Nurturing Our Humanity When Our World Desperately Needs Healing
Charter Oak Cultural Center
Hartford
Nov 13, 2025
“The question is why, when the humans have such a capacity for caring, for love, for nonviolence, why has there been so much cruelty, so much insensitivity, so much violence?”
That was how Riane Eisler began a thought-provoking conversation about the need to reimagine a world centered on caring and cooperation. She spoke virtually with about 30 of us as part of the Charter Oak Cultural Center’s 24th annual celebration of Jewish arts and culture.
Eisler is familiar firsthand with the cruelty of humanity. Her family was forced to flee from Vienna, Austria, after Kristallnacht, a coordinated assault against Jewish people living in Nazi Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. They first landed in Cuba before finally arriving in the United States. Since then, she’s become an internationally known author and futurist who writes about the need to fundamentally change how our systems of family and economics work.
Despite the heaviness of the subject, which dealt with the intersection of gendered oppression, racism and economics, Eisler herself was joyful and spry at 94 years young. She spoke with a smile on her face because, in her own words, there is hope for change.
The main thesis of Eisler’s presentation is that we have inherited a “domination system”, where masculinity is positively conflated with control and violence, and femininity is negatively associated with weakness and passivity. She argues that in this system, women and families are not only marginalized, but purposefully devalued. Domestic violence, which she recasts as family violence, is the soil in which all the cruelties of the domination system flowers.
Her answer to the violence question is not what you might expect. She doesn’t call for the institution of matriarchy, because to her a woman-dominated system is still a system of domination. She instead advocates for a partnership system that recasts caring work, such as raising children and caring for the sick and elderly, as the fundamental economic relationship. Instead of GDP and stock prices as the indicators of national success, social wealth– spending money on personal and family well-being– would determine success.
One element of Eisler’s presentation that I appreciated was her willingness to concede that she didn’t have all the answers. When she was asked what new systems would need to be created, Eisler said that imagining all the changes necessary was too large a task for one person. She said that just as we’ve invented mortgages, stock buybacks and various other economic inventions of the domination system, we need people to come up with “partnership economic inventions” that value the natural economy, the volunteer economy and the household economy.
Towards the end of the conversation, I asked Eisler a question: How did her work interact with systems of hierarchy, since it often seems like hierarchies don’t make decisions that are in the best interests of the greatest number of people?
“Every society needs parents, it needs teachers, it needs managers, leaders, someone to make decisions,” she said. “But there's a difference between hierarchies of domination, which we’ve inherited, and hierarchies of actualization where power is used to give life, to nurture life, to illuminate life.”
That was a legitimately transformational response for me. Eisler spoke several times about resisting the urge to think in binaries. Many of my experiences over the last five years have led me to reject hierarchy and authority wholesale, and I’ve done a great deal of study about its binary, anarchy. It had never occurred to me that there could be a nurturing, responsive kind of leadership.
Eisler’s work requires a leap of imagination, past the world that we see every day and think of as immutable and inevitable, past the comfort of binary solutions, and towards a completely different value structure. I admit, her vision is appealing, even as it’s hard to conceptualize. But as she said at the end of her talk, that’s the task at hand.
“Our job is to really show that there is a better alternative, and that we can create it.”
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