Two Social Categories: Partnership and Domination
Building a new world requires new ways of thinking. As Einstein said, the same thinking that created our problems can’t solve them. Many people understand that we need new categories that describe the kinds of cultures that support a more equitable, caring, and sustainable way of life. The old categories such as right or left, religious or secular, Eastern or Western, technologically-developed or undeveloped, and so forth, don't give us this information. The new social categories of the partnership system and the domination system do.
Much of modern history has consisted of organized challenges to traditions of domination, from the “divinely-ordained” right of despotic kings to rule their “subjects” to the “divinely-ordained” right of men to rule the women and children in the “castles” of their homes to the “divinely-ordained” right of one race or nation to rule over another. These are all parts of the movement to a partnership system.
But there has also been fierce resistance to changing this status quo and periodic regression to the domination system. If we closely look at these regressions, we see something ignored in conventional analyses. Those holding us back or pushing us back to more autocratic, fear-based, violent, and unjust times uniformly work to maintain or impose rigid rankings of domination in our primary human relations. The relations between the male and female halves of humanity and between them and their daughters and sons. There is a reason for this. These foundational intimate relations are where individuals first learn what is considered natural or unnatural, valuable or not valuable, possible or impossible, moral or immoral. This becomes the template for all human relations.
The cultural evolution of societies from pre-history to the present reflects the underlying tension between the partnership and domination systems as two basic alternatives for organizing how we think and live. These two systems structure our relations with one another and our natural environment and represent opposite ends of a spectrum of cultural possibilities.
Societies adhering closely to the Domination system have the following core configuration:
- top-down authoritarian control in both the family and state or tribe
- the subordination of the female half of humanity to the male half
- the devaluation of caring, nonviolence and other stereotypically "soft" values in women and men
- a high degree of institutionalized or built-in fear, coercion, and violence
Societies adhering closely to the Partnership system have a different core configuration:
- a more democratic organization in both the family and state or tribe
- the male and female halves of humanity are equally valued
- values such as caring and nonviolence are highly regarded in both women and men
- a low degree of institutionalized or built-in fear, coercion, and violence
