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Paradigm Shift
Stephen Marshall: Good morning Riane. We have so many things to touch on today but, to start, could you just give us an introduction of how it was that you became so involved with the study of history, of social systems and what you call the dominator model? Riane Eisler: I took a job, at one point in my life, as an assistant scientist at the Systems Development Corporation – it was an offshoot of the Rand Corporation. I lasted a very short time there. And even though their focus was on war games, it was a systems approach. So my work really looks at the system. Unlike most studies, I draw from a database that includes the whole of history, including pre-history and the whole of our lives. Not just politics and economics, like most studies, but… where we live, parent-child, woman-man relations, and yes, a database that includes the whole of humanity – both its female and male halves. And we all know that if we only look at part of the picture, we can’t see the connections between the different parts of the picture. We can’t connect the dots. And I began to see these patterns. I mean, anybody who uses this approach will begin to see what I call the dominator and the partnership models as two underlying possibilities that transcend time and place… and race… and East and West… and industrial or post- industrial, religious or secular, capitalist or communist. You begin to see patterns. Now for me and for the many, many people who are now using my work, writing about it, writing theses about it – there are actually some high schools where kids are really, really touching this stuff– this is something that is empowering for them. When you begin to have a name for something that you intuited - that you intuitively see - and you begin to actually see the configuration, what holds it together, then you are free to really get away from all of this information overload, all of these equally weighted bits of data. And you can really see what you want. More for yourself, in your own relations, and also how every one of us can become more intelligently and more purposefully involved in helping to accelerate this shift from what I’ve called a dominator to a partnership model. Now, I’d like to move into this whole issue of language and how it is used in our society. It seems as if we have been looking, for a long time, in our culture especially, for words to redefine the interactions and inter-relationships of various groups. Feminism, for example, had its way of speaking to the male power structure. But it didn’t necessarily position itself in a role that would extend beyond feminism. And that’s why I think that The Chalice and The Blade was so important. You use the word dominator and the whole idea of dominator cultures – And partnership cultures. Of course, as the anti-thesis. Can you explain to us why you use those words and what they mean in reference to our modern work? In my work over three decades, I have been looking at the long span of human history, trying to see patterns and connections that we need to understand if we are not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. And when I discovered those patterns, naturally because it was a discovery, there were no names for them. So I picked the terms dominator or domination model, and partnership - and sometimes I say partnership/respect - model. Dominator/domination model – hey, you know – it’s easy isn’t it? But a lot of people think that because I chose the term partnership – and it was a long search – that it means just working together. And I want to start by saying… people work together to dominate and to destroy. I mean, I saw it in my life. The Nazis worked together - and I happened to be a very little girl and my parents and I had to flee Nazi Austria, Vienna, where I was born. So that’s not the difference. The difference really is, in the domination model, the primary principle is ranking. You know, man over woman, man over man, race over race, nation over nation. And naturally, when you have to maintain rigid rankings, a lot of violence is built into the system. All the way from violence that many of us still are very familiar with, because it still gets transmitted. Child beating… you know, violence against children. What they call domestic violence, which people used to take for granted: "Oh sure, he beat her? Well she probably had it coming, right." All the way to warfare. These are built into this way of relating because, ultimately, those rankings are maintained by fear or by force. But… there is a continuum. If you move to the other side, you begin to see a very different way. And we’ve all had the intuition that this is possible. We’ve all experienced it in bits and pieces. But we haven’t seen the configuration. And the configuration that I saw was that, instead of this authoritarianism - strong men rule in the family or the tribe or state, with male dominance, domination of one half of humanity over the other - you have a system which is both politically and economically egalitarian and democratic. Equal partnership between the two halves of humanity. That’s basic to the model. And just about everything is constructed differently. You do have hierarchies, but power is exercised the way that people are beginning to talk about – as empowering rather than disempowering. Thank you – now for pure reference, could you define dominator and partnership in very simple terms? I think kids really get it. One of the things that we’ve done - because we work with schools at the Center for Partnership Studies - is we ask the kids to tell us: ‘What was your best relationship like?’ And they’ll tell us some things, you know: "I was treated with respect, and I didn’t feel scared," and you know, all of those things. And then: "Now tell us about your worst relationships." And it’s all of the stuff that comes with the dominator model. Now that’s how you’d explain it to a child. But, to people who understand that behaviors don’t arise in a vacuum… what part of our enormously large human behavioral repertoire - actually it’s called gene expression – what really is either inhibited or actualized depends, of course, on learning. And learning depends on our experience, on our culture, on our child-rearing, on our schools and even beyond that – on the political, economic, religious and, of course, educational and cultural system. So you see a very different configuration there. In the dominator model there are some core elements and in the partnership model there are core elements. Dominator model says strong men rule, be it in the family, tribe or state. You see the ranking of one half of humanity – the male half. It could be the female half, but the opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, that’s just the other side of the dominator coin - (It’s partnership, where there is this equal relationship, this equal valuing, ok, as an aside) - and a high degree of built in violence. You know, ‘spare the whip and spoil the child’. I mean, that’s part of our heritage, from earlier dominator times. But so is warfare, as a means of one nation imposing their will. It’s always somebody imposing their will, to rank themselves – to dominate over another. The partnership model or configuration – the Scandinavian nations are very interesting because of all the contemporary nations, they have been moving more closely – not ideal, not perfect, but consider they have both more political and more economic democracy. There isn’t this huge disparity between haves and have-nots, they have a much more equal partnership between the female and male half of humanity – I mean they have – what we could really talk about a participatory democracy. About 35-40 % of parliament is female. And they have certainly had women heads-of-State. But a very interesting thing happens, and this is basic: As the status of women rises, the valuing of those qualities and behaviors that are stereotypically in the dominator model associated with femininity – care giving and non-violence – also rise in status and social governance. So it’s not coincidental that the first peace academies - you know, we’ve got thousands of war academies – the first peace academies came out of the Scandinavian world. The first laws making it illegal - illegal – to hit a child in the family – came out of the Scandinavian world. The first experiments in what we today call teamwork, Scandinavian world – economics democracy. And it is not coincidental that care-giving policies, health care policies, child care policies, elder care policies, care-giving being stereotypically associated with women – they pioneered that, they pioneered all this including parental leave – paid parental leave… so you begin to see a configuration, don’t you? You used the word ‘fear’ to describe the source and foundation of the aggressive drive. Implying that dominators are scared of something because their behavior is out of balance. So then, what is the origin of dominator culture? Would you take it as far back as the birth of humanity itself? Or are there critical moments that give birth to dominator paradigms? Can you characterize the mot modern dominator culture from the perspective of it source? Well, one of the things that I saw and continue to see in ever more clear detail is something that we know from chaos theory, from nonlinear dynamics and also from my cultural transformation theory. It is that living systems are self organizing, self maintaining. But, during periods of great disequilibrium, such as ours, and such as a period that happened in our prehistory, they are capable of transformative change. And so what I looked at is, as history , as human history from the beginning, not a uni-linear progression. You know, we are told this stuff about, "Oh well, cultural evolution - it’s the rise from barbarism to civilization. And then you get the Nazis and you get Khomeini, you get the Taliban." And I said, "Now wait a minute, this is not a model that fits any reality that we know." Rather, if you look at history as the tension – at all of history as a multi-linear model – that there are these two basic underlying possibilities for structuring relations, be they intimate or international, be they with ourselves or with our mother Earth. And that they can take many different permutations. They can be religious, they can be communist, they can be capitalist… all kind of things. Eastern, Western and so on. Then you begin to see a multi-linear model and you see that all of history has really been the tension between these two, if you will, attractors (in the language of non-linear dynamics for organizing relations). And what we have also – and this is vital today – is our intuition that we live in a time that the old ways of doing things are not sustainable. That, if you translate that into adding the old dominator ways are not sustainable, what you see is a certain level of technological development – we’re at it – I mean nuclear, biochemical… I mean incredible technologies not to speak of the use of technology in the service of the conquest of nature. When you get to this point in technology, the dominator model begins to self-destruct. There begins to be a real conflict between human species and perhaps, even, planetary survival, and the maintenance of the dominator system. And our time now is a time when this struggle is really coming to a head. For the last three hundred or so years, we have seen strong movements toward partnerships and I can talk about that a little, but every inch of the way, it’s been resisted and there have been periodic regressions. Complex. But that’s wonderful. Let me ask you, when you looked at dominator and partnership cultures, did you ever have a tendency to look East-West – to look at it geographically? Or is that too simplistic an interpretation? In other words, would you say that these are inherent qualities to mankind or to person-kind, in general? Well, I think all human cultures, whether they are Eastern or Western - share the burdens of dominator legacy. Now, a lot of people flee East these days. But if we really look at the East, I mean take an example… if you really look at India, it is a place of so much inequity, so much barbarity, and so much suffering that it boggles the imagination sometimes for people to come and to tell us that they have a higher consciousness in India. I mean, little girls are starved slowly by their families… there are bride burnings - and it isn’t just against women. I mean, it’s the whole caste system. It’s the incredible gap between haves and have-nots. It’s all of the inter-tribal and inter-religious violence. My goodness, if they have such great consciousness that we should all go there… No, the issue is that there are ancient partnership elements in India. But, you know what? We don’t have to go to India to find those ancient indigenous partnership elements because one of the things that my work and the work of many other scholars now is showing is that in European and Western cultures, there were also earlier civilizations for thousands of years, not ideal… but they oriented more to the partnership model. OK. I want to get into world religions in dominator cultures. And, specifically, how religion is used to dictate ideals in these societies. Because I think there was a time when spirituality – or at least religion itself – and the idea of becoming closer to God was not a strongly communitarian ideal. Rather, it was reserved for the few. For the men. How did that affect our modern view of religion and spirituality, and, of God? I mean, does the dominator model penetrate that far? A great example of this is how religious leaders once condemned sexual pleasure but now they won’t condemn sexual violence. In know there’s a lot there… There is a lot of talk today about a ‘new’ spirituality. And we have to be very careful with this too. The dominator partnership continuum, it’s a great tool. I mean, I found it and by now so have millions of people who are using it in their world and in their lives. But if you really look at some of the New Age stuff that is coming out, it’s really a repackaging - isn’t it? - of old dominator myths in New Age clothes. Like, take, for example, the story of Iron John. I mean, what is it about? Well it’s the same thing you could watch every day on so-called action entertainment. The hero kills and then he gets to have sex. Same story, but it’s being packaged as this wonderful thing. Alright, if we really go back in history, we see that there is a reason of course, why people are trying to find a new spirituality. A lot of what has been religion and spirituality in the dominator model has naturally been to maintain the dominator status quo. Hindu religions: ‘Oh well, we’re recycling you and this is your karma and if you have to suffer, well that’s too bad.’ Or in Christianity in the Middle Ages: ‘It’s a veil of tears and the only thing you can hope for is a better after-life but only if you obey to the letter, the orders from the guys at the top of the religious hierarchy. Otherwise you’re going to burn in forever which is a very long time.’ OK, so… Yes, the search for a new spirituality is wonderful, but what I talk about is spiritual courage. Not only a spirituality that transforms us, where we can get in touch with our intuition - and our intuition says it is possible to live in the partnership model – we all want it. We all want love. We all want security. Let’s get on with it and build a society that supports this. Let’s transform ourselves so we can get rid of all that stuff that we all carry – you know, that all of us carry – it’s our heritage for dominator times. But look, for example, what we need is to, first of all, focus on childhood relations and stop replicating the abuse and violence in childhood. We have to really focus on gender violence. Those are basic models and it’s not coincidental that the places where you see the most warfare are also places where you have the most rigid male dominance and the most punitive child rearing. In the Middle Ages, just to give an example of how pathological some of our religious beliefs really have been, the Medieval Church condemned sexual pleasure – even pleasure in intimate relations. But do you know what’s sad? They never condemned sexual violence. So if we had the spiritual courage today to go to our religious leaders and say it is time – we urgently need you to take a position. Say it’s a sin… It’s a sin to hit your child. It’s a sin to hit your wife – or for your wife to hit you, for that matter. But you know 99% of the time, it’s the men abusing the women. This is a sin. Could you imagine what could really happen if people really heard that and heard that and heard that? And we would gradually begin to see some of the foundations for partnership societies being built. Let me ask you this question: When we talk about a shift towards a new paradigm – and I imagine that in your eyes, you’d like to see a shift towards a partnership paradigm - does that mean that we throw out all aspects of dominator culture? If not, what do we keep? What do we keep? Alright, if we really look at the whole span of our cultural evolution, one thing that we see and it’s really exciting – we see the movement to challenge the so-called divinely ordained Right of Kings. Or to challenge the so-called divinely ordained right of men to rule over the women and children in the "castle of their homes." Or challenging slavery – you know, the enslavement of one race and domination of one race over another. Or even the environmental movement, which is challenging man’s conquest of nature. They are all related. And a lot of people say, "Well, this is all very radical new stuff." But, actually, in very ancient traditions of societies we now know about, that oriented more to the partnership model, this was common. What we have today is a hybrid, it’s a mix of dominator elements and partnership elements. I just wrote a book called Tomorrow’s Children: Partnership Education for the 21st Century – from pre-school to graduate school – it’s a model and integrative model so that we aren’t just being reactive – so that we are being proactive. We need to have alternative narratives, alternative stories about what it means to be human. Once we have those - I mean, for example, when you learn about biological evolution, you usually learn that it’s very much with the dominator model – pure egoism, violence, fierce competition. But Darwin, himself, noted that as you come to the human level, other dynamics begin to come into play. And the new scholarship on evolution is telling us that co-operation – and in this sense, really, not just in group versus out group, OK, which is the dominator way, "OK we’re going to cooperate to beat you up, right?" But real co-operation… that that was a very important part of evolution. We are learning the enormous importance of the evolution of love in human evolution, of mother-child bonds. You know, you look at those books and women weren’t there – in the textbooks or in the dioramas – or, if they are there, they are sort of squatting on the floor someplace in the distance. You know, the drudge on the hide – is what one of my friends call them – the way women were represented. Well, mother-child bonds were a hugely important part of the evolution of love and we humans, we get biochemical rewards of enormous pleasure – by the grace of evolution – not only when we are loved and cared for. But also when we love and care for another, whether it’s a child or it’s a lover, a friend, a pet! So this needs to be balanced. So what do we retain of the dominator model? Do we have to throw it completely out? In some ways it would be wonderful, but actually no society can orient completely to one or the other. Maybe it can in the future, you know, after maybe a few generations of partnership child care and of partnership education worldwide, because it has to be global at this point. But for now, lets just start strengthening the partnership elements wherever we are. Whether it’s at school, whether it’s at home in our intimate relations. Whether it’s political… and let’s try to leave behind as much as possible of the dominator relations. And this is very important right now because we are in the period of massive dominator regression. Can you talk about that? How would you characterize the era which we live in right now in terms of the dominator reaction to its terminal paradigm? Well change, as we all know, those of us who have changed our diet or given up smoking, it’s not linear. You know, you slide back don’t you? And the same thing is true when you look at cultural change. Sure, over the last three, four hundred years we’ve seen enormous movement. I mean, this conversation – we would both be dead just about four hundred years ago. It would have been heresy to even contemplate. I mean, human rights… if you talked to somebody in the Middle Ages about human rights, they would have had no clue about what you could possibly be talking about. You know, every Sunday there was either a witch burning or a drawing and quartering. I mean that was the way it was in the good old age of faith. So I’m so amused – I’m not amused - I am saddened we are not taught our history. So change is not linear. During this time, there have been periods of regression and the stronger the grass roots partnership moves forward, the stronger the dominator resistance. And, of course, one of the most obvious things is the widening gap between haves and have-nots – the incredible re-concentration of economic power – of media – I mean it is unbelievable. It’s getting to be like the Medieval Church, which controlled everything - you know, before the printing press. But we can’t just fix it with technology. I mean even the Internet, which lends itself much more to partnership relations - it’s getting so commercialized and so controlled. So what we really need to deal with is looking at the whole picture. The tendency has been, in the last four hundred years, to focus primarily on changing what I call the top of the dominator pyramid – economic and political relations. But the base of that pyramid - on which it keeps rebuilding itself – is parent/child relations. Gender relations, intimate relations – the relations where we first learn that either respect for human rights or chronic human rights violations are acceptable in our society – it doesn’t have to be in our own home, but if they are acceptable in the society, we don’t have the base. So what we need to do right now is to also pay a lot of attention to the push back. Fundamentalism is not a religious issue. I mean, I know it’s full of religious rhetoric, but consider Christian fundamentalism – it really has very little do to with the fundamentals of Jesus’ teachings – of caring, non-violence, compassion. In fact, nothing. It is really a return to the fundamentals of the dominator model – a dominator family - where women are put back in their "traditional" - a code word for subservient - place. And children learn very early on that it’s very dangerous to question orders, no matter how unjust. We are seeing the regression, the push back - you know, all this rhetoric about family values. I mean we’ve got to come back and say, "OK, what kind of family do you value? If it’s an authoritarian family, hey I’m not with you. If it’s a democratic family, then hey – I value that too." In schools we are seeing the regression – the testing. What do you think that’s about? It’s about ranking again, isn’t it? And it’s about humiliating. Publicly announcing, you know, this school was on the bottom. Humiliating those on the bottom. But it’s about something else, too. It’s about pushing out all the wonderful things like environmental education. Multicultural education. Gender balance. Because if all you’re doing is forcing teachers to just teach to this test, you can easily get rid of it. So we have to focus on these issues which are the big issues. We are so used to thinking that globalization is the big issue. But you don’t have a prayer about globalization until you build the foundations. Look, if you have an economic model, which is the dominator model of one kind of person – a man – is put on this Earth to be served by another kind of person – a woman – you see it in the East and you see it in the West. Isn’t that a model that you can generalize, then, to all kinds of differences? How can you even begin to speak about economic equity if you have one person that’s doing the serving and the other person in that model is being served. And men don’t have such a good deal in the dominator model. I mean men are supposed to give these guys who want to acquire more territory their lives! I mean, their bodies, and they’ve been doing it all through dominator history. So it’s a miserable system for men too. Interesting. I read a book when I was in university about pedagogy and it talked about how every aspect of education was defined by men. And one of the most interesting observations they made was that if women had designed a classroom, it would never have been a square, with one person at the head. Rather, it may have been a circle with a person in the middle or there may have been a whole different approaches to learning. Could you give us a sense of what we should transform about the educational system in order to bring the youth – I think it was Dr. Kaku who said that this was the most important generation alive – closer to an understanding of the values of a partnership system? What would we need to do to redefine that system? Well partnership education consists of three interconnected elements: Process – how we learn and teach, Content – what we learn and teach, you know the curriculum, and Structure, what’s the learning environment. Let me start with structure. You know, sometimes I say you can’t sit in the corner of a round room. That just goes to show you how important structure really is, isn’t it? I mean, this is architectural structure but the same thing is true of social structure. It’s not so much a question of bad people, but bad structures. So the first thing I would say, if were staying with structure now, is if we want young people to really be prepared to live in a democratic society, then we have to teach it and you got to teach it experientially. I mean, there are schools, for example, we have worked with a number of high schools, where the kids sit on the committees that hire and fire teachers. Ok? They have a voice. It’s not the only voice but it’s their education. They’re involved in establishing the rules. You know, we have this mythology that youth has to be about rebellion. Well, in a dominator system, yes, it really does, because you either want to displace the people that dominate you or just get away from the whole thing, you know. It’s a mess. But if you have a partnership structure and you’re involved in actually working out the rules, you’re not going to have all of this rebellion and alienation and certainly you’re not going to have this horrible violence that you see today. So that’s structure and as I said you still have administrators and teachers and you have leadership. But it is shared leadership. So that’s for structure, but then there are two other elements that are essential. So inter-generational, right? Absolutely. Inter-generational leadership is shared. And, you know, little kids really get the partnership and dominator models. You involve a child – I mean I have grandchildren and this is one of the reasons that I wrote the book on education because I just feel so passionate that we are not giving young people the education that they need to meet the enormous challenges. Environmental, economic, personal, ethical, you know… you name it, technologically - that they face. But young people, babies, they are born with this joy in learning and with this sense of real comfort. They seek comfort. And, through dominator education, through dominator process, starting out early, we knock it out of kids. And it isn’t even adaptive for the post-industrial economy, if you really want to go there. You know it’s so sad, because this is the rationale for the regression now in education. But it is absolutely the wrong way to go. If you want life-long learners… if you want people who are creative, who are able to work in teams rather than just giving or taking orders, you need partnership education. Dominator education is not going to produce the "high quality human capital" that these people talk so much about. And I’m not minimizing the economy, it’s just that I am a little bit sad that we are looking at human beings as a grazing animal, you know. There is more to life than just eating - and that’s very important - but the whole development issue, our human potential for caring, for creativity, for love, for living good lives, for feeling a sense of higher purpose and meaning in our lives, where did it go? Well in dominator education it’s very hard to have that. Now I interrupted you. Do you want to do the other two… I’d love to. OK. Content is something I have always spoken about in education. Changing the narratives so that there are alternative narratives. For example, we tell kids ‘don’t be violent’, right? Especially to boys, because you know, most of the violence naturally is boys because what do we teach boys? Here is your toy gun. Here is your toy sword. Here is your toy weapon… right? And if you are a sissy, a weak sister, boy are we gonna humiliate you if you are non-violent.. OK? So we tell them, ‘don’t be violent,’ but what are the dates they have to memorize? The dates of wars. And where is the information about the non-violently achieved social reforms to which we owe everything from labor reform – even the evolution of child labor - to family planning? I mean, we have to balance this curriculum. That is one of the purposes of partnership content. But it’s more than that. It is to give young people a more accurate, more complete and way more hopeful picture of what being human really means. Process, of course, partnership process, really is very much related to content and structure. But partnership process, where we have made the most progress, is not enough. Because then kids think, ‘Oh well in this little niche, we are going to be nice and we are going to treat each other with respect, and everybody’s going to have a voice and I might even get to do some peer teaching.’ And, by the way, peer teaching – anybody that’s ever taught – the best way to learn is to teach it. I mean involve kids in peer teaching. OK, but if that’s all it is and they don’t get a sense that it’s possible in the real world, it’s not enough. That’s why partnership education is an integrative approach – content, process, structure. In your (Prophet's Conference) speech, you spoke about Zeus and how, in many mythological narratives, rape is the ‘sport of the gods’. To what degree are our myths ingrained with that dominator image and what are the specific values and norms that are being ingrained in both men and women from the teaching of history… from Zeus forward? If we look at Greek mythology, which we are told is so wonderful, we really see a very interesting thing. We see a mirror of the society of the time. I mean there is Zeus, the head honcho, and he is mean and he’s violent and he is constantly raping – not just women, but swans, cows… so rape - it’s a godly sport. If we keep teaching this kind of mythology or, for example, if we teach The Iliad, without pointing out putting it into its historical context... let me expand on that. Sure. At the beginning of The Iliad, there is this big quarrel between the king and the hero, right? And the moral question, as I was taught was, ‘Well who should get this prize of war - Briseis, the slave girl, a captured child.' That was the big issue; the hero or the king. Well, the real issue is what about Briseis? What about her? I mean she’s a human being. So if we teach these things, let us teach them in their historical context. Let young people learn about the Minoan civilization as well, from which the classical Greeks took theirs… Their architecture, you look at the Palace of Knossos. It’s those columns! You look at the deities – so many of them came from the Minoan culture and later into Greece. But the Myceneans were Indo-European invaders who took over this earlier more partnership-oriented culture. Now it’s very sad. I recently saw a textbook that finally included some of these earlier societies… the Minoan society and even Catal Huyuk – which is a Neolithic site - and I thought, ‘Wonderful!’ Do you know how they taught it? There was nothing to make you understand that Minoans were more peaceful, that women had high status, that they were the great craftspeople, that they were unique in the annals of civilization, that they didn’t acquire wealth the way their neighbors were beginning to, by going out and robbing other people and killing them, but because they made beautiful things and traded in them. No. All that they said was, ‘here was this civilization and the Myceneans took it over. Dominator history. As for Catal Huyuk, where the most prominent images are goddess images – not a word. Not a word. Nothing about figures in their sacred art… about a sacred goddess giving birth. Nothing about sexuality and birth and the cycles of life, being part of the sacred imagery. Nothing. So we’ve got to change this. We can’t just focus on deconstructing. I mean, how long can we deconstruct dominator systems? OK, we need to understand them but then we have to go to reconstruct. And this is really one of the great challenges today. So much post-modern art has just been total deconstructionism – cynical, hopeless… forget it. No we don’t want it to see sappy stuff, but we have a rich mystic heritage that we can draw from… from thousands of years, even from Western cultures, as I said. Because these societies were Western. Not to speak of other world regions in the Harappa Valley, for example, before the Indo-European invasions in India. In China, scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences traced the same cultural shift as I did and tested my cultural transformation theory there. Let’s draw some of our motifs from that. Because you can’t just take things away from people. You have to give people something. And those people, being us, healthier more truly life- and pleasure-celebrating imagery and myths. Is revisionism, therefore, a major part of dominator culture? The revision of history? Yes. I think that the revision of history is a major issue for us today. When Stalin came out of power in the Soviet Union, there was a revision of history. A lot of my work is re-visioning history and I like to think of it as re- visioning – not just revising it, but really re-visioning it in terms of, not only our past and our present, but the possibilities for our future. Resacrilizing. I love that notion. Tell us Riane, what is sacred now? What is still sacred in the dominator culture and what do we have to resacrilize? Well when I was writing my book Sacred Pleasure, which is a heresy - I mean it’s a heretical title, you know, Sacred Pleasure, I was just struck all the time by how much of our sacred imagery and it’s not just Western – I mean the Maharavata, they’re just chopping each other to bits! How much of it focuses on either the infliction or the suffering of pain and how few images we have. So… sacrilizing pleasure. In India you have some, but they are really a resurgence of the old partnership motifs. For example, some of the temple imagery, you know, the erotic imagery. So what is sacred to me - and I’ve gone through a rather turbulent spiritual journey in my life, which was not separate from my intellectual journey – it was really interwoven, the two were very much of one cloth. I began to understand that for me some of my most spiritual experiences weren’t with something otherworldly. They were when I touched my husband’s hand, when I look into my little granddaughters wonderful eyes, when I see a beautiful sunset, when I hear some absolutely moving music… they are experiences of connection – of a caring, joyful connection. I think that we deserve this kind of spirituality – that it shouldn’t just be the mystical experience and I know that in partnership living, these altered states of consciousness really can come to us naturally because we don’t have to be in so much denial. We don’t have to be so fragmented. We can really be fully present and, yes, feel the joy. Beautiful. If there is going to be a shift - I use the word paradigm shift or a world view shift - to a partnership culture, we know that the dominators are going to fight back. So how do partnership cultures, or partnership seeds which are growing into a future, who are non-violent, non-aggressive, how do they overcome that dominator culture which will seek to fight hand-to-hand combat? Yes. How do we do this and how do we effectuate change? It’s very difficult to say, "Oh, it’s going to be a snap." But consider, four hundred years ago, what was it like? I mean, people literally, every minute, risked their lives – not just their lives but the most hideous tortures - in order to challenge entrenched traditions of domination. The fact that we have come as far as we have – because of people like you and I – who said, "No! I want something better for me and for my children and for future generations. I want to free myself from this." Yes, the system seeks to maintain itself and the people on top of the dominator pyramid seek to consolidate their power. And that’s what’s happening in a dominator regression. But there are two things here. One is that right now, with all their privilege and rank – it’s like having a first class cabin on a rapidly sinking ship. And I think that a lot of people are beginning to understand that. So, that’s one hopeful thing. I mean, it’s a survival thrust of the species. The second thing is a lot of the people that I meet are from all walks of life including some of the people who sit in the top tiers. They don’t like it. They don’t mind the privileges of course, but they don’t like the system. They don’t like the price – they realize the price that we are paying. They want to free their capacity for caring and for empathy. But we have to change the rules of the game. And I’ve written a lot about what I call partnership economics. We have to get past capitalism, past communism to what I call a partnership economics that starts with giving real value to the work that keeps us all going – the work of caring and care-giving. We can’t even begin to think of caring policies unless we give - I mean, we pay less to a child care worker than to the person we entrust the car to. The person we entrust a child to, we pay less. So, yes, I mean there are non-violent ways of doing it. There have to be because if we do it violently… hey, we’re back to the Soviet Union, another dominator system. That’s not the answer. But the answer is really to just simply elevate art and music and education… I would love to see the youth culture shift from its cynicism, shift from where it really has gone. I mean, it’s at a nadir now. Wrestling and Eminem? Come on. How dominator can you get? Think symptomatically in terms of these two models. If we start changing the art, changing the mythology, changing the music, we can do a lot. |
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