The Opposite of a Patriarchal Dominance Hierarchy
What would an egalitarian partnership-oriented society look like?
It’s hard to imagine something different than the type of brutally competitive society that we’ve always known, particularly here in the US where a highly predatory form of capitalism is also the norm. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, so you’d better always be on the lookout for who has more power than you, more prestige, who is prettier, richer, smarter, better connected, who has a nicer house and a better car, etc., etc.
But what if we didn’t have a society based in a dominance hierarchy? What would that even look like? And is such a thing even remotely possible?
For the purposes of being able to compare, let’s look at what the components of a patriarchal dominance hierarchy are:
- In a pyramid-shaped hierarchy with only a few elites at the apex, you must constantly dominate or risk being dominated. If you don’t win, you lose.
- When patriarchy began about 6–9 K years ago, it brought not only stratification between men and women but in the larger society as well. For the first time, we had social castes and elites. People must know and conform to their place in the social stratification.
- The rules of that stratification are enforced through creating fear, the threat of pain, coercion, bullying and the ostracization of those who will not comply. Men who are not at the apex of the pyramid are also subject to this abusive behavior and are expected to accept it, although they are allowed to abuse those below them in the hierarchy.
- Boys and men must never embody anything remotely feminine because anything female is lower down the dominance hierarchy and is therefore less than. For example, men who have sex with men are like women, so they deserve to be harassed and punished for not conforming to established gender norms.
- Traits that are considered masculine like control, competitiveness, and stoicism are more desirable for everyone than traits that are considered feminine like empathy, nurturance, and cooperation.
- Those who have historically held power maintain it through overt as well as more subtle means. For example, racial segregation laws were overt, but after their repeal, many of the same mechanisms for keeping black people in their place were still observed through custom rather than law.
In other words, the dominance hierarchy called patriarchy, the kind of social system that we have in the US, is very oriented towards control and towards the binary. You are either a man or a woman, a winner or a loser, a leader or a follower, a badass or a wimp. There is not much room for nuance or for constructs that aren’t zero-sum, although this is beginning to change a little bit.
I’ve written quite a bit already about the egalitarian societies of our ancient ancestors, but we are unlikely to be able to recreate the kinds of conditions that small hunter-gatherer tribes or highly homogeneous and tightly controlled societies like Çatalhöyük had, where enforced egalitarianism, including caps on the accumulation of wealth, kept the society intact and functioning well.
So, what does a contemporary partnership-oriented society even look like? Nordic countries such as Denmark have the closest approximation in modern times. Denmark is considered one of the happiest countries in the world by the UN World Happiness Report. One of the reasons may be that Danish schools teach empathy as a part of the regular curriculum, and provide weekly opportunities for students to help each other work through problems with the assistance of the teacher, based on listening to and understanding each other.
A key element of Danish culture is hygge, which could be defined as “intentionally created intimacy”. “In a country where it gets dark very early in the year, it rains, it’s gray, hygge means bringing light, warmth and friendship, creating a shared, welcoming and intimate atmosphere.” One of the elements of this is discouraging competition between individuals. Instead, students are asked to strive to do their best, using only themselves as a metric for improvement.
Cooperative learning amongst people of different skill levels fosters a sense of support and caring. For example, students who are better at one subject help teach those who are less proficient, and they may, in turn, be on the receiving end of that kind of tutoring in another subject. This approach reduces bullying and helps to build a stronger sense of community, but it also teaches the relational skills necessary for successful management and entrepreneurship.
Denmark is considered to be one of the most economically and socially developed countries in the world. Danes enjoy a high standard of living and the country ranks highly in some metrics of national performance, including education, health care, protection of civil liberties, democratic governance, LGBT equality, prosperity, and human development. The country ranks as having the world’s highest social mobility, a high level of income equality, has the lowest perceived level of corruption in the world, is the eleventh-most developed in the world, has one of the world’s highest per capita incomes, and one of the world’s highest personal income tax rates.
Rather than looking at everyone around you as competition, the focus in Denmark seems to be more on how doing and being your best not only helps you the individual but also contributes to the greater good, whether that is on your sports team, at your school, or in your place of work. But Denmark is a small country, with until fairly recently, a homogeneous population. Could we make that same kind of a society work in a much larger and more diverse country such as the US?
Of course, it’s hard to really say for sure, but many businesses are moving away from traditional “I’m the dictatorial boss, and you will do what I say” models of management to ones that are much more partnership-oriented because those are more agile and responsive to changes needed to be effective in a competitive market, and that’s a good sign. A leader in this type of hierarchy is someone who recognizes people’s potential and develops it in alignment with the greater goals of the organization rather than someone who manages from on high.
Letting the people closest to the work product make most of the day to day decisions means that the people making those decisions have a good grasp on what is needed and at stake. They are also a lot more invested in the outcomes, rather than being a kind of cog in a wheel. Organizational goals get achieved through collaboration and relatedness, rather than paternalism or threats.
Partnership-oriented work systems don’t necessarily mean that everyone gets the same amount of say, or that there is no hierarchy at all. It simply means that power is not so much focused downward (power over) but is more likely to have some reciprocity (power to and power with). It means that the main job of any leader is to empower those they lead to do their best work, to offer oversight of the big picture, and to help develop new areas to grow into.
Hierarchies of actualization are employed in partnership-oriented structures to create cohesion and order in a way that is not based in intimidation or for the purposes of maintaining top-down rankings. “Egalitarian and equitable adult relations are the norm. Parenting is not authoritarian but authoritative. Beliefs and stories present empathic, mutually beneficial, nonviolent relations as normal, moral, and desirable.” This is in contrast to the domination stories that “justify and idealize domination and violence, which are deemed inevitable, moral, and desirable.” Such is the case in the state, the family and the workplace, as well as all other aspects of society. The Center for Partnership Studies
Patriarchy presents the father as the leader of the family and the wife and children as followers who must obey him and recognize his authority over them. As of right now more than 50% of Americans still subscribe to the idea that the man is the head of the family. Conversely, partnership-oriented families share power between the adults and may not even be comprised of a mother and a father but some other type of family configuration. Children are encouraged to behave in desirable ways, not through intimidation, but through being brought into the fold, so to speak.
There is certainly ample evidence that people who grow up in families where rigid hierarchies and painful punishments are the norm learn to suppress anger toward their parents. There is also ample evidence that this anger is then often deflected against traditionally disempowered groups (such as minorities, children, and women). Moreover, as the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick documents in the classic work on this subject, The Authoritarian Personality, having been conditioned through childhood abuse to surrender their will to the requirements of feared authoritarian parents, such people also tend to be extremely susceptible as adults to surrender their will and minds to authoritarian leaders.
In other words, at the same time that they learn to deflect their repressed rage against those they perceive as weak, they also learn to submit to autocratic or “strong-man” rule. Moreover, having been severely punished for any hint of rebellion (even “talking back” about being treated unfairly), they gradually also learn to deny to themselves that there was anything wrong with what was done to them as children — and to in turn do it to their own children.
Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
A contemporary egalitarian society would not be a Utopia. Although things like bullying, greed, and prejudice would not disappear entirely, they would no longer be a part of the accepted social fabric as they are in a dominance-hierarchy. This would not only make for a kinder society but also a more productive one, where more workers would feel engaged with the work that they do, and morale would not be damaged by authoritarian workplace bullies.
Rather than teaching children to obey adults because they are bigger, stronger, and capable of coercive punishments, children would be empowered to respect themselves and others. They would be taught to value differences and would learn how to cooperate rather than to reflexively compete and compare themselves to everyone around them. Empathy and non-violence would be valued and taught, rather than might makes right and that whoever is the most ruthless wins. We give some lip service to this, but everything from action movies to the fact that many schools do little to curb bullying speaks to this “survival of the fittest” mentality.
Teaching and other care-oriented work would be economically valued as well as other types of work that contributes to society rather than whatever makes the most money for stockholders and the elites. There would still be some economic disparity but it would not have the huge extremes that we currently have in many places in the US.
Some companies like Costco have found ways to balance profitability with treating their employees like an important resource. Good wages, well above the minimum, substantial benefits, and reasonable working hours are why Costco has such extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees. Company founder James Sinegal says that Costco’s customers stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.” Costco ranks 29th in revenue of all American companies.
In a more egalitarian and partnership-oriented society, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other types of ranking by traditional metrics of social stratification would be greatly decreased. People would be more likely to be evaluated on their actual performance and demonstrated qualities than what is believed to be likely from “someone like them.” Jobs and other opportunities would go to those who show aptitude and interest, rather than preconceived notions about who is best that are buttressed by artificial barriers to others even being given a chance.
Masculinity would be unlinked from domination and violence, and femininity from subordination and obedience. Gender would not disappear, but it would no longer have such restrictive rules about what is acceptable and people would be able to find the expressions of their gender that works for them. This could include traditional expressions of gender that are freely chosen and do not come out of the threat of punishment for anyone who strays from the expectations.
In other words, a man could be very taciturn and love to watch sports and work on cars, but he wouldn’t feel the need to shame another man who was more emotive and liked different things. A woman could be an engineer or a stay at home parent and no-one would think one way or the other about her choice or her ability to do that well based on her gender. She would be treated as an individual.
People would have sex with or form relationships with the people they felt attracted to without regard to gender because there would be no deeper meaning assigned to a man being attracted to a man or a woman who falls for another woman. People could explore who they actually are and what is meaningful and important to them without having to conform to societal expectations about what is acceptable for them.
The cultural narrative would be that self-interest and concern for others are not opposites but mutually supporting. Businesses would thrive, not because they gave workers as little as possible and gave CEOs exorbitant salaries and stockholders the maximum benefit, but because they invested in the human potential of the people who are the backbone of the organization so that everyone could win on some level.
This may sound pretty pie-in-the-sky, particularly in the face of the way that our society currently runs, but movements in this direction are already afoot, and not just in Denmark. The fact that movements toward more partnership-oriented organizations are being spearheaded in business rather than from social organizations speaks to a real chance for this type of outlook to take hold.
Organizational structure can be one of the biggest deterrents to an agile culture. If decision-making is too slow in an overly hierarchical environment, a company’s ability to quickly take advantage of market changes suffers.
Shayne Elliott, CEO of Melbourne, Australia-based ANZ Bank, is keenly aware of this issue. To combat this, Elliott created a new “tribe structure,” which consists of numerous teams of roughly 10 employees focused on launching new products faster and gaining a competitive advantage in its payments, mortgage and business banking units.
These new teams of 10 will replace managers with coaches and product owners picked to round out teams based partly on their ability and willingness to adapt rather than just on their technical proficiency and experience.
Another new business focus is on the importance of EQ (emotional intelligence). When we begin to value how to better understand and work together and prioritize that as a way to positively affect the bottom line, there is a greater incentive in the society to move away from intellect only based metrics.
Maya Angelou once remarked, that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
This certainly holds true in the realm of business. People buy emotions, not products. Teams rally around missions, not directives. Entrepreneurs take on incredible challenges because of passion, not logic.
It won’t be easy or simple, but we do have plenty of possibilities for moving in more partnership-oriented and egalitarian directions. How much we embrace those is up to us, but dominance hierarchies are not inevitable. We can have a fairer, kinder, world if we keep supporting the ways that this type of social system is naturally arising not just because it’s nicer, but because it actually works better.
