Partnership Studies 18: Authoritarianism, Domination Systems, and Partnership

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/23

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). 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with cultural historian Riane Eisler about authoritarianism as a “domination system” rooted in rigid gender hierarchies, family violence, and fear. Eisler contrasts this with partnership-based models that nurture empathy, equity, and care from early childhood. Drawing on neuroscience and cross-cultural research, she argues that human nature is flexible and that social movements for workers’ rights, gender equality, and environmental protection reveal our deep drive for cooperation. She calls for rethinking religion, economics, and AI design to move beyond inherited domination narratives toward more just, sustainable, and life-affirming societies. Eisler frames this as an urgent evolutionary turning point.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you characterize authoritarianism broadly, and how do you describe it with respect to how they see human nature?

Riane Eisler: Well, let me start by saying that what I call the domination model is authoritarianism. And it’s a top-down model, man over man, man over woman, man over nature, race over race. It’s an in-group versus outgroup model, and at the top sits a strongman, usually, like Stalin or Hitler in modern times.

The problem is that we have all inherited that model. We’ve inherited it in the family, which is supposed to be “male headed,” with the father being authoritarian, hopefully a benevolent one. As an attorney, for example, I knew that the English common law and much of our heritage was that: the husband and the wife are one, and the one is the husband. So, right there, you’ve got the male head of household.

That goes to your second question: is the domination system a model for a king or a strong man of any stripe. In my first book drawing on my multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, transhistorical research, The Chalice and the Blade, I point out that totalitarian regimes are nothing more than authoritarian regimes using modern technology. And we’re seeing it right now in the regression that we’re living through, which is, of course, in reaction to all the organized movements I write about..

I can’t emphasize that enough, all these movements challenge the same thing: domination, whether it’s the king’s right to rule, whether it’s the men’s right to rule over women and children, whether it’s the so-called superior race over an inferior race, all the way to the environmental movement challenging man’s dominion over everything that moves on this earth, over nature. These movements came out of human nature, contradicting the old story of human nature, that we’re bad, we’re selfish, because every one of them is really a movement that doesn’t want a domination system.

Jacobsen: Does this show that human nature is fundamentally quite flexible?

Eisler: My latest book, Nurturing Our Humanity, published by Oxford University Press in 2019, draws heavily from what we know today from neuroscience, which is what psychology, of course, has been saying all along, we are a very flexible species. The nature-versus-nurture conflict is a distraction, because human nature is quite malleable, quite flexible – and a lot depends on what children observe or experience in their early years before our brains are fully formed.

So, nurture really shapes us, and that includes, of course, what the culture supports, because families don’t arise in a vacuum; they’re part of a culture or subculture. It is sad that so many people really believe that fear is the motivation that keeps humans from being selfish, when the people who worked on all the movements I just mentioned weren’t driven by fear; they were driven by hope for something better.

Jacobsen: What do you make of the individuals who show that drive for a hope for something better when they’re in the midst of highly authoritarian structures?

Eisler: What I make of them is that it is really human nature coming to the fore, that all things being equal, and these are all movements to make them more equitable, more peaceful, less fear, whether it was the movement to cut hours at work, which we achieved, whether it’s the movement against child labor, these were all movements that were based on knowledge and a feeling that we can do better. A big part of my calling has been to show that for most of our history, including millennia of our prehistory, we oriented more to the partnership side of the partnership domination social scale, and that only five to ten thousand years ago, which, as I always point out, is a drop in the evolutionary bucket, we shifted. But that’s what we’ve inherited.

We’ve inherited families that believe women are inferior to men, and that “women’s work” is also inferior. This is not a question of women against men or men against women. Men are part of a hierarchy of men, and they are just as afraid in domination systems: of losing their job and even of dying in battle because some guy on top, like Putin, wants more real estate.

In domination systems femininity and masculinity are very rigid, very stereotyped. 

And why is gender such an essential part of this authoritarian system? Why did Hitler emphasize it so much? Why did Stalin emphasize it so much? Why does Trump emphasize it so much? Why does Putin or Orbach emphasize it? Why do the Taliban emphasize gender? Why does fundamentalist Iran?

The reason, which we have not been taught, is that the ranking of male and “masculinity” over  female and “femininity” is a model for equating difference, beginning with the difference in form between the female and male forms. And once we learn that, which children do in domination oriented families, one can apply this ranking of stereotypes to all other differences, whether racial or ethnic. You always blame outgroups, as in the stories we’ve inherited, blaming Eve, the first woman, for all of humanity’s ills. We’ve inherited these in no less than our sacred scriptures.

This is why one of the projects I so wish that we could do soon, because it’s so essential, is for representatives of all the major religions to get together and sort the grain from the chaff. And the grain consists of  the core teachings, which are “feminine” teachings, aren’t they? Of caring, which is coded feminine. Of nonviolence, which is, again, coded not manly, feminine, right?

 These teachings are like, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love teachings.

Love is a tremendous force in the history of our species. You know, Darwin himself said that in his book on human evolution. He said in his Descent of Man when you come to what I will now talk about, human evolution, factors such as moral sensitivity, love, and some of the core religious teachings we have preserved in our religions, are much more important than what is written in Origin of Species. And of course we have been taught to associate love with the “inferior” feminine. In fact, the vilification of women is part of the chaff, which is all of the dominator stuff that was added to our scriptures to maintain domination or authoritarian systems.

So let’s talk about family, which we’ve been taught not to pay much attention to. The Center for Partnership Systems just had a summit, Peace Begins at Home—showing how violence in families, so-called domestic violence, which I want to change to family violence, ripples out when we’re adults, not only in replicating that violence in families, but it normalizes violence for people.

So, coming back to your question, how did the people who wanted something better than what we’ve inherited, how did they come to that?

I think it’s human nature, this wanting something that is not based on fear, because authoritarianism maintains itself through fear of pain, through fear of violence.

Jacobsen: What about psychological or emotional terror in these systems? And also, what about psychological and emotional terror and violence?

Eisler: Psychological and emotional terror is a big part of the maintenance of domination systems, because we all have psyches, children are very dependent and susceptible, and children are told, mind you, that it’s their fault, their fault. So denial starts in dominant families. You don’t start with climate change denial or COVID-19 denial or election result denial.

No, you start with denial that those who are your caregivers, on whom you depend for life, for food, for shelter, are causing you pain. That’s where it starts. So, we have to pay attention to our cultural environments, and families are where most children learn to be in denial or to accept authoritarianism and violence as normal. Yet some of these very children grow up to question that all of this fear and all of this injustice is necessary.

And that gives me hope.

Jacobsen: If there’s one structural change that is made by people living in authoritarian or domination-based societies, what is it that sort of starts the shift to a more partnership-oriented model?

Eisler: I have, as you know, found through research that there are four cornerstones of either domination-oriented or partnership-oriented societies. And that it starts with childhood and family. And we haven’t paid enough attention to that first cornerstone of either domination or partnership oriented societies.

Because of our formal and informal education, we have also been taught to marginalize or just ignore how gender roles and relationships are structured. And yes, that is the second cornerstone. And all of these four cornerstones are interconnected, by the way. But the very rigid gender stereotypes are necessary in domination systems for ranking not only male but also masculine over female and feminine. But to this day people aren’t taught about gender being so important. They’re either taught that it’s a matter of women against men or men against women, as I said.

Actually research shows that gender is a fundamental principle in the organization of families, of societies, of economics –  which is the third cornerstone, and of society at large. And they’re all interconnected. 

And, of course, the fourth cornerstone is story and language. I told you that we’re working to both deconstruct and reconstruct The Odyssey, which is a secular epic like so much of the celluloid epics that get huge audiences because they do get our adrenaline flowing. But they also reinforce masculinity as defined in domination systems. And as you pointed out, whether it’s a woman who is embodying this violence it’s the same thing. You’re still idealizing the hero or the heroine as a killer. And you’re normalizing violence.

Jacobsen: How does this affect men? How does it affect women? And then, how do people who don’t fit those categories get sidelined in a society? It follows the outcomes of those deemed not to fit the conception of human nature.

Eisler: That’s why I always talk about anybody in between, because, as far as I can tell, there have always been shamans who were what we call gay or lesbian today. They have always… but how that is treated depends on the culture.

Now, we make a lot of the Athenian society, but what they approved of was pedophilia. It had to be an older man with a young man. That is not what we’re talking about. That’s called co-option. Where you use an idea and then pervert it so that the young man plays the role of the woman, who is so despised because Athenians really did despise women, not all of them, of course, but that was the norm. There is a book by a classicist, Eva Kuhls, called The Reign of the Phallus.

Excellent book, and it’s cited in my book, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. I have a whole chapter on it, actually called The Reign of the Phallus, dispelling some of the crazy ideas and idealizations of Athenian society. For one thing, their fabled democracy was only for propertied men: a tiny percentage of the Athenian population. It wasn’t for slaves of both sexes or for any women, whether they were “free” or enslaved people, and really the vast majority of “free” women were enslaved people.

It was a very male-centred, domination-centred society, trying again to have something a little better. Still, it really wasn’t better for most of the population.

And today we are questioning. Those of us who want something more equitable, more peaceful, more sustainable than the domination system, which we have inherited. We realize that we have to understand that the framers of our constitution were slaveholders and that no women were included in the Bill of Rights, or any part of the Constitution..

We’re questioning the domination norms about men who are attracted to men, women who are attracted to women, lesbians and gays, And some realize that there have also always been people who are trans. But that’s part of the denial, that all that is abnormal, that it never existed. After all, it’s part of our scriptures. That’s another reason why the project to sort the chaff from the grain and expose the chaff, which is being used against us every day, is so urgent.

Jacobsen: It’s so easy to lose sight of the flexibility of our human nature. So we begin to see things as such rigid categories. Is the reiteration of these narratives just that robust?

Eisler: Nature has polarities, but they’re gradual. There’s hot, and there’s cold. There’s light, and there’s dark. And that’s why I talk about the partnership–domination scale. But these very rigid definitions of woman and of man are part of the rigidity, of the fear and violence-based domination system.

And we have inherited that. We are fighting one another. Think of the argument between capitalism and socialism. It’s a distraction, because both Smith and Marx said that the three life-sustaining sectors – the natural, community volunteer, and household economics sectors are  outside of what is properly economics – which is crazy, absolutely wild.

But Smith and Marx were creatures of their time. The work of caring for people was to be done for free by a woman in a male-dominated household. There’s nothing about caring for nature in what they wrote. Nature was there to be exploited. And now we’re coming to what is an evolutionary dead end guided by these misguided theories.

We are at a point in our technological revolution where the domination system is not sustainable at this level of technology. We must use technologies to help us build a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable world.

And that goes for AI as well. Some people who are working with AI are beginning to realize that if AI is programmed for domination, we have every reason to fear it. But if AI is programmed for partnership, it can be our helper, our friend.

So that choice is right there.

Jacobsen: Riane, thank you for your time today.

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In-Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices.  In-Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In-Sight Publishing by Scott  Douglas  Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.