All Posts Tagged With: "alternative health"

“If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.”
African proverb

I have been listening to Riane Eisler’s brilliant book, The Real Wealth of Nations.  It is a miraculous synthesis of her life’s work in the study of cultural values, gender relationships, and economics.

One framework that resonates particularly strongly is her characterization of cultures on a spectrum between two opposite modes: domination at one end and partnership at the other. This framework allows her analysis of current economic theory, policy and practice to be independent of political or social ideology. Any culture can be one of domination or of partnership, and never are they purely one or the other.

As she characterizes them, domination requires insensitivity, competitiveness, cruelty, and destructiveness. It inhibits the partnership qualities of consciousness, caring, and creativity. Human beings have the biological capacity for the full spectrum of all these traits. Whatever model our culture orients to will bring out, express, or inhibit these tendencies.

Domination systems are rigid, top-down rankings that are maintained through physical, economic, and psychological control. A superior / inferior worldview ranks men over women and humans over other species, leading to other rankings of in-group over out-group, which applies to anything including race, ethnicity, or religion.

By contrast, partnership systems value and support participation, empathy, equity and caring. Continued