Partnership: An Interview with Riane Eisler

08-10-05

Introduction:

You can read about Riane Eisler in the interview. However, before you read the interview with her, you may find the following material to be interesting and in harmony with much of what Riane talked about in our conversation. I spoke with Michael McElhenie, one of the leaders of the “Leadership for Results” United Nations program that helps catalyze collaborative solutions to HIV/AIDS in Africa, SE Asia and the Caribbean. See his article in The Integral Leadership Review, September 2005.) This is something he had to say that is very relevant to the interview.

Mike: We started these programs in 2001; we saw results right off the bat.

What we were doing was trying to impact multiple levels of systems. We wanted to impact individuals intrapsychically and behaviorally—to change how they saw themselves, how they saw their worlds and how they took action in them. We wanted to impact relationships throughout vast interconnected networks. Most importantly, we wanted these leaders to develop and implement more collaborative, more complete solutions to the complex issues surrounding HIV and AIDS. So when we talk about results we are talking about results at many levels of systems.

Russ: I remember one story you told (Integral Leadership in Action conference, Westminster, Colorado, April 2005) about bringing men and women into separate and then mixed groups to talk about their gender and sexual relationships and the impact that had. It brought tears to my eyes.

Mike: This work was tremendous! One of the things that is very clear in the research cited by our friends at the United Nations Development Programme is that when you increase women’s empowerment you decrease the incidence of HIV and AIDS.

Russ: What you are saying is so in keeping with the message that Riane Eisler is putting forth.

Mike: Yes, it is absolutely true and I see this reflected in Riane's writing. We are seeing it on a small scale and a large scale. It has been particularly true in Cambodia. Gretchen Schmelzer and Fran Johnston have been integral in the work there. Along with efforts to increase the power and the visibility of women, we have seen a significant decrease in the incidence of HIV and AIDS and, in particular, the stigma related to HIV and AIDS. Increasing the voice of women helps everyone, including men, bring their compassionate energy into the various systems in which they are involved, whether it is at the societal level or more local. This increases people’s awareness of how their maltreatment of others, particularly those living with HIV/AIDS, is not creating a better society. So women’s empowerment is an incredibly important variable not only in addressing HIV and AIDS, but also in improving the general health and wellbeing of society.

In the story you mentioned, men and women first met as gender groups in separate rooms and talked about what it meant to be a man or a woman. What it meant to be a good or bad man. What it meant to be a good or bad woman. They talked about all of their experiences related to that. For the men I was with, they slowly and quite cautiously began to admit to each other— after some people in power spoke up first— that having a woman initiate sex feels good. It does a lot for the ego and it does a lot for the relationship. That was an acknowledgement by the men in this room, for the first time in their collective history, that women actually enjoyed intimate relationships. Some would say, “You’re kidding me! How could this possibly be so?” Yet, the denial began to break down, led by the powerful men in the group, and men began opening themselves up to another reality regarding this important aspect of gender relationships.

What this opening up did at a psychological and a social level was to level the playing field just a bit and men, and the women they shared this new insight with, said, “Wow! We are in this together!” It is not just men holding the power and being the authority over everything. It is being partners and we are not that different and, at the same time, our differences are subtler. People can embrace both sides of that reality and be able to move forward in their relationships in a different way.

In one workshop, a very powerful policeman from Swaziland was brought to tears at the realization that he had been ignoring the needs of his wife for twenty some odd years. He decided to have a discussion with her about this insight that very night. The next day he came and his wife was right next to him. As I was to lead the group that day, she came up to me and said, “Michael, I wanted to come in and see what had so powerfully moved my husband to want to be my partner, not just my husband.”

I swear, you talked about stories bringing tears to your eyes, well that was what was happening right there in front of 50 people. My partner doing the workshop with me, Felice Tilin, saw me hugging this woman and her husband and all of us letting loose these joyful tears. She came up with tears in her own eyes and asked, “What’s going on?”

I said, “We are just having a wonderful moment.”

She said, “I felt it from across the room.”

And now, Riane Eisler:

Q: A way to begin this would be to help the readers have a sense of who you are and what you’ve been about in your career.

A: I sometimes have said that my life is like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together, because I have a varied background.

I have a background academically in both sociology and in law. I have used that background to embark on what my work has been: a systems study of our past, present and the possibilities for our future as a species. That is fairly big, right? My first job was as a systems scientist at the Systems Development Corporation, an offshoot of the Rand Corporation. Already in the 50’s, when nobody talked about systems, that was something that I was involved in.

Perhaps the most significant parts of my background are two-fold. One was what happened when I was a child and the Nazis took over my native Austria. That was cataclysmic for me, of course. We had to flee and it completely changed my life. It brought up the question that my work sought to answer: when we have such an enormous capacity for caring, for empathy, for creativity and yes, for love, why is it that there has been so much cruelty, so much violence, so much destructiveness? Is it inevitable—as we are often told—or do we have alternatives? That is a burning question for many of us. It certainly was for me starting very early in my life.

The second formative experience was not only the immigration process, the changing of so many cultures—first to Cuba, then later to the United States—but in the 60’s, like many women, I suddenly realized that as important as having been born Jewish had been in my life, having been born female probably affected my life even more. As happened with many women at that time—I realized that many problems that I had thought were personal were really cultural and social. That was very important because one of the things that distinguish my research methodology is that most studies of human society are quite aptly called the study of man. And then we are told, “Don’t worry, man includes woman.” Well actually, woman includes man…

(LAUGHTER)

A: …but the point of it is that these studies use a very, very incomplete database. Not only that, but when you focus on one half of humanity, you don’t take into full account the domain that is primarily associated with women, namely, family and other intimate relations. In other words, the private rather than the so-called public sphere is ignored. So in my research, I was able to see patterns and configurations that are not visible otherwise, because I drew from a much larger database.

There were no names for these configurations. Connecting the dots was what was possible at that point, because if we only look at part of the picture, we don’t see the configuration of the whole picture, right? So there were no names and I had to name them. I named one configuration the dominator or domination model and the other one the partnership model. I also use the term “gylanic,” because the cultural construction of the relationship of the roles of the two halves of humanity is a key element of the social system.

Q: Your partnership model and dominator model concepts are very interesting, because they aren’t just about interpersonal relationships or family relationships, but they are also about social, economic and political relationships, as well.

A: They are about everything, really. The whole picture includes women, children and early childhood relations, which are so foundational to a society, and affect everything. We’re socialized to just sort of immediately ghetto-ize that and say, “Oh, this is about women and children,” whereas nothing could be further from the truth. To understand human society we need an approach that takes into account the whole of the population: men, women, and children.

Q: Please summarize the quality or characteristics of a dominator model.

A: We’re all very familiar with the characteristics. Basically we’re talking about a system of beliefs and a way of structuring institutions—family, education, religion, politics, and economics—in a way that imposes and maintains top-down rankings of domination. I call this a “Hierarchy of Domination,” be it in the family, the state or tribe. And of course, we see it in economics, religion, and education. The partnership and dominator models are just that—models—so we’re always talking about the degree to which a particular culture, economic system, business or family orients to one or the other. And these categories go beyond conventional ones such as right vs. left, religious versus secular, or Eastern vs. Western. Examples of rigid dominator cultures are Nazi Germany (a secular Western rightist society), Khomeini’s Iran (a religious Eastern society), Stalin’s Soviet Union (a leftist society).

Q: I was noticing in the paper this morning there was a photograph of a long table with the men who are in the process of trying to forge a constitution in Iraq seated around it. The absence of women is so noticeable.

A: It is noticeable to us now, and yet I remember in the 60’s when I woke up as if from a long sleep this was a problem nobody was talking about. It had been pushed into the background. In those days you picked up a newspaper and 99.9% of the names and faces in the United States were male. Now, we’ve moved a little from that. But, of course what we’re seeing in Iraq now is the takeover of fundamentalism. Whether it’s Muslim, Christian or whatever, it is really not a matter of religion. It’s a matter of a return to a rigid domination model.

The domination model is a system of top-down rankings. In fundamentalism we see: theocratic top-down rule and the ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half. There is also a high degree of built-in, culturally condoned abuse and violence, from very punitive childrearing to “holy wars,’ and a belief system that presents all that as either divinely ordained or ordained by nature.

Q: So then most of us are very familiar with the dominator model. We’ve been living in it.

A: That is a good point because the mere fact that we are having this conversation, of course, shows that we’ve also begun to move away from it. Consider the European Middle Ages. They looked a lot like the Taliban, didn’t they? The Inquisition, the Crusades, the witch burnings, enormous abuse and violence in child rearing and, of course, chronic, chronic wars and very rigid male dominance.

Q: You have an alternative that you suggested as a result of your work and that is a partnership model.

A: It is a so very important that we know that there is an alternative. Just for starters, I would like to say that this alternative is about a configuration. When I use the term partnership, this is not about just strategic alliances or cooperation. People collaborate and cooperate in the domination model. The 9/11 terrorists did; invading armies and monopolies do, etc. So the difference between competition and cooperation isn’t the difference between these two models. The difference is that each has a very different cultural configuration.

We can see the partnership configuration in tribal societies such as the Teduray of the Philippines and the Minangkabau of Sumatra. We see it in very technologically developed cultures such as the Nordic cultures: Sweden, Finland, and Norway. There we see a much closer orientation to the partnership model than anywhere else in the world today, except for tribal islands of earlier cultures.

Q: Would you characterize the partnership model?

A: Well, let’s look at the Nordic Nations. First of all, rather than having hierarchies of domination—these rigid rankings—they do have hierarchies. They have more of what I call hierarchies of actualization. I’ll get back to that because it’s key to my model for business and economics. But the first thing that you see is that they have much greater political and economic democracy. They don’t have these huge gaps betweens haves and have-nots. They have a generally high standard of living for everyone.

Second, rather than ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, they have much more equal partnership between women and men. With this—and this is critical—you find that as the status of women rises, so does the status of those traits and activities stereotypically considered feminine: caring, care-giving, non-violence.

So what do you see? You see that the Nordic nations were pioneers in what my friend from Finland, Hilkka Pietila, calls a caring society. We call it a welfare state, but it’s very different from the U.S. welfare system. They have universal health care, childcare allowances, elder care and paid parental leave. In other words, in cultures that orient to the partnership model, the care giving that is stereotypically associated with women can become a fiscal priority of the nation.

This is very, very good for the economic health of the nation. Finland, for example, in both 2003 and 2004 ranked ahead of the much wealthier, much more powerful United States in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness ratings. And of course, these nations are always on the top in the U.N. Human Development Reports.

These nations also pioneered the first peace studies courses. They pioneered laws against physical punishment of children in families. They pioneered a strong men’s movement to disentangle male identity from violence. They also pioneered what we today call industrial democracy, teamwork in factories, rather than turning human beings into mere cogs in the industrial machine. Ecologically sound manufacturing, such as the Natural Step, was also pioneered by them.

Now, none of this is random or coincidental. It’s part of the cultural configuration characteristic of the partnership rather than domination model. It is a configuration that factors both what happens to the female half of humanity and also what happens in people’s day-to-day lives.

Q: In addition to The Chalice and The Blade, you wrote a book with David Loye, your husband, called, The Power of Partnership, in which you were trying to help people learn how to make the shift from a dominator orientation to a partnership orientation. Is that correct?

A: That’s right. The first book that came out of my cross-cultural, historical, multidisciplinary study was The Chalice and The Blade. Then I wrote another book, Sacred Pleasure, which looks at the cultural construction of both sexuality and spirituality using the analytical lens of the partnership-domination continuum. My next two books were very much concerned with putting all this into action. I wrote a book, Tomorrow’s Children, on applying my findings to partnership education.

Then came my last published book, The Power of Partnership. That was a real departure for me. I decided to do this in the form of a self-help book. As a matter of fact, it won the Nautilus Award as the best self-help book of 2003. However, it’s a very different genre of self-help book. Most self-help books talk about how we relate to ourselves, our intimate relations and our work relations. But this book goes on to our community and national relations, to our international relations, to our relations with Mother Earth and yes, our spiritual relations, showing how they are all interconnected and—even beyond that—how very different every one of these relations is depending on the degree to which there is an orientation to the partnership model or the domination model. That book is an action book. It is full of action checklists. It’s a how-to book.

Q: It is. There are many activities on all the different levels or in the different lines that you were just talking about. As I heard you describing that, what came to mind was in Integral Theory, the notion of lines: that we have multiple lines of development. Intellectual might be one, emotional another. Certainly how we engage in relationships is one. There are many different ways that lines of development could be described or characterized. What strikes me about The Power of Partnership and all your work on The Partnership Way, is that you’re doing what the Integral approach is talking about: development along multiple lines, whether it has to do with self, relationship or community.

A: Very true. I would say that certainly from the perspective of the new conceptual framework of the partnership/domination continuum, we cannot really develop fully in any area, whether it is emotionally, spiritually or mentally, under the domination model. For one thing, it is a very stressful model and stress gets in the way of full development, because our brain’s neurochemistry tends to go into fight, flight or disassociation. The difference with my work is that my focus is on the conditions that we need to put in place—and that we can put in place—so that we can more fully develop, so that we can live in a culture that supports, rather than inhibits the full development of our enormous capacities, which really are so striking in humans: our capacities for consciousness, for caring, for creativity.

Q: Riane, as you are probably aware, there are a number of developmental models afloat saying that there are stages in adult development and/or stages in cultural development that suggest that people who are at “lower stages of development” may or may not have developed the cognitive capability, the world view, the values to be able to develop in this way. What you’re talking about is really something that is going to be of greater interest to people who are at higher levels of development. If that’s the case, that’s where it seems to me your more community oriented, collectively oriented aspects become relevant because you’re really talking about needing to change culture and individuals.

A: That’s the whole point. It’s really a chicken and egg issue, isn’t it? We have individual responsibility. But as I show again and again in The Power of Partnership, if we don’t change the culture, change will be inhibited. We hear so much about healing. But we are trying to heal ourselves in a dominator cultural context. It’s like trying to go up in a down elevator.

We must work through our own dominator mental and emotional tapes that run. We have inherited them. Our parents didn’t invent them. They inherited them, etc., etc. The fact that they are much weaker now is a very good sign, even though we are in a time of regression when there are those who are trying to make them much stronger again.

Not coincidentally, these people are focusing on the primary human relations between women and men and parents and children. They intuitively recognize that these relations are foundational—while sadly most progressives still tend to see them as “just” women and children’s issues.

Our job is awareness and then action. The more we change our cultural environment, the more we can also have more awareness. And then we are also more able to act.

But I would say this: it isn’t just cognitive development that’s the issue. This is a difference between my approach and that of many of the stage models that people have become so interested in. It’s emotional. It’s very important that we become aware that emotional development or lack of it impacts cognitive development.

People who were brought up in a very rigid dominator way, unless they are exposed to alternatives—including but not necessarily therapy—tend to see only two alternatives: you dominate or you are dominated. They don’t see a partnership alternative.

It’s our job—and I’ve certainly taken it upon myself as part of my job—to show everyone that not only is a partnership alternative possible, but that it is much more effective economically and, of course, much more equitable, pleasurable, and far less stressful. As many of us are aware, today the mix of high technology, nuclear bombs, biological terrorism, conquest of nature with ever more powerful technologies possibly will take us to an evolutionary dead end. We urgently need a cultural transformation and that’s our job.

Q: Ultimately, I want to get to the question of leadership, but I think there is still more foundation to be laid. For example, you brought up the subject of economics. In a new book that’s coming out called Enlightened Power yours is the first chapter: "The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power." Can you lay out for us a little bit of the economic argument in support of a partnership approach?

A: It is something I’m very deeply involved in. I am actually working on a new book on partnership economics: a caring economy. We’ve been told for a long time, for example in terms of organizational structure, that hierarchies of domination are needed for success. In these hierarchies of rigid top down rankings, accountability, respect, and benefit flow mostly from the bottom up. Enron, for example, certainly didn’t have much accountability or respect from the top down. Most of the benefits accrued to the people on top. That’s the classic domination model. And Enron shows that in the long term it’s hardly successful.

I don’t mean to pick on Enron. But these hierarchies of domination, where there is so little accountability or respect by those on top, are rife with horrible corruption and cause great suffering and loss. These companies eventually went bankrupt or changed their names. These were disasters for many people: stockholders, employees and their pension plans. What we’re discovering today—and it’s all over the management literature—is that hierarchies of actualization are much more efficient, much more effective.

Now what is a hierarchy of actualization? Well, if we look at the way power is conceptualized, it isn’t conceptualized so much as power over, power to dominate or to destroy, but power to empower oneself and others to be the best we can be. It is also power with. So a term like teamwork is really part of the shift to partnership where there’s a different way of looking at power.

In a hierarchy of actualization, you have respect, benefit and accountability flowing both ways. But you also have something else that is very important: you have much better information flow. This is very important for companies to make effective business decisions. In partnership structures, not only do you have teamwork where people can really have input and use their brains and their creativity, but you also have the possibility for much more creativity.

When people are in a hierarchy of domination, they know very well that they better conform. It’s very dangerous to disobey orders or to question. Particularly in a post-industrial economy where we are told we need a flexible workforce, a creative workforce, a workforce that can solve problems, the hierarchy of domination just does not work. The structure inhibits creativity and flexibility.

There is something else really basic that takes us back to what I was talking about when I spoke of the Nordic Nations. There are many studies now showing that when people feel cared for—which is part of the hierarchy of actualization—people perform much better. There are empirical studies showing this. So all in all, what we’re finding out is that the partnership model is not only more conducive to higher stages of human development, but it actually is much move conducive to economic well-being.

Q: Have you actually been exploring studies to that effect?

A: Yes, all this will be in my book on caring economics. But I have an article that will be out in a book that is being published by Stanford University that was put together by the people in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

Q: You mean Cooperrider and others?

A: Yes, David Cooperrider is one of the editors. I was very honored that Case Western Reserve University gave me an honorary Ph.D. in May of this year. I was one of two; the other was the vice president of Uganda.

Q: Congratulations!

A: It was lovely.

My article is the first chapter in the book, because it frames the rest of the material in the book. It’s called, "The Economic Imperative of Revisioning the Rules of the Game: Work: Work Values and Caring." I cite some of those studies. People like Jane Dutton at the University of Michigan have done some of this work. Alice Isen has done a lot of studies on people doing better when they feel better. And of course, people don’t feel good in hierarchies of domination. When people feel good, they even negotiate better. It all makes sense.

Q: You carried this theme over into the chapter in Enlightened Power: The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power.

A: Yes.

Q: Let’s see if we can talk a little bit about what are the implications of all this for leadership? Some of it may be fairly obvious. Dominator models of leadership are prevalent in most societies. For example, I was doing an interview with someone recently and asked about his definition of leadership and he said a leader is someone who has followers.

(Laughter)

A: You see, that is a dominator definition.

I do want to say something: we all need teachers, but we don’t need gurus. The guru is really a dominator phenomenon. We all need leaders, but we certainly don’t need to have leaders who consider it their function to make followers out of us.

Q: So if we don’t have followers in a partnership model, what is leadership?

A: Leadership is many things. First of all it is the capacity to inspire. Second, it is the capacity to have a vision of what one’s goals are and how to implement them.

Q: A course of action?

A: Yes. You see a lot of this in the corporate literature today where you read about the leader and the manager no longer being a cop or a controller, but rather being someone who facilitates. I think the good leader nurtures. That is a statement that takes us back to an important issue: the stereotypically feminine and the stereotypically masculine.

Q: Please tell us about that.

A: I think that if we really are serious about changing our economic system, about changing our world so that our children and generations still to come will survive and thrive, we need to pay attention to what I call the hidden system of gender values. The sociologist, Louis Wirth, once said that the most important things about a society are those that are seldom talked about. I paraphrase that into “the most important things about a society are those that people feel uncomfortable talking about.”

Q: Interesting. Be aware of the shadow.

A: Well, I’m not a Jungian. I should make that clear. I don’t know about shadows. But I do know that if we are uncomfortable talking about gender, if we are uncomfortable talking about parent-child relations as fundamental, as being indexes of social structures and values—which they are—there is a reason for it. We’ve been so indoctrinated to think that a male superior, female inferior divided species model is either divinely or naturally ordained that we’re uncomfortable when it’s questioned. That is part of our mental maps, our emotional maps. Yet, if we don’t examine that hidden system of gender valuations, we really cannot make the changes that we need for the cultural transformation that so many of us want.

I want to emphasize that we are talking about stereotypes, not anything inherent in women or men. But in the domination model not only women, but also so-called feminine values, such as caring, compassion, empathy and non-violence, are relegated to a secondary subservient place. So we have very strange fiscal priorities. We’re told there is no money. But there is always enough money for building prisons and, if you think of it, that’s for the dominator archetype of the punitive father, right? And we always have enough money for weapons and wars, and of course that relates to the dominator “masculine” archetype of the warrior.

Q: I thought you said you weren’t a Jungian?

(Laughter)

A: I’m not a Jungian. Let’s not even go there because Jung really takes these archetypes as universals rather than as constructs of the domination model. So the archetype of the punitive father is a dominator archetype. It’s not a human archetype; fathers don’t have to be punitive. But in the domination model, there is always money for punishing; there is always money for wars. Of course, that’s another dominator archetype: the hero as violent warrior. This cultural construction of masculinity and it’s elevation of men over women really governs our systems of values unconsciously. So we’re told there is not enough money for what? For the work of caring and care giving, for health care, for child care, for elder care, are you following what I’m saying?

Q: Yes, for education...

A: In other words, for these “soft”, stereotypically feminine things.

If you look at the Nordic Nations, you see a very different set of priorities. These nations were dirt poor at the beginning of the 20th Century. Do you remember the mass immigrations from there, the potato famines, etc.? But when they started to invest in care giving, they became prosperous. And this happened as the status of women rose and policies were instituted with women as half of the legislature there, not just 10-12% like here. They really developed what we so need. They developed high quality human capital that we hear so much about today. So the dominator model is economically a very pernicious system. It is also a system that artificially creates scarcity.

Q: Because it allocates resources in some ways to the exclusions of others?

A: Absolutely! And it also destroys resources through constant wars and through diverting more and more resources into weaponry. As the weapons get more technologically complex and expensive, it is basically a disaster for the world. And the domination model not only creates material scarcity through misallocation of resources, it also creates emotional scarcity, because if the only alternatives are dominating or being dominated how can you really have intimacy? How can you fulfill that emotional need? It also promotes spiritual scarcity because there’s something really immoral about the whole system.

Q: What is the role of leadership in our current circumstances?

A: I would like to see leaders world-wide stop thinking in terms of the conventional categories of right versus left, religious versus secular, capitalist versus communist, east versus west, north versus south, technologically developed or underdeveloped. I would like them to think in holistic ways, which is only possible once we transcend this hidden system of gendered valuation.

All these conventional social categories fail to take into account the social and cultural construction of the roles and relations of the two halves of humanity. Why? Because women are so devalued that anything concerning them is not considered important.

I would like to see leaders use the analytical lens of the partnership and domination models, because then they will really see the whole picture. They can make more sound policy decisions. That’s the first thing. There is an urgent need for partnership leaders, for leaders that can offer people—whether it’s in an organization or in a nation—a vision of a viable and positive alternative and how to get there.

Q: How do you think we need to go about trying to increase the kind of leadership you’re talking about in the world and in our organizations?

A: First of all, I think the challenge for leaders is enormous. For me a leader is somebody who has the spiritual courage to step out of the prevailing paradigm. We’re beginning to see partnership leaders all over the world. Wangari Mathaai with her greenbelt movement in Kenya is an example of leadership that empowers. In Brazil, Thais Corral has used radio as a tool to empower women. Now there is a network of 400 women’s radio programs that have developed.

Q: By implication, are the examples and the strategy for creating more of a partnership approach to leadership focused on women?

A: Raising the status of women is not going to solve all of our problems, but without it our problems cannot be solved. That is one of the core findings from my work. If you go back to what we were talking about—the shift to a more stereotypically feminine style of leadership that’s empowering rather than disempowering, nurturing rather than coercive—we’re talking about a hidden gendered system of values becoming embodied in leadership. I want to again emphasize this; this has nothing to do with anything inherent in women or men. Some women can be very cruel and some men can be very caring. And please, bring out that it has a lot to do with the way that the domination model is structured and the way the partnership model is structured.

We need to—as leaders—now I’m talking socially—observe what the people pushing us back focus on. Whether it was Hitler in Germany, Khomeini in Iran, the fundamentalist alliance in the United States or the so called Muslim Fundamentalists, one of their top priorities is always getting women back into their “traditional place.” This is code for subservient.

A “traditional family” is another code for an undemocratic, authoritarian, male-headed family, and a very punitive family in which children learn early on that it is very dangerous to question authority, no matter how brutal or unjust. That’s foundational to the domination model. We cannot dismantle the top of the domination pyramid and still leave it’s foundations of domination and violence in the primary human relations between women and men and between parents and children largely in place.

So it’s not only the status of women. For example, a very important leverage point is changing traditions of violence and abuse in family and other intimate relations. Where do people first learn that it’s okay or even “moral” to use violence to impose your will on others? It is in these early family relations. That is why I have co-founded The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV). This is a start up. We are just getting going and we do need support for it. I invite people to support us. The SAIV international council includes major world leaders: Queen Noor and Prince El Hassan of Jordan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Harvey Cox, Professor of the Harvard Divinity School, etc. Men, not only women. The website is www.saiv.net.

We’re not talking about women now taking over from men. Matriarchy and patriarchy are just two sides of the domination coin, as I never tire of pointing out in my writing. The real alternative is the partnership society. We need to pay attention to the primary human relations if we are going to have the foundation for a partnership society.

It’s not coincidental that there has been the movement toward a more stereotypically feminine leadership and management style we read about in the corporate literature. Along with the entry of women, not only into worker positions, but also into leadership positions, has also come the change in how leadership is conceptualized and defined. These are not unrelated.

Q: You are very clear about the fact that you’re not advocating a feminine model over a masculine model or vice versa, that you’re really talking about something that integrates values from both sides. Is that correct?

A: There are some wonderful values that are considered masculine; logic—not that men are more logical than women, but we think that.

Q: It’s a masculine, as opposed to male, quality.

A: Yes. And assertiveness. Those are great qualities whether they are embodied in a man or a woman. However, some other stereotypically masculine traits such as conquest, domination, those are lousy whether they are in woman or a man. But the problem is that they’re so entangled with masculine identity.

Q: Are there comparable qualities on the feminine side that are entangled in women’s identities?

A: Absolutely. For example, the idea that women should be passive. That’s a lousy quality whether it’s in a woman or a man. We humans are equipped to be active, to be co-creators of our lives, of our societies and of our evolution. That women are supposed to serve, rather than being served, that women are supposed to be followers, rather than leader, these are lousy ideas for both women and men.

Q: Those seem like qualitatively different. They sound more like social norms than qualities compared to the kind of aggressive qualities ascribed to the masculine.

A: Well, I think that the conversation about what is nature and what is nurture is one of those polarized conversations that don’t make much sense. If it is true that men are more biologically predisposed to domination, to violence, then it is all the more reason that we had better take a good look at our socialization processes from day one, don’t you think? Because what we’re doing is reinforcing that possibility a thousand fold in the way that little boys are brought up and are taught what is masculine.

There are very interesting studies—and I have become very interested in this—in the whole issue of brain neurochemistry and how it develops differently in different environments—and very specifically in a partnership or dominator environment. Remember we were talking about creating the conditions that support or inhibit different kinds of traits and behaviors? For example, there is a gene that is associated with violence in men, but there was a Danish study that showed men with that kind of gene—it was a study of violent criminal behavior—the only ones that engaged in that behavior were the ones that in the studies that had been abused as children. By abuse, it includes gross neglect.

Q: That’s an example of the socialization that you’re talking about?

A: The interaction of genes and experience is what we need to pay attention to. Since culture is the most powerful shaper of human experience, we need to pay attention to culture.

Q: How would you suggest that we as leaders go about that in our lives?

A: I have offered in my work some tools.

Q: In the Power of Partnership and elsewhere?

A: Yes, but the most basic tools are the analytical tools of the partnership model and the domination model. We as leaders by using these tools can obtain a much more complete and more realistic assessment of what’s holding us back from full human and socio-economic development. That’s the first thing. The second thing is leaders have the authority of being able to influence others. So it’s not only that we learn how to use these tools, we need to understand what are some of the leverage points that we need to address.

I have identified four key leverage points for cultural transformation, each with a cascade of systemic effects. One is childhood relations. The second is gender relations. The third one is an economics going beyond both capitalism and socialism to what I call an economics of caring that no longer devalues caring and care-giving, because how are we going to have caring policies if we devalue caring and care-giving? It’s not realistic. The fourth is beliefs, stories and myths.

If leaders take this seriously, then we can build the foundations for a world of partnership: a sustainable, peaceful, and equitable world. If leaders take this seriously, we can have a highly effective and at the same time more equitable and humane economy. We need to change the rules of the game. We need to encourage and support more caring behaviors rather than penalizing them with the rules of the game. It’s very clear that dominator rules of the game do not support caring behavior.

Q: Are you aware of anyone using the dominator/partnership model explicitly to look at leadership?

A: The fact that my article was chosen as the lead article for the enlightened leadership book will tell you that the editors of that book felt that it was a very important analytical tool and a very important way of looking at leadership.

Q: It seems to me that what you’re looking at, what you’ve described, is pervasive. There is virtually nothing in human relations that can’t be understood through that lens.

A: That’s the whole point. Our conventional cultural categories – capitalist vs. communist, right vs. left, religious vs. secular, East vs. West, and so on, they are all fragmented. They just look at economics or they just look at religion or they look at location. As I said, they don’t even take into account the primary human relations between women and men and parents and children.

Q: I asked you at one time whether you were familiar with the work of Ken Wilber. He is certainly familiar with your work. But I asked you about that, because it seems to me that you are taking a somewhat integral approach to this whole set of phenomena. You are looking at culture. You are looking at systems. You are looking at the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individuals. That is a central aspect of integral theory, along with the lines of development that we talked about earlier.

A: I think that both Ken Wilber’s Integral approach and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics certainly have very much of the same goals as I do. Our approach is different in the sense that I pay much more attention to conditions that will help us move to these higher stages. I do think that there are higher stages that we are capable of. The other thing that is different is that I don’t think that they really take into full consideration the importance of the primary human relations: between the female and male halves of humanity and between them and their sons and daughter. They have good models, but they are incomplete.

Q: Okay. Well, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think I should have?

A: It’s been a fine interview. There is one thing I didn’t mention. A number of associates and I did a study for the Center for Partnership Studies called “Women, Men and the Global Quality of Life.” For anyone who doubts the centrality of gender relations to our social and economic systems and the existence of a hidden system of gendered evaluations, which so profoundly affects quality of life, they should read that study. We compared two bundles of statistics from 89 nations gathered by established international agencies. One was quality of life measures. The other was measures of the status of women. What we found, of course, is a strong correlation between the two. But we also found that in significant respects the status of women can be a better predictor of general quality of life than GDP. The study can be found at the Center for Partnership Studies website which is www.partnershipway.org.

Q: And if anyone should want to contact you, what route would you recommend?

A: I would suggest that they go to that website or that they email me at center@partnershipway.org. The other website that would be good is the website for The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence at www.saiv.net. I would like to invite people to support that.

Q: How can people get involved with your work?

A: They can get involved by volunteering to take a role in building SAIV right now. We are looking for somebody who can help us by being a part-time operations officer. We also need somebody who can help with fund raising. People can also help by simply making donations. They are tax deductible. SAIV is a project of the Center for Partnership Studies, which is nonprofit. The best way for becoming involved with my work is either to join in one of our projects—for example right now we are discussing with an award winning filmmaker, a documentary on my work—or simply by using it. The www.parternshipway.org website has a library with a lot of articles. It has a bookstore; it has a speaker’s bureau. It has all kinds of resources.

Q: Great. Thank you so much.