Partnership Studies 21: Marketing Manipulation, Domination Systems, and Partnership Economics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/01/14

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 conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks Riane Eisler how marketing turns trauma and insecurity into profitable “needs.” Eisler argues advertising repurposes psychology to manipulate wants, sustaining domination-oriented economics by filling the emptiness produced by in-group/out-group hierarchies and rigid gender roles. Basic consumption meets real needs—food, shelter, clothing, and self-respect—while manufactured desires promise status and belonging through excess. She traces similar “sales” logic in religious mythmaking and warns that secular culture can reproduce the same distortions. A partnership framework, she suggests, shifts incentives toward caring connection, empathy, and well-being rather than control, competition, and compulsive consumption—and ecological sustainability, too, for everyone.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Marketing and consumption are framed as a “science,” where people are made to feel less than, which is what people are often made to think through trauma, family trauma, and economic trauma. This is an entirely improvised question. People are given a fabricated want or aversion to fill through widespread consumption, and that consumption is, in many ways, mediated by marketing and advertising. What is the partnership studies framework for economics, marketing, consumption, and related areas?

Riane Eisler: It recognizes that marketing and advertising have taken what we know from psychology and the social sciences and turned it into the manipulation of people’s wants and needs. It is fascinating, but at the same time very troubling. It is part of contemporary domination-oriented economic systems because, as a larger middle class began to emerge in many industrializing societies, in part due to the Industrial Revolution, there was a challenge to the traditional top-down system. That challenge was more than met by marketing and advertising, which became tools for increasing consumption, used to help fill a sense of emptiness or void created and maintained by the larger domination system. 

Jacobsen: So what separates, in your view, this pathology of consumption from the necessity of consumption?

Eisler: We need to eat. We need a roof over our heads. We have basic needs as human beings. The system creates artificial needs under the guise of fulfilling basic needs, including valuing and feeling good about yourself, both of which are very difficult in domination systems.

Let us start with what domination systems do. They create in-groups and out-groups. Most people in today’s world are affected by this in one way or another. Those on top are nervous that someone else will displace them — replace them, really. Those at the bottom are struggling.

What the domination system does is convince them — and, in many historical and contemporary cases, religion plays an essential part in this pyramid — that they must flatter, believe, and obey those on top. It does this by identifying the people on top as “job creators,” for example, in modern industrial and post-industrial economies, rather than as exploiters protected by the domination system. Partnership-oriented systems are not entirely equal, but they do not organize society around rigidly fixed “those on the bottom” and “those on the top” in the same way.

That makes a significant difference. So how do you maintain a domination system once industrial production and modern economies can generate enough manufactured and consumer goods — clothing, housing materials, and so forth — to meet people’s basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing? You have to convince them that if they consume more than they need to satisfy their basic needs, they will feel better. 

I keep thinking of an old shampoo advertisement where a woman uses some product, and she is ecstatic — practically having an orgasm. What is the message of an ad like that? Or consider a man who has been socialized to feel entitled to women: there are often car advertisements featuring a beautiful woman standing next to the car, seemingly impressed or “wowed” by it.

All of these wants and needs are really the product of deprivation of closeness. Take rigid gender stereotypes, which are damaging for both men and women. Women learn to manipulate or conform. Men are expected to maintain control, whether they want to or not, and to maintain separation. The result is a mess. Then comes the use of what we know from psychology about manipulation and about marketing.

Advertising has taken that knowledge and used it to convince people that their real needs — the need for caring connection, the need for shelter, the need for food, the need for clothing, and the need to feel good about themselves — will be met if they conform to marketing and advertising messages and consume, consume, consume.

Jacobsen: What functions as a brake on this? Usually, as things move toward excess, there is pushback. What is the push and pull between the enforcement of a consumer mindset built on fabricated wants and a reintegration that returns to the basics of what we need socially — clothing, housing, food, and so on?

Eisler: That is the question we need to answer for people. What fulfills our basic needs? It requires a different view of what it means to be human. If we adopt a competition mindset — a dog-eat-dog mindset — you will take care only of yourself and perhaps your family. I say probably because studies have shown that gendered socialization can be so intense that men feel entitled to use what they earn on themselves and their perceived needs — gambling, prostitution, and so on.

For example, studies in Brazil have shown that one dollar in a mother’s hands is equivalent to ten dollars in a father’s. This is not because men are inherently evil, but because what I just described is part of their socialization. It is a highly complex system because it was developed in ways that effectively brainwashed people.

In my book The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, I describe how domination systems sustained themselves through story and myth after violence established control. Consider the violence of ancient domination systems: the Assyrians, for example, lined roads with crucified people. It was a reign of terror, an extreme form of domination. But what really keeps the system going is not just the overt violence — it is the myths and stories, the distortion of what is presented as “reality.”

To sustain domination, the myths and stories had to be changed to idealize rigid gender stereotypes: the hero as active, forceful, associated with what Jung called the animus.

In many normative stories, the hero is a killer. Think of The Odyssey, or some of the heroic figures in the Hebrew Bible. It is all very complicated, and people are trained to accept total contradictions and not notice passages in the Bible that clearly contradict the assertion, found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that there never was and never can be anything but a male deity. Yet in the Book of Jeremiah, for example, the prophet condemns women for baking cakes to the “Queen of Heaven.” It is remarkable, but people skip over that. 

Jacobsen: Also, in Exodus and the Ten Commandments, there is a very explicit statement — one of the first commandments — “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” If the commandments are rank-ordered, then this one addresses the existence of other gods. The deity — Yahweh — is described as jealous. If the deity is jealous and people are commanded not to worship different gods, this reflects a cultural milieu in which multiple gods were believed in and practiced. From a naturalistic lens on the psychosocial and cultural history of religion, this points to an implicit polytheistic environment attempting to consolidate monotheism.

Eisler: Yes, Raphael Patai, who was both a cultural historian and drew heavily on archaeological findings, repeatedly documented that during the same period reflected in the biblical texts — when prophets were recorded as condemning the people for deviating from exclusive worship of a jealous God — there were idols to Asherah, and idols to male deities as well. There was polytheism. But that is largely omitted or minimized in the biblical narrative.

So the written tradition gives us a distorted picture of historical reality. In a sense, it is brilliant: systems of belief can grant benefits, such as reduced time in purgatory — historically, in medieval Christianity through indulgences — if one pays the church a specified amount in local currency. It becomes incredibly complex. 

Jacobsen: Could we see the marketing and advertising of Yahweh—or of monotheistic religion more broadly—as a prototype for modern multinational corporate culture, in which marketing and advertising are treated as a “science” designed to cultivate fabricated wants?

Eisler: As an analytical framing, there is a functional similarity between some religious promise-structures and modern advertising. Advertising and marketing present visual stories of people feeling joyful, fulfilled, and complete because of a product they are encouraged to buy. Many religious traditions—monotheistic ones included—also contain promises of ultimate meaning, belonging, protection, or reward, though those promises are often oriented toward the afterlife, moral order, or communal identity rather than toward material consumption in this world.

In some forms of Christianity—especially in later Protestant traditions and, more recently, in “prosperity gospel” movements—the idea that God will bless the faithful in this life becomes central. In Islam, long-standing teachings emphasize divine justice, moral accountability, and providence, but it would be inaccurate to treat material prosperity in this life as a uniform or dominant doctrine across Muslim history. More broadly, across traditions, fulfillment is often promised but deferred to an afterlife, a future redemption, or an ideal moral order.

Historically, Western Christianity developed robust systems of fear and relief around sin, punishment, and salvation. In late medieval Catholicism, indulgences were formally defined as the remission of temporal punishment for sin under specific theological conditions. Abuses in their promotion and sale became a major scandal and a catalyst for the Reformation. It is therefore more accurate to say that people were sometimes led to believe spiritual penalties could be reduced through church-mediated practices, rather than simply “paying the church to shorten time in purgatory.”

Modern marketing and advertising are largely secular institutions. For that reason, the most illuminating distinction is not always between religion and secularism, but between partnership-oriented and domination-oriented cultures along the partnership–domination continuum. A secular consumer society can distort needs and wants in ways that function similarly to distortions produced by religious hierarchy.

What is being sold differs, but the underlying social message can remain the same: some belong to the in-group, while others are pushed to the margins. Separation becomes normal rather than a caring connection. To feel valued or fulfilled, individuals are encouraged to defer to consumer messaging, institutional authority, or both.

We live in an era of competing myths—not a simple binary, but a crowded marketplace of meaning. Alongside multinational corporations and transnational movements, traditional religions continue to shape the lives of billions of people. Not all major world religions are monotheistic—Hindu traditions, for example, are internally diverse and are often described as polytheistic, monistic, or henotheistic depending on the school—but all large systems of belief construct narratives that organize identity, desire, and belonging.

This dynamic is visible in desires that go beyond basic needs—things people feel they require but that are often socially manufactured wants. There is a symmetry between longing for eternal life and longing for eternal youth: both can be leveraged by institutions that promise fulfillment while maintaining dependence.

Across both secular and religious myth-systems, a recurring pattern is the logic of domination: comply, conform, purchase, or obey—or risk exclusion, shame, punishment, or loss of meaning. In consumer culture, the mechanism is buying; in some religious systems, it is fear of spiritual consequences. In functional terms, both can reduce human flourishing to submission to external authority. Both systems can end up delivering the same pressure: do as I say.

Jacobsen: Whether it is telling people they need to buy more, or that they need to support the church, the mosque, or some other institution—because those institutions present themselves as intermediaries between the individual and a punitive, male deity—there seems to be a shared structure at work.

Is there one key difference, though? In corporate advertising, the promise is focused on an idealized terrestrial life: eternal youth, perfect memory, bodily enhancement. Take this pill, and you will become better. In religious myths, by contrast, what is promised is usually perfection in an entirely different realm.

Eisler: Consider Islam, for example, where rewards for martyrdom are explicitly located in the afterlife, not in this world. More broadly, many religious traditions have emphasized that this life is not what ultimately counts. That logic even appears, somewhat unexpectedly, in Buddhism.

Buddhism incorporates the principle of not harming, but it is framed as a negative command rather than a positive vision of flourishing. The result can feel strange, even pathological. Advertising operates similarly, yet it passes as usual for people who have been conditioned to listen either to the priesthood of marketing or the priesthood of religion.

Jacobsen: A central component of mental health is functional reality-testing: being in touch with the world, understanding social dynamics, and maintaining a coherent internal sense of self. Do these promises—whether extraterrestrial and heavenly, or terrestrial and consumer-driven—create conditions under which people may struggle to maintain psychological health?

Eisler: They tend to create dependence on a higher authority. You will receive something if you buy or if you obey. In consumer culture, the higher authority consists of those who sell and market products. In religion, the higher authority is framed as divine, mediated through institutions. In both cases, agency is diminished.

People become more like puppets on strings than active, healthy, autonomous human beings. This is why the crucial distinction is not between secularism and religion, but between domination and partnership. That is why I introduce the domination–partnership continuum as a worldview.

Jacobsen: It is often framed as a social scale because human beings are a social species. 

Eisler: Yes, from birth onward, we are interdependent. We rely on caring connections to survive and to thrive. Research on infants in orphanages shows that the absence of a loving connection negatively affects brain development itself. Some children do not survive at all.

Jacobsen: Do we see different forms of pathology along that social scale? The distinction should not simply be secular versus religious. However, within the domination–partnership model, that contrast may still be analytically useful in this case. In corporate systems, the pathology often emphasizes radical individualism, which produces isolation and social fragmentation.

In religious systems, by contrast, there is often genuine community, which is frequently noted as a strength. Yet, as you suggested earlier, it is often a community structured around a male authority figure—a priest, an imam, or a rabbi—who holds varying degrees of unquestioned power.

Eisler: These figures function as intermediaries between individuals and a supreme male deity. That mediation confers power. Marketers also hold power, even though they typically operate as employees of transnational corporations. They draw on secular knowledge, including insights derived from science, to influence behaviour and sustain patterns of consumption. In both cases, people are kept dependent—either on buying or on obedience.

I remember visiting a basilica in Rome and reading that if you knelt up the steps with a contrite heart, your time in purgatory would be reduced by a specified amount. There was, of course, a theological caveat—the requirement of sincere contrition—but the transactional logic was still present.

In both systems, some form of reward is exchanged for compliance. Churches receive donations; corporations receive purchases. Religion, however, is a two-edged sword. The Catholic Church, for example, has done immense good. At the same time, its history includes episodes such as the Crusades, including campaigns like the Albigensian Crusade, which targeted fellow Christians. These events reflect a troubling alliance between religious institutions and secular rulers—emperors, kings, and other authorities.

Many people come to treat these arrangements as simply “reality,” and that is part of the problem. The deeper reality is that no amount of consumption can replace a caring connection. While many religions explicitly criticize materialism, it is also problematic to base one’s life entirely on what is promised after death, on what is framed as life beyond this so-called vale of tears. Much of this functions as propaganda for maintaining domination systems.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and for your time, Riane.

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.