Partnership Studies 15: Riane Eisler on Politics: Partnership Leadership vs. Domination

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/02

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 interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler contrasts domination leaders—hierarchical, punitive, spectacle-driven—with partnership leadership that centers care, gender equity, childhood, and Earth. Rapid technological change meets trauma, enabling authoritarian regression from Afghanistan and Iran to parts of the United States. Economics still mislabels care as “reproductive” work; universities remain top-down, even as women advance in law, medicine, and science. Marx missed gender’s central role; dictatorships proved domination’s logic. Narrative reform, education, and evidence from prehistory support swift shifts. Ireland’s recent changes illuminate society’s recovering immune response and resilience.

Interview conducted on October 18, 2025.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When it comes to politics, how does a politician act under a domination style of leadership versus a partnership style? And as a side question, can people “fake it till they make it” into either model? Because both seem emotionally rewarding: power feels good, but so does community.

Riane Eisler: We’re living through a period of transition from domination toward partnership. There’s a strong global movement in that direction—but it’s also being countered by a robust regression, often expressed through religious mythologies. You can see this in Afghanistan, Iran, and even in parts of the United States, Hungary, and other nations.

I have to digress briefly because this ties into change itself. We’re in an age of immense technological transformation—artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and other scientific breakthroughs are reshaping our world. But change is tough for people who have been deeply traumatized by the domination system, often beginning within their families. Poverty is traumatizing, too. So, for many, genuine transformation feels nearly impossible. They cling to the old norms.

And those who push us backward have a tremendous advantage, because our collective consciousness is fragmented. We divide ourselves by inherited categories—right and left, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, capitalist and socialist. These divisions distract us from the real underlying issue.

None of these categories is holistic. None truly accounts for the fundamental components of a social system—mainly family and childhood, or gender relations. These areas are either marginalized or, in domination-oriented societies, treated as unquestionable hierarchies.

So yes, it’s a difficult time. But what’s at stake is nothing less than our survival.

We must change our categories and our thinking. As Einstein said, it’s madness to believe we can solve our problems with the same consciousness, the same vocabulary, and the same worldview that created them.

This fragmentation of consciousness keeps the old systems in place—the illusion that the same mindset can solve the problems it created. We have to shift toward a more holistic way of viewing society, one that truly includes gender, childhood, and family, and recognizes their foundational importance. So a whole-systems analysis is essential.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do we do this?

Riane Eisler: Take economics, for example. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx identified the most basic human work as caring for people and caring for our natural environment—the sources of life itself. Yet they classified this vital work as “reproductive” rather than “productive” labour, and it was devalued accordingly. And this devaluation is perpetuated by our measurement of “productivity” like GDP and GNP, where caring for people outside the market is not included, and neither is caring for nature, so that a tree is not included until it is dead, a log, that can be bought and sold in the market. This makes no sense, and neither does including only the rebuilding after a natural disaster, like a storm, but considering the damage to people and nature just “externalities” and therefore not to be counted in these measures!

And of course, there’s story and language—because we all live by story. If we fail to adapt those, we’re lost. 

Once you begin to see “reality”—including politics, mythology, and culture—through the whole-systems lens of the partnership-domination social scale or continuum, everything looks different. We see how our epics idealize and celebrate the hero as a killer. The Odyssey, the hero’s journey, and even modern entertainment are all variations of the same domination narrative. Today’s blockbusters are the digital descendants of the Roman circuses—spectacles of adrenaline and violence that distract rather than enlighten.

We’re living in an era when truth itself is under siege. Facts, such as those demonstrating climate change, are dismissed or distorted. 

However, science, though indispensable, is not immune to bias. Scientists are human; they carry cultural assumptions like anyone else. I often think of Galileo—threatened by the scientific establishment of his time because his observations challenged entrenched dogma. Or the old scientific prejudice that women were merely containers for male genetic material, the belief that heredity passed “solely through men.” These are striking examples of gendered distortion disguised as science.

Jacobsen: That reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut. I recall a story where he was on stage with another humanist writer who made a cutting remark, and he replied with equal wit—something like, “Well, women can’t do science. They discovered that at Harvard,” referencing Lawrence Summers’s infamous comment. It was sardonic, of course, pointing out how absurdly chauvinist that notion was.

Eisler: And what we’re seeing now, ironically, contradicts those old biases. In many professional fields—law, medicine, academia—women are the majority of new entrants. Most law school classes today are primarily female. The same trend is emerging in medicine, especially among general practitioners.

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of practical realities catching up. But the old structures persist—universities, for example, still mirror the hierarchies of religious institutions, built on centuries of domination.

Universities are still very top-down and fragmented, despite students’ growing demand for multidisciplinary teaching. By the way, our new course materials for teaching global history through the partnership-domination social scale are almost ready for release.

At the University of Arkansas, there’s a faculty member who teaches global history and discovered my work. He’s been using it because it integrates gender as a key analytical lens—something still treated as taboo in much of academia. It’s astonishing how hard it remains to address gender seriously.

Women can enter science, as Jane Goodall did, but they’re still a minority. More women are now receiving Nobel Prizes, which is encouraging and long overdue. But it’s worth remembering that until the early twentieth century, women were barred from most universities—Harvard, for instance. In Canada, many women couldn’t even hold academic positions or obtain full professional visas until the 1970s.

So, real progress, but within only about a century.

Even thinkers like Marx, who called it “the woman question,” dismissed it as secondary. He couldn’t see that gender relations are a central organizing principle—shaping families, economies, and every social institution. He was wrong about that.

When you talk to Marxists today, many still try to reconcile that gap in his thinking. Marx himself was a complex figure—a mix of domination and partnership impulses. In his personal life, he was very much the dominator. In his political theory, he believed in the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which is inherently a domination model. And history proved it: the USSR became a full-blown domination system.

Yet to his credit, he did imagine that dictatorship as temporary—a stage toward something more egalitarian. But he remained a man of his time, bound by the norms that said women didn’t count and “women’s work” didn’t matter.

Meanwhile, men today face their own crisis. They’re flooded with propaganda urging them to reclaim dominance. Many boys and young men mistake that for strength, forgetting they’re simply part of a larger hierarchy of domination. If someone higher up—say, a ruler like Putin—wants more territory, those same young men are expected to give their lives for his ambitions.

Jacobsen: So we’re back to politics.

Eisler: Yes, we’re back to politics, which is still studied separately, although domination scales up from the household to the nation.

The personal is political, and the political is personal. That’s what partnership thinking helps us finally see.

It’s all interconnected. Someone like Putin, for example, if we examined his childhood, I’m certain we’d find deep trauma. The same applies to many leaders. Even in the United States, both the president and vice president have spoken publicly about the impact of their early experiences. So yes, we face an enormous challenge.

But returning to your question, can politicians truly transform or express that change? If they don’t, we’re in trouble. 

But if they do, they can also face backlash, because much of the electorate still sees no alternative to domination. And for those deeply tied to authoritarian movements, like the MAGA faction in the U.S., there’s virtually no willingness to reconsider. It’s a difficult moment in history.

Yet I have faith in human creativity and in our instinct for survival. 

That brings us back to something you mentioned earlier—the re-mything impulse, as I call it, the urge to recover what’s been lost or hidden. It’s like a cultural immune system. Deconstruction and reconstruction of stories are part of this process. 

But what we must reconstruct is nothing less than what society accepts as “normal” and “natural.”

That requires revisiting the evidence from prehistory, archeology, the study of myths, DNA studies, all of which show that for most of human history societies were more partnership-oriented than domination-based—and some still are today. 

Change is possible, and it can happen swiftly. Look at Ireland: it has become far more partnership-oriented in just a few decades.

Jacobsen: Riane, thank you for your time.

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