Latest Riane Eisler Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Care work produces public goods, and should be supported in families by policies such as paid parental leave and caregiver tax credits, and by investments in good training and wages for caregiving, including early childhood education, in the market.

  Riane Eisler

  Childhood, Training, Wages

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• As long as women and the "feminine" such as caring and caregiving are devalued, we cannot realistically expect more caring economic policies. Young people have a major role to play in creating a caring economics.

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, Play, Creating

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Care work is still primarily done by women for free in families and for poverty wages in the market, and this is a major reason that worldwide women are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor.

  Riane Eisler

  Wages, Done, Care

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We are rapidly moving into the post-industrial age, when we must redefine what is "productive" work, as more and more jobs are being replaced by automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

  Riane Eisler

  Jobs, Moving, Productive Work

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• If we are serious about breaking cycles of poverty, we have to change this (economy).

  Riane Eisler

  Poverty, Serious, Economy

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Neither capitalism nor socialism is capable of meeting our unprecedented global challenges. Both came out of early industrial times, and we are now well into the post-industrial age. Both came out of times when the West still oriented much more to the domination side of the social scale, so both these theories did not pay attention to caring for people and nature.

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, People, Challenges

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• For both Adam Smith and Karl Marx the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, was "just women's work" - and in their minds not even classified as "productive work."

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, Productive Work, People

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• For Islamic fundamentalists male "honor" is equated with control over the women in a man's family - to the extent that killing a woman who makes her own sexual choices (like marrying without her father's consent) is considered honorable, rather than criminal.

  Riane Eisler

  Father, Islamic, Men

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Many young people are hungry for new thinking. So I invite them to use the tools and other resources we have developed to accelerate the shift from domination to partnership.

  Riane Eisler

  Thinking, People, Tools

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We humans are wired for empathy by evolution, but when children grow up in dominator families they internalize this male over female template for relations early on. They then automatically apply it to other differences, whether based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.

  Riane Eisler

  Children, Growing Up, Race

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• It is not coincidental that for so-called religious fundamentalists - whether they are Western or Eastern, Muslim or Christian - rigid male dominance and "holy wars" are priorities. Or that competing sects of the same religion, such as Sunni and Shia, are at each other's throats. In these cultures, women are rigidly controlled by men.

  Riane Eisler

  Christian, Religious, War

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Contemporary nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where women are half of the national legislatures, have more caring policies, less violence, and more environmentally sustainable policies. These are connections we must pay attention to if we are to build a better future for us all.

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, Connections, Attention

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Difference is not equated with superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving.

  Riane Eisler

  Differences, Inferiority, Serving

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We can learn a great deal from whales. It is the same lesson we can learn from our close genetic relatives, the bonobo apes of the Congo. Here mothers have a great deal of authority, there is very little violence (with no signs of sexual violence against females), and their society is held together by sharing and caring rather than by fear and force.

  Riane Eisler

  Mother, Caring, Whales

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• For most progressives, what happens in families is a matter of "just" women's issues and children's issues. So progressive movements have focused primarily on dismantling the top of the dominator pyramid (politics and economics) and left its foundations (domination in family, gender, and other intimate relations) in place.

  Riane Eisler

  Children, Pyramids, Issues

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We urgently need an integrated progressive political agenda if we are to have foundations for a more equitable, sustainable, caring world.

  Riane Eisler

  Caring, Political, Foundation

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• People from authoritarian, male-dominated, punitive families tend to vote for "strongman" leaders and for "hard" punitive policies (prisons, wars) rather than "soft" caring policies (healthcare, childcare). Not everyone from this background does. But many people do. And this conditioning can be exploited, as Trump's campaign did, especially in times like ours of economic, social, and technological upheaval.

  Riane Eisler

  War, Caring, People

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• If we look at the last decades, we see that the US rightist-fundamentalist alliance demonized partnership-oriented families and painted women's rights as a threat to "tradition" - which of course it is to traditions of domination. These people had an integrated political agenda that recognizes that a "traditional" authoritarian, male dominated, punitive family is foundational to an authoritarian, male dominated, punitive politics. We can see this connection in sharp relief in brutal top-down regimes, be they secular like Nazi Germany or religious like ISIS in the Middle East.

  Riane Eisler

  Religious, Top Down, Rights

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• While there were many factors in the 2016 election, from false news to voter suppression and Russian hacking, the question is why so many people responded to Donald Trump's demagoguery.

  Riane Eisler

  People, News, Voters

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• What happened in the US is a regression to the domination side of the social scale. Trump claimed that he, as a "strongman," would solve all our problems, and was elected by fanning fear, hate, scapegoating, the debasement of women.

  Riane Eisler

  Hate, Regression, Sides

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

  Riane Eisler

  Religious, Degrees, Different

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We can't just tack on environmental balance to a fundamentally imbalanced system.

  Riane Eisler

  Balance, Environmental

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• In our age of nuclear and biological weapons and the ever more efficient exploitation of nature, the mix of high technology and an ethos of domination could take us to an evolutionary dead end.

  Riane Eisler

  Technology, Ethos, Age

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The good news is that there is strong movement in this direction of shifting from domination systems to partnership systems. Over the past several hundred years, one progressive movement after another has challenged traditions of domination - from the 18th century "rights of man" movement challenging the "divinely ordained right" of kings to rule their "subjects" to today's environmental movement challenging the once hallowed "conquest of nature."

  Riane Eisler

  Strong, Kings, Past

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com