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

Categorized in : Moving Jobs Productive Work

For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. .....The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.

women law children

In sum, the struggle for our future is . . . the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.

patterns struggle world

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.

top-down religious rights

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.

creating caring play

So many of the models of courage we've had, ones that are still taught to boys and girls, are about going out to slay the dragon, to kill. It's a courage that's born out of fear, anger, and hate. But there's this other kind of courage. It's the courage to risk your life, not in war, not in battle, not out of fear ... but out of love and a sense of injustice that has to be challenged. It takes far more courage to challenge unjust authority without violence than it takes to kill all the monsters in all the stories told to children about the meaning of bravery.

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to change our realities, we also have to change our myths. As history amply demonstrates, myths and realities go hand in hand.

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I pray for a world where we live in partnership rather than domination; where "man's conquest of nature" is recognized as suicidal and sacrilegious; where power is no longer equated with the blade, but with the holy chalice: the ancient symbol of the power to give, nurture, enhance life. And I not only pray, but actively work, for the day when it will be so.

suicidal men peace

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.

caring challenges people

[On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.

love-life religious art

When the status and power of women is greater so also is the nation’s general quality of life; when they are lower, so is the quality of life for all.

quality-of-life quality greater

This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.

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.

wages care done

And this exclusion of "women's work" continues, despite United Nations data gathered since 1975 (the beginning of the UN Decade for Women) indicating that women globally contribute two-thirds of the world's work hours, for which - given the imbalanced, unjust, and truly peculiar nature of the accounting characteristic of dominator economics - they globally earn only one-tenth of what men do and own a mere one-hundredth of the world's property.

For new ideas to be translated into new realities requires not only clarity of vision but also the opportunity to change old realities.

change opportunity reality

Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured.

communication teacher children

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.

ethos technology age

The link between intimate violence in the home and the international violence of terrorism and war is as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist.

together home war

The only life many of the leaders of the anti-family planning movement seem to care about -- indeed obsess about -- is life before birth and after death.

movement care leader

Can we really expect adequate funding for programs to clean up our environment and care for people's basic needs as long as the socially essential work of caretaking and cleaning is relegated to women for little or no pay?

care long people

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.

issues pyramids children