Contribution to GTI Forum What’s Next for the Global Movement?
We are all working for the same goal: a more equitable and peaceful world where caring for people and nature is a top social and economic priority. But we are doing this in separate silos and with thinking and institutions that cannot solve the problems they created. On top of this, we face a backward push worldwide to authoritarianism, inequality, violence, and unsustainability.
If we closely look at this backward push, we see that it extends well beyond issues like climate change, race, immigration, or politics that most progressive people and organizations spotlight. Regressives put enormous time and energy into “social issues” that focus on family, gender, and sexuality to promote domination. They use tactics ranging from the deregulation of harmful business activities to idealizing strongman political rule to inciting violence and abuse against racial and ethnic outgroups. But their long-term strategy is to push us back to a time when domination in our foundational family, gender, and sexual relations was the accepted norm.
To understand this unified regressive agenda, let us consider the following:
(1) Neuroscience shows that children’s early observations and experiences directly affect the structure of our brains, and with this, how we think, feel, and act—including how we vote.
(2) These observations and experiences are very different depending on the degree that our early environments orient to the partnership or domination end of the partnership-domination social scale.
For those not familiar with the partnership-domination scale, here is a quick summary of what decades of research reveal about the unified regressive frame—and how we can more effectively move forward together.
Foundational Dynamics
(1) By transcending inherited social categories like religious/secular, right/left, East/West, North/South, capitalist/socialist, we see that a common goal of the consolidated regressive agenda is to restore authoritarian, top-down, punitive, in-group versus out-group systems in both the family and the state or tribe.
We find this kind of family system in religious domination-oriented cultures like the Taliban and fundamentalist Iran as well as in secular and Western ones like Orban’s Hungary, the rightist Nazis, and the leftist USSR. Why? Because neuroscience shows that our politics and economics are largely a function of our worldview and values, which are largely the result of children’s genes’ interaction with their cultural environment. And all this is primarily transmitted through families during our most formative years.
I want to add that there are hierarchies in partnership systems, starting in families, but they are empowering hierarchies of actualization rather than disempowering hierarchies of domination. Research shows that children who experience fear, pain, and anger in punitive, authoritarian, male-dominated families tend to go into denial, deflecting these feelings to different races, gays/trans people, and other outgroups they are taught are inferior, dangerous, or malevolent. This denial becomes habitual, as in denial of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and election results.
Fortunately, not everyone raised in these kinds of families takes this route, but many people do—maintaining and even demanding punitive domination systems in times like ours of massive technological, economic, and environmental change.(2) Regressives internalize rigid gender stereotypes, despite the evidence that both women and men are capable of caregiving (labeled “feminine” in domination thinking). They do not recognize that gender fluidity is part of human nature nor that there is massive evidence that prehistoric human cultures oriented more toward partnership than domination.
Again, we clearly see this focus on rigid gendered rankings in otherwise different domination regimes. Western secular regimes like Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Trump’s MAGA movement, and Putin’s Russia all see men and “masculinity” as superior to women and “femininity.” This subjugation of women and the “feminine” is even more overt in religious Iran and the Taliban, where it is a top government priority, as are binary gender stereotypes and the arrest and killing of anyone who deviates, like women who refuse to wear the chador and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
All of us to varying degrees were taught to rank men and “masculinity” over women and “femininity.” Our religions teach that women are inferior and must be controlled by men, starting with Eve. The university canon has had little or nothing about girls and women, and even the new women’s, men’s, and gender studies are marginalized.
We have not been taught that the ranking of men over women, rigid gender stereotypes that allow no deviation, and ranking “masculinity” over “femininity” is a bulwark of domination systems. But how gender roles and relations are structured is not “just a women’s issue”: it is a central social and economic organizing principle.
(3) The economic operating systems we have inherited have been shaped by gendered values in which the economic contributions of the “women’s work” of caring for people from birth as well as caring for our natural life support systems are devalued.
Both Smith and Marx (fathers of capitalism and socialism) perpetuated these values. For them, the work of caring for children, the elderly, and the sick and keeping a clean and healthy home environment was to be performed for free by a woman in a male-controlled household. There is nothing in their theories about caring for our natural life support systems.
Even metrics like GDP and GNP perpetuate this distorted system of values. These metrics include activities in the market (once an exclusive male preserve) that harm and even take life, like selling cigarettes and fast foods and the medical and funeral costs they result in. But they do not include the “women’s” work of caring for people outside the market (a market where child care workers generally earn less than dog walkers). Nor do they include caring for our natural environment, so trees (which provide us oxygen) are only included when they are dead, as logs.
(4) To support domination systems, we also inherited false narratives, which are re-taught by regressives. Notable are those about an inherently flawed human nature like “original sin” and “selfish genes”—which argue with each other, but both justify top-down control. To support the old rankings based on fear and force, we inherited stories like Eve’s and Pandora’s that blame women for all our ills. We inherited “classic” fairy tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty that idealize royalty and promote women’s helplessness and dependence. As we see revived in parts of the US where pushback to domination systems is strongest, we also inherited narratives that promote racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices.
Conclusion
Diverse movements such as the environmental, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and women’s empowerment movements require a unifying framework: a comprehensive partnership approach, recognizing our interconnection with one another and the natural world. This new frame encompasses family, childhood, gender, economic, and political relations, and is key to a successful whole-systems transformation and a better world.
