Social Trust, 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.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler examine how domination systems weaken social trust while partnership systems cultivate cooperation, security, and mutual care. Eisler links distrust to inequality, family hierarchies, gender socialization, childhood trauma, and coercive authority. She argues that children carry normalized patterns of domination into institutions and public policy. The discussion also considers oxytocin research, women’s socialization, Freud’s theories, coverture, and humanity’s capacity to replace habitual domination with partnership and care.

Scott Jacobsen: Right. Hi, Riane. We are once again back with the newly 95-year-old Riane Eisler, good as new. Our birthdays are a day apart, July 22 and July 23. She is an Austrian-born American social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, attorney, and author. We have now done several dozen interviews.

You are one of those people with whom I have enjoyed developing a long-term collaboration. Today, I want to talk briefly about social trust. I want you either to correct me or to add more nuance to my general frame of mind here.

My assumption is that domination systems tend to have lower levels of social trust, while partnership systems tend to have higher levels of social trust.

Paul J. Zak is a neuroeconomist. He and other researchers have investigated the relationship between oxytocin and social behaviour, including trust, attachment, generosity, and cooperation. One influential experiment found that administering oxytocin increased trusting behaviour in a particular economic game. Later studies, however, have shown that oxytocin’s effects are context-dependent and cannot be reduced to the idea of a simple “bonding” or “trust hormone.”

This is part of a broader body of 21st-century research into how neurochemical activity influences bonding, trust, and cooperation. Oxytocin appears to play a role, but it is only one component of a much more complex biological and social system.

In your research, can you explain domination systems and partnership systems in relation to social trust? How are human beings socially structured in that regard?

Eisler: I think we are talking about something very fundamental, which is that it is really not wise to trust domination systems. Somehow, people intuit that.

The whole regression toward domination is, in a way, animated by a lack of trust in the system. Unfortunately, this lack of trust is often misdirected, but it is real. You really cannot trust a system that is designed to favour those at the top.

The finding that those at the top tend to trust the system more makes sense because the system protects those at the top of the pyramid. Unfortunately, the intuition many people have, whether they are on the right, the left, or elsewhere, that the system does not protect them can also be quite real.

As I said, and as I want to emphasize, that distrust is unfortunately often directed the wrong way.

Jacobsen: What about overall social health? What are the consequences of low social trust? Research has found associations between social trust, institutional effectiveness, and economic performance, but the relationships are complex. Do poorer or more unequal societies tend to have lower levels of trust?

Eisler: Societies marked by poverty, inequality, corruption, or insecurity often have lower levels of trust. We human beings possess an intuitive intelligence that tells us when something is not right.

That may be our salvation, provided that this intuition is directed not toward some imaginary past, but much further back in our past, toward the configuration of an alternative.

That alternative is a higher-trust society, which is a partnership society. We know the configuration of that society. It takes us to the four cornerstones identified in my work.

These four cornerstones are childhood relations, gender relations, economic relations, and language and narratives. The first two, however, are routinely ignored or marginalized: family and childhood, and, of course, gender. These are often treated as ancillary matters or dismissed as “women’s issues,” if you will.

Jacobsen: What about trust within families?

Eisler: Families are part of the first cornerstone, family and childhood. We know from neuroscience, developmental science, and longstanding psychological research that childhood experiences are crucial.

The problem is that we have isolated the family as something private, as though it has nothing to do with society at large, whereas the kind of family we have, or do not have, is embedded in social norms. Children internalize these norms, which affect nothing less than our social policies and social structures.

This is where gender comes in. If children observe and experience the marginalization of women’s work as less important, they carry that assumption into public policy. It is all interconnected, and we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of interconnection.

Science has, in a way, been complicit in this by neglecting systems-oriented approaches, including nonlinear dynamics, self-organization theory, and complexity theory. Conventional analysis often focuses on linear cause and effect, which is important, but it is not the whole picture. Another part of the picture is the interaction among the various components. This takes us back to the four cornerstones.

Jacobsen: What about trust among women? Even under oppressive conditions, can the lack of trust between women become that extreme?

Eisler: Women are socialized, beginning at birth, not to trust anything except the supposed wisdom of older men. Older women, by contrast, are portrayed as witches and evil stepmothers in our fairy tales. We are taught that immediately.

Women are also socialized to compete with other women for the man who is supposed to become their “protector,” although he may instead become their abuser. Sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference.

Jacobsen: In your observations and life experience, do people ever fully escape these mindsets after a certain age, or do they leave an unmistakable imprint throughout life?

Eisler: It really depends. Judging by my own experience, people can change. People do change. I have certainly changed from completely accepting the system, and desperately attempting to fit into it, to recognizing how unhealthy much of Freud’s theory about women was.

Freud proposed the concept of “penis envy,” but women did not necessarily want a penis. They wanted access to opportunities and privileges that were denied to them as women at that time.

The Oedipus complex is also deeply problematic. It frames relationships in terms of rivalry, including rivalry between father and son. That reflects the broader mythology of domination because men, too, are placed within a pyramidal hierarchy. They are given one compensating position, however: within the traditional patriarchal family, the pyramid is supposed to be headed by the man.

This hierarchy was historically embedded in law. Under the English common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s legal identity was largely incorporated into that of her husband. William Blackstone famously summarized the doctrine by stating that husband and wife were considered one person in law, with the wife’s legal existence subsumed under her husband’s during marriage.

Jacobsen: How are these norms of distrust passed through social networks? We see these network effects in peer groups, both female and male, do we not?

Eisler: They are passed through peer groups, but I think they are already transmitted within families. Despite the denial built into domination systems, these systems create trauma, and people do not truly trust one another.

Children cannot always trust their parents. They are taught to mistake fear for respect. Respect becomes tinged with the fear of pain, whether through physical or emotional punishment, inflicted by the same people from whom children must receive what all human beings need: care.

In domination-oriented families, coercion and care become intertwined. Under those conditions, it is impossible to feel genuine trust. It is a mess, but we mistake that mess for what is normal.

There is a saying often attributed to Gandhi that we must not mistake what is habitual for what is natural.

Jacobsen: We will call it a day. Riane, thank you very much for your time today.

Eisler: Thank you.

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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.