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The Two Competing Systems That Will Determine
the Future of Our Love Lives, Work Lives, and the
Survival of Our Children
I have been a marriage and family therapist for
more than fifty years. I help men and women address
two areas that most everyone must deal with these
days—Our love lives and our work lives.
Sigmund Freud recognized the importance of these
two areas many years ago when he famously said,
“Love and work are the
cornerstones of our humanness.”
Over the years I have been in practice I have
learned that we can’t heal individual lives
without addressing issues that impact couples.
Further, I have come to see that we can’t heal
couples relationship without addressing family
dynamics, including our wounding in our families of
origin. We know, too, that families don’t
exist in isolation, but are members of communities,
countries, and members of the community of all life
on planet Earth.
I believe that all people, with the exception of
those who refuse to accept the realities of life in
today’s world, would agree that humans are out
of balance with life on Earth. Existential problems
such as the climate crisis, the loss of
biodiversity, an economic system that is dependent
on exponential growth, and the continuing threat of
wars that could kill us all, are not being
adequately addressed.
We all have experienced two forces working in
each of us. One force is based on love, trust, and
a belief that we can solve our problems. The other
force is based on fear, anger, and a belief that
nothing we do will succeed and we might as well
just give up.
The beginning of a solution to our dilemma comes
from a Native American story that has many
variations. It is a story of the two wolves and is
an ancient tale that has been a part of traditional
wisdom stories for generations. Historians
typically attribute the tale to the Cherokee or the
Lenape people.
The story features two characters: a grandfather
and his grandson. The grandfather says, “I
have a fight going on in me between two wolves. One
is evil – he is anger, envy, regret, and
sorrow. The other one is good—he is joy,
peace, hope, and love.
The grandson takes a moment to reflect on this.
At last, he looks up at his grandfather and asks,
“Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee
grandfather gives a simple reply. “The one you
feed.”
Domination and Partnership: Which One Will We
Feed?
I first met Riane Eisler in 1987 shortly after
the publication of her book, The Chalice & the
Blade: Our History, Our Future. I was moved by
their simplicity, vision, and truth:
“Underlying the great surface
diversity of human culture are two basic models
of society. The first, which I call the
dominator model, is what is popularly termed
either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking
of one half of humanity over the other. The
second, in which social relations are primarily
based on the principle of linking rather than
ranking, may best be described as the
partnership model. In this model—beginning
with the most fundamental difference in our
species, between male and female—diversity
is not equated with either inferiority or
superiority.”
Eisler has written numerous books that have
expanded on these ideas including her most recent,
written with anthropologist, Douglas P. Fry,
Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and
Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and
Future. In their chapter, “The Original
Partnership Societies,” they recognize that
the roots of our partnership lives go back nearly
two-million years to a time when we were all
hunter-gatherers.
“Nomadic foragers—also
called nomadic hunter-gatherers—constitute
the oldest form of human social
organization,” say Eisler and Fry,
“predating by far the agricultural
revolution of about 10,000 years ago as well as
the rise of pastoralists, tribal
horticulturalists, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and
ancient states.”
They go on to explore the reasons humanity
shifted away from partnership towards a domination
model.
“There are a number of theories
about how and why domination systems
originated,”
say Eisler and Fry.
“One theory, which recently
seems to have received some support from DNA
studies of prehistoric European populations, is
based on the proposal of archeologist Marija
Gimbutas that in Europe the shift was due to
incursions of Indo-European pastoralists
originating in the Eurasian steppes who brought
with them strongman rule, male dominance, and
warfare.”
This theory is consistent with the work of
historian and natural scientist, Dr. James DeMeo,
whose research indicates that the origin of our
disconnection and resulting alienation occurred
6,000 years ago in the Middle East.
The Original Dominator Societies Emerged in
Middle-East as a Result of Environmental
Trauma
In his well-researched treatise, Saharasia: The
4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression,
Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the
Old World, Dr. DeMeo says,
“My research confirmed the
existence of an ancient, worldwide period of
relatively peaceful social conditions, where
warfare, male domination, and destructive
aggression were either absent, or at extremely
minimal levels. Moreover, it has become possible
to pinpoint both the exact times and places on
Earth where human culture first transformed from
peaceful, democratic, egalitarian conditions, to
violent, warlike, despotic conditions.”
Dr. DeMeo found that the trauma resulting
from
“repeated drought and
desertification, which promotes famine,
starvation, and mass migrations among
subsistence-level cultures, must have been a
crucial factor”
in changing the way we related to the Earth and
each other from one of partnership to one of
domination.
“Once so anchored into social
institutions, the new draught-and
feminine-derived behavior patterns reproduce
themselves in each new generation, irrespective
of subsequent turns in climate towards wetter
conditions,”
says DeMeo.
Once the domination system is introduced, it
spreads. Violence begets violence. As social
scientist, Andrew Bard Schmooker reminds us in his
prophetic book, The Parable of the Tribes: The
Problem of Power in Social Evolution,
“Power is like a contaminant, a
disease, which once introduced will gradually
yet inexorably become universal in the system of
competing societies.”
That is certainly what we have seen as
Indigenous, partnership cultures, throughout the
world have been wiped by the power of what we
euphemistically refer to as
“civilization.” Schmooker said it simply
and powerfully:
“Civilized society in general
has been like a rabid dog. Its bite infects the
healthy even though it contains the germ of its
own destruction.”
Similar views have been voiced by geography
professor Jared Diamond and historian Yuval Noah
Harari.
Restoring Our Partnership Future: Indigenous
Wisdom and Worldview Can Guide Us
Drawing on their own research and the wisdom of
Indigenous people from around the world, Wahinkpe
Tope (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D, have
written an important book, Restoring the Kinship
Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts
for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth.
In the book’s introduction, they draw on
the experience of environmentalist and author Paul
Shepard who said,
“When we grasp fully that the
best expressions of our humanity were not
invented by civilization but by cultures that
preceded it, that the natural world is not only
a set of constraints but of contexts within
which we can more fully realize our dreams, we
will be on the way to a long overdue
reconciliation between opposites which are of
our own making.”
In Restoring The Kinship Worldview,
Wahinkpe Tope and Darcia Narvaez share a chart by
Wahinkpe Tope, originally published in The Red Road
(chunku luta): Linking Diversity and Inclusion
Initiatives to Indigenous Worldview. He contrasts
what he calls the “Common Dominant Worldview
Manifestation” and the “Common Indigenous
Worldview Manifestation” which are very
similar to the contrasts Riane Eisler describes
between Dominator and Partnership systems and James
DeMeo describes as Armored Patrist and Unarmored
Matrist behaviors, attitudes, and social
institutions.
Winkpe Tope’s original chart had forty
contrasting manifestations.
Only the Partnership/Indigenous Worldview Can
Save Humanity
Thomas Berry was a priest, a
“geologian,” and a historian of
religions. He spoke eloquently to our connection to
the Earth and the consequences of our failure to
remember that our survival depends on accepting our
place as one member, among many, in the community
of life.
“We never knew enough. Nor were
we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in
the great family of the earth. Nor could we
listen to the various creatures of the earth,
each telling its own story. The time has now
come, however, when we will listen or we will
die.”
Our only way forward, I believe, is the
Partnership/Indigenous pathway. Native Americans
have long understood the destructive nature of the
Dominator system that has infected our Dominant
worldview. According to Native American scholar
Jack D. Forbes, in his book, Columbus and other
Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation,
Imperialism, and Terrorism,
“For several thousands of years
human beings have suffered from a plague, a
disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse
than malaria, a malady much more terrible than
smallpox.”
Native peoples call the disease Wetiko and
Forbes describes it as the cult of aggression.
“Indians are murdered,” he
says, “in order to force impoverished
mixed-Indians to gather rubber in the forest
under conditions that doom the rubber-hunters
themselves to miserable deaths. Small countries
are invaded so that an entire people and their
resources can be exploited. Human beings of all
colors are seized or insnared in debts and are
forced to live out their brief lives as slaves
or serfs. Boys are raised to obey orders and
serve as cannon-fodder, while girls are raised
to give their children over to armies, factories
or plantations.”
Forbes says it is an insidious disease that has
become so pervasive it is seen as normal.
“I call it cannibalism…but
whatever we call it, this disease, this wetiko
psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness
known to man.”
Indigenous peoples refuse to be wiped out. Their
communities and the Indigenous wisdom, and
worldview they embrace, may well be the hope for
all humanity. As Thomas Berry reminds us, we will
listen, learn, and act on that wisdom, or we will
die. Our Moonshot
for Mankind and Humanity is bringing
together leaders from around the world to help us
all heal. Please join us.
©2023 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
+ Suicide
* * *
Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of seven
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages and his
latest book, The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression. For over
38 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. He looks forward to your feedback.
E-Mail.
You can visit his website at www.menalive.com
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