From Systems Work to The Chalice and the Blade

You can also watch this conversation on YouTube or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

I’m thrilled to announce that Riane Eisler will be a teacher on our online course New Ways of Knowing which begins on January 14.

As a Christmas gift, we’re offering five 20% off vouchers with the code Chalice at checkout. If you’d like to buy attendance as a Christmas gift, order a ticket for yourself and write to us at info@studiokainos.com. We’ll switch it into the name of the recipient, and schedule an email to the recipient on Christmas Day …or Christmas Eve for our European readers.

In 1938, seven-year-old Riane Eisler watched as Gestapo soldiers threw her father down a flight of stairs. It looked like her worst nightmares were about to come true, but then her mother stood up to the Nazis and saved her father. Miraculously, her family survived Kristallnacht and fled to Cuba.

Much later, the two poles of the humanity she witnessed that night would lead to a career as a pioneering social scientist. How can it be, she wondered, that human beings can be such monsters and such angels? Is it inevitable for society to be controlled by the most violent and ruthless among us, or is there another paradigm at our fingertips?

After training as systems theorist and an attorney, Eisler would go on to author nearly a dozen books, including The Chalice and the Blade in 1987, which became an international sensation and sold half a million copies.

The book takes readers back into pre-history to argue that before the rise of ‘might is right’ dominator cultures, many groups of humans lived in what Eisler calls ‘partnership societies.’

Men and women worked together rather than against one another. Children were raised by communities instead of atomised family units. The gap between what we now call rich and poor was far smaller. Some lasted for 1000 years. These societies weren’t perfect, and Eisler doesn’t argue that we should fetishes them or try to return to them. Instead, she presents them as an example of an eternal truth that could well save humanity:

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I first read The Chalice and the Blade when I was in my early twenties, after coming across Eisler’s work through a series she recorded with Terence McKenna called Man and Woman at the End of History, which I listened to on repeat.

Eisler expanded on the fundamental thesis of The Chalice and the Blade over the next three decades, particularly in her 2007 book The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economy and 2019’s Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future co-authored with neuroscientist Douglas P. Fry, both of which we discuss in more detail in our interview.

It’s a real honour to be publishing this, and it’s one of my favourite conversations in years. It reminded me of what I first felt reading The Chalice and the Blade, namely that Eisler’s work points to the same truth that psychedelic experiences so often remind us of: we’re creating much of our own experience. Our lives are contextual and changeable based on how we are socialised, how we think, and the choices we make. We are also, as I argued in Listen to the Land, in deep relationship with geographical and social forces that shape us beyond our control.

Even so, human culture, more than any other aspect of reality we encounter in our short time on earth, may be the most malleable, fluid, contextual and alive. Because of that, it’s what we can change most fundamentally in our lifetimes. We have the capacity for tremendous agency in response to our environment.

That’s why extractive capitalism isn’t inevitable. It’s why weak, narcissistic leaders aren’t inevitable. It’s why AI superintelligence isn’t inevitable. As I’ve explored on Kainos since we launched at the beginning of the year, particularly in our first documentary Leviathan, the dominator model is reaching the limit of what it can extract, control and mimic. As its emptiness is revealed to more and more people, a space is opening for something new.

A kind of society that has never existed before.

One step toward getting there is moving beyond meaningless double binds. Polarity certainly isn’t meaningless, but we’ve become tangled in shallow polarities that take us nowhere. Left vs Right. Good vs Bad. Spirit vs Science.

What I find so powerful about Eisler’s work is that it points to the polarity beneath so many others we wrestle with day to day: domination and partnership.

Will we try to dominate reality, or work in relationship with it? Will we try to force our children to be how we think they should be, or respect their essential expression and evolution? Will we try to overlay our ideologies onto reality in exchange for a fleeting sense of control, or accept that the only real control arises when we let go?

Eisler has written extensively on economics and politics, because this is where we see the ugliest expression of domination and our perpetual fight against it. Today, there is a growing recognition in the political sphere that the old distinction of left and right is largely meaningless. The Political Compass model, which maps political leanings against degrees of authoritarianism or freedom rather than fixed ideological points, is an example of this shift.

Eisler pioneered this kind of thinking decades ago, and her work is more relevant today than it has ever been. It ties in directly to a lot of the topics we’ve explored on Kainos, including the woke left swinging to the woke right, the rise of authoritarianism, the domination of technocracy and the resistance against it.

As I’ve argued, we can’t understand the ‘high weirdness’ and intensity of this era without understanding the deeper psycho-spiritual drivers powering it. Eisler’s work points to these, touching on something much deeper at play than political disagreement. It’s something similar to what I explored in Life’s a Game and the Bad Guys are Winning.

Our social dynamics are an expression of our relationship to reality. Our ‘us and them’ politics is an expression of a deeper wound of ‘me and it’. It’s a twisted projection born from the agony of the question: “Do I really belong here?”

“Am I part of reality, or a stranger with no power? Am I beautiful, or am I worthless?” If we feel we’re strangers in an alien and uncaring cosmos, we’re left with little choice but to fill the unbearable gap where belonging resides. We have to try and control what can’t be controlled, and if that’s what we’re doing then domination or weaponised victimhood are both viable strategies.

But they lead us nowhere, because they are based on illusion. In reality, we’re all part of everything. An idea encapsulated in the Sanskrit phrase, Tat Tvam Asi.

You are it. When we stop being strangers in a hostile world, and become interdependent with all its drama and glory, we tend to show up very differently.

Between those poles of domination and partnership, connection and separation, there are layers and layers of nuance that we need to explore to move into new paradigms in economics, society and spirituality. Riane and I explored some of these topics in this film, and we’ll keep the conversation going in New Ways of Knowing in January.

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