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Reclaiming True Human Nature: Evolving from Domination to Partnership
Riane Eisler is one of the most important scholars, thinkers, and visionaries of our lifetime. Her monumental body of work, which includes the well-known book The Chalice and the Blade (1987), provides us a view into the prehistoric reality of our species (which is, in many respects, far more advanced and far more civilized than much of more recent historic times), and provides us visionary way-showing, articulating what’s possible (and necessary) as we evolve beyond the “dominator” patterns that have precipitated the existential polycrisis of the Anthropocene, and heal the pathological root causes of dominator systems.
Having gazed deep into the mists of yore by examining the archeological record (pre-historic Eurasian, African, and Mediterranean cultures; notably Ҫatalhӧyük, Minoan Crete, and ancient China), Riane has plumbed the depths of our shared cultural heritage as well as the depths of our collective psyche – what Jung calls the collective unconscious – and has revealed for us a far more hopeful and compelling story of what lies at the root of human nature and what’s possible as we go forward along our shared evolutionary journey. Unlike the “dominator societies” we find pervasive throughout the more recent millennia of recorded “history,” which, she tells us are “trauma factories,” we “have an alternative… but we have to change our paradigm.”
In this special podcast interview, Riane shares the four cornerstone issues with us, which she also wrote about in an essay written exclusively for our forthcoming book: Our Biggest Deal: Pathways to Planetary Prosperity. In her essay, titled “Toward a Caring and Partnership Economy: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism,” Eisler describes the historic underpinnings of our dysfunctional systems and their more balanced alternatives, which (thankfully) are to be found in the indigenous and pre-historic cultural roots of our shared ancestries.
[[[*** You are invited to pre-order print and e-book copies of Our Biggest Deal, a collaborative project of the Y on Earth Community, using the discount code: OBD10 for a special 10% pre-publication discount at yonearth.org/ourbiggestdeal …AND, this week only (to celebrate our global community’s 2025 Climate Week happenings) you are invited to download a FREE PDF of the book as well – you’ll find the form via the same link!***]]]
Among Eisler’s many impactful publications are: The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), The Partnership Way: New Tools for Living and Learning, Healing Our Families, and Our World (1990), Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (1995), The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life (2002), The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating Caring Economics (2007), and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (2019).
PEACE BEGINS AT HOME SUMMIT – NOV. 29, 2025
[[[***YOU’RE INVITED: This November 29, 2025, Riane Eisler and several global leaders are offering a very special virtual summit: Peace Begins at Home: Changing the Roots of Violence and Authoritarianism. You may register for this historic summit at peacebeginsathomesummit.org. ***]]]
ABOUT DR. RIANE EISLER
Dr. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (hon) is internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and cultural historian. She is the author of The Chalice and the Blade (now in its 57th U.S. printing and 30 foreign editions), The Real Wealth of Nations (hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking”), and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press). Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor in Chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (published by the University of Minnesota). She is a childhood survivor of the Nazi occupation of Europe, and has influenced thousands of scholars, activists, and policy makers working to eradicate the scourge of authoritarianism from our cultural fabric.
PODCAST RESOURCES & RELATED EPISODES
https://www.peacebeginsathomesummit.org/register
Episode 157 – Soraya Afzali, Expert Political Scientist on the Dangers of Autocracy
Episode 154 – Sarah Arao, Founder, Mantle of Hope in Uganda
Episode 134 – Reverend Matthew Fox on Hildegard von Bingen and her “Viriditas”
Episode 75 – Dr. Jandel Allen-Davis on Race, Riots, and Reflection: Healing Our Communities
Episode 71 – Karenna Gore, Founder, Center for Earth Ethics
Episode 58 – Sarah Drew, Visionary Author, Gaia Codex
Episode 50 – Anita Sanchez on Women’s Voices, Indigenous Wisdom & the Sacred Hoop of Life
Episode 32 – Lila Sophia Tresemer, Co-Founder, The Star House Temple
PODCAST SPONSORS
A special thank you to our sponsors and supporters who make our Y on Earth Community Podcast possible and who have also supported the writing and publication of Our Biggest Deal:
AndCO Hospitality, Bluestone Life, The Brad & Lindsay Lidge Family Foundation, Clean Edits, Climate First Bank, Dobrosphera Kind Media Group, Earth Coast Productions, Gaia.AI, Goodstead Financial, Husch Blackwell, Launch Legal, Patagonia’s Home Planet Fund, Regenerative World Quest, The Riverside Boulder, Verona Rylander Philanthropies, and Wele Waters.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
5:00 – Aaron Perry
Welcome to the Why on Earth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today I have the distinct pleasure to introduce and host one of my personal heroes and incredible historian, sociologist, and futurist, Dr. Riane Eisler. Riane, it’s so great to have you here.
5:47 – Riane Eisler
It’s wonderful to be with you.
5:50 – Aaron Perry
I’m really excited about our conversation and about sharing with our audience some of the incredible writings that you’ve provided our world over the last few decades. And the impacts you’ve had on many thinkers, thought leaders, and folks working for deep systems change.
6:16 – Riane Eisler
I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you so much.
6:23 – Aaron Perry
Riane Eisler, both attorney and has an honorary PhD, is internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and cultural historian. She is the author of The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. Printing and in 30 foreign editions, as well as The Real Wealth of Nations, which was hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking, and Nurturing Our Humanity how domination and partnership shape our brains, lives, and future, which was co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry through the Oxford University Press. Rhian is president of the Center for Partnership Systems and editor-in-chief of the online interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, which is published by the University of Minnesota. So, Rhian, you have I have written such an incredible collection of books and articles. And the one that first grabbed me years and years ago, and I have to say it has been among the 20 or 30 most impactful books I’ve Read, is The Chalice and the Blade. And I know we’re going to talk about more of your current and forward-looking work, but I wanted to kick things off by inviting you to tell us just a little about Chalice and the Blade, which was published in 1987, and why and how that’s been such a foundational work to so many of us working in the world these days.
8:23 – Riane Eisler
Well, you know, my passion for this work is very deeply rooted in my own childhood. Of experiences as a child refugee with my parents from the Holocaust, from the Nazis. And that experience really led me to questions which my work years later, through a whole systems analysis, starting with the chalice and the blade, seeks to answer, which is why, when we have such an enormous capacity for caring, for consciousness, for creativity, why has there been so much violence, so much insensitivity, so much cruelty? And as I said, years later, I embarked really on 10 years. I had written some earlier books, a drawing from my legal book, background. One was no-fault divorce, marriage, and the future of women, predicting what was later to be called the feminization of poverty, that no-fault divorce would cause many formerly middle-class women and children to fall into poverty, not because it’s a bad law, but because it takes place on a very uneven playing field. And then I wrote with my partner and my late husband, David Loy, the Equal Rights Handbook on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which got endorsements from Aaron Alda and Carol Burnett and all the luminaries, really. And it was too late. The ERA did not pass, and as I predicted in that book, until then, constitutional protection had broadened always to include more people who are covered by it. And this was the first time, and no less than half of humanity, being enshrined in the Constitution in an amendment that simply said that no state or the federal government can discriminate on the basis of sex. It was rejected, and I predicted that that would usher in a massive regression, and it did. So, getting to the chalice and the blade, I went back to the questions of my childhood, which always, always… In fact, the first draft of Dissolution that I sent to McGraw-Hill, which was then a major publisher, I’m afraid I rather stunned the editor of the book, who reminded me, hey, you have a contract to write about no-fault divorce, because I was going into history history. And The Chalice and the Blade looks at the larger picture. It is a whole systems, multidisciplinary, transhistorical, including our prehistory. And of course, I found what is now being verified all over the place, that for millennia, for thousands of years, Before the 5,000 to 10,000 years of domination history, human culture oriented more to the partnership side of what I call the partnership domination social scale. And it has since been verified. In fact, you know that one of the most contemporary, just a few weeks ago, Chinese archaeologists found a matrilineal culture that was more egalitarian in all respects. You see, we make this mistake of thinking that the opposite of patriarchy is matriarchy, and it’s actually partnership. And this is what my work shows. Yes, equality between both forms of humanity. Instead of rigid gender stereotypes, and therefore ranking not only male but, quote, masculine over female, end quote, feminine. And these rigid gender stereotypes are really described already, and that whole system is described. And that book launched a lot of other books. And my thinking, as you know, expanded to really pay much more attention to childhood and to economics. I wrote a book called, as you said, The Real Wealth of Nations, because the argument between capitalism and socialism is a distraction. And really, the article I contributed to your book, deals with that. And it shows that what we need to move toward is not socialism. Look at what happened with socialism in the former Soviet Union. It turned into another, well, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx wanted. It doesn’t solve anything. The real issue in economics, as I write in this article, is giving value and rewarding our great human capacity for caring, which is a human capacity, even though in domination systems, caring and caregiving is relegated to, quote, So, that was the first book, and it took me ten years to do the research, and I have to say that really the tremendous support I got for it by my partner, by David Loy, was so important because what I kept finding was so different from the conventional story, which we now know, of course. Is false.
15:35 – Aaron Perry
Yeah, that is what really hit me as a young man exploring history and anthropology and philosophy and literature as a college student and graduate student. And the way you helped me the incredible awareness that the story where most all of us are living with is not necessarily the real story or the true story. And that, especially in the mists of prehistory, there is so much, as you say, widespread matrilineal partner cultural fabric, virtually all of our ancestry includes it one way or another. And as I think I shared with you a few days back, my mixed personal ancestry includes Mohawk from North America, Turtle Island, where the matrilineal is alive and well, and the partnership dynamics are alive and well. And many of my friends and relatives are are immersed in that milieu. But for most of the rest of us living in the modern world, it’s hardly even, it seems, imaginable and perhaps difficult for us to see through the veils and layers of quote unquote programming that are at work virtually every moment of every day of our lives. And I love, I’m showing the audience that’s seeing the video here. This is one of the printed editions of The Chalice and the Blade, Our History, Our Future. And this is truly, I think, one of the most important books for folks to Read. And Rhian, I’m not being hyperbolic or sentimental when I say you are one of my heroes. And thank you so much for bringing this focus Well, it was a breakthrough.
17:55 – Riane Eisler
And of course, at the time, there was a lot of skepticism, even by, quote, liberals, about this finding. And today, there are all these books, but, like Total Huyuk, for example, in Turkey, which was, there was people for a thousand years there, the archaeologist Ian Hodder, who, by the way, was interviewed for a film that’s being made about my work and my life called, not coincidentally, The Chalice and the Blade, which has not been completed yet. He wrote an article in the Scientific American with some astonishment. Saying, gee, being born a woman or a man in Catalhoyuk was not a deal. You know, it did not determine or affect one’s status in life. And it was a generally egalitarian society. But the books that have come out more recently recognize the peaceableness and the generally egalitarian character, but they don’t talk about gender. And, you know, one of my contributions really is to show that gender is not just a women’s issue, or just a men’s issue, because there is the very important men’s movement, by the way, which I’ve supported from day one, practically, and in our forum, and I in our summit, which is happening on October 29th. Peace begins at home. Two of the leaders of the men’s movement, Gary Barker, president of Equimundo, and Jackson Katz, who has worked with armies and with football players, et cetera, will be speaking. But the agenda is an organized principle for families, for economics, and for other institutions, some for our lives. And we’re not taught that. We’re taught the caveman cartoon before our brains are fully formed, much less our critical faculties, right? And what does it show? You know, on one hand he’s got a weapon, a club, but the other hand he’s sort of dragging a woman along by her hair. So what’s the message to children? Domination systems, that’s how it’s always been, right? And that’s how it will always be. And yes, gender is part of that cartoon. So we’ve all internalized And it’s really time that we understood that that is not human nature, quote unquote. That human nature actually is much more suited to the—close to the partnership systems as we were for most of our prehistory. And frankly, there are contemporary societies societies. Denmark quickly shifts to the partnership side. Ireland quickly shifts to the partnership side. Nordic nations, they have caring economic policies—Finland, Sweden, Norway—and they’re not socialist. I mean, that’s what we have to get out of our—we keep fighting one another. And we keep saying, well, capitalism versus socialism. Capitalism is just the most recent version of domination economics, whether it’s a Chinese emperor, or an Arab sheik, or an Indian Pasha, or a feudal lord. We are taught by neoliberalism, which is neither new nor liberal, by the way, but it is trickle-down economics. And trickle-down economics is partnership, I mean, is domination economics. It does not mean that it is new. Very old. And what’s happening as we see a domination regression is that the gap between haves and have-nots is widening and widening and widening. And we are taught to identify with those on top. And this This is really part of our socialization to fit into domination systems, isn’t it? So we’ve got to change our worldview and think not of right-left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, because look, there have been terribly repressive, regressive, violent regimes in all these categories, domination regimes. I mean, think of the Taliban and fundamentalist Riane. They’re Eastern religious societies. Think of the former USSR, which was a leftist, right? Western society. Again, top-down economics, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Think of Putin’s Russia. Today. Think of what’s happening. This regression to domination pays a lot of attention to gender, doesn’t it? And to childhood control, what children learn. You know, don’t let them, you know, put on those blinkers so that they only see the domination system as inevitable. We’ve got to our paradigm. Think of domination, think of partnership. Beautiful. Yeah, thank you.
24:58 – Aaron Perry
Just making a quick note here and I wanted to circle back, Riane. First of all, I got to ask with this film you mentioned, Chalice and the Blade, is there a publication date? Do we have a sense of when that might be available?
25:21 – Riane Eisler
Well, they’ve been working out it for four years. And it’s been quite a, there’s so much, because I’m so old, you know? And they’re trying to combine my life and my work. And my work, as you know, I mean, really, even the systems analysis, the whole systems analysis, I mean, the first book stemming from that, the Alice and the Blade came out in the 80s. And we’re now in the 21st century and 2025 going on 2026. So no, but we do need more support for the film. And we need more support also. I mean, I’m thinking legacy now. I’m 94 now. I’m thinking of really, and the summit and the film are part of legacy work, really. And the summit focuses on one of the four cornerstones, as you know, family and childhood. Because think about it, it’s really peripheral, isn’t it, as is the majority of humanity, to our categories that we’ve Left, right, religious, secular, eastern, western, northern, southern, capitalist, socialist. I mean, for both Marx and for Smith, that work of caring, which is labeled feminine, right, was to be done for free by a woman in a male-controlled household. And that was the norm in their time. And they called it reproductive rather than productive, and that’s still perpetuated by GDP, GNP, by our economics classes, by our management and business classes. We’ve got to change this, especially in our age of climate change. And yes, there is a connection between the exploitation and subordination of women and the exploitation and subordination of our natural environment, our Mother Earth.
27:57 – Unidentified Speaker
Yes.
27:57 – Aaron Perry
Hear, hear. Rhiannon, I’m so grateful and honored that you wrote and contributed an essay to our massively collaborative forthcoming book called Our Biggest Deal. And I’m holding up a proof, which we just received last night in the mail, the first printed proof of the project. And in it, we have essays from you and 27 other extraordinary thought leaders, some of whom are late career, some mid career, some early career, working on these issues through a variety of channels and projects. And programs and organizations. And notably, there are several women authors who have contributed, who have so much important perspective on this lensing of caring and stewardship and restoration as it relates to a, shall we say, more properly attuned economic and financial framework. And in addition, In addition to your essay, which is called Toward a Caring and Partnership Economy Beyond Capitalism and Socialism, we have essays from Kate Williams, who runs One Percent for the Planet, from Dilafrouz Konikbayeva, who runs Patagonia’s Home Planet Fund, from Georgia Kelly, who does so much work with the Mondragon Cooperatives through her organization Praxis Peace Institute, Samantha Power, working on bioregional finance solutions. Dr. Stephanie Grippney working on regenerative finance for impact. And of course, Maria Rodale, who in her essay comes right out and says, I think in the first paragraph or two, she says, did you realize when Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, he was living with his mother And she was taking care of the food and the laundry and everything. But none of that is evident, right? In the words that he wrote, apparently. And so to your very point and to what you’ve been speaking and writing about for decades, there is a set of fundamental and foundational pathologies that thankfully we can heal. We can transform, we can transmute. It takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of work. These are systemic challenges, but I’m so grateful that we have your voice and contribution in this project, right? Which is working on these challenges and opportunities in a collaborative framework. And in your essay, you lay out the four key cornerstones, which you’ve been speaking to already. And I was hoping we could step through those for folks to help them kind of understand the framing that you’ve presented us for working on this deep systemic change?
31:14 – Riane Eisler
I’d be happy to do that. You know, the Four Cornerstones are fundamental for both domination and partnership systems. And our job is, look, a lot of the work of, quote, progressives, has been putting out fires. But the problem is that domination systems are constantly causing fires. They’re constantly causing trauma, whether it’s in the family, whether it’s through economics, whether it’s through wars. It doesn’t matter, because these things are root causes these four cornerstones. And so we have to, yes, we have to put out the fires, but realize that by so doing, we’re not changing the system. We’re just not. We are simply maintaining, actually, the system. So at the same time, we have to focus on root causes. Root causes. And that’s what the four cornerstones are. The first one is family and childhood. You know, you mentioned Nurturing Our Humanity, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2019 and is the latest book that I wrote. I was working on it for about seven years when I invited Douglas Fry, who’s an anthropologist and notable in the peace movement, very, very much so, and also one of the leading scholars on gathering, hunting, foraging societies, which is how we lived for millennia, for thousands of years in our prehistory. And he and his partner, his wife, Genevieve Suyak, wrote for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, at which you can find IJPS, an article called The Original Partnership Societies. And, of course, it’s the foraging societies, isn’t it? And that is such an important piece. But the point of it is that it starts, as I note and document, all through nurturing our humanity. What neuroscience shows is that what children observe or experience, particularly in their first five years, affects nothing less than how our brains are structured, and hence how we think, how we feel, how we act, and yes, even how we vote. So that’s the first cornerstone, and if you really look at the current regression to domination, there’s a tremendous emphasis, isn’t there, And removing from our schools, from our formal and informal education, which of course, you know, spans social media, spans all kinds of media for that matter, anything suggesting that we are capable as humans to have an alternative to the domination system, a more partnership-oriented system. Despite the fact, by the way, that if you really look at this through the frame of the partnership domination scale, what you are seeing is, yes, a regression to more rigid domination worldwide, but you also see all these movements, the women’s movement, the more recent children’s rights movement, the anti-racism movement, environmental movement, so many movements all challenging the same thing, a tradition of domination, you know, man’s dominion, right, connect the dots. And so this summit that I mentioned really addresses violence in the home. It’s called Peace Begins at Home. And how it spills over into our other relations, our relations socially, in our nation, you know, the use of violence, I mean, like we’re seeing today, even in the United States internally, and what ISIS is doing. This is built into, baked into the domination regression. We cannot just talk about war and terrorism and maybe crime as violence. And not speak about what used to be called, and I’m trying to change it, domestic violence. It has to be called what it is, family violence, violence in the family. That changes right there. And the fourth cornerstone, by the way, is story and language, and they’re all related. The second cornerstone is, of course, gender. And I’ve spoken a lot about that and written a lot about that from a systems perspective. Because, look, if in their homes—and as I said, these cornerstones are all related—children observe that women and the, quote, feminine, right, caring, is not rewarded, is not economically important is not socially considered important. You know, women used to go around saying, I’m just a housewife, right? I mean, fortunately, that has changed. But the thing about it is that we have learned to accept a gendered system of values. And so what does the ranking of male and, quote, masculine and very rigid gender stereotypes, because otherwise how can you rank one over the other, over, quote, female and feminine, what does it really teach? It teaches us that diversity, difference, whether it’s based on race, whether it’s based on religion, whether it’s based on ethnicity, is to be equated with superiority and inferiority, with, yeah, with dominating and being dominated, with being served and serving. This is a primary part of the domination system. And you see it, don’t you? I mean, In our nation, our president just dismissed, quote, domestic violence. It’s just an argument between a husband and a wife. No. It maintains the violence, the cruelty that is fundamental to domination systems in all relations. And that takes us to economics, which I do talk about a lot, and properly so, and that’s the fourth cornerstone. Because, as I said earlier, we have inherited economic systems that are simply—capitalism and socialism—that are simply not capable of meeting our challenges. Of climate change, of nuclear weapons, which we have today. We have to have a systemic transformation from domination to partnership. And as long as we keep arguing about capitalism versus socialism, or socialism versus capitalism, first of all, we’re ignoring history. We’re ignoring what happens in the former Soviet Union, for example, which became the dictatorship of the proletariat. Another domination system, right? But secondly, we are maintaining a system that does not value the most important human work, caring for people starting at birth, and yes, caring for our natural life support system, our Mother Earth. You know, there’s absolutely nothing in what both Marx and Smith wrote about caring for nature. Nature was there for one thing, to be exploited. And the only issue was, well, with capital do that more efficiently. You know, the question isn’t who’s on top, I mean, which is what capitalism versus socialism is all about. The question is creating a system that works for all of us and for our natural environment. And of course, that’s all related to the fourth corner story. Which is story and language. And we’ve talked already about some of the false stories that are part of our heritage from more rigid domination times, including stories blaming woman, Eve, Pandora, for all of humanity’s ills. I mean, that’s a crazy story. But it’s part of what we’re talking early on. And one of the projects that I so like to see started in my lifetime still is for leaders of all of the major religions to get together and look at the scriptures and sort the grain, the of caring, of love, of do unto others as you would have them do unto you from the chaff, which was added in the course of domination history, which started only about five to ten thousand years ago, but which, as I show in as early as the chalice and the blade, really The pen had a huge influence, the stories that were false, false stories. Woman is not to blame for the exploitation of nature. Woman is not to blame for, I mean, it’s ridiculous, because women as… To the contrary, right? It’s crazy, you know, but even in the U.S., Jung, in Jung, who was really much forward-thinking in many ways, the anima and the animus are dominator stereotypes. Woman does not have a self, an ego. She is either man’s inspiration or man’s temptation. Think about that. And that’s crazy. That’s buying into confusing dominator archetypes with human, female archetypes. Now, one thing that Jung did recognize is that men also have an anima. And, you know, but caring is not It’s not a feminine thing. It’s not an anima. It is a human characteristic. Through the grace of evolution, we are given empathy, which is then either suppressed or compartmentalized in this in-group versus out-group thinking and acting, which is characteristic of domination systems, starting with the female other, isn’t it? So if we pay attention and if we work on shifting these four cornerstones, and story is so important, and so is language. I mean, we have a language that we’ve inherited from the Indo-European invaders who brought with them, it seems, domination. And it is a very gendered language, in romance languages. You know, Finnish wonderfully does not even have a word for he or she. It is human. And that’s what we have to move toward. So, a lot of work to do, but I do want to say something, and I’ll stop this monologue in a minute. We don’t have to start from square one. Once we realize that for millennia of our prehistory, we oriented more to partnership, that nations like Ireland almost overnight shifted to partnership, that the Nordic nations shifted to partnership. And yes, they have almost 50% of their national legislature is female. And it’s not because women are better than men. It’s that the, and this is directly related to having caring policies, by the way, which are supported by both men and women in the Nordic nations. Men have a terrible time in domination systems. You know, they have to give nothing less than their lives because some guy on top, like a Putin, wants more real estate. I mean, think of all the men who have died because of this invasion right now of Ukraine. I mean, it is We are not trained to connect the dots, and we have to have a new frame, a very old frame, but a new frame, because those pushing us back, they focus on childhood, on gender, on economics, on widening the gap between haves and have-nots, on trickle-down economics, and they focus and language with a really tremendous genius that they have for that. But, you know, we can do the same.
48:29 – Aaron Perry
Yeah. Brilliant. Well, my sort of synopsis takeaway from this, Riane, is we’re at a point in a time when we need to reboot to restart, to restore, and that the good news is the more appropriate quote-unquote operating system, if you will, is actually encoded in our deep time memory, in our DNA, in our ways of being as human. Yes. And that the partnership modality is the natural modality for us, and the dominator modality is actually highly aberrational when we have a clearer understanding of deep time.
49:27 – Riane Eisler
Well, look, we are really all interconnected. The Nobel Prize in Physics was recently awarded to two physicists, if you remember. For their work on the subatomic level, on entanglement, on interconnection. But we’re not only connected by technologies of communication and transportation as humans. We are also today interconnected by technologies of destruction. We now have the power, once attributed only to a male deity who presumably lives somewhere in heaven and controls everything. Everything. It’s summed up in the phrase, God-fearing, because it’s a very capricious deity. And this is not working. It is not capable of fulfilling Really, what we need to do, which is to shift to a caring economics of partnerism, which is described in this book, The Real Wealth of Nations, which consists of the contributions of people and nature, for goodness sakes. And we have to care for those. Is really a, is it compartmentalized as, you know, uncaring is masculine and caring is feminine? That’s nonsense. Men are just as capable of caring as women. But the socialization, I remember being in a park a long time ago and hearing a child wailing. And then I heard a male voice saying, and I’m going to hit you until you stop crying. Real men, real boys don’t cry. Well, I mean, trauma. Trauma. Domination systems are trauma factories. And we can’t blame our parents. They just simply transmitted what they were taught. But it is time to really re-examine. There are two halves of humanity, two forms of humanity. And yes, there are lots of people and always were people in between. And these rigid gender stereotypes are simply a creature of domination systems so we can rank one masculine over feminine. And so that’s, I mean, but it’s so hard for progressives also to really realize the importance of this. Yeah, yeah.
52:42 – Aaron Perry
Well, Riane, let me remind our audience that you are hosting a very special summit, October 29th of 2025. Called Peace Begins at Home, Changing the Roots of Violence and Authoritarianism. Folks can go to peacebeginsathomesummit.org to register. We’ll include the link in the show notes. And I want to also take this opportunity to thank you, Rhiannon, all of the essay contributors who provided so much wisdom and insight to our new book, Our Biggest Deal Pathways to Planetary Prosperity. And I want to thank our project sponsors who helped make the book possible and who also are supporting our Why on Earth Community podcast series along with our other projects and programs. And this includes Andco Hospitality, Bluestone Life Insurance, the Brad and Lindsay Village Family Foundation, Clean Edit, Climate First Bank, Dobrosfera Kind Media, Earth Coast Productions, Gaia AI, Goodstead Financial, Patagonia’s Home Planet Fund, Regenerative World Quest, Verona Rylander Philanthropies, And to get access to the wonderful essays, the case study vignettes, and the other content and material in this book, Our Biggest Deal, you can go to whyonearth.org slash ourbiggestdeal, and we’ll include that link in the show notes as well. And during our pre-launch, pre-order campaign period, you can use the code OBD10. To get an exclusive 10% discount when you pre-order the print books and the e-books. So I want to be sure to mention all of that and a huge thank you to everybody involved in that project and in all of this work and really want to encourage folks to register for Riane’s upcoming Peace Begins at Home Summit. And it’s going to be a tremendous opportunity to hear from some of the world’s most heart-centered and wisdom-rooted leaders working on these issues. And Riane, we’ve talked about several of your books, and perhaps we’ll dive just a little deeper into this one I’m about to mention in our behind-the-scenes segment that we’ll record shortly for our Ambassador Network at the Y on Earth community. But I want to bring up this other book that I really enjoyed reading called Sacred Pleasure. And I was hoping you would tell some of our audience a little about this, as I imagine many of our audience would love to Read this book if they haven’t yet already and or have Read this book and have loved it as I have.
56:13 – Riane Eisler
Well, I’m so glad brought up Sacred Pleasure, because that book, which came out ten years after The Chalice and the Blade, really foreshadows so much of what I write about in more detail later. It certainly foreshadows the real wealth of nations. It certainly foreshadows even my work on neuroscience. And see, because we’re bombarded with all of this news and bits and pieces, rather than putting things together, because we lack this frame, the partnership, domination, social scale. And really, we have to change our minds, our consciousness. That’s what it really amounts. But I love sacred pleasure, because It starts with, as you know, and by the way, people who consider themselves, quote, conservative, really love this book because it’s very personal. It’s the first book where I really talk about myself. And also the first part shows how both sexuality and spirituality have been transformed as we shifted from partnership to domination. And then the second part, and I wanted it published in two volumes, and then Harper said, no, you don’t do that. So it came out in one. The Spanish edition is in two volumes, the first being part one and the second being part two. But part two deals with everything that’s happening, and then some, today, including including the so-called sexual revolution, and looks at how women are being had, really, and mistake the one-night stand, you know, the hook-up, for a sexual revolution. No, it’s the male model of sexuality, that’s all. I even suggest an ethic for sexual relations. This crazy saying, like, all’s fair in love and war, which is nuts. I mean, of course not. But, well, I could go on and on, but I really highly recommend it, and I’m so glad that you brought it out. And, of course, we are talking at the summit, and And I really want to invite you and all of the people who are watching to register and also to become a sponsor. All we need is your logo. And your sponsorship will be listed. And of course, we need help funding. This is a very expensive virtual event. We have speakers from We’ll have 26 speakers from 17 nations worldwide. So you can imagine what that is like, But we’ve got people like Ella Gandhi, you know, Gandhi’s granddaughter. We’ve got Dr. Richard Davidson, who worked with the Dalai Lama. He’s a neuroscientist, Richard Davidson. Because the good news, and I really want to stop with that, is that we can change. Those of us who have gone through psychological counseling, et cetera, know that it’s quite an investment to change, but we can change. We can, if you will, rewire our brains. But why not start? Where it all starts in families. And why not get rid of family violence? And that’s what the summit is all about. It’s about connecting the dots between war, terrorism, crime, social violence, and family. Violence, which we are simply not taught to do. Hear, hear.
1:00:50 – Aaron Perry
Well, Riane, we are so looking forward to the summit on October 29th, and for all of our audience who join as well, look forward to seeing you there, and really encourage folks to sign up for this very, very, very special opportunity. And Riane, before we sign I’m going to thank you so much for being a guest on our Why on Earth community podcast. And it is a real joy and honor to have this opportunity to chat with you. And before we sign off and go to record our behind the scenes segment for our Ambassador Network, I want to invite you, if there’s anything else you’d like to say or share with our audience, Please, my friend, the floor is yours.
1:01:50 – Riane Eisler
Well, we have changed, we can change, and change, transformative change, and the focus on these four cornerstones of family and childhood, of gender, of economics, and moving to a caring, to rewarding And of course, story and language, that’s essential. And remember, we need this new frame, because those pushing us back to more rigid domination have the frame, if you really look at what they’re doing. It is amazing. It’s almost as if they had Read my work and said, oh, four cornerstones.
1:02:41 – Aaron Perry
Thank you so much, my friend. Wonderful.
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