We can’t safely build a 21st Century world on an 18th Century operating system. The economic and social systems of the world are failing humanity and our planet. We are experiencing serious breakdowns:
The argument of Capitalism versus Socialism fails to recognize that both are rooted in Domination. This system has caused 6,000+ years of suffering and injustice. There is another way — a socio-economic system that supports mutual respect, non-violence, equality, empowerment, and caring: Partnerism.
Building a new social system is accomplished by leveraging the Four Cornerstones upon which social systems are built and maintained.
Neuroscience shows that what children experience and observe, starting at birth, determines how our brains develop and therefore how we think, feel, and act. Infants and children absorb partnership or domination worldview's from parents' relationships with each other and from their relationships with parents and siblings, long before they go to school and long before critical mental faculties are developed.
For 75 years, the world has marched to the drum of “Gross Domestic Product,” a narrow, distorted, and short-term measure focusing on goods and services, without accounting for whether they help or harm us or our natural environment. It’s time for a new toolset.
The Social Wealth Index (SWI), a new tool under development, documents the enormous economic value of the work of care, its key role in a nation’s human capacity development, and what investments are needed for a better quality of life and a strong economy. When accurately accounted for, care emerges as both a prime mover of economic growth and a reliable indicator of a nation’s current and future social well-being and economic vitality.
The unaccounted value of the ‘invisible economy’ is estimated at $10.8 trillion globally. Partnerism's caring economics includes huge value generators that make visible and invest in human capacity development.
We are at an economic tipping point. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacies of current economic thinking. Even before now, millions of jobs were already replaced by automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, and predictions are that job losses will accelerate exponentially in the next 20 years. This opens the door for redefining what is and is not productive work as part of a new sustainable and equitable economic system of Partnerism.
What distinguishes us as humans is our enormous capacity for caring, consciousness, and creativity. Now is the time to use these gifts to construct:
Five Building Blocks for the Caring Economics of Partnerism:
For the last 35 years social scientist and cultural historian Riane Eisler has been advocating for Partnerism, a more caring social and economic system. Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Studies and author of a dozen books including, The Real Wealth of Nations and most recently Nurturing Our Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2019).
In the coming weeks, a toolkit for sharing Partnerism will be available here. Please sign up to join the movement and be notified when the toolkit is available. Also, we welcome your input on what tools you'd like to see for sharing Partnerism...We're building this together!
