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A republication from February 2006: Riane Eisler’s Hierarchy of Actualisation

The excerpt is from Russ Volckman’s excellent Integral Leadership newsletter. See below an insert about the importance of Eisler’s previous book about the origins of hierarchy.

“Q: Would you characterize the partnership model?

A: Well, let’s look at the Nordic Nations. First of all, rather than having hierarchies of domination–these rigid rankings–they do have hierarchies. They have more of what I call hierarchies of actualization. I’ll get back to that because it’s key to my model for business and economics. But the first thing that you see is that they have much greater political and economic democracy. They don’t have these huge gaps betweens haves and have-nots. They have a generally high standard of living for everyone. Second, rather than ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, they have much more equal partnership between women and men. With this–and this is critical–you find that as the status of women rises, so does the status of those traits and activities stereotypically considered feminine: caring, care-giving, non-violence. So what do you see? You see that the Nordic nations were pioneers in what my friend from Finland, Hilkka Pietila, calls a caring society. We call it a welfare state, but it’s very different from the U.S. welfare system. They have universal health care, childcare allowances, elder care and paid parental leave. In other words, in cultures that orient to the partnership model, the care giving that is stereotypically associated with women can become a fiscal priority of the nation. This is very, very good for the economic health of the nation. Finland, for example, in both 2003 and 2004 ranked ahead of the much wealthier, much more powerful United States in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness ratings. And of course, these nations are always on the top in the U.N. Human Development Reports. These nations also pioneered the first peace studies courses. They pioneered laws against physical punishment of children in families. They pioneered a strong men’s movement to disentangle male identity from violence. They also pioneered what we today call industrial democracy, teamwork in factories, rather than turning human beings into mere cogs in the industrial machine. Ecologically sound manufacturing, such as the Natural Step, was also pioneered by them. Now, none of this is random or coincidental. It’s part of the cultural configuration characteristic of the partnership rather than domination model. It is a configuration that factors both what happens to the female half of humanity and also what happens in people’s day-to-day lives…

2. The Caring Economy model

Q: Ultimately, I want to get to the question of leadership, but I think there is still more foundation to be laid. For example, you brought up the subject of economics. In a new book that’s coming out called Enlightened Power yours is the first chapter: The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power. Can you lay out for us a little bit of the economic argument in support of a partnership approach?

A: It is something I’m very deeply involved in. I am actually working on a new book on partnership economics: a caring economy. We’ve been told for a long time, for example in terms of organizational structure, that hierarchies of domination are needed for success. In these hierarchies of rigid top down rankings, accountability, respect, and benefit flow mostly from the bottom up. Enron, for example, certainly didn’t have much accountability or respect from the top down. Most of the benefits accrued to the people on top. That’s the classic domination model. And Enron shows that in the long term it’s hardly successful. I don’t mean to pick on Enron. But these hierarchies of domination, where there is so little accountability or respect by those on top, are rife with horrible corruption and cause great suffering and loss. These companies eventually went bankrupt or changed their names. These were disasters for many people: stockholders, employees and their pension plans. What we’re discovering today–and it’s all over the management literature–is that hierarchies of actualization are much more efficient, much more effective. Now what is a hierarchy of actualization? Well, if we look at the way power is conceptualized, it isn’t conceptualized so much as power over, power to dominate or to destroy, but power to empower oneself and others to be the best we can be. It is also power with. So a term like teamwork is really part of the shift to partnership where there’s a different way of looking at power. In a hierarchy of actualization, you have respect, benefit and accountability flowing both ways. But you also have something else that is very important: you have much better information flow. This is very important for companies to make effective business decisions. In partnership structures, not only do you have teamwork where people can really have input and use their brains and their creativity, but you also have the possibility for much more creativity. When people are in a hierarchy of domination, they know very well that they better conform. It’s very dangerous to disobey orders or to question. Particularly in a post-industrial economy where we are told we need a flexible workforce, a creative workforce, a workforce that can solve problems, the hierarchy of domination just does not work. The structure inhibits creativity and flexibility. There is something else really basic that takes us back to what I was talking about when I spoke of the Nordic Nations. There are many studies now showing that when people feel cared for–which is part of the hierarchy of actualization–people perform much better. There are empirical studies showing this. So all in all, what we’re finding out is that the partnership model is not only more conducive to higher stages of human development, but it actually is much move conducive to economic well-being.”

3. The historical origins of hierarchy

In the book that launched Riane Eisler’s fame, The Chalice and the Blade, where she outlines the difference in dominator and partnership societies, she formulates the following hypothesis, based largely on the research of M. Gimbutas. The story goes more or less like this: for more than 100,000 hears of human history, humans lived in egalitarian bands. But it is a mistake to think that the rise of agriculture and domestication is itself responsible for hierarchical warrior societies. That agriculture gave rise to warfaring empires is the result of an ‘exogenous’ import: that of the masculine-dominated, warrior societies of pastoral nomads, born in the Eurasian steppes, who in fact took over the agricultural kingdoms, and developed a hybrid civilization. Before these invasions the evidence points to feminine-dominated societies, not geared to war. She dates these developments to about 4400 BC.

Riane’s website is at www.partnershipway.org.

From http://defectivebydesign.org

Dear supporter,

Today, Apple launched a computer that will never belong to its owner. Apple will use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to gain total veto power over the applications you use and the media you can view.

We’ve launched a petition calling out Apple’s new product for what it is: a frightening step backward for computing and for media distribution. Can you read it, sign it, and share with friends?

http://defectivebydesign.org/ipad

Also, when you’ve signed, please take the time to share the petition on sites like Identi.ca and Reddit:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/shareipad

Defective by Design’s John Sullivan is on the ground at the Apple event with a group of protesters, letting the public and journalists know about the “Restriction Zone” Apple is constructing around their products. We’ll be posting images from the event throughout the day, so sign the petition and please check back frequently and help us circulate these images.

http://defectivebydesign.org/ipad

This summer we saw the dangers of DRM on ebook readers, when Amazon deleted hundreds of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from readers’ computers while they slept. Applying this control to a general purpose computer marketed especially for media distribution is a huge step backward for computing, and a blow to the media revolution that happened when the web let bloggers reach millions without asking for permission.

DRM and forced updates will give Apple and their corporate partners the power to disable features, restrict competition, censor news, and even delete books, videos, or news stories from users’ computers while they sleep– using the device’s “always on” network connection.

Apple can say they will not abuse this power, but their record of App Store rejections gives us no reason to trust them. The Apple Tablet’s unprecedented use of DRM to control all capabilities of a general purpose computer is a dangerous step backward for computing and for media distribution; we demand that Apple remove DRM from the device.

http://defectivebydesign.org/ipad

Thank you for your support!

Sincerely, Holmes Wilson, Matt Lee, Deborah Nicholson, Peter Brown and John Sullivan — the DRM Elimination Team

Interesting report on the tack taken by James Purnell, uk Labour MP:

“James Purnell’s article in today’s Guardian is interesting on a number of counts.

Moreover, if Labour is to reorient its politics to link with new forms of citizen activism, this will require a thorough reassessment of policy in certain areas, not least in relation to civil liberties.”

• Data | data.gov.uk
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  The on-going financial crisis results not from a cyclical or managerial failure, but from a structural one: more than 96 other major banking crises occurred over the past 20 years, and these crashes have happened under very different regulatory systems and at different stages of economic development. These solutions only deal with the symptoms and not the systemic cause of today’s banking crisis.
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Excerpt from Michael Edwards in Open Democracy:

“There are four key points in my argument:

One clear message emerges from these four points: Social transformation is not a job to be left to the whims of billionaires. Perhaps if we supported the energy and creativity of millions of ordinary people, we could create a foundation for lasting progress that will never come through top-down planning by a new global elite, however well intentioned. When this principle is accepted and philanthropy is recon?gured to be less technocratic and more supportive of people’s own self-development efforts, then change will come — larger than we can control, quicker than we can imagine, and deeper than we could ever hope for by reducing everything to market forces.”

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• EuroITV 2010
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Edward Berge

I’ve often quoted George Lakoff’s work (with Mark Johnson) in The Philosophy of the Flesh. He has a new article at the Huffington Post about returning to democracy after the recent events in the news. Read the entire piece, which is a call to action at this link. Here are some excerpts:

Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?

This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.

The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.

All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.

Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option — a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”

The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.

Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

Conservatives…don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government. But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life — like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.

• lg3d-wonderland: Project Wonderland
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• Play as Being Wiki - Play As Being Wiki
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• Friedrich Ochsenhorn - Play As Being Wiki
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• Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy - Henry Giroux | Twine
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• PayPal Freezes Wikileaks Assets – The Command Line
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• Open Patents - P2P Foundation
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Edward Berge

Corporate capitalism had a huge victory today by buying the Supreme Court (now known as the Supreme Corp, the conservative majority, anyway), who ruled to remove all corporate political financing restrictions. Now corporations are free to literally buy whatever they want with unlimited funding of political ads. But this is how capitalism works, so should we be surprised? I’m really looking forward to seeing the “integral” spin on this one. That is, if they don’t just ignore it as irrelevant, which is more likely.

The argument in favor of this travesty is that corporations are “people” and thus have rights of free speech, which include freedom to contribute money to candidates of their choice. This will make an integral spin especially problematic, since corporations are in the lower quadrants and thus not “dominant monads,” i.e., people with consciousness. Thus the corp should not have the same rights. For those of you with memberships to IL etc. please forward such integral spin here for our consideration.

Fight back at www.savedemocracy.net

Here’s another link to voice your opposition: http://my.barackobama.com/FairElections

This led to further discussion of the Gaia Integral Postmetaphysical Pod in the Integral Capitalism thread. Here are a few excerpts:

Nickeson said:

Edward, do you think Harris in his essay Thoughts towards in integral political economy was in any way influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844? It has been 40 years since I read that little volume, but I recognized some distinct parallels. If I recall correctly he had an idealized semi-utopian vision there which was dedicated toward the humanistic, self-realization of the individual worker and thus the society at large. It was not too much different than the visions of the early anarchist thinkers. The problem that all of them have is the assumption of a highly advanced, fully industrialized, wealthy political economy as their basis. Later it became axiomatic for Marx that the worker’s revolution had to take place in a nation of advanced industrialization or else the sought for redistribution of wealth would just be a redistribution of poverty that would have a “trickle up” effect from the lumpen into the central government.

I said:

Harris is obviously influenced by Marx, and from knowing Ray he is also influenced by those early anacharists. And yet he is integrally informed so he adds to those theories while not being strictly limited to them.

And yes, all of this revolution of the masses does presuppose a relatively ample economic surplus brought on by the industrial revolution. Yet this revolution is not communist but rather democratic. It’s a fight to introduce democracy not only into politics but into business. Capitalism is not a democratic economic system and is not by necessity wed to our democratic political system, although we can see how it is corrupting that political system by such as the recent Supreme Corp ruling. And capitalism is not by necessity wed to the industrial revolution but one could argue it’s a holdover of feudal aristocratic governance applied to the new forms of market economy that emerged with industrialization. As I said in the spiritual commodity thread, using Wilber using Marx, the economic base advanced much more quickly than the societal worldview, with the latter trying to impose its view on the new economic structure.

Perhaps it’s time for the view to catch up to the economic base? We know that democratic businesses, like credit unions for example, are a very competitive and viable alternative to for profit, capitalistic banks. Same with worker-owned businesses. And these alternatives also create surplus that does not have to go to rugged individualistic shareholders as profit but can be redistributed to members and communities for more beneficial social purposes. Harris ideas about distributing such surplus on each level under the prime directive seem integrally apropos here. All of which seems more suitable expressions of democracy wedded to markets than the aristocratic capitalism currently in power.

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• Evolution - P2P Foundation

There is a phase of consciousness that is called Flow and every real mystic probably knows it well. It is the basis for my own idiosyncratic sense of mysticism, the sense of wholeness and integral and a corresponding sense of liberty. The last two paragraphs of the previous post are significant in the matter. Circumstances today reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an Integral related forum four years ago that needed a little update and a slightly different application. So I am posting it to Integral Liberties sort of as a node of awareness from which I can circle around. The following is the essentials of that essay.

I first encountered the Flow when I was 15 or 16 in a non-sexual spontaneous coming of age situation. I believe it was Loren Eiseley who once wrote that in a rite of passage, whether ritualized or not, “the boy becomes a man and the man sees god,” which would have been true if I had been habituated to myth. I was not, but nonetheless, the world changed in every way that could be perceived, and it has continued to do so with every subsequent experience. The texture of the air changes, as does the color of it all as well as the weight and dimensions of my body, the nature of sound and the velocity of time. And everything moves together with such precision that if I could distinguish any seams in the environment they were totally without significance. Those are just a fraction of the effects. Energy rises from just below the hips, firing up through the guts in surprisingly cool but dense flames that stretch the body, explode in the chest and free the lungs of all constriction so the next breath has infinite capacity. And those are just a fraction…

This is the place from where a shaman finds the shaman’s song. All of the current writers observing the shaman like to quote Knud Rasmussens interviews with Aua, the Eskimo Shaman. All of these shamanic overview authors pay Aua homage and weigh in with his story of how he learned his song. He seemed to have been in some sort of extremis one day when he saw a little shore bird called an aua, whereupon the man fell into an ecstatic rapture and spontaneously composed his power song. I could, as they say, relate to that.

Years ago as a teenage hobo I was hitchhiking west after visiting a friend on the Rosebud Rez in South Dakota. The scene was a backwater crossroads in the middle of northern Nebraska, in the middle of October, in the middle of the afternoon when the heat was unseasonable but had no sharp summer edges and it eased the time by as if it were wide and deep. It was a recently harvested landscape with stubbled ocher horizon hills and yellow cottonwoods mid-distance. There I pulled myself up into the cab of an 18–wheeler and settled in. I had just scored a ride almost all the way home. The driver waited for some traffic to pass, dropped in both boxes and bore down on the fuel. The trailer was overloaded so the tractor fell back hard on the rear axles, roared and quaked, hammered against inertia and surged out onto the blacktop. All that power trying to propel all that steel vibrated up from the ground through me and out into the entropic universe and I went into an ecstatic trance. It was not the first time, mystic that I was even then. But it had one memorable feature, for rising with that power came a song that was being composed down around my root chakra. It had no coherent words, but it was full of words that I had never heard before. They sounded through my heart and I let them go just short of my tongue. I had just enough presence of mind to keep them to myself lest I raise some alarm in the driver. That song rolled along with me for 30 or 40 miles and then faded late into the afternoon.

I am a sensualist and I relish living deep in the world because to it I trust my life. When a nondual experience of this kind arises out of an intense earthly situation I trust it is giving me the consciousness of the most profound truth of my body and capacity and the ability to translate it simultaneously into the harmonization of time, place, action and identity. I know I have forgotten any number of these events but I can list a few: working 30 hours straight on a sculpture, losing myself in composing poetry, walking into a badly storm torn sunset, stalking elk, running D.C. streets at dawn, realizing a guiding life-long truth—age 17–-hitchhiking east out of Flagstaff, realizing the liberating value of my total insignificance while driving down a highway in southeast Wyoming, waiting for a gunfight, doing shamanic style energy healing that worked, racing horses, racing cars, driving a much too tiny boat in profoundly bad water when one second finds me in abject terror of a standing wave I can’t see around, I can’t see over because I can see nothing but all that thick brown water and dirty white foam curling back down upon me. But the next second I am assured that I am immortal, that mistakes are impossible. I can read every molecule of water in that wave, time stands still and allows me to do everything I need to do with no effort at all…the world changes and all that happened three paragraphs above happens again.

The other things I trust explicitly are dreams. I have awakened with dream images perfect before my eyes and in full, ecstatic, non-dual awareness. In fact two such dreams and the awareness that arose from them prompted me to spend about five years (part time) trying to create a universal unified field theory not unlike Ken Wilber’s attempts to do so with AQAL. I quit that fool’s errand when I realized with almost absolute certainty that the image I thought I was drawing of the universe was actually the image of my psyche. I suspect the same of Wilber’s work.

I am a sensualist and not a thinker, nor a spiritualistic thinker. I do not hold with anything that has to do with any aspect of what could be called Spirit or The Divine or any of the other 10,000 names. I have no superstitions about these nondual suppositions. But I do have a theory. I am sure it is not unique and doubt if any of these conclusions are new and original and I have no authority on which to base them. But they have everything to do with integral, not the academic philosophical wannabe Integral®, but that which is material.

Until my participation on that particular internet forum compelled me to research Wilberismo and correlated tangents I had not read much except poetry for years. When I first heard there was a need for an integral philosophy and Mr. Wilber was slaving away, multi-media, to prove there was such a thing, I had to wonder why. Why develop a theory as to everything being integrated when anyone with half a set of senses and a shred of instinct left on how to use them could know for certain that integral reality is plainly, manifestly, there to be known and navigated? It exists on the leading edge of now when all that is within one’s sphere manifests into perception; when everything including the perceiver cascades into a spherical, dimensionless veil of the senses as a perfectly integrated pattern; an instantaneous, seamless legacy of 13.7 billion years (give or take) of uninterrupted cause/effect-cause. That this pattern is tumultuously dynamic does not change the fact that it has total formational integrity. I will call it manifest non-duality in the sense that the non-dual is not a static state but an emergent event. Like Whitehead said, everything is an event. And even though all the events are seamlessly bound and at once both cause and effect, this does not mean there is anything predetermined or intelligently designed in what I have perceived. (Both of those superstitions, I believe, are artifacts from dualistic thought and the desperate safety seeking of anthropomorphic projection.) There is an accidental and random quality to the patterns like the accidental and random quality of colored shards of glass tumbling past the mirrors and prisms of a kaleidoscope.

When an event cuts one loose from habituated conditioning that leads into a disorienting state, if the instincts for life outweigh the fear of living, the senses and instincts haul the consciousness into a much more complete alignment along the dimensionless front edge of now, manifestation and life. This is the only place I have found that is actual and whole, where integration is so complete that it is no longer of conscious consideration. Then the universe changes because one is no longer drawing back to observe it, but is pegged balanced and upright in one’s tiny, and totally insignificant vessel. Integral.

Edward Berge

There’s an interesting discussion on the above topic in a thread by that name at Gaia’s Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality pod. Craig Hamilton’s conferences came up in this regard. Someone mentioned that while they didn’t approve of his marketing methodology they nonetheless would participate because of some of the presenters. I replied:

This goes to my point above, that sometimes we have to give up some valuable stuff to effect change. Yes, Hamilton brings together some key voices that might make a difference. But those voices, by participating in his conference, offer tacit approval to his commodified method. And many folks then also assume this is the proper way to proceed in the spiritual marketplace. I’m even wondering if those valuable presenters like Swimm, by participating, aren’t subconsciously influenced by such participation and such methods come to be seen as a necessary evil within a commodified culture, that we have to use such measures to reach people in the first place but once we do then we’ll change methodology. Unfortunately in the process we get corrupted and the methodology doesn’t change.

That’s why I boycott I-I and things like the Integral Conference. Yes, there are many people that go to these that challenge Wilber, even on issues such as this commodification. But the conference itself is promoted with such methods and financially supports I-I, which supports such methods. And by attending and participating we tacitly support such measures, measures that will continue because they are receiving support, even if one talks opposition.

What’s the alternative? Those that oppose such methods might form their own integral organization and conference and market themselves in a different way. But I-I has done all the work, it’s just easier to go to theirs, we don’t have the resources, maybe we can change it from within etc etc. To walk our talk is the hardest challenge imaginable. And we all know this has to be done because I-I is not going to change in this way, ever, even after Wilber is gone.