Partnerism, Gender, AI, and Domination

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.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler examine feminism, partnerism, domination systems, gender hierarchy, AI, economics, trauma, and historical memory. Eisler argues that gender is central to domination, not marginal, because family structures teach hierarchy early. They discuss women’s erased history, Athenian democracy, authoritarian regression, ecological externalities, and partnership as a humane alternative rooted in deeper human possibilities rather than nostalgia for the past, with urgent implications for politics, culture, and survival today.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: My thinking is that, over the last couple of centuries, there has been a pattern of a significant minority of women working diligently for equality, alongside a smaller cohort of men working with them, or independently but toward similar aims, on shared objectives, for various reasons. Does that align with your understanding of the historical and contemporary record over the past few centuries, or has the ratio been skewed in different ways?

Riane Eisler: Well, there is no question that what you say is accurate, but the people working for equality tend to focus on racial equality, on ethnic equality, and on economic equality, and they marginalize gender equality as somehow less important. This is true of progressives as well as those who seek to reinforce domination systems, although the latter often emphasize gender as part of maintaining hierarchy. The reason they focus on gender is precisely that they recognize, often intuitively, that gender is not just a woman’s issue but a primary organizing principle of society, of family structures and institutions.

Now, feminism has changed that marginalization to some extent, but gender studies are still often siloed in the academy, and many academics do not treat gender as central. It is vital to address gender because everyone exists within some form of gender identity, whether male, female, or otherwise, including gay and transgender identities. This remains a significant issue, and I have been working to address it. People who seek recognition, by the way, often avoid talking about gender. If you want to be acknowledged in established academic circles, you tend not to foreground gender, or you confine it to a marginalized area of study.

Jacobsen: There is a core historical argument to consider, not only recorded human history, but the broader arc. Modern agriculture dates back roughly 12,000 years, while contemporary political and economic systems, including those that evolved from barter, are relatively recent. These are quite young compared to the approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years of Homo sapiens’ history. Arguably, concepts of sex, and likely gender roles, emerged far earlier than these systems. That seems a reasonable inference, given their near universality across cultures. So when you argue for partnerism, you are making a claim rooted in a much deeper historical timeline about what should be central.

Eisler: Yes, absolutely. And I think that the social frame of domination and partnership, and the patterns associated with each, shows that gender is a central inheritance from more domination-oriented periods. One reason The Chalice and the Blade has had such an impact is that we have not been taught this history. Even archaeological findings, such as evidence from Neolithic sites in China indicating matrilineal or matrifocal social organization, come to us in fragments. We lack an integrating framework, whereas those promoting domination systems often operate within a clear ideological frame.

If you look across different regimes, whether the Taliban, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or authoritarian systems such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, or contemporary Russia under Vladimir Putin, there is a recurring emphasis on rigid gender hierarchies. Women are often treated as subordinate, expected to serve as helpers to men, reflecting long-standing religious and cultural narratives. So it is very complex, because we all carry this relatively recent, comparatively speaking, dominator conditioning, along with the traumas it produces.

In my book Sacred Pleasure, I address this, and it foreshadows much of my later work. I do not think we can move forward unless we recognize gender for what it is: a central pillar of domination systems, learned early in life, that provides a template for interpreting difference itself, often as a basis for in-group versus out-group thinking and behaviour.

Jacobsen: There is a meta-question within the framework of partnerism over the last several thousand years: why have domination systems been so successful at maintaining dominance?

Eisler: Trauma, because these systems function as trauma-producing structures at multiple levels. Families oriented toward domination tend to be highly punitive, teaching people to respond punitively to deviation, including deviations among boys. Boys are also deeply affected by this.

Jacobsen: I am well aware of the social policing from older men, younger men, and women, the whole “man up” culture and so on.

Eisler: And women, absolutely. But we are at a point where domination systems are not adaptive at this level of technological development. It is very interesting that, with AI, we are now in an era where intelligence, or what has been defined as intelligence, has historically been associated with men. If you look at the humanities, for example…

Jacobsen: It is unreal.

Eisler: I mean, it is striking. It does not fully reflect humanity when you consider how many canonical figures in philosophy and the humanities have historically been white men. But this also presents an opportunity. AI is making what has been treated as a male monopoly on intelligence increasingly obsolete. What remains central are capacities often culturally associated with women, relational awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Men, of course, experience emotions such as anger and contempt, but softer emotional capacities have often been undervalued. So the question becomes: what is left that only humans can do? AI presents both a crisis and an opportunity.

Jacobsen: The training of AI systems relies on human-produced data models that approximate aspects of human cognition and language. These are built on centuries of cultural production, much of it shaped within domination-oriented systems. Therefore, the weighting and outputs of these systems, including the use of synthetic data when human-generated data becomes limited, may reflect those historical patterns. In that sense, there is a concern that such systems could reproduce domination-oriented narratives. What does that imply? That is a real problem.

Eisler: Because there are two issues here. One is the displacement of what has been defined as “intelligence,” historically associated with men, which presents both a crisis and an opportunity. It is a crisis for men, certainly; for women, less so. But the programming of domination into systems is a crisis for everyone, for both women and men. At the same time, some people are becoming conscious of this.

We return, however, to changing the rules of the game in economics. As long as profit is defined in terms of accumulation, exploitation, and the ability to “win”, to be superior over someone else, we are confronted with the need to rethink the economic system. We are already at a point where the current system shows signs of strain. The task is to determine what kind of economic system is needed. It is not simply a choice between capitalism and socialism, because both have historically devalued what they call “reproductive labour,” and both have treated nature as an externality not accounted for in measures such as GDP. That is a fundamental flaw.

So yes, there is the problem of how AI is programmed. It can be shaped deliberately, and alternative systems can be built, but there are constraints. AI systems require substantial energy, much of which still comes from fossil fuels. So there are real limitations and trade-offs involved.

Jacobsen: From your own personal history, what have been the clearest indications of the necessity of change and the existential risks associated with domination systems? That may be useful for some final reflections.

Eisler: Nuclear weapons are an obvious example of existential risk, as seen since the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More gradually, climate change presents another. Denial is also part of domination systems, whether it is denial of COVID-19, denial of election outcomes, or denial of climate science. These forms of denial are connected to trauma.

Many people involved in regenerative movements are trying to respond, but their efforts are often compartmentalized. They do not see the system as a whole, nor do they recognize the importance of the way relations between women and men are structured. That is not the only factor, but it is central. Domination systems tend to be hierarchical, like pyramids, with authority concentrated at the top. You can see this reflected in households, for example, in the persistence of the idea that the male should be the “head” of the household. This is not new; it is a recurring pattern that re-emerges over time.

Jacobsen: But even the idea of the male as the head of the household is, in practice, often more myth than reality.

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Eisler: Well, of course, because women learn to navigate systems of power, as people in constrained positions often do. Women have also been socialized to act as helpmates to men, to function as agents within male-centred structures. In classical times, for example, in Ancient Athens, women managed the oikonomia, or household economy. But they did so as agents of the male head of household, and they were largely confined to women’s quarters. It was a very complex system.

We have inherited aspects of it, and we often idealize Athenian democracy, even though it applied only to a small group of free men with property. Women were excluded, as were enslaved people, both female and male, and also men without property. So it was a very limited democratic model that the framers of American democracy drew from. This contemporary emphasis on originalism can be seen, in part, as a regression toward maintaining hierarchical structures. We are, in effect, reinforcing elements of domination. And we are about to run out of time.

Jacobsen: True. Can you offer any personal anecdotes that exemplify this, an individual story? Earlier, you mentioned an interaction in which someone said something to you that wasn’t egalitarian, but at the time, you were so socialized that you took it as a compliment. The aim here is not to criticize or judge, but to understand context through lived experience, alongside the more abstract discussion. So, can you bring it down to earth with another anecdote from your life?

Eisler: My life experience was that, for the first half of my life, I tried to fit into the gender stereotype of the “little woman behind the great man.” It was a disaster for both my husband and me; that marriage did not work. My second marriage was really a partnership. I did not want to marry for a long time, because the terms husband and wife felt tied to domination structures, and my consciousness had changed.

David’s first book, The Healing of a Nation, which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, an award also given to Martin Luther King Jr., reflected many of the gender assumptions of its time. He later learned feminism and partnerism through our work together and embraced these perspectives. When we went to the Nairobi World Conference on Women, he participated in a panel, one of the few at the time, on what men can do to support women’s liberation. Even today, people sometimes use the term “women’s lib,” whereas analogous terms in other liberation contexts would be considered dismissive.

Jacobsen: Yes, I think some people, like Warren Farrell, have discussed ideas such as “gender liberation,” but even that can be somewhat limiting relative to what you are describing. When one spends decades developing a broader conceptual framework, like your partnership model, incremental efforts can seem partial. They are helpful, but they do not always capture the full scope. That is what I am taking from your point.

Eisler: Every one of us can work for a partnership. We can begin by sharing the language of domination and partnership within our own networks. Language matters. Linguistic research suggests that without words for a concept, it becomes difficult to grasp it fully. That is a starting point.

At the same time, movements such as anti-racism and environmental advocacy often work in parallel. They challenge the same underlying patterns of domination and exploitation, but they do not always recognize their shared foundation. The broader shift is from domination systems to partnership systems. I will continue working toward that as long as I can. I will also send you the article from the Monterey Weekly, it was a cover story that captures my journey, and I think you will find it useful.

Right now, we are in a global crisis shaped by domination dynamics. Conflicts persist in part because leaders at the top of hierarchical systems pursue power and territory, such as in the case of Vladimir Putin and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The consequences are severe and tragic.

Jacobsen: As a final question, would you say that partnerism carries more hilaritas, a sense of positive humour or lightness in life, than domination systems?

Eisler: Absolutely.

Jacobsen: Whereas domination systems tend toward either an absence of humour or humour that comes at the expense of others, in the sense of use and abuse.

Eisler: Absolutely. You have said it. I do not need to add much further. Everything changes as we move from a lack of consciousness, which enables domination, to the kind of consciousness required for partnership. The first step in that consciousness is the knowledge now emerging, often in fragments, that for long periods of human history, many societies were more partnership-oriented. That does not mean returning to an idealized past, but it does suggest that partnership is a real possibility.

The question, then, is how to implement it: what kinds of corporate charters, what kinds of economic metrics. For example, treating forests as having no economic value until they are reduced to timber reflects a deeply flawed system. Yet many people accept the status quo without question, and change is difficult, especially for individuals shaped by trauma. To some extent, we are all affected by that.

Jacobsen: Riane, thank you very much for your time again.

Eisler: Have a wonderful day, and I will see you soon.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 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 fellowships, and currently serves on several 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.