Creating Foresight Fueled Action: Riane Eisler
Reclaiming Our Cooperative Potential
We can talk about trends, emerging issues, change, and future visions as much as we want – and generate excitement about the positive potential of futures thinking for our businesses and governments – and still never escape the gravity of our guiding narratives fashioned around domination and competition. Constructing these futures are very different on the surface but fundamentally driving the same destructive nature at their core.
In this formative interview, TFSX co-founder Frank Spencer speaks with world-renowned social systems scientist, futurist, cultural historian, attorney, consultant, speaker, and author Riane Eisler, diving deep into the (re)framing of a society built upon cooperation, partnership, and deep care. As she states during the conversation, the belief that humans are inherently competitive, egocentric, and violent is utterly false, drawing upon decades of research around the past, present, and future of human equity, empathy, peace, transformation, and models of economic and social partnership. As Riane notes in her book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, “…humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage.”
We’ve waited a long time to interview Riane, as her ground-breaking work is foundational to our passion to democratize the cooperative evolutionary trait of perceiving the emerging “whole” that fosters imaginal anticipation and the co-creation of transformational realities, This is a MUST WATCH for anyone who cares about the future of humanity, planet, and our cosmic journey, and knows in their heart that there has to be a better way.
