The Key to Change for Humanity?

Thank you. I am a writer of quite a few books. In fact, one of my books just came out recently in a new German edition. In English, it was The Real Wealth of Nations.

All my recent books, over the last 30 years, starting with The Chalice and the Blade, which is also available in Europe, are really based on my multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, historical research. It has attracted quite a bit of attention because it is what we might call whole systems analysis. That is, unlike most studies of society, of the economy, it does not marginalize or just ignore the majority of humanity: women and children. And once you take this into account, you are able to see connections that are otherwise invisible. Yes, the status of women, the status of children: these are not just, quote, women's issues or just children's issues, but they're key social issues.

And my most recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2019, really shows how the evidence from neuroscience, which shows that nothing less than our brains develop in interaction with environments, which for humans are mainly cultural, of course, especially in the first five or so years of our lives, really backs up the new categories that I've introduced: the partnership system and the domination system, or rather the partnership-domination social scale, which transcends conventional categories like right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern, et cetera.

So that's me. I am very passionately committed to this work, because what it shows is not only that a better way of living and making a living is possible, but that it is actually deeply rooted in the real story of our past.

That takes me back to The Chalice and the Blade, which was the first book reporting findings from this research. What we know today is that we have been told a false story. The caveman cartoon: in one hand he's got a club, a weapon, and with the other hand he's dragging a woman by the hair. And we think nothing of showing this to children before their brains, much less their critical faculties, are formed. So what does it say? It says male dominance, violence, inequality: that's just human nature, right? It's always been that way, and by definition it always will be that way.

Number one, we know today from neuroscience, for example, that the pleasure centers in our brains light up more when we share and care than when we win and dominate.

But there is also evidence, and it is an enormous amount of evidence, from archaeology, from anthropology, from linguistics, even from DNA studies, that shows that for literally thousands and thousands of years, human culture was more generally equitable, more peaceful. War, we now know, despite what we're told, is only between five and 10,000 years old. That's a drop in the evolutionary bucket. And yes, it was more gender-balanced. In other words, it was oriented more to the partnership rather than the domination side. My books and articles, and my speaking and teaching, have focused on this. It's very important that we know the real story about human nature and the real story about our past, because otherwise we think we're stuck.

Now, I've introduced four cornerstones that we must shift from domination to partnership. One of them is of course stories, narratives, but also language, because our language keeps us trapped. Think, for example, of the only two categories in English, and I think in most European languages, for relations between women and men: matriarchy and patriarchy. And what's the choice? Either fathers rule or mothers rule. There is no partnership alternative in it.

And as for right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western: for one thing, there have been oppressive, repressive, violent regimes in every one of these categories, whether it was Hitler, the Nazis, or whether it was Khomeini in Iran, which you are familiar with, or ISIS; religious, secular, leftist, Stalin in the former Soviet Union. It doesn't really matter.

But for another, if you really think about it, and this fragments our consciousness, every one of our conventional categories, like conventional studies of human society, either marginalizes or ignores women and children, the majority of humanity. So we can't see the connections, and we can't see that, yes, the partnership configuration is very different from the domination configuration.

And it's not a coincidence: whether it was Khomeini in Iran, and I mention Khomeini because you're Iranian, or Hitler in Germany, or Stalin in the former Soviet Union, or the Taliban, or ISIS, they are very different, but for all of them, a top priority is always either imposing or maintaining an authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated and highly punitive family. This is not a coincidence. So we have to consider the family, and the new multidisciplinary work that is beginning slowly to emerge in our very siloed universities shows [this].

They were not matriarchies. They were not matriarchies; they were more partnership-oriented. See how the language gets us trapped: if women had some power, it was a matriarchy. No, it was more partnership-oriented. So when people say that there is no evidence of matriarchy, they're right. Men also had [power]. [Women's] position was nothing like what the position of women later became: subordinate, helpers, basically male property. So I really need to correct that.

But to answer your question, my work draws heavily from new approaches, new theories about living systems, and societies of course are complex living systems: about how complex living systems maintain themselves and how they can undergo transformative change, from chaos theory, from nonlinear dynamics, from self-organizing theory. I've introduced cultural transformation theory, which incorporates some of this thinking.

And what it shows, to answer your question of how we got to this place that is really taking us to an evolutionary dead end unless we shift, with climate change and with weapons like nuclear and biological warfare, et cetera: it was during a period of great systems disequilibrium. There were enormous climate changes, armed invasions, huge technological changes.

But just because we shifted five to 10,000 years ago, and began in different places, at different speeds, to shift towards the domination side, doesn't mean that it had to happen. I am neither an environmental determinist nor a cultural determinist. I think that we have to leave that behind.

And my approach is also not linear. We've been taught that the story of human culture is a straight line, right? From, quote, barbarism to, quote, civilization. Well, you look at some of the civilizations, and they're pretty grim, aren't they? Whether it was a Chinese emperor, or an Arab sheikh, or a Hindu [ruler] during domination times, or Nazi Germany, or Khomeini's Iran. It's nonlinear. It's a nonlinear theory, and it is really supported by evidence rather than just by a worldview. And it introduces a new way of thinking about our past, our present and, most importantly, the possibilities for our future.

It's more than a couple of decades that I've been working on this. I was born where you now live, in Vienna. And when I was very small, a gang of Nazis came into our home on Kristallnacht and dragged my father away. So I really think that my work is very deeply rooted in that early experience. But of course, I think of my life really like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together, because there are so many different elements in my background.

My first job was with an offshoot of the RAND Corporation, the System Development Corporation, where, way back when nobody was talking about systems analysis, I learned about it. Now it's become a popular term. I'm also an attorney, and pattern recognition is really part of being a lawyer, because people don't come to you and say: apply section 1222 of the civil code to my case. They say: oh, this and this happened. And then it's up to the attorney, isn't it, to figure it out.

But to go back to the roots: I witnessed cruelty, destructiveness and insensitivity, but I also witnessed something else that today I call spiritual courage. It was my mother who displayed that courage. I call it spiritual courage because it's not the courage to slay the dragon, like we're taught is courage, but the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. She recognized one of the young Nazis as a former errand boy from the family business, and she got furious: "How dare you do this to this man who has been so kind to you? I want him back now."

She could have been killed. Many Jewish people were killed on Kristallnacht, [named so] because of all the glass shattered in Jewish homes, in synagogues, in businesses. But by a miracle, she wasn't. By a miracle, with some money passing hands, she obtained my father's release. By a miracle, we escaped.

And that led me to the question that animates my research: is all this cruelty, insensitivity and destructiveness inevitable, as we're told when we talk about human nature, or are there alternatives? And if so, what are they?

To answer that question, I immediately could see that the old social categories don't answer it, because there have been terrible regimes in every one of them: right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western, Northern. And by then I also realized something else: we were looking at society through a very distorted and narrow lens that really does not take into account, by any means, the whole of society, the majority of society, women and children.

And therefore what we know today from neuroscience, to really fast forward to Nurturing Our Humanity, really is so important. Because what does it tell us? It tells us that nothing less than how our brains develop, and with this how we feel, how we think, how we act, how we vote, [depends on it]. Why, after the Arab Spring, did people vote for a repressive regime? You have to ask yourself that question. Because it felt more familiar. You have to take the whole, including the family, into account.

Now, fortunately, not everyone raised in domination families grows up that way. But we also know something very interesting from neuroscience, and this is all in Nurturing Our Humanity: the parts of our brain that help us really be resilient and see change and go with change are less developed in the brains of people who consider themselves very conservative, in my language, domination-oriented. They eventually get the change, but it takes them a long time.

So what do you get? You get climate change denial. You get election result denial. It's follow the leader, follow the authority figure. You get COVID-19 denial. This makes no sense, does it? But it does, if you look at the whole picture and understand that this is really something that we have to address.

So the four cornerstones I've introduced start with childhood, go on to gender, and then go on to economics. But beyond capitalism and socialism: we need both markets, businesses and government policies, as COVID-19 shows writ large, but a caring economics of partnership. And I can talk more about that. And of course, narratives and new language, because, as Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them, and the language keeps us trapped, doesn't it?

All four of these pillars are aspects of culture. But if you notice, they're not the aspects that have been emphasized in most theories of social change.

If you look at modern history through the new lens of the partnership-domination scale, you begin to see something that otherwise would [not] seem obvious: every single modern progressive social movement has challenged the same thing, a tradition of domination. Whether it was, in the 1700s, [the challenge to] the divinely ordained right of kings to rule their, quote, subjects; or the 18th and 19th century feminist movement challenging, again, the divinely ordained right of [fathers] to rule over women and children in the, quote, castles of their homes; whether it was the abolitionist and then the civil rights and the anti-colonial movements, challenging again another divinely ordained right, of a, quote, superior race to rule over inferior ones; all the way to the environmental movement, challenging our once idealized dominion, domination, conquest of nature.

But if you look at these movements, they have focused primarily on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid, politics and economics as conventionally defined, because I define them differently. And they left in place the foundations on which domination systems have kept rebuilding themselves, in regression after regression: whether it was the Nazis, whether it was Stalin, whether it was Khomeini, whether it's the Taliban or ISIS.

You have to understand that these domination regimes all have the same configuration: an authoritarian family and tribe or state; a rigid ranking of man over woman, and of "masculinity", as defined or misdefined in domination systems, over the soft, the feminine, caring, caregiving, non-violence; and a high degree of built-in abuse and violence, because how else are you going to maintain these rankings of man over woman, race over race, religion over religion? Do you see what I'm saying? There is some violence in partnership systems, people lose it, but it doesn't have to be built into the system. And of course, very different stories and language.

If we start looking at society from that perspective, then we see that we really have to pay much, much more attention to these foundations. Whether it was the chador that became the flag of Khomeini's Islamic dictatorship: this is not a coincidence.

I really want to talk about gender for a moment, because it's so drilled into us, especially into people who consider themselves liberal, that these are just women's issues or children's issues. Why? Because in our universities there's hardly anything. I woke up one day and I realized: my God, in all my years of higher education, there had been hardly anything by, about or for people like me, women. It was a big aha. It was really: whoa, something is wrong.

So really, we have to understand that this model of our species, of difference, beginning with the difference in form between the female and the male, is a template for what I call in-group versus out-group thinking. Superior, inferior; dominating, dominated; being served, serving. It's a template. So it's not coincidental, whether it's Shia against Sunni or Sunni against Shia in the Middle East, or whether it's racism or antisemitism in the West. It doesn't really matter. It comes from this view that difference means there are only two alternatives: you either dominate or you're dominated, just like with matriarchy and patriarchy. There is no partnership alternative. And in reality, not only is there a partnership alternative, but we're finding it is much more effective, including economically effective.

People tell me they read my work and it's full of aha moments, because things that seemed random and disconnected suddenly make sense. But gender: we have inherited, Xerxes, and I think this is really important, a gendered system of values that goes along with this male-superior, female-inferior model of our species, where anything stereotypically considered soft, feminine, caring, caregiving, non-violence is devalued. You know what the socialization of, quote, real men is: not being like a woman. In domination systems that's very negative, right? That's how it has been, but it deprives both men and women of their full humanity.

And the good news, of course, is how many men today are, for example, diapering babies, feeding babies, doing, quote, women's work, for which they would be despised, and are despised, in domination systems. And how many women are trying to be assertive. In men, aggressiveness is highly valued; in women, it's: you must not assert yourself. But women are taking on more leadership positions, et cetera.

So we're seeing movement towards partnership, but it hasn't been understood to be key to the change. Really changing our definitions of humanity, of being human, of masculinity and femininity, is a key to change. My work shows that. And as I said, the good news is that we're seeing changes, but not fast enough. People need a new worldview that connects the dots.

I think that we have technologies of communication to do it. In a sense, it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we are seeing the shortening of our attention spans, which is very bad, because we have the capacity to make connections, to see patterns, but it's very hard to do it if you're jumping from one thing to another. But on the other hand, we do have technologies of communication.

I believe, strangely enough, that because the domination system is taking us to an evolutionary dead end, [and] an ethos of domination and [advanced] technology is a lethal mix, in a strange way that is a sign of hope. I also see hope in COVID. That may sound strange, but it was a way of stepping back, and people are beginning to talk about what I talk about: let's not go back to the old normal, where even in the wealthy United States one quarter of all children, one quarter of all children, lived in poverty. We don't want to go back to that normal. People are beginning to talk about creating a new and better normal.

And of course, you have 70 million people who voted for Trump, who are living in a completely virtual alternative universe. Follow the leader: if the authority figure, whether it's a pastor or whether it's Trump, tells them something, it has to be [true]. It is really fascinating, isn't it? So we see that the struggle for our future is not between right and left, religious and secular, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern. It is between these two configurations.

And we have to shift these foundations, starting with childhood. We see trends towards what I call partnership parenting: authoritative, but not authoritarian, and certainly non-violent. To hit a child, think about that for a moment, to hit this helpless human being, that's wrong. But it's also preparation for learning that it is very dangerous to question authority, no matter how crazy, no matter how [unjust] it is.

So we now have about 50 nations, pioneered by Sweden. Some of the Northern European nations have been moving to the partnership side: more gender balance, more women in government, more caring policies, universal health care, child care, very generous paid parental leave. These are huge. These are partnership policies. These are caring economics policies. But Sweden also pioneered a law that said that it's against the law to use physical discipline against children, and they launched a massive educational campaign.

So you asked me what we need. We need a massive educational campaign to show people that there is a partnership [alternative], to show that childhood and gender are central to the shift [we need] to survive and thrive, and that in our post-industrial age we need new measures of economic health. We're developing such a measure. We know from neuroscience today that if we are to have that high-quality human capital that economists keep talking about, right, flexible, creative, resilient people who can work in teams rather than just giving or taking orders, it starts in childhood.

So we have to turn reality right side up. And it can be done if enough consciousness changes. That is what this work is about, because [it leads to] action, to policy. I introduced the term human infrastructure already in 2007, and now President Biden is using it. I wrote a book, The Real Wealth of Nations; the subtitle is Creating a Caring Economics. It got co-opted to mean only the care economy, rather than an economy that has as its goal caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for our natural life support systems. That is what we need, of course.

But we are moving. There are also 70 million people who are in some kind of crazy domination-oriented reality, so we have a lot of work to do. But it can be done, and change does happen. Change does happen. Change has happened not only from partnership to domination, but [also toward partnership] during the disequilibrium, the dislocations of, first, the industrial revolution and now the shift to the post-industrial knowledge-service age. We're seeing a lot of change, so it can happen.

It's absolutely the wrong measure. Yeah.

Yes. Of course. GDP is the result of what I call domination economics. And it isn't just capitalism, it's also socialism really, because of both Marx and Smith, who are still taught in economics schools today. In their time, caring for people was to be performed for free by a woman in a male-controlled household, so much so that even as late as when Marx wrote, and in the 1900s, many of the laws still said that a woman, a wife, because most women married, could not sue for injuries inflicted on her. Only her husband could, for loss of her services. So that's what we've inherited.

So GDP, of course, [does not count care] as, quote, productive work, because both Marx and Smith relegated care work to reproductive rather than productive. All right. So what does GDP include as productive? Activities that actually harm and take life. Selling cigarettes, selling unhealthy fast foods, and the resulting medical costs and the resulting funeral costs: they all make GDP go up, don't they? A tree is not part of GDP, even though we depend on trees to breathe, unless it's dead, unless it's chopped down.

But not only does GDP include as, quote, productive the negative, it fails to include as productive the activities in the non-market economy: in the natural economy, in the volunteer community economy and in the household economy, because the system was simply set up to exploit those. I mean, it was domination economics.

We at the Center for Partnership Systems are developing [an alternative]. We launched, in 2014, what we called Social Wealth Economic Indicators: metrics that show the economic value of investing, the return on investment if you will, from investing in caring for people, starting in childhood, and investing in caring for our natural life support systems. We now have a team of economists working, because there are 24 of these indicators, and that's a lot of indicators, to condense and upgrade them into what we call a Social Wealth Index. Hopefully by the end of the year, we'll have the first prototype of this index.

It is different from other GDP alternatives, which don't focus on women's work, on gender again, on caring. But also because it not only looks at where we are, a snapshot of quality of life as it is today. It also looks not at the outputs but at the inputs: what investments are needed for a better quality of life.

So for example, when we launched the Social Wealth Economic Indicators, and you can find out more about them at centerforpartnership.org, the United States, for example, invested less than half the OECD average in family support. And not coincidentally, the United States has the highest infant mortality, the highest maternal mortality and the highest child poverty rates of any developed nation. We have to connect the dots, don't we? And again: family, women, too.

Yeah. And we have to remember that people do collaborate in domination systems. Cartels collaborate, gangs collaborate, invading armies collaborate. We're talking about the governing values, and that takes us back to the gendered system of values. In other words, yes, partnership systems are based on mutual respect, mutual accountability, mutual benefit. But there are hierarchies too, what I call hierarchies of actualization, empowering rather than disempowering. We read about it, it's the trend in that direction, even in the management literature, but it is not placed in context. We need to understand that this is part of the shift from domination to partnership.

I spoke at the United Nations, at a session organized by the country of Bolivia on harmony with nature, and I made the point: you cannot tack harmony with nature onto a fundamentally imbalanced system. You really need whole systems change. And that's happening in bits and pieces, but unfortunately not as yet, because this new worldview is not yet mainstream. We have to make partnership mainstream, make partnerism mainstream, because then people feel empowered. They stop fighting each other for the scraps, because that's how the domination system maintains itself.

And really, we can move, but we have to pay attention to these four cornerstones, [starting with] childhood. And there are trends in that direction. Even the American Psychological Association, last year or the year before, finally said spanking is not only ineffective as a means of discipline, but it is harmful, not only physically but psychologically. It is all part of the movement from domination to partnership.

So I do these interviews to get these ideas out, because people aren't reading books as much. I wish they would, because my books are very accessible. They have tremendous amounts of evidence, but they're written well, I've been [told]. It's just a fascinating story, really. And certainly my book on economics is getting a lot of attention now, because the times have finally caught up, or are beginning to catch up, to the need for a new way of thinking, and therefore new policies, and a new, better way of living and avoiding disaster.

And you are part of the partnership movement. I can see that.

We have challenged paradigms. I sometimes say as a joke that when I get really depressed, I think of the European Middle Ages. Why? Because they looked a lot like the Taliban, with the Inquisition and the Crusades and the witch burnings. Women had no rights, children, nobody had human rights. If you had said human rights then, people would have thought you were crazy. St. Augustine said that for anyone to question their status in life is like a nose wanting to be an eye. Can you imagine?

And so we have changed, but we have had regression after regression, and we can only avoid those by really paying attention to these four cornerstones. This is very practical. This is not [theory]. This is reality, backed up by neuroscience.

So I have confidence that we humans are very creative. Look, everything around us is a human creation, and I don't just mean the furniture of the houses. Our culture, our economics: they're all human creations. We can recreate them. That's what I'm counting on. And I want to be part of helping to guide that shift from domination to partnership, to a world that is not perfect, not a utopia, but what I call a pragmatopia: practical [and possible].

It needs to be essentially changed. And I'll tell you, I wonder how people can think that we can continue with an economy that depends on overconsumption, depends on overconsumption, when it's taking us to a disaster. Of course it needs to change.

But I think that we have to change the definition of what is and is not productive work. We always have to go to basics, and that takes us again back to the gendered system of values, right? And to getting economics schools to stop dividing [work] into productive and reproductive. Feminist economists are talking [about this]. It's crazy. The production of human beings that are creative, that are resilient, that can work in teams: that is the most productive work. And we can do this all through life. We're amazing creatures.

So it's a choice. It's the truth. And I hope more and more young people in particular will make the choice to think and act and create differently.

It's difficult for me to choose. This is like choosing among children: who do you love more? I have to say that one of my favorite books that I wrote is called Sacred Pleasure, and it's about sexuality and spirituality. You would love it, by the way, if you haven't read it yet, because it foreshadows so much.

But probably, I think you have to take them all together, because The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure really look at how in the world we got to this mess and what our possibilities are. Then I started to write books looking at specific aspects of society: on education, Tomorrow's Children. And then I wrote a book that's sort of a self-help [book], The Power of Partnership, on seven relationships and how they differ depending on how much we relate to either end of the partnership-domination scale. And then I wrote my economics book.

The economics book is extraordinarily timely now, I would say. But so also is The Chalice and the Blade, so also is Sacred Pleasure, and so also is Nurturing Our Humanity, because of the neuroscience that it brings to bear. So I find it very difficult to answer your question about what is the one book.

I usually ask people to start with The Chalice and the Blade. But the German edition doesn't have the epilogue that I wrote on its 30th anniversary, bringing it up to date, bringing it up to the Trump years. So if you can, get the English one, the 57th printing or a later one. Get the new one instead of an old one, because then you'll have this.

So, Xerxes, I don't know what to say. I'm going to leave it to you, and your readers, to let me know which you think is the most important.

Thank you, Xerxes. Thank you. Bye bye.