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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right are today focusing their attempts to regain control in a rapidly changing world on frantic efforts to maintain control over women, particularly over women's sexuality. Moreover, given their mythologies about "holy wars," it is also understandable that they should use "divinely approved" violence to do so.
We can't just tack on environmental balance to a fundamentally imbalanced system.
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.
...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects.
to change our realities, we also have to change our myths. As history amply demonstrates, myths and realities go hand in hand.
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.
Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.
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.
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.
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.
To heal ourselves we also have to heal society.
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.
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.
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."
