By Riane Eisler
Remarks at the 2018 Safe Ireland Summit | Dublin, Ireland
I have been asked to tell you about the findings from my research identifying the core components of a safer, more equitable, and caring world—especially one where women and children are finally safe—a goal that is very close to my heart. In doing so, I will place violence against women and children in its larger social and historical context, and, most importantly, explore with you how to bring about fundamental change—not only in the prevailing worldview, but in our lives and our world.
So, I am going to share a great deal of information with you. But first, I want to tell you a little about myself, because my work, and the passion I have for it, are deeply rooted in my early life as a child refugee with my parents from Vienna after the Nazis took over my native Austria.
Questions from my Childhood
We only escaped from the Holocaust by a hair’s breadth. Shortly after that takeover, on Krystal night—so-called because of all the glass shattered in Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues—that night of the first official terrorism against Jews, a gang of Austrian and German Nazis broke into our home, and I watched in horror as they dragged my father away.
That night I saw cruelty and violence, but I also saw something else that profoundly impacted me, what I call spiritual courage. My mother displayed that spiritual courage, the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. She recognized one of the Nazis as an Austrian who had been an errand boy for the family business and confronted him angrily, asking, “How could you do this to a man who has been so kind to you?” Now, she could have been killed; many Jews were killed that night. But by a miracle, she wasn’t. And by another miracle, she obtained my father’s release that night—of course, money passed hands. A short time later, in the middle of the night only with what we could carry, my parents and I left Vienna.
Because they had been able to purchase exit visas and also entry permits to Cuba—one of only two nations that let in Jews fleeing the Nazis at that time—I grew up in the industrial slums of Habana, because the Nazis ‘confiscated’ (official word for armed robbery) everything my parents owned. And there, I experienced and observed dire poverty until my parents were able to get back on their feet again.
All these experiences—and yes, they were traumatic—led me to questions, questions many of you have probably asked at some point in your lives, like, “Why—when we humans have such an enormous capacity for consciousness, caring, and creativity—has there been so much insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness? Is it inevitable, or are there alternatives? And if so, what are these?”
These were the questions that many years later animated my research, writing, and activism.
A Second Turning Point
But before then, there was for me another pivotal experience that was in the late 1960s, when I suddenly woke up—along with thousands of other women in the West—to realize that as much as having been born Jewish almost cost me my life, having been born female also profoundly impacted my life, my life options, and even how I saw myself.
So, I threw myself into the then just emerging women’s liberation movement, the second wave of feminism, which, along with the backlash against equality for women, became trivialized as “women’s lib.” Even to this day, many people who consider themselves progressive regard traditions of violence and abuse of women as “just women’s issues”—a truly peculiar situation since women are half of humanity, and, in fact, women and children together constitute the vast majority of humanity.
Now the good news is that a substantial number of us are beginning to wake up from what I have called the domination trance, a trance perpetuated by all our institutions, our systems of belief, both our popular and scientific narratives, and even our language, so we are just beginning to see something that, once articulated, may seem obvious: that how a society constructs the roles and relations of the two basic forms of our species—male and female—as well as how it constructs early childhood relations, are actually fundamental social issues that directly impact whether all our social institutions—from the family, education, and religion to politics and economics—are equitable or inequitable, authoritarian or democratic, violent or nonviolent.
A New Perspective
This was a central finding from my multidisciplinary, cross-cultural research, which differs from conventional studies. Often aptly called the study of man, it draws from a database that includes the whole of humanity, both its male and female halves. It also differs from most sociological studies, which pay scant attention to family and other intimate relations. This database includes the whole of our lives, not only the so-called public sphere of politics, economics, and religion but where we all live—our family and other intimate relations. And rather than the siloed approach of conventional historical studies, it takes into account the whole of our history, including the long span of thousands of years of prehistory.
If we only look at part of a picture, of course, we cannot see all its parts, much less how these parts relate to one another. So, looking at human societies across time and space using this larger database makes it possible to see patterns, configurations that, yes, answered the questions of my childhood.
You can not see these configurations by looking at society through the lenses of our conventional social categories: right vs. left, religious vs. secular, East vs. West, North vs. South, capitalist vs. socialist, technologically developed or undeveloped, and so on. First of all, each of these old categories only look at a particular aspect of a society, like location, economics, or ideology, but also—and this fundamental—none of them tell us how a society structures our foundational gender and parent-child relations, even though we know from both psychology and neuroscience that the nature of these relations—which children experience and observe in their early formative years—impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, and hence how we think, feel, and act.
Moreover, if you think about it, societies in all these familiar categories have been oppressive and violent, as I will shortly illustrate.
It’s only by leaving these old categories behind that we see that cross-culturally and historically there are two underlying social configurations: the Domination System and the Partnership System.And once we understand these two social configurations, we can answer the critical question of what kind of society we need to support our enormous human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity, rather than—because we obviously also have these—our capacities for insensitivity, violence, and destructiveness.
Domination Systems and Partnership Systems
No society is a pure domination or partnership system; it’s a partnership-domination continuum. But I want to briefly give you some examples of contemporary societies that are close to the domination end of the social scale.
These are very different societies if we only look at them through the lenses of conventional social categories: Hitler’s Nazi Germany, a rightist Western secular society; Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, a leftist Eastern secular society; the Taliban of Afghanistan, an Eastern religious society; the would-be theocratic regimes of Western religious fundamentalists.
Please continue the transcript from this speech here: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/breaking-out-of-the-domination-trance-building-foundations-for-a-safe-equitable-caring-world/?fbclid=IwAR3XJpRuOI3f8VlZ1Ge0mD5D6kKHYuheszGQ9BjrpNGJW7-pp17KMRN348I
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