistory..

Human prehistory shows millennia of partnership-oriented cultures. Domination systems emerged only five to ten thousand years ago, which is a very brief period in cultural evolutionary time. Understanding this changes the way people see the world and live in it.

If we believe that survival and thriving depend on moving toward a partnership paradigm, then we must actively accelerate this shift. I want to add that methodology, epistemology, and ontology—all these methods—carry assumptions. Recognizing and questioning them is part of the work.

One of the assumptions in whole-systems research using the partnership–domination social scale is that there are human rights standards. Not everything goes. Postmodernism, in claiming that there are no standards, essentially says anything goes. Without standards, people tend to revert to old patterns of domination. We must establish a new standard: one that respects human rights, fosters care, and promotes caregiving. That is built into the methodology.

Jacobsen: Thank you again for your time. I will see you next week.

Eisler: Thank you.

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