Riane Eisler: A Caring Economy based on Partnerism

Riane Eisler is a walking story. A social systems scientist, cultural historian, and futurist, whose research, writing, and speaking and groundbreaking contributions have transformed the lives of many worldwide. Riane is the recipient of many honours, such as the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award earlier given to the Dalai Lama, and is included in the Great Peacemakers books as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.

She is the author of many books, including “The Chalice and the Blade”, “The Real Wealth of Nations”, and “Nurturing Our Humanity”, which focus on her innovative whole-systems research that offers new perspectives and practical tools for constructing a less violent, more egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable future. Riane is the President of the Center for Partnership Systems, which provides practical applications of her work, and editor-in-chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies published at the University of Minnesota.

In this exclusive interview for Community Index Magazine, Riane discusses the key role women play in a nation’s quality of life and the economic value of caring for people and for nature.

1.Your work and books, including the internationally acclaimed “The Real Wealth of Nations”, have inspired and transformed the lives of many worldwide. You are championing the “Partnership System”, focused on building a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on Partnership rather than Domination. Can you briefly describe what this concept means and why domination systems are “trauma factories”?

We are all familiar with domination in our own lives: top-down relations backed up by fear of pain, whether it’s physical, economic, or emotional pain. What we may not yet be familiar with is the family, social, and economic configuration of systems based on domination, or that this configuration heavily depends on what is internalized by us as normal, even divinely ordained, in our intimate family and gender relations.

Our conventional social categories such as right/left, religious/secular, Eastern/Western, capitalist/socialist (all of which we inherited from times when domination in families, economics, and all social institutions was generally accepted) do not let us see this configuration. Nor do they make it possible to see that there is an alternative to domination-oriented societies: the partnership configuration.

Only as we start connecting the dots, which requires including the majority of humanity – women and children – and the millennia of our prehistory, does all this become evident. Why? To begin with, neuroscience shows that what happens in children’s first five years impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, and with this how we think, feel, and act – including how we vote. This means that the nature of family relations, which are marginalized in conventional social studies and categories, are key elements of the interactive, mutually supporting configurations of either a partnership or domination-oriented system.

Our siloed, fragmented education makes it hard to see all this, so it is easier to understand it from a visual that shows these contrasting configurations.

All of which takes me to your second question: why domination systems are trauma factories? Through the lens of the partnership/domination social scale, we see that traumas start in domination-oriented families. These are families that are authoritarian and highly punitive, where male dominance is the ideal norm. Consider that Putin enacted a new law that lowered the penalty for family violence in Russia so that if you hurt or kill a child or other member of your family your penalty is lower than if you hurt or kill a stranger! Putin recognized the connection between families that use violence or the threat of violence as a means of control and a state that does the same. These are not coincidences, they are patterns!

Other institutions in domination-oriented systems also create trauma. For example, physical punishment of children in schools, such as caning, used to be the norm in the West and still is in much of our world, including some southern US states. This causes trauma, as does domination, top-down economics, which create artificial scarcities for most of the population – not to speak of the waste and destruction of resources through war and the failure to adequately support the “women’s work” of caring for children.

2.Gender equality is a key component of the partnership configuration. What alternatives are out there to injustice, cruelty and suffering?

In much of the West, in Canada, Europe, and the US, as well as in bits and pieces all over the world, there is a growing recognition of the importance of how the roles and relations of females and males (and everyone in between) are socially constructed. This recognition is basic to my research, which deviates from earlier methods that marginalize or leave out women and children. What my multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, trans-historical research shows is that how gender roles and relations are constructed is not, as we are still often told, “just a women’s issue” – in other words, a secondary matter. Actually, this is a key family, economic, and social organizing principle. So if we are to successfully build a future that is more just, sustainable, and humane, we must pay special attention to gender!

If we look around us, this is evident. In fact, those today trying to push us back to more rigid domination times pay special attention to gender, whether they are religious or secular, Eastern or Western, and so on. Consider religious societies like the Eastern Muslim Taliban or the Western Christian fundamentalists, where the subordination of women is clearly visible. Consider both fascist Hitler’s Germany and socialist Stalin’s USSR, where women and the “feminine” were culturally subordinated. Consider that these are all domination systems characterized by dehumanizing out-groups, whether “infidels” or Jews or people of colour.

The reality is that rigid male-superior, female-inferior gender stereotypes equate difference with dominating or being dominated, with being served or serving. This ranking of male and “masculine” over female and what is viewed as “feminine” is a template for in-group versus out-group thinking, and with it, as we see all around us, dehumanization and violence.

3.Based on your work findings, the Nordic nations seem to be more oriented towards a partnership system. How can a country like Romania bridge the gap between the willingness to implement the partnership framework and the reality on-site?

Yes, Nordic nations have more caring policies because they do not subscribe to the dominator norm of devaluing women and caring, which in domination systems is labelled feminine, whether in women or what are considered “effeminate” or “girlie” men. Romania has people who recognize that cultural systems and the values they normalize are human creations, and therefore can – and have been – changed.

Perhaps one way Romanians who want to move to a more just and sustainable world can start is by exposing that what we have been taught about our past is false.

”In reality, Balkan countries like Romania have a long prehistory of orienting more to the partnership rather than the domination side of the partnership-domination social scale.

This means spreading findings from archaeology, mythology, and even recent DNA studies, about our Western partnership prehistory. You can find much of that information in books such as “The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future”, now in 56 US printing and about 30 foreign editions. It is not yet published in Romania, though when it was recently republished in Spain, there were interviews and stories about it in all the major Spanish media.

4.How do you define the Caring Economy and what are the steps towards nurturing and caring for our planet and all the living systems on it?

As you noted, my book “The Real Wealth of Nations” details not only the problems with current economic operating systems, whether capitalist or socialist, but also proposes a caring economics of Partnerism.

Consider that both capitalism and socialism came out of early industrial times in the seventies and eighteen hundred – and we are today in the 21st century post-industrial knowledge-service age. So our current economic operating systems would be antiquated on that count alone. But the problem is deeper: both the “fathers” of capitalism and socialism perpetuated a gendered system of values: a system in which caring is coded “feminine” and hence out of bounds for the “real men” in charge. There is nothing in Smith’s or Marx’s writings about caring for nature, which both viewed as only there to be exploited. As for caring for people – for children, the sick, the elderly, for everyone – for both men and their economic theories, this work was to be done for free by a woman in a male-controlled household. Even in the mid eighteen hundreds, when Marx wrote, a wife could not sue for injuries negligently inflicted on her; only her husband could, for loss of her services! Not surprisingly both Marx and Smith called caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for nature, just “reproductive” rather than “productive” work – which is still taught in business and economics schools.

 It is also reflected in currently used metrics like GNP and GDP, where, for example, trees on which we depend to breathe, are only included when they are dead: as logs. Not only that, the work of care in households has only recently been valued through government policies like paid parental leave, pioneered by Nordic nations, and it is still available only in a few US states, rather than nationally, This devaluation of care work continues worldwide, even though a recent Australian study showed that if the unpaid work of care in households, still primarily performed by women for free, were included, it would be 50 per cent of the reported Australian GDP!

”So the first step is recognizing this fundamental problem. We need new metrics that show the enormous economic value of caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for our natural environment. Women and children are the mass of the world’s poor and the poorest of the poor, so shifting to a caring economics of partnerism that adequately rewards care work is essential if we are to reduce poverty.

So the first step is recognizing this fundamental problem. We need new metrics that show the enormous economic value of caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for our natural environment. Women and children are the mass of the world’s poor and the poorest of the poor, so shifting to a caring economics of partnerism that adequately rewards care work is essential if we are to reduce poverty.

It all starts with changes in consciousness. Let’s remember that all our gains in shifting from domination to partnership, from abolishing child labour and women getting the vote to even the idea that there is such a thing as human rights and that these must also be applied to protect the majority of humanity (women and children), all these gains were due to a small, in their time unpopular, dedicated group of women and men who were persistent and did not give up. We can each make a difference!

The interview was initially published in the bilingual yearbook Community Index Magazine no. 5. You can flip through it here: https://communityindex.ro/community-index-magazine-2023/