Partnership Studies 17: Partnership Models, Human Futures, and Cultural Transformation
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/16
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 wide-ranging conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler discusses the core differences between domination and partnership models and why fragmented worldviews hinder our understanding of social systems. She explains how her framework of relational dynamics reveals overlooked drivers of culture, from childhood environments to gender norms. Drawing on archaeology, neuroscience, and history, Eisler highlights evidence for earlier egalitarian societies and emphasizes the need for new stories that celebrate cooperative human potential. They explore how people shift toward partnership values, the cognitive barriers they face, and why cultural narratives must evolve to prevent humanity from repeating destructive patterns.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Between a domination and a partnership model, something that comes to mind is how we acquire knowledge, how we integrate knowledge, and how we use knowledge. What is the big difference between partnership and domination models—knowledge acquisition, attainment, and use?
Riane Eisler: The difference between the conventional way we’re used to thinking, feeling, and acting—which is very choppy and fragmented—and the partnership-domination social scale is that this scale is based on a whole-systems analysis. And it’s based on connecting the dots. If you only look at part of a system, you don’t see the whole system. So I had to introduce and develop my own method of analysis, which I called the study of relational dynamics. This methodology focuses on relationships: What kinds of relationships does a particular social system support or inhibit? And, second, what is the relationship between the major components of social systems that mutually support each other? That led me to the understanding that our old social categories fragment our consciousness. East–West and North–South focus on geography. Capitalist–Socialist focuses on economics. Left–Right focuses on politics. There have been regressive, repressive, awful societies in every one of these categories. And all of them either marginalize the majority of humanity—women and children—or, as in some religious ideologies, claim that this is how God and nature intended it to be: rigid gender stereotypes and the ranking of male and masculine over female and feminine.
We’ve all grown up with this. This is not a question of men against women or women against men. It is certainly not a question of shaming or blaming. It is a question of taking the scales off our eyes and looking at the whole system. And yes, looking at relationships.
We are now in a period of global regression to domination, which is a reaction—I cannot emphasize this enough—to movements during a period of massive disequilibrium, as the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the late eighteenth century, went into high gear over the following centuries. Movement after movement, organized social movements, all challenged the same thing: domination. But it requires a whole-systems view to understand this. The movement against the rule of kings over their subjects, the rule of men over women and children, the rule of a “superior race” over “inferior races,” and, ultimately, the environmental movement challenging human dominion over nature—over everything that moves on this Earth—are all connected. We’re not used to connecting the dots.
As for knowledge aquisition, in my book Tomorrow’s Children, I emphasize repeatedly what I recommend as a partnership education for the twenty-first century, both formal and informal. That means weaning us from violent entertainment. It is better than the Roman circus in its audiovisual sophistication, but it accomplishes the same thing. It normalizes violence, just as violence is normalized by violence in the family—what I call it, rather than “domestic violence,” which gets marginalized immediately. The victims of this violence are mostly women and children, some men, and many boys—many, many boys. That normalizes violence.
As for knowledge integration, conventional analyses of societies have left out formative dots, actually huge lacunae: childhood, family, and gender. How these translate into economics, worldview, stories, and language remains invisible to us because we have excluded them. And we do not recognize that a partnership alternative exists, even though so much evidence is coming at us in bits and pieces—again, very fragmented. Archaeologically, for example, Chinese archaeologists recently found a prehistoric society that was matrilineal and matrilocal, dispelling the caveman cartoon of a man holding a weapon in one hand and dragging a woman by the hair with the other. You would think we would connect the dots, but we rarely do.
Jacobsen: Blinding lacunae—our inability to see that these partnership models are available. What was the reason this Chinese discovery matters?
Eisler: The Chinese discovery is just one in a whole series of findings that arrive in fragments. Archaeological evidence shows, for example, that the handprints in Paleolithic caves were not primarily made by men but by women; the anatomical ratios of finger lengths differ reliably between male and female hands, and the prints match female patterns. Catalhoyuk was peaceful, gender-balanced, and more equitable for roughly a thousand years. We know these things. The data are there. But we do not connect the dots.
What does this mean for our species, for humanity? For thousands of years—as shown in Nurturing Our Humanity, which I co-authored with Douglas Fry, an anthropologist specializing in peace studies—we lived as gatherers and hunters. We have learned to reverse the phrase, putting hunting first, when actually most of our calories came from gathering, a sphere in which women played a significant role. We also now know that women, including pregnant women, hunted as well. Yet the evidence arrives in such scattered pieces that you must be a generalist to synthesize it—and you need a conceptual frame. That frame is the partnership–domination social scale.
Jacobsen: What do you think is the easiest element for people to integrate when leaning toward the partnership model, and what tends to be the hardest cognitive gap?
Eisler: It is tough for us to give up our stories, both religious and secular, even though we have inherited narratives that idealize the hero as a killer. Consider The Odyssey: Odysseus still depends on a woman, Penelope, to secure his power and rulership, and the text features influential female figures that offer clues to an earlier cultural layer. Yet his adversaries—Sirens, Charybdis—are portrayed as monstrous females whom he must defeat or outsmart. He uses Calypso and Circe as sexual conveniences. The double standard is already firmly in place. Penelope is idealized for weaving and unweaving her tapestry to fend off suitors, while he freely exploits other women. It is an ethical mess, but we have learned to idealize these stories. We blame Eve or Pandora for humanity’s ills.
Jacobsen: What is your favourite story that most aligns with the partnership model?
Eisler: We are trying to create partnership stories—imagining what such narratives would look like. As we have discussed many times, the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy. That is simply the other side of the same coin of domination. The alternative is partnership.
We want enlightened men and women to take leadership. That is the new hero-and-heroine journey. But we face many obstacles.
Still, societies have changed before. Five to ten thousand years ago—which is a drop in the evolutionary bucket—our cultural systems shifted dramatically. And now, with nuclear weapons and climate change, we must move toward partnership quickly. But it will require tremendous effort and tremendous creativity—or else a terrible disaster will force the change.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Riane.
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