Our Words and Our Consciousness

Copyright Dr. Riane Eisler and Sande Hart 2026

As we try to meet today’s challenges, from social injustice and the growing gap between haves and have nots to environmental unsustainability and increasing violence, we often ignore vital tools: the words we use.

Yet our language shapes our reality. So do the stories we are taught to believe. Both shape our consciousness about what is, and is not, possible.

This is why linguistic psychologists tell us that words reflect and perpetuate a culture’s values and assumptions. We’ve been in a kind of trance, without considering the impact of words and the stories they convey. In reality, words play a huge role in how we perceive the world and ourselves.

Language, Culture, and Consciousness

Language – the words we are accustomed to – contain and communicate information we and our surrounding culture consider normal. However, language also can shift our culture and our worldviews. It can redefine our impact, our consciousness, and our interactions.

Consider the words domestic violence or family violence. Which terms we chose will influence both public perception and government policy.

Domestic violence has been relegated to a secondary status, because our inherited cultures marginalize women and children, who are most of the victims of this violence. Domestic violence also brings a more detached view, washing over the difficult reality of what we have to address. Family violence, violence in families, or intimate violence invokes a more personal sense of our common humanity, so we cannot look away.

Similarly, when most of us think of the word hierarchy, we imagine a vertical scale of domination. Yet by leading with actualization, as in actualization hierarchy, we see a spiral design that creates a mutually beneficial outcome.

All societies need parents, teachers, leaders, and managers, which entails some form of hierarchy. But in a hierarchy of actualization, there is transparency, empowerment, creative power, and power with. Contrast this with a hierarchy of domination where parents, teachers, managers, and leaders rely on power over backed up by fear of pain, be it bodily or economic. By clarifying what kind of hierarchy we mean, we help envision and create something better for us all.

Or think of the difference between innovation and creativity. Both aim to improve and expand, but innovation is often tied to improving existing technologies, systems, or products that harm us, like highly processed fast foods or carbon-releasing fuels. Creativity encompasses a broader, more expansive meaning. It invokes imagination and the courage to explore beyond conventional limits, so as to benefit us and our natural environment, rather than causing harm. Creativity is not about adhering to existing frameworks but about exploring new possibilities and envisioning realities that may not yet exist.

Old and New Social Categories

What we lack, and urgently need, are new terms that describe both the kinds of cultures and subcultures we have to leave behind and a more equitable, sustainable, less violent alternative.

We have seen how the words we inherited from more authoritarian and violent times shape our thinking and acting. Now we must re-examine the social categories we inherited from these more authoritarian and violent times: right vs. left, religious vs. secular, capitalist vs. socialist, Eastern vs. Western, Northern vs. Southern. These are the categories we are used to, but none of them tells us what we have to build for more equity, sustainability, and peace, as there are violent, repressive, and authoritarian societies in all these old categories. Moreover, all marginalize or ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity: women and children.

What we lack, and urgently need, are new terms that describe both the kinds of cultures and subcultures we have to leave behind and a more equitable, sustainable, less violent alternative.

Actually, these terms exist: the partnership system and the domination system. Both are the result of decades of research drawing from an inclusive data base that takes into account:

1. The whole of humanity, including its male and female forms

2. The whole of our history, including prehistory: the long period before recorded or written history

3. The whole of our lives, including our family and other intimate relations

Using these social categories – and the partnership-domination scale, since orientation to partnership or domination is always a matter of degree – we see configurations or patterns that are otherwise invisible.

We see how existing categories like religious/secular, eastern/western, capitalist/socialist, rightist/leftist focus on what used to be called “the men’s world” (from which women and children were generally barred). We also see that these old categories, which focus on different characteristics like geography, economics, or spiritual beliefs, fragment our consciousness. We further see that mounting evidence from disciplines like archeology, myth, and even DNA studies shows that for millennia most prehistoric cultures oriented to the more equitable, less violent configuration of the partnership system – until there was a shift to domination only five to ten thousand years ago (a mere blip in human cultural history}.

We also see modern history from a new perspective. For one thing, we see commonalities in societies that are otherwise very different. For example, we see that the religious Eastern systems of the Taliban and fundamentalist Iran actually share a close orientation to the domination system. And so do rightist and leftist Western societies like Stalin’s former USSR and Hitler’s rightist Nazi Germany. They too have the configuration of authoritarianism, rigid male dominance, rigid gender stereotypes (despite the existence of gays and lesbians in all cultures), and reliance on fear and violence to maintain rigid ranking in families, economics, and other institution.

Also connected through the partnership-domination lens are organized social movements that all challenge the same thing: a tradition of domination. Black Lives Matter challenges racism, MeToo challenges the domination of the male human form over the female form, and the environmental movement challenges the conquest and domination of Nature, which today threatens us with an evolutionary dead-end. These are all trends to shift from domination-oriented societies to partnership-oriented ones, as were the Enlightenment movement challenging the “divinely ordained” right of kings to rule, the movements to abolish slavery and the “divinely ordained” right of a “superior” race to rule over a “inferior one” – one of the rationales for white dominance being reinvigorated today.

There are many more trends toward partnership, including that the United Nations is finally talking of women’s and children’s human rights. But the movement toward partnership is today also countered by a massive global regression to domination, bringing more violence, fear, and climate chaos in its wake.

In other words, to make sense of what is happening in our world we must have new categories: categories that show that a better system is possible, categories that take into account the whole of humanity, including both its male and female forms and everyone in between; the whole of our cultural history including the millennia of prehistory that evidence shows oriented to partnership, and the whole of our lives, including our family and other intimate relations.

We urgently need the consciousness that what happens to children, starting in families, is not “just” an isolated family issue. Nor is the subordination of women and the “feminine” “just a women’s issue.” These are fundamental family, economic, and social organizing principles than negatively affect us all.

Two Social Configurations

Today’s regression to strongman rule, violence, and denial (be it denial of climate change, election results, or Covid 19) is a regression to the cultural configuration of more rigid domination times. This configuration consists of:

1.Top- down strongman rule in families, economics, and society;

2.The subordination of women and the “feminine” to men and to a “masculinity” equated with domination and conquest;

3.Built-in traumatizing abuse and violence, from child and wife beating to pogroms and chronic warfare;

4.Stories and language justifying strongman rule, violence, hierarchies of domination, and in-group versus out-group beliefs, like blaming women (Eve or Pandora) for all “men’s” ills.

Cultures orienting to the partnership configuration also transcend familiar categories. They can be prehistoric foraging societies, studied by anthropologist Douglas Fry and others, or technologically-advanced “high civilizations” like Minoan Crete, where women had leading roles. They can be modern societies, like Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which lead world-happiness reports largely because they have more 4“feminine” caring policies like universal health care, accessible/high quality childcare, and generous paid parental leave. These Nordic cultures are not socialist nations; they have a healthy business sector. Nor is their greater focus on caring policies due to their relatively small, homogenous character since many small, relatively homogeneous nations are warlike, unequal, and do not have caring policies.

The difference is that they have been moving toward the partnership side of the partnership-domination social scale in their norms of greater equity in families and the state, their caring policies, and their pioneering work for peace academies and legislation that family violence (including spanking children) is against the law – and their national legislatures having almost 50 percent women.

All these societies orient more to the partnership configuration of:

1. Democratic and egalitarian families, economies, and societies, with hierarchies of actualization where accountability, respect, and benefits flow both ways, rather than only from the bottom up;

2. The female and male forms of humanity are equally valued, there are no rigid gender stereotypes, and qualities such as nonviolence and care are valued in all people and in policy;

3. Abuse and violence are not built into institutions such as families and governments, as they are not required to maintain rankings of domination;

4. Stories and language recognize that we can be insensitive and violent, but these traits are not idealized, and sensitivity, empathy, and caring are social norms.

   
   

Four Cornerstones

To move from domination family, economic, and social systems requires both short-term tactics and long-term strategies. The first step is recognizing these two contrasting configurations as a systemic frame. The next step is recognizing the four foundational and interconnected cornerstones that support either domination-oriented or partnership-oriented societies: family/childhood, gender, economics, and story/language.

The first cornerstone of childhood/family has been a focus of domination and would-be domination regimes. Not only does the Maga movement consider the socialization of children a key “social issue” but their “Christian” parenting guides urge painfully teaching children that their parents’ words are law.

Why? Domination systems require punitive, physically and emotionally violent, families. Neuroscience shows that what children observe and experience impacts how our brains develop, and hence how we think, feel, and act – including how we vote and what kind of leaders we want.

It is in families that children first learn to equate respect with fear, or alternately, that respect must go both ways between parent and child, and that violence (including spanking, which the American Psychological Association reported is ineffective discipline and emotionally and physically harmful) has no place in childcare.

Consider that the violent and autocratic Putin substantially reduced the legal penalty for some family violence in Russia. He recognized the connection between a punitive, authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated family and a punitive, authoritarian, rigidly male- dominated state.

To build a more equitable, sustainable, and peaceful world, we must globally shift to what childcare experts advocate: caring for children, not through fear, but by modeling and acting with respect, leaving behind domination traditions of spanking and other violence in families. This first cornerstone was the central theme of the Center for Partnership Studies’ virtual forum PeaceBeginsatHomeSummit.org in 2025, where its recording can be found. It reached many thousands of people worldwide, with over 2,000 registrations and speakers from all over our planet.

The second cornerstone we must shift to partnership is how a society organizes the roles and relations of the two basic forms of humanity: male and female. Again, the subordination of women is a major theme of the regression to strongman rule and male entitlement in the U.S. and of religious domination cultures such as the Eastern Taliban and fundamentalist Iran, as it was for secular leftist societies like Stalin’s former Soviet Union, where there were no women in the Politburo, and rightist Western Nazi Germany, where women were banned from leadership and received lower wages than men.

Why? Ranking male/”masculine” over female/“feminine” and rigid gender stereotypes are foundational to authoritarian, top-down, violent societies. They teach children to 6associate difference with superiority and inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving. And this is a template for the in-group versus out-group thinking and acting characteristic of domination-oriented cultures or subcultures for different races, religions, sexual orientations, and so forth.

The third cornerstone is economics. The argument between capitalism and socialism fragments our consciousness. We need both (free) markets and (enlightened) government policies.

The problem is that capitalism and socialism came out of more rigid domination times in the 1700s and 1800s. Both perpetuate the domination system’s gendered values, where anything stereotypically coded “feminine” – such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence – is deemed inferior to anything coded “masculine” – such as domination and violence. So caring for people was in their time to be done for free by a woman in a male-controlled household. And since caring was equated with the feminine or women, neither Smith nor Marx said anything about caring for nature.

Leaving these unhealthy valuations behind is essential to move to a caring economics of partnerism, where, as detailed in The Real Wealth of Nations, caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for our natural life-support systems, are valued and rewarded, whether done by women or men. Consider that in our most common economic measures today, GDP and GNP, the work of care is not even included as “productive” unless performed in the market – and then, for very low wages!

The fourth cornerstone takes us directly back to the beginning of this article: language and normative stories. The most cherished fairy tales we inherited, like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Scheherazade, transmit domination messages. They idealize those on top -- princes, sheiks, and kings -- and teach rigid domination gender stereotypes. Cinderella is rescued by a prince and Sleeping Beauty can’t wake up until a prince kisses her. Women’s helplessness and passivity is a given and only men (again men on top) are capable, active, and entitled to rule.

Worse, in One Thousand and One Nights, the king or caliph, who has sex with countless young women before having them murdered, is not punished for his crimes. We are told his actions are justified because his favorite wife deceived him. Even worse, he is actually rewarded for his crimes when a smart, creative, lovely young woman (Scheherazade) joins his harem, entertaining him every night so he doesn’t kill her -- in what we are told is a great love story!

These fairy tales are only the tip of the iceberg. We already mentioned familiar stories blaming woman (Eve or Pandora) for all of “man’s ills.” Then there is the famous cartoon of a caveman with a weapon (a club) in one hand, dragging a woman by the hair, which we think nothing of showing children before their brains, much less their critical faculties, are formed, There are countless normative stories like “original sin” and “selfish genes” telling us we’re bad, and therefore must be rigidly controlled from the top, as in “God-fearing.”

There is already some new language like the increased use of “empowering,” “transparency,” “she or he” and “they” – reflecting a shift toward partnership. But our consciousness of the words we use must be much more widespread, involving artists, musicians, writers, education, AI, and media, normalizing the language and stories appropriate for a partnership-oriented society.

Conclusion

The struggle for our future is not between any of the social categories we inherited from more rigid domination times. It is between partnership–oriented and domination– oriented families, economics, and social systems.

To effectively move toward partnership requires more than disconnected tactics, as important as these are. It requires a whole-systems consciousness, and with this, long- term strategies that focus on the four foundational, interconnected, cornerstones of childhood/family, gender, economics, and story/language.

We want to close by again mentioning one strategic intervention: the Peace Begins at Home campaign backed by both religious/spiritual and secular leaders to end family violence. This campaign nor only changes words, from the familiar (marginalized) “domestic violence” to “family violence”; it emphasizes the link between violence in the family and the violence of war and terrorism.

We must connect the dots so people see that the trauma-inducing violence that children observe and/or experience in their families is foundational to imposing and maintaining the fear-backed relations of domination systems.

As we change our consciousness, new actions emerge for building a world that works for everyone – including women and children. As we change our language and stories, we change dysfunctional beliefs, and support partnership rather than domination. Using long-term strategies in addition to short-term tactics, we address the four cornerstones on which all societies rest, changing root causes, not just symptoms. And instead of arguing with one another about old categories that fragment our consciousness, we build foundations for a better world.

NOTES

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Harper Collins, 1987,

Center for Partnership Systems media graphics (including section on changing our

language): https://centerforpartnership.org/partnership-info-sheets/

Eisler, Riane. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Kohler,

2007).

Eisler, Riane and Fry, Douglas. Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and

Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Fry, Douglas, editor. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary

and Cultural Views. (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Hart, Sande, www.sandehart.com and www.GlobalWomansVillage.org

Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American, January 2004: pp.

77- 83.

Mukerjee, Madhusree, “Interview with Riane Eisler,” Scientific American, September

28, 2023, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-family-trauma-perpetuates-

authoritarian-societies/.

Reed, Donna, and Ema Buffie, “The Burning Times” Documentary 1990

The Global Woman’s Village, www.globalwomansvillage.com