Partnership Studies 11: Faith, Gender, and the Partnership–Domination Paradigm in Religion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/23

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. 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 in-depth dialogue with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler discusses the intersection of religion, gender, and power within her partnership–domination framework. Eisler explains how faith-based systems can either reinforce domination—through fear, obedience, and male supremacy—or foster partnership, emphasizing love, care, and equality. She traces patriarchal control from ancient myths and religious dogma to modern politics, linking domination systems to violence and ecological neglect. Eisler advocates re-examining cultural narratives, from Homer’s Odyssey to modern media, to dismantle misogyny and revalue caring work. Through conscious cultural evolution, she argues, humanity can transcend domination and build societies grounded in empathy and mutual respect.

Interview conducted October 11, 2025.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Welcome to Riane Eisler on partnership studies. Thank you for joining me again. We’re on partnership studies number ten or eleven; I’ll confirm that in the transcript. Today’s topic is everyone’s favourite dinner table discussion over Christmas — religion, life after death, death, domination systems, justifications for domination systems, abortion, and related issues. Let’s start with the big picture: what is faith, or what is religion as an expression of faith?

Riane Eisler: That’s a difficult question because we all must have some faith. The question is whether there is fear associated with that faith. Is there guilt, in-group versus out-group division, anger, or not? Do we assume, as many religions that support what I call domination systems do, that what counts is not “this vale of tears”—the world in which we all live—but what happens before we are born and after we die? 

Much of the emphasis in religions that maintain domination lies in the assumption that what really matters, as in the crusade against abortion, concerns what happens before we are born. Similarly, in religions that assume we will go to hell if we do not believe in their doctrine, or to heaven if we do, what matters is what happens after we die. The space in between is assumed to be one of suffering, as expressed in the medieval phrase “vale of tears.” 

Many reform movements—such as the Unitarians and some of the more progressive branches of the Presbyterians—have emphasized something else: what we do while we are here on this planet, while we are alive. Love, which lies at the core of all our scriptures—caring, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you—is emphasized, rather than being applied only to the male members of the in-group.

Jacobsen: Do the societal patterns you identify in partnership and domination models of society appear here as well? For instance, in a faith-based system that is more domination-oriented, you find more violence. In contrast, in those that are more partnership-oriented, you see greater gender equity. Are those patterns evident in these forms of human activity, too?

Eisler: Absolutely. The moment you introduce fear, the question becomes: fear of what? Fear of violence, of punishment. In male-dominated societies—patriarchies—that fear becomes associated with a male deity. Gender is built into everything. It is not just a “women’s issue.” It is a central organizing principle for families, religions, societies, and economies. However, we have not been fully aware of it. Changing consciousness, therefore, involves, in a significant way, changing our consciousness about gender.

Jacobsen: The sacralization of rank, control, and domination within religious systems. You have this fear of death, this unknown of what happened before we were born or where we are going—if anywhere—when we die. At least we can have control here and now, and I can be the one to impose it, Mr. So-and-so. Any thoughts?

Eisler: That is a domination system. What you are pointing out is that religion can be, as we see in the Unitarian Universalist tradition and in some of the more progressive branches of other faiths—as we see in Judaism, particularly in Reform Judaism, or even in Conservative Judaism—differsr from what we see in Orthodox traditions. In Orthodox Judaism, there is love, but it is love for the male who must study the Torah and Talmud, and women are expected to help him do that. Women play a very active role in Orthodox Judaism. Still, they are thoroughly socialized—one might say indoctrinated—to do so.

Jacobsen: Within Jewish communities, these were often the elite intellectual men and families, were they not?

Eisler: The elite intellectual men and families, yes. Religions that uphold and support domination are unfailingly structured with man on top—as in “God-fearing”—and God, of course, is male. It requires a tremendous amount of acrobatics because Yahweh, or Jehovah, was originally a war god, and the story of Eve and Adam being expelled from the Garden is such a blend of older mythologies.

Why would—a question I asked as a child—a woman ask advice from a snake? It’s not something we usually do. Yet, under the old reality and even after the prehistoric shift to domination, consider the Oracle of Delphi: she was a priestess, a woman working with a python, a snake that symbolized oracular prophecy. It made perfect sense for Eve, in the older symbolic order, to ask advice from a snake. But under the new dominator reality, she was punished for it.

Think also of the prehistoric Minoan goddess-priestess figures with snakes coiled around their arms in trance. That represents the old religion, which we can only partly reconstruct. Still, there were priestesses—there is no question about that. And they were associated with snakes and oracular wisdom.

All the so-called goddess and priestess figurines from prehistory are a testament to that, and they’re all, as Merlin Stone wrote, in the basements of museums. It’s fascinating that if you see a male figure, he’s called a god or a priest; if you see a female figure, she’s labelled a woman. Of course, she was often a priestess, a deity, because that was the mythical reality in those days.

We’re now discovering so much about prehistoric belief systems, about social structures in our prehistory. Recently, and this was reported in The Wall Street Journal, of all places, owned by Murdoch no less, Chinese archaeologists uncovered an ancient prehistoric society that was matrilineal and relatively egalitarian.

However, we’re given all this information in fragments, and my work has  been about “connecting those dots.” To do that, you need the framework of the partnership–domination scale, a whole-systems methodology. The more a religion supports and sanctifies domination and violence, the more it serves as an instrument of the domination system. The more it emphasizes the core teachings—what we might call the feminine-coded values in domination systems—such as love and caring, the more it reflects our shared human capacity and need for connection.

So, it isn’t religion per se that is the problem, but rather religions that lean towards the domination side of the social scale. They are harmful not only to their adherents—often deeply traumatized individuals drawn to them—but also to all of us. I can attest to this from my own experience attending a Methodist school in Cuba. When Dr. Muñoz, the principal, asked who believed in Jesus Christ, I finally grew tired of being the only child who didn’t raise her hand. There was tremendous pressure to conform, to proselytize, and to not “tolerate”—a word I dislike—rather than truly accept difference.

Regressions to domination always produce violence. Religions that lean toward domination consistently frame gender through fixed, ranked stereotypes—masculine over feminine. Yet semantically, the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy. It is partnership. And the evidence indeed shows that in prehistory.

The evidence from prehistory shows clearly that societies in which women were priestesses and held power were not matriarchies. For example, in Minoan Crete, there are depictions of both male priests and priestesses. The assumption that dominating and being dominated are the only alternatives is a projection of our own conditioning. In Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie, the story explores the dilemma of whether to adopt a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy. Still, the film ultimately points toward more complex possibilities than simply swapping rulers. You can’t merely have women in charge; you need partnership, which includes, of course, enlightened men.

Jacobsen: As far as my limited knowledge goes, most movements for gender equity, particularly around women’s equality, have included a substantial majority of women, alongside a smaller but essential cohort of enlightened men. Without those men, progress wouldn’t have been possible. You even need a weak partnership model to make any real progress toward universalism.

Eisler: Yes, there are more and more enlightened men. The whole men’s movement—figures such as Gary Barker and Jackson Katz—reflects that. They have worked on men’s engagement in gender equity and preventing violence. They embrace caring for men, showing that men, though still a minority in caregiving roles historically, are increasingly taking on traditional caregiving responsibilities, such as diapering and feeding babies, and engaging in what we traditionally call “mothering”—caring work.

The gender stereotypes are being questioned. And that’s one of the primary reasons, as you can see in these regressions to domination, for the renewed insistence on reinstating the male as head of household, as superior, as decision-maker. These frameworks connect gender and domination and aim to return to those old dominator stereotypes—that only the “masculine” is entitled to rule, just as God is entitled to dominate through fear and force.

Jacobsen: Another aspect of those narratives—the gods themselves are often framed as male. The extreme example, I think, is Protestant and Catholic Christianity, where the primary feminine counter-image is the Virgin Mary. You have Rachel and others, but generally speaking, it all collapses into imagery of motherhood and virginity.

Eisler: That’s the only role for women in a strict patriarchy, which classical Greece certainly exemplified in many ways. In ancient Athens, the “good” women were confined to the household, to the “women’s quarters.”. At the same time, the hetairai often served as courtesans and companions with social roles distinct from respectable wives.

Jacobsen: It’s almost a pretty title — it even sounds lyrical.

Eisler: The hetairai were the ones present at men’s feasts—companions and entertainers. There’s this dynamic, like in Jung’s concepts of animus and anima, where the anima has no independent identity except in relation to the male animus. She’s either a man’s temptation or a man’s inspiration. We’ve been conditioned to see women as existing simply to be men’s “helpers,” right?

Jacobsen: De-agentified, basically. There’s no autonomy.

Eisler: Absolutely no autonomy. And all this talk about ego being the problem—frankly, women have struggled in this second phase of feminism to develop an ego, to have an identity that is truly their own. In the domination mythology, women are still expected to lack one. So, there’s much work to do. That’s where the Four Cornerstones come in, and where the project I’ve long envisioned becomes vital: bringing together genuinely progressive representatives of all religions to sort out the essence—the actual grain of their teachings—from the dominator overlay. Until that happens, religion will continue to be used against us.

A Sufi Muslim once told me quietly that while he agreed this is an essential way to address how religion is being weaponized to justify domination, he couldn’t participate—because clerics might issue a fatwa calling for his death.

Some extremists interpret the Qur’an to justify violence against non-believers; others emphatically reject such readings and argue for peaceful interpretations.

Did you know that toward the end of the war, Hitler issued an edict allowing German soldiers to have four wives, like the Koran allows for Muslim men? He said it was to boost morale. But of course, it was the reinstatement of rigid gender stereotypes.

Jacobsen: There you go. Was that under Christian auspices at that point, or was it more of a secular fascist policy?

Eisler: It was a mess, really, because as you know, some Christian denominations actively supported Hitler.

Jacobsen: Yes, they did.

Eisler: Gender was absolutely central to his ideology. However, it’s rarely discussed except in my books and in Claudia Koonz’s work. The role of gender in authoritarian movements is profoundly underexamined. You can see the same dynamic resurfacing today in the United States. With the current administration, it’s pretty clear that gender is at the heart of the regression.

Jacobsen: I’ve always felt that the American portrayals of World War II—especially on popular channels—miss the point. It’s all about battle strategies, generals, “heroes,” and the hardware—guns, tanks, bombers, munitions. They rarely engage with Hitler’s ideological obsessions. And when modern podcasts do cover it, they focus on things like the drugs the Nazis used, rather than the psychological and ideological pathology driving it all.

Eisler: It was so clear. In Nazi propaganda, Jews were blamed for the so-called emancipation of women. It was right there in front of everyone’s eyes, but people didn’t see it—they didn’t connect the dots. Gender was absolutely central.

We’re always brought back to the Four Cornerstones, as they serve as the pillars supporting either domination systems or partnership systems, beginning with childhood and family. If we connect the dots, we see how crucial  is what children observe, experience, and are taught in families that are dominated. They learn fear. They learn that punitive violence from those in power is normal. They know the supposed superiority—because they see it in their families and cultures—of men over women, of the “masculine,” as defined by domination systems, over the “feminine,” which is equated with weakness, caring, caregiving, and nonviolence. Those qualities are treated as flaws for men!

It’s all interconnected. Gender informs economics, too. I often repeat: What do children see? If they grow up seeing the ranking of male and “masculine” over female and “feminine,” they internalize the equation of difference with superiority and inferiority, dominance and submission, serving and being served. Think of the old photographs—women standing behind men who sit and are served. That visual hierarchy translates directly into economics. That’s why gender stereotypes, and their ranking, is essential for the maintenance or imposition of domination across the board.

Both capitalist and socialist systems exclude the three life-sustaining sectors from their economic models: the natural economy, the volunteer community economy, and the household or family economy. For instance, a tree—on which we depend for absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen—is counted in GDP only when it’s dead, when it’s a log to be bought and sold. Only then is it considered “productive.” Similarly, you can work from dawn to dusk caring for children, the sick, or the elderly, and none of that counts as “productive” labour. It’s labelled “reproductive.” Unless someone is paid for it.

If a housekeeper or an au pair performs the same work, it suddenly becomes “productive.” This was by design. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx—reflecting the assumptions of their time—believed that caring and caregiving were women’s unpaid duties within a male-controlled household. Neither addressed care for our natural life-support systems, which were also marginalized as merely reproductive.

It’s absurd. We must transform how we reward and value caring and caregiving—in both market and non-market sectors. That’s what we’ve worked on at the Center for Partnership Systems: creating new ways to measure what truly matters. Because we value what we measure, and we measure what we value.

We began by asking: how many children receive adequate care? How many don’t? We measured both inputs and outputs, as most so-called alternatives to GDP only measure outputs, providing a snapshot of the system at one point in time. We also wanted to measure the investments—the inputs that make a caring society possible.

Jacobsen: What about in faith-based systems—the psychological mechanisms that function like an economy? The pleasures and pains of work and reward, but applied to things that, as far as we can tell, don’t exist outside the believer’s perception. There’s this idea of deferring gratification for celestial payoffs: rivers of milk and honey, seventy-two virgins—or white raisins, depending on the translation—union with God, or a better reincarnation next time, maybe as a Brahmin instead of a labourer. What’s the psychological economy of that in partnership studies? How does it fit into the religious mythos? It seems to tie in nicely with the central theme here.

Eisler: You’ve touched on something essential. Religions that support domination teach that obedience is what truly matters. That’s the core psychological attitude—obedience and praise. Praise of the dominator deity. “Thy will be done.” “Praise be to God.” I recently attended a concert featuring Mozart’s Mass, which is beautiful music. Still, they projected the lyrics, and I honestly wished they hadn’t. The words were psychopathic: “We obey you, we venerate you, we worship you.” It was all submission to power.

Jacobsen: That reminds me of that Monty Python scene—Michael Palin as the priest, the boys singing, “Oh Lord, you are so absolutely huge.”

Eisler: Exactly! “Oh Lord.” Think about that word for a moment—Lord, King of Kings. What does it imply? Historically, the feudal lord was venerated and even had the so-called “right of the first night” with a serf’s bride. It was grotesque. Yet we still call God “Lord.” The language reveals the structure: domination.

There was, for a time, a movement to broaden that language—to speak of “God and Goddess,” or simply “the powers that be.” But the current regressions are pushing back hard against that inclusive trend. Take creationism, for example. The pope—the head (another revealing word) of the Catholic Church—once said that evolution is compatible with creationism. And I would agree, but only if we’re not talking about the creationism of the Lord, the dominator deity who demands obedience.

Jacobsen: Evolution is too subtle for that worldview.

Eisler: Science, modern Western science, originated in a world, in the words of the historian of science David Noble, a world without women—and also, I would add, a world without children. Only gradually did science begin to open those boundaries. I mean, Galileo, for example, challenged the “scientific” orthodoxy of his time by asserting that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. He was punished for that—tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633, forced to recant, and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Jacobsen: There’s another aspect of faith that ties into generational thinking. Many traditions speak in supernatural or superstitious terms—curses passed from “fathers unto sons unto sons”—as though morality were genetic and punishment hereditary. But these same texts also carry an obsession with lineage. There’s deep time embedded in them. Even the gods themselves, whether in polytheistic or later monotheistic systems, have genealogies. Christianity, for example, compresses it into one paradoxical figure—God making himself his own son, dying, resurrecting, and promising to return. Technically, that would be a third appearance.

Yet underneath all of that is reproduction—control of women’s reproductive choices. When to have children, if at all, how many, under what circumstances. The pill, mifepristone—these are astonishingly recent in human history. But they’ve undercut the ideological structures that depended on controlling women’s fertility. And now we’re seeing a backlash, an attempt to reassert those mandates.

What do you make of this? Of the technological undermining of those old controls—and the pushback that’s followed? How do you see partnership systems advancing amid such overwhelming pressures on every part of life?

Eisler: Well, look, I have—and this started with my book The Chalice and the Blade, which was the first stemming from my multidisciplinary, whole-systems approach. In that book, which came out in 1986, I argued that we have a choice between breakdown and breakthrough in evolution. 

I also argued that, in our time of what I call “technologies of destruction”—nuclear weapons and, more slowly, climate change, both of which are human creations—we have to shift to partnership: to an understanding of our interconnection, to a more nonviolent way of relating. Otherwise, eventually—and perhaps quite suddenly with a nuclear bomb, even a suitcase bomb—our species is doomed.

So this is so obvious to me. And yet, many people are in denial about it. The domination system, at our current level of technological development, if guided by an ethos of domination, can take us to an evolutionary dead end.

Jacobsen: Most of us are in denial about this, to keep on going. But that’s the reality. I mean, do partnership studies applied to faith-based systems imply the building of new narratives, or dissolving a little bit of the dominant narratives and allowing people to formulate their own sense of agency without them?

Eisler: Well, it really requires both. I’m working with Melanie Lynch on deconstructing The Odyssey, because Homer was the great propagandist for the imposition of the domination system. If you look at The Odyssey, it is full of clues about an earlier society in which women held power—but they’re now primarily vilified in the story. Think of the Sirens, who are portrayed as deadly to men. There’s no evidence of that anywhere, but there you have it.

What you see in the Odyssey are influential female figures, yet they’re depicted as monsters. Charybdis is a monster; Scylla is a monster. Odysseus must navigate between them to avoid destruction. Circe and Calypso—he lives with them, has sexual relationships with them—and they “hold” him through attraction. They’re framed as dangerous or immoral. Penelope, of course, is the loyal wife; yet Odysseus gains his power through her. And he has Telemachus kill the slave girls who first clean up the mess after Odysseus kills the suitors vying for Penelope to marry them so they can gain power, and then these female slaves are executed for having had relations with the suitors, whether willingly or under coercion. It doesn’t matter; Odysseus commands that they be killed.

It’s the normalization and glorification of the hero as a killer. And it’s really about relegating females—who once, and still, held power in partnership with men—to a subordinate position.

The Iliad, of course, starts with this “moral issue” of whether the king Agamemnon or the warrior Achilles should possess the “prize” of war—a woman, a human being, now a slave—without any concern for what she might have thought of all this. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey normalize the hero as a killer and frame patriarchal violence as virtue.

But we also have to make up new partnership-oriented stories. So, it’s a process of deconstruction and reconstruction at the same time. One is not exclusive of the other. 

We need to deconstruct many of the false stories we’ve been told. But we also must reconstruct—and feminists, for example, have reconstructed a lot of the fairy tales that children, girls and boys, are told, which are such idealizations of nobility: the king, the prince, the male. So much so that a Sleeping Beauty can’t even wake up without a prince, a male, a prince, a superior, a dominator.

It’s always the older woman who is the villain. In contrast, it’s the innocent young woman who is subordinate and subservient and grateful to the prince for rescuing her. Talk about teaching learned helplessness here—and teaching boys that men are the superiors, and nobles are even more superior than other men, and so on.

I did a radio show where I just made fun of this—this was in the sixties—the idea of somehow being able to fit into the princess slipper, because that’s what it was. You had to mould yourself to fit into the princess. But I was furious at that time. And then I stopped being angry. I stopped blaming and shaming. And I realized that men are also in terrible shape in the domination system. 

I used to wear those stiletto high heels—my God. I don’t know how people put up with that. I don’t know how I walked then, but I don’t anymore.

Jacobsen: So, I want to do a couple of things. I’ve got to give credit where credit’s due—this was not me pointing this out. This was a Jewish woman criminal lawyer who I travelled with in the Summer. She astutely had noted that Schopenhauer had a decidedly negative image of women—that’s putting it mildly.

He had an essay titled On Women. He writes that in societies where monogamy is the norm, “to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.” He claims that women are “by nature meant to obey.” He describes them as childish, short-sighted, and intuitive rather than rational, asserting that they are deficient in justice. Some scholars have called him the arch-misogynist—in the sense that he is uncompromising and systematic, rather than incidentally prejudiced. This misogyny was not peripheral but foundational to his worldview; his values and philosophical conclusions flowed downstream from that mountain. He critiqued marriage, partnership, and monogamy.

He built this as part of his metaphysical and ethical system. So this may be the first instance of which I’m aware—and again, I cannot take credit for pointing this out; it required further light research for me to see it—of what might be called metaphysical misogyny. I mean, there are transcendentalist versions of misogyny that appear in theologies involving gods or divine hierarchies. Still, Schopenhauer’s philosophy was distinct in that it was metaphysical without necessarily invoking a god, just from one man’s system.

What are your reflections on individuals like him who built entire philosophical schools?

Eisler: He wasn’t alone. I mean, look at Aristotle. Among his so-called wisdoms was the idea that enslaved people and women are meant to be subordinate because they were “born” that way—born into slavery, born women. Period. Deductive logic in a loop.

Nietzsche—Nietzsche was a misogynist par excellence. And strangely, he’s often quoted by scholars who should know better as a philosopher who valued freedom. But, of course, that freedom was only for males. He was very clear that it did not apply to women, who were meant to be subordinate.

And even into the modern era, before genetics was widely understood, influential scientific lore held that only men passed on hereditary traits—that women were merely vessels. We think that scientists are free of bias because they’re called “objective,” which is absolutely absurd.

So our job is to examine all of these myths, deconstructing and reconstructing them. Because people need stories. People live by stories. And I pointed this out already in The Chalice and the Blade.

We need stories that show the advantages of partnership. And there are many of them. Findings from science again—though often isolated—show, for example, that sex is much better when both partners, including the woman, enjoy it.

So these truths exist. But the old patriarchal logic says: you use the bodies of women. And women have internalized this—thinking somehow that they’re sexually free, “liberated,” when they perform hyper-sexualized acts for male approval, like twerking in pop culture.

Take the example of Miley Cyrus in that famous performance. A friend of mine, Brie Mathers, wrote an excellent book exposing this illusion—that so many young women have internalized because it’s socially rewarded—the idea that if they become more effective sex objects by enjoying being sex objects, they’re somehow liberated. This is absolute nonsense. You’re not liberated if you’re still defined as an object.

Miley is precisely that—a sex object—when she twerks around a fully dressed older man. Think about that image. It’s the same old story, just updated for the modern stage.

That old painting comes to mind—the one with the fully dressed men having a picnic with naked women. I think it was Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Manet. Something is clearly wrong with that picture.

Jacobsen: Rigid ranking, gender control, sanctioned violence, gods, metaphysics, philosophers, abortion, life after death—narratives, cultural logics. I suppose we should conclude by discussing any thoughts on conceptions of life after death within these frameworks.

Eisler: It’s punishment and reward. If you’re a good, obedient, God-fearing person, you get to go to heaven. And if you’re not—if you’re a sinner—you go to hell for eternal torture. This isn’t just a medieval idea; it’s baked into some modern religious beliefs of those who want to impose them on others. It’s domination through religion—first over those who believe it, and then over those on whom they wish to impose it.

The fact of the matter is, none of us has the cognitive equipment to know what happens after death or before birth. 

Jacobsen: Any final thoughts before we go?

Eisler: I think the importance of the Four Cornerstones—story and language, especially—is enormous. I’m leaving language aside for now; we could do another discussion on that, though it’s pretty depressing. But the stories we’ve all been told, whether religious or secular, have to be examined and re-examined through the lens of the partnership–domination social scale.

Just think of those Four Cornerstones and how much attention they receive—whether it’s the Taliban, the current administration in the United States, Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. There were no women at the top in the USSR. Women could be functionaries below, but in the Politburo? Nothing. And look how much attention is paid to gender—and how we’ve been conditioned to accept it as “just the way things are.”

Dominator religion reinforces this—the Lord, the King, the God commands it to be so. That’s a complex story to overcome, but some people do. I’ve even written about a man who could reasonably be called a fascist in his hatred of Jews, whom a Jewish rabbi and his wife befriended. They helped him—and he ended up converting to Judaism. People can change.

And we have to count on that. Neuroscience tells us that the first five years of life are critical, when our brains are forming in response to what we see and experience. But it also tells us we can change. Consciousness can shift in an instant—it really only takes a second.

My work has changed the consciousness of many people, including myself.

Jacobsen: The end.

Eisler: See you next week. 

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