Design Economics Podcast with Vinny Tafuro

And then I discovered that actually being an outsider was a tremendous advantage. And all the questioning I did as a child, like, wanted to know. In the bible, it says that henceforth, woman is going to be dominated by men. And I always ask, what what what was it like before the henceforth? And nobody wants to talk about it.

Well, now we know.

Hello, and welcome to season one episode five of the design economics podcast, where we explore how design thinking driven by data is revolutionizing economics for the twenty first century. My name is Vinny Tafiro, a futurist, economist, and your host for this episode. Today, I will be talking with doctor Riane Eisler. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD, is the recipient of many honors, such as the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award earlier given to the Dalai Lama, and internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian. She is author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade, now in its fifty seventh US printing and 27 foreign editions.

The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as a template for a better world we have been seeking so urgently, and most recently, Nurturing Our Humanity, published in 02/2019. Eisler's innovative Hull Systems Research offers new perspectives and practical tools for constructing a less violent, more egalitarian, gender balanced, and sustainable future. Eisler is president Center for Partnership Studies, which provides practical applications of her work and editor in chief of the online interdisciplinary journal of partnership studies published by the University of Minnesota. Today, we explore Rayne Eisler's groundbreaking partnership domination framework and how it reveals patterns conventional economics miss. Our conversation examines how caring economies can transform our social systems and create more equitable sustainable futures aligned with design economics principles.

So with that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Doctor Riane Eisler.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to start, you have been working on some of this stuff for quite some time. And really, what the what has your work centered around and what is the Center for Partnership Systems?

Well, that's a long answer because my passion for this work, and I have a lot of passion for it, is deeply rooted in my childhood experiences, which were very traumatic and led me to questions that many of us have asked at some point in our lives. Does it have to be this way when we humans have this enormous capacity for caring and for creativity and for really sensitivity, why has there been so much insensitivity, so much violence, so much cruelty? And years later, I embarked on a transdisciplinary, really a multidisciplinary study to try to answer this question of whether there is an alternative to this. And the answer from my research was yes. There is, but we can't see it because our consciousness has been so fragmented by conventional facts, which are not true, by conventional stories, which are not true.

And yes, by much of our education, both in our homes and of course in our schools and our universities, which are very silent and very top down. And all of this makes it very hard. I mean, like if you use the lenses, I very early in my research realized that trying to understand whether there is an alternative, I couldn't do it by using, by looking at societies through the lenses of conventional social categories, like right, left, religious, secular, eastern, western, northern, southern, capitalist, socialist. Well, for one thing, we inherited these categories from more authoritarian, more violent times. Really, they all fragment our consciousness.

You know, they focus on either ideology or location or none of them look at the whole systems, the whole social system. And this is what I I had my first job really was at the Systems Development Corporation, which was an offshoot of the RAND Corporation. And their systems that they were interested in were weapons systems, which I really wasn't. But it taught me to use this whole systems approach, and what passes for it has not been a whole systems approach. Just like our conventional categories, you know, right, left, capitalist, socialist, etcetera, etcetera, they actually either marginalize or just ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity, women and children, and hence family.

Because in rigid domination times, and we see this in this regression that we're currently in, women and children are really under the control of their heads of families, which are supposed to be men. This, by the way, is not an issue of women against men or men against women, because men have to give nothing less than their lives because some guy on top, like a Putin, wants more real estate. Right?

Yes.

And and men have to really are socialized, well, among all else, not to be like a woman. So caring, caregiving nonviolence are coded feminine. And this all became really evident when you connect the dots. And I came up, and I'm going to wind this down, with two comprehensive models of society, or rather what I call the partnership domination scale, with the partnership model on one side, the domination model on the other. Because there are polarities in nature.

I mean, hot, cold, light, dark, etcetera. But it's always a matter of degree, isn't it?

I see. I see then.

So my research has focused on the shift from domination to partnership. And that there are many, many, many trends in that direction, but there's also enormous resistance to this shift. And as I said, we're in the midst of a regression to this top down, rigidly authoritarian, male dominated, punitive, really, model of society.

When when I first was introduced to your work, it was the first time I heard the term macro historian. And so I think maybe for people listening, what is the time frame for this shift? Because I think that's what really blows my blew my mind and really was like, wow. This is this is big. So we're not talking about, like, a shift of, like, ten or fifteen years.

What is this what is this macro history side of it? How does that work?

Macro history and a systems approach really look at the whole of our history, including that long, long span that we call prehistory before deciphered written records. And in my research and my first book drawing from this research, it wasn't my first book because I'm also an attorney, as you know, and my first two books drew from my legal background. But the first book drawing from this multidisciplinary cross cultural research was The Chalice and the Blade, which is now in about 57 US printings and about 30 foreign editions. And it's still going very, very strong because so much of the evidence is disproving the old story that you know, well, the caveman cartoon story, isn't it? I mean, with one hand, he's dragging a woman by the hair.

With the other hand, he's got a weapon, a club. Yeah. And we think nothing of showing this to children before their brains, much less their critical faculties, are born are developed. And this has to stop because this cartoon does not represent prehistory. And so much, I mean, from films like, you know, the computer, you know, 02/2002, I mean, so much just keeps telling us, that's how it's always been.

That's how it's always been. And it's a lie. Just simply not true. I mean, societies like Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, for 1,000 in prehistory, a part agricultural, early agriculture part still gathering or, you know, gathering, hunting. And I say gathering first because most of the calories came from gathering, not from hunting, as we've been taught.

Right? Hunting, gathering, see, our language. Mhmm.

Hunting was the bonus more than the the foundation, I guess. Right?

Well, you know, we have been taught false stories, like original sin and selfish genes. It's the same story, isn't it?

Mhmm.

We're bad. We have to be rigidly controlled from the top, as in God fearing. Yeah. And fear, fear of pain, is what holds the domination system together. But this study, and I really want to emphasize this, is the whole systems approach, the study of relational dynamics.

And it is, first, it looks at what kinds of relations does a particular social system support or inhibit. Do they have to be these top down fear based, whether it's economic fear, whether it's you get killed, you get beaten in your family? Family is very important. And the book that you mentioned, Nurturing Our Humanity, which I wrote, and it came out with Oxford University Press in 2019, it was, It draws very heavily from neuroscience, which is showing that that story is not true. That Yeah.

The whole nature versus nurture, it's nature and nurture, and nurture trumps nature.

You had mentioned in that nurturing or going back to the nurturing part and this idea of, like, we show children pictures that came in. And, you know, you wrote in one of one of your interviews, you had said that, you know, about what children explain experience and observe early on in their family directly relate how their brains develop. And then in that case, it influences how they think, feel, and act as adults. And so maybe you could explain a little bit more of of how that connection is because we all sort of, like, get it because we're all you know, so many people today are dealing with childhood trauma. But not just trauma.

I think what you're getting at is just that the what we traditionally present to children as normal is maybe not normal in what the possibility is.

First of all, it all starts with consciousness, doesn't it? That there is an alternative. And we have been traumatized into thinking that there isn't. That is really the beginning. How can we create something if we think it's impossible?

Absolutely. And we can't. And we are not taught to connect the dots. I mean, look at the last three hundred years. Okay?

One movement, this is a period of disequilibrium. You know, I draw a lot in my research from newer approaches to complex living systems, looking at interconnections. And what this shows is that we have to look at families. I was interviewed for the Scientific American on how authoritarian, top down, male dominated, rigidly male dominated families and that kind of a state are connected. I mean, look at Putin.

He lowered the penalty for family violence, for violence in the family. And we are going to have a summit on that, by the way, Vinny. And I really think that this is a watershed moment to have it because we need to understand that violence in the family against mostly it's against women, against children, that is a direct channel toward the violence of war that we hear so much about, the violence of terrorism, the violence of crime. And there are studies, but they're all scattered. And my work really brings Because it offers a frame, the partnership model and the domination model, and the partnership domination scale.

And as you know, in nurturing our humanity, I introduced the biocultural partnership domination lens, and it is biocultural.

Could you explain that a little bit?

As I said, have been told the wrong story about how we humans develop. And neuroscience is in bits and pieces, and we are only told this in bits and pieces elsewhere, showing that, as I said, the story of nature versus nurture is not true. It's nature and nurture. And that the first five years, as you said, the findings are very clear that are nothing less than our brains, and hence how we feel, how we act, how we vote. These are profoundly influenced by what children observe and experience in their first five years.

Now, the good news is that we can change. We are an enormously flexible species. It's almost, yes, I mean, there are other species, our primate cousins. And it's very interesting in that connection that we Again, story, story and language. It's the chimps is what we focus on, but there are also the bonobos.

Bonobos.

And the bonobos are much more in some ways I mean, they share the same DNA with us as chimps do, but they're very different. They're brighter. They're not male dominated, and their sexuality is frontal, just like ours.

Mhmm.

And not only that, they use their sexuality not only for procreation, but for pleasure. Yes. The society is bonded much more by the sharing of pleasure, food, sex, what have you, than by fear. And that's I mean, there are lessons for us to learn. And, of course, we've been told all kinds of things.

And and a lot of books are coming out now about Catal Huyak, which was not male dominated, which was more peaceful, and which was far more egalitarian, not only in terms of gender, but in terms of everyone. There were some differences in status and in wealth, but

they were

not so huge. I mean, think about it. In The United States and now CEOs of corporations earn, what is it, three, four hundred times what the people, you know,

who Yes.

In these corporations earn. I mean, that's obscene. Yeah. And so is so called neoliberalism, which is neither new nor liberal Liberal. Situation.

No. Stories being false, but they're geniuses at this. Yes. Labeling. Because we're traumatized, and we're conditioned to believe what some authority figure, and yet some strong man tells us.

And we have to really understand that domination systems are trauma factories, starts in families, economics create artificial scarcity by misdistribution of resources by not investing in childcare, in helping families really raise their children, our wealth. Well, I wrote a whole book about real wealth of nations creating a caring economics, and we can talk about that a little bit.

And it's actually the perfect segment into what the economic implications of your work are. So I think where when I first read both the I I guess because I I read both the Chalice and the Blade and and Real Wealth and Nations. And I think in the Real Wealth and Nations part, and I think this is something that what we look at with the institute is is how do we start counting the capital that's not financial capital? And I think that's where your work really was an early, early start to this. Because I know you know that, like, how much traditional economics devalues care work and and the things that are needed to really function, which make a society function.

And maybe you could talk a little bit more about how those things are not counted, especially in like that neoliberal paradigm and in traditional economics, how they're not counted and how partnership systems might count them differently or better.

Well, I'm glad you asked this because, again, we have been misled into fighting capitalism and socialism. And, of course, we need markets, and we don't happen to have a free one. And, of course, we need government policies. But the real issue is what do we value in our economic system and what do we devalue? And look, both for both Marx and for Smith, there is nothing, nothing in their writings about caring for nature.

Nature is there to be exploited. Period. Also, there is nothing in their writings about the value of caring for people starting at verse in their economic writings. So this issue is not socialism versus capitalism. It's really how do we create an economics that no longer assumes, for example, that as we see in this regression, because we're going you know, that regression is pushing us that way.

I mean, for them, for both Marx and for Smith, caring for people starting at birth, caring for the sick, the elderly, everybody, was to be done for free by a woman in a male controlled household. So our whole economic system, whether it's capitalist or socialist, and our economic measures like GDP, make this distinction. And it's a very, very harmful distinction still taught in our business and our economic schools between productive work and reproductive work. And the three life sustaining sectors, I mean, think about that, are left out of both capitalism and socialism of productive work. And what are these?

There's a natural economy. There are the volunteer community economy, and there are the household economy. So GDP, which reflects this, a tree, which we really depend upon to breathe. Right? Yeah.

Oxygen is only in GDP when it's dead, when it's a log.

Yeah.

As for the work that parents and of course, it's mostly mothers still, but more and more men. And this whole these rigid gender stereotypes, they are part and parcel of the domination system. Because how else are you gonna rank male and masculine over female and feminine? You have to and you can't admit that there's anything in between. And we see you know, I mean, historically, and right before our eyes, there are people who really sort of navigate this.

And, you know, there are gay people. There are trans people. I mean, and there have always been. The question is, how does society really deal with all of that? So economically, I would take neoliberalism.

It is really another contemporary version, the so trickled down economics, of what I call domination economics. And I think we really have to label it correctly because whether it was a Chinese emperor or an Arab sheik or an Indian pasha or a feudal lord, it's been trickled down economics, hasn't it? That

It has.

As in feudal times, those on the bottom are to content themselves with the scraps. That's that's what Of

those above.

Exist, falling, literally falling from the opulent tables of those on top. And so let's call it what it is. It's nomination economics. But we are taught in our families. You see how it all hangs together?

Yes. And we are taught in our gender stereotypes that real men don't feel empathy. Empathy developed in the course of evolution. Men have it just as much as women do. And that's why I've always felt that the men's movement is so important.

I mean, yes, the women's movement is fundamental. It's really part of four cornerstones

Yeah.

That I have discovered are fundamental to both domination oriented and partnership oriented societies. Starts with families and childhood. Gender, huge. I mean, what do children learn in a family that is rigidly male dominated? They learn that difference I mean, think about that, because there's a fundamental difference in our species in form between male and female.

Difference has to be equated with superiority and inferiority, with dominating or being dominated, with being served or serving. And that then is applied to all differences, racial differences, religious differences, you know, differences in ethnicity, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And it's also always us against them, us against them. The nations that have oriented most to partnership, contemporary nations, are Nordic nations. And you know what?

The percentage of their foreign aid through NGOs going to people to whom they are not genetically related. People on the other side of the globe is larger, larger Yeah. Than anywhere else. We are the two guys just got the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on entanglement, on our interconnection.

But it

takes a long time, and we have all these stories and all this language. Yeah. It contradicts the possibility of partnership.

I I wanna go back to the Nordic nations in a little bit, though. But I wanna for now, maybe as before we go into kind of the tenants of of design economics, which a big one is paradigm change, could you give an overview of the the of the four corner of the four cornerstones and and how those are essential to creating a partnership oriented society? I think having that basis before we go forward will be good because we can refer back to the four four cornerstones then.

Well, first of all, I want to say something about language, if I may, because it's part of the fourth cornerstone. You know, much in our language and if you want more information, there are diagrams, by the way, of the configuration of the domination system and of the partnership system, of the four cornerstones, diagrams showing that the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy, That is really the other side of the coin. The alternative is partnership. But we we're so even even films like the one on Barbie Mhmm.

Even that they just

ends with, well, the matriarchy or patriarchy, and they don't know that there is a partnership alternative. And difference you know, equality does not mean sameness. Means valuing This is a huge thing for us, but I had to coin terms for hierarchies because every society needs parents, teachers, managers, leaders, if it's a complex society. So but we have been taught to either have a completely flat organization with no parents, no leaders, no managers, no teachers. And that's crazy because there's a difference, actually.

You need this new frame of the partnership and domination system to see it, that hierarchies of domination are just that. They're backed up by fear, by force, fear of pain. And they're very top down. Hierarchies of actualization, a power is conceptualized. Well, we hear a lot about power with these days.

That's a trend towards partnership, of course, towards the understanding that but it's also our creative power, power too, because everything around us was really a human creation, wasn't it? Our desks, our pens, our pencils, our computers, AI, you know, everything. But we can change our cultures.

Yes.

And we have a tendency towards wanting one thing, caring connection. But in domination systems, that becomes in group versus out group. You have some degree of empathy for the in group, but none for the out group. As I said, in nations that have moved towards partnership, like Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, they have empathy for people with whom they are not genetically related.

Yeah. I the language part and and this creating creating terminology for some of this as as a kind of foundation for the cornerstones then is so that you can start to talk about how we value things as opposed to just matriarchy versus patriarchy, that it's actually neither system the way we currently have things value what we do in child, how we raise children, or how we address gender differences, or or the fact that economics doesn't count the value of the caring portion of the economy. And so I

guess I didn't answer your question.

I just

realized you wanted to know about the four cornerstones, and I went off on language. And

We talked about that first. Well, it's a basis, though, because without without proper vernacular where we're where we understand that these are different, we're we're just the gold we're the proverbial goldfish in the water because we don't know we're in the water. We don't know that language itself is a technology. It's a technology that that that we've had for only three thousand years, especially in written format. So so I think it is crucial.

But, yeah, if you could, go into then how that helps shape how we handle the four cornerstones.

I will, because if you consider now the partnership and domination systems, the four cornerstones are based on the fact that they look at really raising children and helping children to grow up very differently. And so family and childhood is one of the cornerstones. And in domination systems, well, parents control. I mean, of course children need limits. We're moving in, child rearing experts will tell us that, yes, we want authoritative, but not authoritarian.

That's a partnership trend, isn't it? And neuroscience really backs that up, the importance. As I said, we can change unless we're completely traumatized, and some people are. The domination system gets traumatized men to the top and women too. But anyway, but women have to really, really not identify as quote feminine.

And caring, caregiving, and nonviolence are coded feminine. So there you have it.

So they have to fight their way to the top.

The gender, really. As I said, rigid gender stereotypes are central, and we see it in this regression that we're, you know, seeing globally. But, you know, it's not just the Taliban that focus on gender or fundamentalist Iran. Hitler's Germany focused very much on lowering the status of women starting in families, but also in the workplace. We're talking about I won't go into a whole thing, and it's not right versus left.

I mean, Stalin believed in patriarchal family, you know, control, control. And then of course, the third cornerstone is economics. It isn't what we value is a question of what do we reward. And this is what the real wealth of nation really is about, that to not reward caring, caring for people, caring for children, caring for nature, is one of the really fundamental flaws in both the capitalist and to some extent in the socialist system. I mean, there there is some more caring policy, but it became state capitalism in the Soviet Union, didn't it?

And this is a real problem because it isn't just changing who's on top. It's changing system. Yeah. Not to have sameness, but to have a more fulfilling, more peaceful, more sustainably environmentally sustainable way of life. And and this takes us to a story.

The story that fortunately a lot of people are beginning to understand is a true story that at a certain level of technological development, the domination system goes into self destruct.

Mhmm.

And so our job is not to disrupt or to tear down or and certainly not us against them. So much infighting among communities for the scraps, really, falling from the from the opulent tables of those on top. We have to work together, the antiracist movement, the gender equity movement. You know, I started by wanting to tell you about the last three hundred years, and I went off. So let me let me go back to that.

Because as the industrial revolution and with it, this this equilibrium, you know, things changing technologically, went into high gear, you begin to have one movement after the other, large social movements, all challenging the same thing, a tradition of domination. I mean, think about it. Yeah. The so called enlightenment rights of man movement, challenging the divinely ordained right of kings to rule their core subjects. The feminist movement challenging again the so called divinely ordained right of men to rule over the women and children in the castles of their homes, the anti racism movement, the abolitionists, you know, then the anti colonial, then the Black Lives Matter movement, etcetera, challenged again, the so called divinely ordained right.

I mean, always invoke God fearing. Right?

Yes. As if it's a natural system or supernatural system at that.

Absolutely. And it isn't a question of not being religious. We all need to feel that there is some meaning in our lives. And some religions are beginning to move towards partnership, but that's another story. The stories that we've been told have to be reexamined.

The language that we've learned has to be reexamined. And, you know, I I think that the I believe, and I wrote this, that we'd either have breakthrough in evolution or breakdown in evolution. Mhmm. And it depends on how quickly we can move towards this alternative of partnership, not sameness, but a more equitable, sustainable, environmentally sustainable, and more peaceful. I mean, we're killing one another.

You know, we have these terrible technologies of nuclear bombs and bacteriological warfare. You know, the power of total destruction once again attributed only to a supreme male deity. And now we have that. So this this doesn't work anymore.

And so the the the thing there is is is we're transforming no matter what. It's whether or not we have to collapse or do we transcend.

That's exactly our, you know, break through.

Mhmm.

Or

Or breakdown.

That's those are our alternatives. But there's so much to convince us, to fragment our consciousness, and to believe these untrue stories about, quote, human nature. I mean, I really highly recommend Nurturing Our Humanity, but I recommend all my books.

I recommend them as well, though. That perspective that you have and that you give and that you the examples of these things that we look at from the women's movement to the enlightenment movement against the divine right of kings, they were all they're all still fighting the dominant paradigm. We're still in that, not partnership.

And what is the environmental movement about? I mean, you go all the way to that. It's, again, challenging man's once hallowed conquest and dominion of I mean, it's just we have to change. And this is not a question of blaming or shaming. A question that recognizing that and and the gender that's talking about trauma is a very important partnership trend.

Because like in nurturing our humanity, I include the ACES studies, the adverse childhood experiences studies. I mean, anyway, we have to change our paradigm.

Yeah. And I love with the changing paradigm how the focus on so many people are like, what can I do? And in reality, just raising your raising children and and and organizing your family in a more partnership oriented model will be the grassroots that kind of does this. And I kinda wanna extrapolate on that as we move into the second tenant. You have a something you'd written in, I think, 02/2015, and it was it was about partnership education consists of three core components.

And this was process, how we learn and teach structure, where learning and teaching takes place, and then content, what we learn and teach. And perhaps you could expand on that as as the creative way that we change this paradigm.

Absolutely. I'd love to Because so much of, quote, progressive education has focused on the first two, on process primarily. Somewhat unstructured, but very little on content. And we must focus on all three in our educational system. And this whole idea that education should prepare us for what is rather than for what can be and should be, we have to be taught pattern recognition skills.

And yes, we have to be taught caring, caring for self, caring for others, and caring for our mother earth. Mother earth is really interesting how that domination of women, girls, and nature is conflated in that term. But it's not accidental. It's not accidental. I really think that we can do it.

Yes. This regression is going to cause and is beginning to cause, even in The United States, enormous suffering, a punitive system. I started to tell you about Putin, how he lowered the penalty for family violence. Well, he recognizes intuitively because he has that domination frame that a authoritarian, strong man ruled, punitive, violent, often emotionally violent, sometimes, spanking, I mean, is a domination tradition. And yet parents still globally believe that it's fine.

It's going to do that. But it's not because it conflates punishment, pain with caring, coercion with caring. And it's traumatic. Started to tell you about our summit, and I want to tell you about this because I want people to know that we are sponsoring a summit, a virtual online summit called peace begins at home. Okay.

The connection that Putin gets

Mhmm.

Between a domination oriented family and that kind of a state or tribe. It's a question of connecting the dots, isn't it? Yeah. Neuroscience and this is why I'm glad that you are focusing on my latest book. Although, I I I mean, socialism became global because people actually read books and formed groups to discuss them.

Is it?

We need to do that. I I you know, I've always been an outsider, and I used to hate that and want nothing more than to fit in. And then I discovered that actually being an outsider was a tremendous advantage. And, you know, and and all the questioning I did as a child, like, I wanted to know. In the Bible, it says that henceforth, woman is going to be dominated by men.

And I always ask, what what what was it like before the Forest? And nobody wants to talk about it.

Nobody is gonna answer that question.

And, well, now we know what what it was like before the Hens Forest because we have evidence from archaeology. We have myths. Yeah. So many myths telling us that there was an Eden. There was a better time when woman and man lived in harmony with one another in nature.

You know? Yeah. Mean, it it it it and I also I also wanted to know why would woman ask advice from a snake? You know, because we usually don't do that. And, you know, even in historic times, think of the Oracle of Delphi.

It was a pythoness, a woman, a priestess, working with a python, with a snake. I mean, the associations of vilification are really of the snake and of woman, that every all of man's ills, right, are the fault of Eve or of Pandora. These are stories that really make no sense except in the context of the shift from a partnership culture to a domination culture.

That they were specifically picked as stories because there was an elevated wisdom associated with women and serpents, you had to make a negative story to tear down that that authoritative symbolism or structure.

Absolutely. You had to if you were going to and and again, I want to emphasize this isn't a question of blame or shame. I mean, the violence, I mean, the roads that the Assyrians lined with crucified people.

Mhmm.

I mean, this these were very dramatic takeovers. And it started with Indo European invasions, at least in Europe, bringing I mean, these people were herders. And you know in the story of Cain and Abel, you reverse the roles? It is Cain that kills Abel, the herder? No.

It was the other way around. And DNA shows this, by the way. But we need the frame of the domination partnership scale.

I'd like to revisit the summit, especially as we go into that third tenant and kind of making economics accessible. And I think what you said about Putin by lessening the punishment for crime at home that actually builds a cultivation of domination within the household that that may have been diminishing. So what is this summit? When is the summit? How is it gonna be run?

And and

Alright. It's on October 29

Okay. Good.

Of this year. It's virtual. We have some wonderful speakers already, like Gary Barker from Equimundo, you know, the men's movement. His motto is caring men. And we have to really counter the belief of so many young men these days influenced by Tate, for example, that the only alternative is going backward to even more rigid gender stereotypes.

Because, look, so many men are diapering babies, feeding babies. I mean, obviously, it's possible. It's part of man's

nature. Absolutely.

Absolutely. It's so much more rewarding. We get endorphins, rewards of biochemical pleasure when we care for others, even when we care for a pet.

Yeah, We do. I think that endorphin side, think, yes, as science now is learning how how important touch and companionship is. Like, we've known this, but we've sort of gotten away from it. I think we're we're starting to see that again. And and how do we work that into our economic models?

Well, this is a very big problem. And I think that, again, the story that AI somehow is gonna take us over is kind of a distraction, at at least at this point. The real issue is how AI is programmed. Will it be programmed for domination or for partnership? And since it draws so heavily from social media, right now, it's heavily programmed for domination.

Yeah. Because it gets all the information that's on the Internet, but it doesn't get the information of real conversation and real interaction between humans. It has no idea.

Well, as I write in nurturing our humanity, we have to realize that for most of human history, millennia, we related face to face. And that this relating only through machines machines are very, very helpful, but they are human inventions.

Yeah.

And they're really neutral. How they're developed, for what purposes they're developed, see, this is animated by the most basic technology, the human brain. And the human brain is told false stories all over the world now. And this, we have to change. And I think people are beginning to be more and more ready for the change, for understanding that we need to understand that there is an alternative, not perfect.

Yeah. I agree. And I think this is a good place to kind of start going towards, you know, the end of this here. In your conversation with Heidi Bruce, you mentioned, you know, this roadmap to less violent, more equitable, and sustainable future. Some of that is the four cornerstones.

How can people start to do this, whether it's at an academic level within the nonprofit sector? You talked about, you know, with your own organization, the Center for Partnership Systems, what we're doing here to link these so we become a force that works together. And so what do you see as part of that mid network?

I think that the summit addresses all four cornerstones, really. It addresses certainly childhood. It addresses gender. It addresses economics because, basically, one of the reasons that this spanking and hitting and using force in child raising persists is because there is no parenting education. There is no education for caring, and there is no support.

And it's relegated to mothers who then are, in redetermination systems, denied the technologies of family planning. So it's it's all of one piece, isn't it? And we have to change that. But look. We need both tactics.

You know? As I said, domination systems are trauma factories, and we have to do what we continue to do, which is put out the fires. But that maintains the system, doesn't it?

Yeah. We

also have to have long term strategies. And some of these strategies are really short term because they feed into current trends, the trend towards what I call partnership parenting. And by the way, there's a journal, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, that I highly recommend and the inaugural issue. And it was it was the first journal that was online, peer reviewed, and free access. It's the only journal that I can think of that actually features art in every issue.

Really? It's wonderful because we have to that's art is a symbolic language, isn't it? That's that's one of the reasons that archaeologists rely so much on art, but they don't well, anyway, I won't go into that because the old archaeologists projected, like, on the on the on the so called Venus figurines

Yes.

Fat women with very obvious vulvas and you know? I mean, why were these venerated? Why were there statues and statuettes of them? They were not some obscene No. Venus figurine.

No. A part of a very different worldview. Yeah. So but you asked about stay tuned for the summit.

Yes.

One of our wonderful board members who is a media expert and a PR expert, Gina Miltaldo, is is handling it. We need financial support. We need you to use your networks to not only spread the news of the summit, but to really spread the new paradigm. And, you know, I think it was my calling really to do this somehow, but it is a paradigm in development. Yeah.

And it is you who will do the developing, the adoption of it.

As we take it forward. But this has really been enlightening. I do want one last thing that we didn't get to touch on that I wanna talk about is you were a little bit about the Nordic states. And specifically, there's some things about how The US states, maybe not as a national or federal thing, but as this as a United States country, how some of those things might be learned and adapted. Is there something you can expand on with that?

Well, I think that there is a myth somehow that these are socialist nations, but they have the configuration of partnership. I mean, think about it. There's more equity in both the family and the state. Think about that child rearing. There's very generous caring policies of paid parental leave for both parents, for women and for men.

They're the, quote, feminine is more valued more. It's a question of degree always. About 40% to 50% of their national parliaments are females. And it's not that women are better than men, but men are not socialized to be caring. It's just that, you know, the traditional quote, which isn't really traditional, but that's how we're taught.

The socialization of men is not to be like a woman, not to be caring, not to be nonviolent. It's it's a little crazy, isn't it? And Yes. Men are suppressing that part of their humanity. And of course, as I said, you know, in terms of foreign aid, these people recognize their interconnection with the world.

And really, we have a world that is completely interconnected now, not just by technologies of communication and transportation, by weaponry that can span the globe in a matter of minutes, really, seconds in some cases. Yeah. So this is this is serious stuff, isn't it?

It is. It is. And I think, you know, the other part of that interconnected though is is the people are interconnected now too. And if I we can emphasize those relationships and partnerships and see that we're talking about people in all of these places.

And when we talk about people, we really need to talk about people, not men. See our language.

Yes.

And and and really, the the romance languages are terrible in that regard, but it's a process. And the first step in the process of change is changing our worldview, changing our consciousness. And that seems to be my job. I will continue that for as long as I can, but I hope that many people will continue it after I'm gone because we don't have much time.

Oh, and I appreciate you taking the time to be here with me today and to do this conversation. Your work has been pivotal in in influencing me over the last few years. And to have you on the show and and to have you be part of this is really special. And so I thank you for taking the time to do it.

Well, I'm glad that I could be with you. And you might consider forming book clubs because it's really a question of you and your audience developing a new, but not so new, very old partnership system.

Yeah. And that sharing of information. And I think the Design Economics Coalition is something we recently put out on our website, and we're gathering people from academia, from the business market sector, from the social sector, and different thought leaders to come together and then and convening virtual meetups and conversations. And I think book clubs and discussions of different topics will probably be part of that. So I'd love to have you as part of that as well.

I'm part of that. You know that.

Alright. Riane Eisler, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Design Economics Podcast. We will be back next month with another engaging conversation. You can find the Design Economics Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Please check out our show notes on our website, designeconomics.io. The design economics podcast is produced by the Institute for Economic Evolution, and I am your host, Vinny Tafuro.

Thank you for listening.