Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Emily Race: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Founding Mothers podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. Today we are speaking with Riane Eisler. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD is the recipient of many honors such as the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award earlier giving to the Dalai Lama, and is internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian.

[00:00:41] Riane Eisler: It's funny because our language only gives us matriarchy or patriarchy, but that's very deliberate, because there is no partnership alternative there. Either mothers rule or fathers rule. Whereas as you move to the partnership side, you have a real partnership between the two forms. You don't have the ranking of one form of humanity, the male form over the female form. With it, and this is fundamental to economics and to everything else, you don't have what you have in the domination system, which is the devaluation of anything stereotypically, because domination systems have very rigid gender stereotypes associated with the “feminine” like caring, caregiving, nonviolence.

[00:01:40] Emily Race: She is the author of many books, including “The Chalice and the Blade,” now in its 57th US Printing in 27 Foreign Editions, “The Real Wealth of Nations,” hailed by Noble Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking, and “Nurturing Our Humanity,” Oxford University Press 2019 co-authored with Douglas P. Fry.

Eisler's innovative whole systems research offers new perspectives and practical tools for constructing a less violent, more equalitarian gender balance, and sustainable future.

Eisler is President for the Center of Partnership Systems, which provides practical applications of her work. An editor in chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies published at the University of Minnesota, she keynotes conferences worldwide, has taught at many universities, written hundreds of articles and contributions to both scholarly and popular books, pioneered the application of humans rights standards to women and children, and consults to businesses and governments on the partnership model introduced by her work. Welcome Riane, and I know you also go by Dr. Eisler. Thank you so much for being here with us on the Founding Mothers podcast. It's such a treat.

[00:02:53] Riane Eisler: I'm delighted to be with you, Emily. It was good to just talk with you briefly and find out a little about you.

[00:03:02] Emily Race: I wish we had more time, but I want to jump right into things, and I'd love for you to just share a bit about who you are and the journey of how you got to where you are today.

[00:03:11] Riane Eisler: Well, my name is Riane Eisler, and I'm probably best known for a book called “The Chalice and the Blade.” The subtitle is “Our History, Our Future.” The book that Emily, you just said, your mother has two copies of, and that book is probably more relevant than ever today.

It basically introduces a different paradigm, a different way of looking at our past, our present, and the possibilities for our future. Very briefly– it was a long journey– where I started my research and writing on these two underlying social systems and on the urgent need to shift to the partnership side of what I call the Partnership Domination Social Scale. I have a lot of passion for that work and that passion is actually deeply rooted in my own childhood as a child refugee from the Nazis with my parents. Those traumas really led me to questions that I'm sure many of our listeners have asked at some time.

Does it have to be this way when we humans have such an enormous capacity for consciousness, for caring, for creativity? Why then has there been so much insensitivity, cruelty, destruction? Is it, as we're often told, just human nature. Or are there alternatives? And if so, what are they? Many years later I was able to really try to answer those questions through my multidisciplinary cross-cultural historical research.

The answer to them is, yes, there is an alternative, but we can't see it by looking at our past, our present and the possibilities for our future through the lenses of conventional categories, like right, left, religious, secular, Eastern, western, northern, southern. Why? Because for one thing, there have been repressive violent regimes in every one of those categories, so none of them really tell us what we need to build to have a better way of living. Number two, and the two are related if you really look at it, these categories fragment our consciousness. You know, a colleague of mine calls them weapons of mass distraction. They're certainly not holistic. They marginalize or ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity, women and children.

How can we connect the dots then, if we don't look at the whole picture? That gives you a sense of who I am and why I do what I do.

[00:06:06] Emily Race: Thank you for all of that. I know there are many more tidbits and pieces and turns that fill your experience up until now. One thing that really struck me, and I'm sure listeners who are here would agree, is this idea that we can't really look to this binary thinking is what I was hearing. We need to create, it sounds like, from a new place, this new paradigm.

What is that place that the partnership systems, as you would call it, are born from?

[00:06:34] Riane Eisler: Well, you know, Einstein put it very well. He said, “You cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.” That's really what I discovered. Yes, there are polarities in nature. There's cold and there's hot, there's night and there's day.

But it's a matter of degree, and that's why I talk about the Partnership Domination Social Scale. It's a matter of degree, but the extent to which a family, an educational system, an economic system, politics, and so on, and technology, of course, are guided by an ethos of domination or an ethos of partnership and by the structures that go with that, that really profoundly affects everything in our lives. At this point, with climate change, with biological and nuclear weapons, it's a matter of survival, isn't it?

[00:07:28] Emily Race: Yes, it is. So we could spend time looking at what that paradigm of domination looks like, and I think we're pretty familiar with it because we've been living in it. We see examples of that in the news cycle. I'm more curious to hear from your perspective, what would a paradigm of partnership look like, or partnership systems look like?

[00:07:49] Riane Eisler: Let me just give you the two core configurations to start with because you can't really understand the partnership system without also understanding the domination system. In other words, you need to deconstruct, but then you need to reconstruct. As you know, so much of the conversation is just about deconstructing, criticizing.

And my work is really very much about reconstructing, which is what we need to do. So let's start with our families because that's really where we start and none of the categories that I've mentioned are really family. Well, I told you the marginalized women and children who were confined to families in more rigid domination systems. So that's a clue right there. You have a family and economic and social structure of top down rankings, an authoritarian structure. Whereas as you move to the partnership side, you have a more democratic, more egalitarian structure where everyone's voice is respected because in the domination system, what you hear about respect is really fear.

It is fear of being punished by your parents, fear of losing your job, et cetera, et cetera, and in a rigid domination system, fear of losing your life, right? Because you speak out second. This, again, is not something that these conventional categories look at. what you have is male dominance in the domination system.

It's funny because our language only gives us matriarchy or patriarchy. But that's very deliberate, because there is no partnership alternative, is there? Either mothers rule or fathers rule. Whereas as you move to the partnership side, you have a real partnership between the two forms.

You don't have the ranking of one form of humanity, the male form over the female form and with it, and this is fundamental to economics and to everything else, you don't have what you have in the domination system, which is the devaluation of anything stereotypically, because domination systems are very rigid to stereotypes associated with the feminine, like care, caregiving, and nonviolence.

As you move to the partnership side, of course you don't have that. You see trends in that direction, right? And that's very healthy. The third thing is abuse and violence in domination systems. You have to have it really built in and institutionalized because how else do you maintain these top-down rankings, whether it's man over man, man over woman, race over race, et cetera.

As you move to the partnership side, you have some violence and abuse. People sometimes lose it, but it doesn't have to be built in. You don't have to have these rigid top-down rankings. Here I want to make a very important point. I distinguish between what I call hierarchies of domination in domination systems.

Hierarchies of actualization where power is power with power to rather than power over. It doesn't have to be a completely flat organization. The fourth thing, of course, is story and language, and they're very different. This is why a podcast like yours is telling a different story which is so important, but in very practical terms, you'd have less violence, you would have far more investment socially. Immunities, caring for people starting at birth, caring for our natural life support systems. You'd have an economic system that, unlike both capitalism and socialism, doesn't omit the three life sustaining sectors: the natural economy, the volunteer community economy and the household economy.

I have a whole book called “The Real Wealth of Nations”, and the subtitle is “Creating a Caring Economics”, and when I wrote that book, when it came out in 2007, just putting caring and economics in the same sentence, it was like, ah. Now you hear it, don't you? You hear it? It's been coopted to only mean direct care, but it doesn't matter.

We're hearing more about the importance of care. Everything would be different. We don't live in a pure domination system. I mean, the Taliban, Hitler’s Germany, those were much closer to the domination side. How many is Iran? Or the so-called Trumpist view of what we need, you know, strong man rule, male dominance. You know what? Trump said it. He said, There are only two alternatives. You are a dominator, or you're dominated. There is no partnership alternative. My work shows that there is, and it is really more effective and it certainly helps us not only survive, but thrive.

[00:13:04] Emily Race: Beautiful. There are so many important pieces in what you shared.

I believe on the website, which we can link in this podcast, there is a diagram that breaks this down. Is that a good place to direct folks?

[00:13:15] Riane Eisler: Yes. We have some really good visuals. We have a lovely young woman who makes really good visuals, and I think that you can get to them by going to the top of the website.

I think that one thing that we really have to pay attention to are childhood and gender. They're left out or marginalized. I mean, we hear them, but people can't connect the dots. Putin connected the dots. Hitler connected the dots. Khomeini connected the dots? The Taliban connected the dots. Or the so-called Rightist Fundamentalist alliance, which is not religious, it's really domination that they want. They want a theocracy with top down rule in the family and the state. They put a lot of energy into “family values”, which are not really valuing families. They only value one kind of family, the kind of family that goes with the domination system and authoritarian male dominated, highly punitive family.

My latest book, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2019, is called “Nurturing Our Humanity” and the subtitle is “How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives and Future.” It draws heavily from neuroscience, showing that the stories we've been told about pro-human nature are crazy.

All my work also shows that we've been told the wrong stories about our cultural history. For millennia, starting with gathering hunting societies into the early farming societies, we are still orienting more to the partnership rather than the domination side.

[00:15:13] Emily Race: That is very comforting to hear, right? To know that there's a natural element to all of this. Domination and partnership can both exist almost naturally, and so we have a power to choose, is what I'm hearing, more of a partnership cycle. I really want to break down some of those pieces you shared a bit more. You talked about the family. I firmly believe, and perhaps you share the same belief, that families can take many different shapes and that doesn't have to look like a male and a female, and there are many different ways that that can look. Then what does the partnership element look like in a family system?

[00:15:46] Riane Eisler: For one thing, as you just said, Emily, it can look many different ways. It can be people who are gay or who are lesbian, who form a family. It can be a nuclear family, it can be an extended family, it can be all kinds of things.

But the one thing that they all have in common is they're not authoritarian. They're not punitive. They don't use violence, either physical or psychological violence. In domination systems, in the family, caring is inextricably linked to coercion. Think about that. I'm hitting you for your own good.

[00:16:31] Emily Race: I just want to underline that in case people missed it. You said that caring is linked with coercion in a dominant family.

[00:16:38] Riane Eisler: We're not used to thinking, even the neuroscience, which I drew so heavily on, in nurturing our humanity.

They keep talking about the family, but families don't just spring up out of no place. They're embedded in a larger culture or subculture, and if we don't connect, I started to talk about the Putin and the Taliban and Hitler, et cetera, Stalin. They saw the connection between a punitive, authoritarian male dominated family and a punitive authoritarian male dominated state. Putin, for example, and this is something that people have to understand, a few years ago he'd radically reduced the penalty for domestic violence. Think about that, it is now much less in Russia, much less if you kill or hurt a child or a wife or a woman in the family. Your penalty is much less than if you kill or hurt a stranger. That makes absolute sense in terms of the domination system because the two are inextricably interconnected.

Neuroscience shows that fortunately we have very flexible brains. But unfortunately that very flexibility, especially in the early years, makes at least some people very, very susceptible to rigidity and to the domination view. They will vote for strong male leaders because that's what they're used to in their family, in their culture, in their religion, in their education.

We have to connect the dots.

[00:18:29] Emily Race: I have to share that on this podcast, we've actually had multiple people point this out, this connection of how what happens in your family, or that's the beginning of what you learn in the patterns of the communication and then it gets exaggerated in the rest of society.

What I'm hearing as a way forward is if we start to imagine a new way of communicating with one another in our family systems– a new way of relating to power with– power is not coming from the parents over the children, but there's a different way of communicating. Is that what you would say or how would you imagine that?

[00:19:00] Riane Eisler: There are hierarchies, you know, I mean, we need parents. We need teachers. In a complex society, you need managers, you need leaders, but the chalice and the blade are really two symbols of power, aren't they? The blade is power over. It's the power to dominate. It's the power to take life. The chalice is a very different kind of power. It is the power to give life, to nurture life, to illuminate life. I really wanted to have some metaphors, some symbols, for these two ways of looking at power, but also in a domination hierarchy, accountability, respect, benefit, flow mostly from the bottom up. In a partnership hierarchy of actualization, you still have a hierarchy of the family, but respect is both ways. Accountability is both ways. The fact that we today are hearing about transparency, that's a partnership trend, isn't it? But we can't name it. It all seems so random, unless you have this larger frame.

[00:20:19] Emily Race: That really resonates with me. As someone who's worked in corporations for a long time, leading and facilitating workshops and trying to point out to managers for example, how can we have mutual respect between the manager level and your direct report level. I think a big question that especially leaders and companies ask themselves is, are we trying to get to a place where there's no hierarchy at all, or what's the evolution? I really appreciate how you broke that down.

[00:20:45] Riane Eisler: Well, you know, I've been really thinking about this for a long time. What I see is that everything is constructed differently depending on the degree of orientation to either end of the Partnership Domination Social Scale, everything. I wrote a whole book on sexuality and spirituality, called Sacred Pleasure, which I really recommend you start with; it's a lovely book and men and women very often read it to each other if there are a couple, because of the very personal nature of these two subjects.

[00:21:23] Emily Race: Amazing. One thing that's come up for me, as you talked about the symbols of the chalice and the blade, which is that symbols are so powerful, right? It gives us something to hold onto or almost helps us ground into the concepts that you're talking about. I've heard in certain circles this masculine-feminine used to describe these two dualities, but part of me actually wants to move away from that. I'm wondering how you feel about that terminology being used.

[00:21:49] Riane Eisler: I think that we have to acknowledge that it is there because domination systems, as I said, have very rigid gender stereotypes. I mean, how else can you rank the so-called masculine or male over the so-called feminine and the female. You have to ascribe certain traits to it, but in domination systems, men are socialized to not be like a woman. A sissy, a woman. Women have internalized this. This is not a matter of women against men or men against women. It is liberating all of us. Women, men and everybody in between, from the rigid. The movement towards gender fluidity is a partnership movement.

Unfortunately, people are so very often a transgender woman, or a man who becomes a woman adopts the stereotype, with the high heels and the frilly dress, and that's not what it's about. It's about being human.

[00:22:58] Emily Race: In a lot of these conversations and perhaps in this one as well, if we look at the degrees of evolution as a culture, as a collective that we're going through, I sometimes question, what's the next evolution? We're trying to just get to a place of understanding that gender fluidity is a thing, then what's the next evolution beyond that? I'm hearing a bit of that in what you're saying.

[00:23:19] Riane Eisler: I think that what we're really talking about is becoming more fully human. Those women, men and everyone in between. I can relate this very much to economics, because of “The Real Wealth of Nations.” I really wrote a whole book applying these templates to economics. It's not good enough to say, Well, we should be nicer or we should be kinder. That doesn’t do us anything if we don't understand that what we're dealing with is a hidden system of gendered values that shows up in policy.

Just think, why do so many legislators, even in the United States, always find money for prisons. Well, who's that? That's the punitive male head of household, isn't it?

Or they find money for weapons. And you know, being a Holocaust survivor, we need weapons because we live in a world where there are regimes obviously that are more domination oriented, so we have to defend ourselves. But the amount of money and wastefulness in the United States that is spent on these “hard masculine priorities” rather than on caring for children, caring for people's health, caring for our national life support systems, it's obscene, isn't it?

[00:24:42] Emily Race: It is. I'm glad we're transitioning to talk about economies because that is something I myself and others I've spoken with struggle with. Is it the capitalism that's the problem? What's the solution? If it's capitalism, is there a different version? Is it socialism? There's something else on the website speaking to that, right? That both socialism and capitalism come from a domination system. Is that accurate?

[00:25:04] Riane Eisler: What we are talking about is domination economics. If you look at capitalism, it did challenge some domination traditions. I mean, Smith was challenging this top down system where the king and the mobility, quote unquote, “controlled the resources.”

Then of course, Marx came and he challenged the control by the so-called Robert Barons, of early capitalism, which we see again today in these huge gaps between those on bottom. But actually we're talking about dominator economics because look, it can be a Chinese emperor. It can be an Arab Shik. It can be a Hindu Pasha, it doesn't matter. Trickled down economics relates this idea that we should content ourselves like the serfs were to content themselves with the scraps falling from the tables from those on top. That's the problem.

The problem is that both capitalism and socialism perpetuated this gender system of values for both Smith and Marx. First of all, there is nothing about caring for nature for both of them. Nature is there to be exploited, period. Number two, as for the work of caring for people in households, childcare, keeping a clean and healthy home environment, et cetera, that was to be done for free by a woman.

In a male controlled household for them that was just reproductive rather than productive. The problem is that that's still taught in our economic schools, and it has to change. I spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in a session called Harmony with Nature, and I said, You have to have harmony with nature in a fundamentally imbalanced system.

I mean, you can't just tack on on environmental, justice and environmental care to a system that at every corner, is built to devalue that. That's why I've recommended a caring economics of partnerism. We need markets, but we don't have to have a free market.

[00:27:22] Emily Race: Can you share more then? I'm really loving this whole idea of that the system needs to change, if we're going to care for the family and for children and for nature, for the earth. Can you share more about what that partnership system would look like from an economic perspective?

[00:27:38] Riane Eisler: Well, first of all, let's take education. Children would be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, et cetera, but they would be taught caring for self. Caring for others. Caring for our natural life support systems. I wrote a book. People aren't reading these days, and that's really a shame. Because you have to read a whole book in order to really get yourself into it. It's called “Tomorrow's Children.” And it's about partnership education, and so that would be right there, a very specific difference. In those families where there's a mother and a father, they would both care for the children and they would both have their careers, their professions, their jobs. It would be balanced.

[00:28:26] Emily Race: Well, can we pause there? Because as a new mother, this is something my husband and I talk about ad nauseam because we're trying to figure out how could we model a new way while still having the programming that we've seen and been immersed in. One thing that feels like attention for me is wanting to honor what you're saying, that we each have our own career, our own creative paths, and yet we also want to be present with our child. We don't want to outsource that care. Do you have thoughts on how that would look, that shape would look to hold space for both?

[00:28:56] Riane Eisler: I think we need much more social support. For caring for children, for people who work also outside the home. GDP by the way, and I'm taking a detour here, has to be replaced. Because GDP reflects and perpetuates this simple denial of the value of household, of caring for children if it's not monetized.

But you know, people can read “The Real Wealths of Nations.” You can go to the website and we at the Center for Partnership Systems are developing a new set of metrics. We launched the first iteration of these social wealth economic indicators in 2014 and now, there are 52 of them, which is a lot. We're trying to condense and update them into a Social Wells index. And if people can support this work, please donate to the Center for Partnership Systems who are not for profit and is tax deductible. All contributions count. Mm. Whatever you can please do, because we measure what we value. We value what we measure.

But to return to what you were saying, we need for people who work also outside of the home, we need what every co-developed nation has, we need federally funded parental leave for both mothers and fathers. Where there are fathers, secondly, we need affordable and yes, subsidized and highly paid childcare. The idea that this is something that people should do for some kind of a minimum wage is crazy.

I mean, it is absolutely nuts and parents can't afford it. It's an investment in our future, especially in our knowledge service, post industrial era, where even economists who live in some alternate reality, you know, with their reasonable man, and I don't know what else they tell us, that the most important capital for this era is what they like to call high quality human capital.

I prefer human capacity development. We know from neuroscience, again– and all this is in “Nurturing Our Humanity” and in “The Real Wealth of Nations” too, by the way– we know that whether or not we have these flexible, creative, resilient people, et cetera, et cetera, largely hinges on the quality of education and care children receive in the first five years.

We need to invest in that. It was tragic that that got cut out of Biden's bill. I mean, I'm glad that the climate change provisions went forward. But it is indicative of how strong the hold of this gender system of values still is. I really think we need a movement by parents to say, Wait a minute, let's identify the obstacle first. Let's be real. It is a gender system of values. Let's change it. And let's look at the neuroscience. Let's not be in denial about this.

[00:32:21] Emily Race: You're kind of hitting on it as we transition towards the end of this conversation– to look at how do we get there? What are some of the steps that we could take as listeners? What are some of the paths forward that you see to make this a reality?

[00:32:34] Riane Eisler: Well, for one thing, we don't have to start from square one. I already said we have the models from most of our cultural evolution, not to go back to any good old days.

They weren't ideal societies, but we know the configuration we have to build, and I have proposed four cornerstones because if you look actually at modern history, you see that every single progressive movement has challenged the same thing, a tradition of domination. Think about it, the Enlightenment, the so called rights of man movement challenged the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule their code subjects. Abolitionist Civil Rights, Black Lives Matter movement challenges the so-called divinely ordained right of a superior right to rule over an inferior one. The feminist movement challenges the so-called divinely ordained notice of men to rule over the women and children in the “castles,” you know, a military metaphor of their homes. All the way to the environmental movement, challenging her once idealized, hallowed conquest and domination of nature. However most of the resources and attention has gone on what I call dismantling the top of the domination pyramid. Far less attention has been given to these four cornerstones on which regression after regression, whether it's Nazi Germany, Roman Iran, the Taliban, Putin, it keeps rebuilding itself and their childhood.

For the reasons I gave about neuroscience– and by the way, one thing that neuroscience demolishes is the story that we're just wired to be selfish.-- because whether it's selfish genes or whether it's original sin, it's the same story. We're bad and have to be rigidly controlled from the top.

They fight each other, but it's the same story. You know, obviously it's really crazy. It's the domination story.

We know that the so-called pleasure centers of our brain slide out more when we share and when we care than when we win and dominate.

But we may be predisposed. Certainly these millennia of movement towards the partnership side of cultures built that way seemed to indicate that, but, because the brain develops in interaction with this environment isn't genes, it's gene expression.

I'm giving you much, too much material.

Emily Race: Oh, it's great material.

Riane Eisler: But yes, you have to read these books because you can’t do it in such a short time. So the other one is economics. Yes, we need a free market. Yes, we need government policies enlightened. Policies that pay attention to what we know from, among other things, neuroscience partnership policies.

We need to move beyond both capitalism and socialism to what I call a caring economics of partnerism, and of course, story and language. We really have to pay attention to changing the story. We can all do that within our circle of influence. Other things that you can do as a parent, work with other parents, form groups, partner groups, work for these policies, show how important it is to move to a caring economics of partnerism.

I think, Margaret Mead said it, she said just about every gain that we've made over these last 300 years or so, which happened in a time of a great disequilibrium as the Industrial Revolution got into high gear, by the way. And now we are really in high gear with the shift from the industrial to the post industrial era.

So we've got to intervene. The thing about it is that we can all make a difference, right? What Margaret Mead said is the truth, that every single gain that we've made is to usually an unpopular at first group of women and men, a small group that then becomes larger, larger and larger.

[00:36:47] Emily Race: I have a quote from Margaret Mead that I actually shared with someone very recently that was on my fridge about never underestimating the power of a small group of people to create change.

[00:37:03] Riane Eisler: So form a rope. With your husband, with other friends, with neighbors. And today your neighbors are on the internet. I can use these darn social media that are being so perverted for something positive, not for hate, and for in group versus out group.

There's a whole aspect of domination systems, which is deflection of fear and of anger to some outgroup as designated by some authority figure.

[00:37:37] Emily Race: A lot of this may resonate with listeners. They may already be very conscious of some of the things you're speaking to and others may feel new. I'm imagining that if you're a listener and want to educate yourself more, that some of the books mentioned would be a great place to start. And also the Center for Partnership Systems website.

[00:37:56] Riane Eisler: Absolutely. I welcomed you all, because what we really need is a partnership movement, starting with a caring economics of partnerism and changing our story.

They're all interconnected, childhood, gender, economics and story and language for goodness. Leave behind the old categories. They fragment our consciousness. I mean, literally, they are weapons of mass distraction, because they don't look at the whole picture, for goodness sakes.

[00:38:31] Emily Race: I hope that this podcast is a place that people can start to hear new language and understand new ways of thinking about things.

With that, to close us out, is there any other way, aside from the donation piece you mentioned, that we could support the work you're doing?

[00:38:44] Riane Eisler: Form groups, join in the conversation, write letters to the editor. Write letters to your representative, to your congressperson, to your senator, to your governor, to whatever.

Get out and vote. and don't expect the perfect. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Just get out and vote for more partnership oriented alternative.

I have to say it's a pleasure to talk with you, Emily.

[00:39:19] Emily Race: Likewise. I wish we had more time, and I also hope this is a great appetizer, a great snack for people who are hungry to learn more.

[00:39:26] Riane Eisler: Well, we have some courses on the website. One is a course with me, called Changing Our Story, Changing Our Lives has four videos, lots of resources, and very affordable, and you can use all the materials, including the videos, and you can take it as a group if you want. The other is a course on caring economics, including as a social wealth index. So there are many ways that you can be involved in this partnership movement,

[00:39:59] Emily Race: I love that it all comes back to seeing yourself as powerful, right? That you still have power within a system that may feel like it wants you to believe otherwise.

[00:40:09] Riane Eisler: Absolutely. And we have to understand, we have to use our voices before it gets to the point where you really get killed for using your voice. This is a very delicate moment in history where, well, the chalice and the blade ends with two scenarios, break through an evolution and break down an evolution. That's where we really are right now. And it's young people like you. Another thing is you can form a group of young people. Really we are so hungry for a new way of thinking, except I really think that they have to spend a little time immersing themselves in this. Because otherwise it's just random. But I have. I have confidence in our human creativity and our human caring.

[00:41:06] Emily Race: Well, I'd like to leave it on that then, because that is a beautiful thing to leave us with. Again, I'm so grateful for everything that you shared, all the work you've been doing throughout your lifetime and, and really you're leaving this legacy for us to continue to move forward with. I appreciate you deeply, thank you for being with us today.

[00:41:25] Riane Eisler: Well, thank you Emily, and stay in touch.

[00:41:30] Emily Race: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Founding Mother's podcast. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Emily Race, and edited by Eric Weisberg. If you want to support the show, please leave us a rating or share this episode with the important people in your life.

We'd also love to hear from you. If you or someone you know would be a great guest to share about their vision for the world, you could email emily@founding-mothers.com or visit www.founding-mothers.com/podcast