Four Cornerstones of a Partnership Society Over Todays Dominator Society
FAMILY / CHILDHOOD RELATIONS Neuroscience shows that what children experience and observe, starting at birth, profoundly impacts how our brains develop and therefore how we think, feel, and act. Infants and children absorb partnership or domination worldviews from parents’ relationships with each other and from their relationships with parents and siblings, long before they go to school and long before critical mental faculties are developed.
GENDER RELATIONS How a society constructs gender roles and relations not only affects everyone’s individual life options; it affects families, education, religion, politics, and economics. When people learn to equate the physical differences between male and female with superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving, they internalize a template that can automatically be applied to different races, religions, sexual orientations, and other differences.
ECONOMIC RELATIONS The top-down gap between haves and havenots is built into domination systems, ancient or modern, Eastern of Western, capitalist or socialist. Moving to a more robust, sustainable, and humane economics is not only vital for human and environmental reasons, but for purely economic ones. A caring economics of Partnerism recognizes that the real wealth of our world consists of the contributions of people and of nature.
NARRATIVES/LANGUAGE We need the language of partnership and domination systems to transcend old categories, and to describe the configuration of beneficial family, social, and economic systems. A caring democracy requires accurate narratives about ‘human nature’ and human possibilities. Shifting to the partnership side of the social scale requires a concerted effort in which the arts, music, literature, and education are informed and inspired by science and caring values.