Language, Domination, and Partnership Systems

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler examine how language reflects and reinforces domination or partnership systems. They discuss linguistic relativity, gendered grammar, Finnish pronouns, patriarchy, matriarchy, social hierarchy, and cultural narratives. Eisler argues that partnership language can reveal interdependence, challenge inherited divisions, and support more caring social institutions and relationships.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let us talk about language. People make a big hullabaloo about large language models and sometimes extrapolate their capabilities to artificial general intelligence. Large language models are forms of artificial intelligence, but they are not synonymous with artificial general intelligence. Through neural networks, transformer architectures, statistical modelling, and probabilistic generation, these systems can produce text that appears reasonably intelligent or, at minimum, convincing to most people, while still producing factual and reasoning errors.

Human language seems to involve a broader generative capacity. In the Chomskyan tradition, human linguistic competence is treated as a rule-governed generative system capable of producing an enormous range of expressions.

Within partnership and domination systems, language also seems to have a particular character. We have focused on how people use language, but I do not know whether we have focused sufficiently on the verbiage itself: terminology, vernacular, and even the sequelae of meanness versus niceness, let us say, corresponding roughly to domination versus partnership.

When you examine the language produced by what we might call trauma-producing domination systems, in contrast with healthier, partnership-oriented systems, what emerges in your analysis?

Riane Eisler: I think language is fundamental. We have not really had the terms necessary to connect the dots and see the whole system. Our inherited language often fragments our consciousness. By that, I mean that it prevents us from seeing connections among different aspects of the social system.

As you know, I have spent most of my life trying to mainstream the terms “domination system” and “partnership system.” It is very difficult to get people to include childhood and family, as well as gender, in their analyses. It is also difficult to get people to envision an economics that goes beyond both capitalism and socialism towards what I call a caring economics of partnerism.

Language also includes the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we are taught to tell ourselves, and the stories we tell about human nature and about being. All of these cornerstones are related.

It may sound complex, but underneath our conventional categories, many of which we inherited from more rigid and violent domination-oriented periods, there is a relatively simple pattern.

Historically, men have often dominated women, but men themselves also occupy positions within domination hierarchies. Most men are not at the top. They are subordinated to other men and, occasionally, to women who operate within institutions structured according to traditionally masculine domination norms.

The important point is that partnership is not simply an alternative to patriarchy in the form of matriarchy. It is an alternative to domination by either sex.

Jacobsen: There are an enormous number of languages in the world, and language can influence habitual patterns of thinking, although it does not absolutely determine what people are capable of thinking.

Wittgenstein famously wrote in the Tractatus, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” There are languages, or linguistic conventions, that seem to exhibit features that could be interpreted as more compatible with partnership.

Eisler: Yes. Finnish, for example, does not distinguish between “he” and “she” in its standard third-person singular personal pronoun. It uses the gender-neutral hän.

That is interesting because domination systems train us to make a radical distinction between what they define as masculine and feminine, and then to rank the masculine above the feminine.

Finnish does not encode that particular distinction in its personal pronoun. I think that kind of linguistic structure can be more compatible with partnership thinking, although, of course, language alone does not determine a society’s social organization.

Nordic societies have also tended, to differing degrees, to place greater social and economic value on activities associated with care, which domination systems have traditionally coded as feminine.

Research on linguistic relativity suggests that language can influence habitual thought, categorization, and attention. I would not say that something literally ceases to exist because we lack a word for it. Rather, without a useful term, it can become more difficult to identify, discuss, connect, and make socially visible.

That is why I have spent most of my life trying to disseminate the terms “partnership” and “domination.” They help people see that beneath conventional divisions such as right versus left, religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, Northern versus Southern, or capitalist versus socialist, there are recurring configurations of partnership and domination.

Those patterns cross the conventional boundaries that so often divide people and encourage them to fight one another.

Jacobsen: Domination systems contain a great deal of fear. At the individual level, that would presumably produce a strong tendency towards self-protection.

Would you therefore predict that language within a domination system becomes less agentic in some respects? It might become highly self-referential or defensive. Instead of “we,” “you,” or an outward orientation, the language might revolve more strongly around protecting the self or the in-group.

Would both the terminology and the verbs themselves reflect this defensive framing?

Eisler: I think we see that, do we not? Domination systems are, by definition, strongly organized around in-group versus out-group thinking.

There is always an in-group. Historically, even the term “mankind” illustrates how male experience could be linguistically positioned as representative of humanity as a whole.

Consider how patriotism can be framed within domination systems. It becomes “us against them.”

Yet we are all interconnected. That has become especially apparent at our present level of technological development. We are globally interconnected through technologies of communication and transportation, but also through technologies of destruction, including nuclear weapons.

That interconnection is a reality that should be taught in schools. Our lives are interconnected.

Jacobsen: The domination hierarchy did not necessarily consist simply of all men ruling all women from the top down. There were men at the top, historically usually heterosexual adult men, followed by secondary, tertiary, and lower-ranking men who might then exercise some degree of authority within the household.

You can see aspects of that social history reflected in highly gendered languages, which provides an interesting contrast with the Finnish example.

Eisler: Yes. Grammatical gender is inherited in many European languages, and it is particularly extensive in many Romance languages.

In standard grammatical conventions in languages such as Spanish and French, masculine forms traditionally function as the default for many mixed-gender groups. If you have a group containing women and men, conventional agreement frequently takes the masculine form.

That grammatical convention does not itself prove the superiority of men, of course, but it developed within historical cultures in which men generally enjoyed greater institutional authority. Modern speakers and institutions are increasingly experimenting with inclusive alternatives.

Jacobsen: Then a question remains. Why, through biological and cultural evolution, have we not commonly seen domination organized in the reverse direction, with women systematically dominating men?

Eisler: That is an interesting question. As you know, my position is that there was never a matriarchy if by “matriarchy” we mean a mirror-image system in which women, as a class, dominated men in the way patriarchal systems institutionalized male authority over women.

Mainstream anthropology has likewise found no clear evidence of societies organized as straightforward mirror-image matriarchies, although matrilineal, matrifocal, woman-centred, and relatively gender-egalitarian societies certainly have existed and continue to exist.

The assumption that matriarchy must be the conceptual opposite of patriarchy is misleading. What I am talking about instead is partnership, beginning with partnership between the two basic biological sexes of the human species while recognizing, of course, the broader diversity of human gender identities and social roles.

We are not normally taught to examine those relations as fundamental components of social systems.

You know the four cornerstones I have introduced: childhood and family, gender, economics, and story and language. They are interconnected. Gender runs through them. Economics runs through them. Childhood experiences run through them. The stories and language through which we interpret those experiences run through them.

That is why the alternative to patriarchy is not simply matriarchy.

Popular culture even struggles with that problem. Consider Barbie. The film plays with a society organized around female authority and then confronts the question of what happens to men within such a structure. Simply reversing who dominates whom does not solve the underlying problem.

Partnership does.

That is why it remains such an uphill struggle to get people to recognize what, once articulated, can seem obvious.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.