The work of Maria Gimbutas, for example, has strongly indicated that southeastern Europe held a flourishing partnership civilization from 6500 to 3500 BC. Similar to the form of Neolithic groups found in Crete, it would seem that the people of Old Europe developed complex religious, governmental, and economic systems without rigid sexual or class hierarchies. Women held high positions in the social order; a basically egalitarian relationship prevailed between the sexes -- one that indicated a division of labor, but not the superiority of either sex. Parallel to evidence of such egalitarian cultures in Crete and Catal Huyuk (in what is now Turkey), there is much to suggest active trading, but little to be found that suggests military weaponry or fortifications.
In a sweeping turn of events (over several millennia), early partnership societies may have been overrun and conquered by nomadic bands, whose own mode of social organization was based on the dominator model. Raids grew into full-scale invasions... until, some four thousand years ago, the world historic defeat of partnership culture was complete.
Eisler stresses that a fundamental characteristic of the conquering civilization was that it valued the destructive power of the blade: "[The invaders] characteristically acquired wealth, not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction."
Robert Bly and Philip Slater have proposed a contrasting hypothesis for the origins of the authoritarian form of social organization, which emerged at this time. Both have looked to the transitional period some 5-6 thousand years ago when gathering and hunting gave way to agriculture and the domestication of animals -- a time when humanity, in a wide variety of locations across the globe, glimpsed the possibility of controlling and manipulating nature. Bly provides this image: we began to realize that nature could be tamed and soon, "the health of cities depended on training wheat or barley to grow in huge fields alone whether it wanted to or not". As the centuries progressed humanity witnessed the emergence of kings, nation-states, social classes, standing armies, and slavery. One can imagine the grand evolution of this form of "civilization"; a decisive historic leap from the Neolithic tribal community to a centralized state organization, which manifested in the birth of "cities" capable of dominating and ordering a whole river valley.
What was the purpose of these new forms of organization: fixed vertical hierarchies of status, and rigid systems of control, backed by coercive power? According to Slater, nothing less than the management of enslaved tribes who would not voluntarily participate in the society of their conquerors.
Slater argues that the past 5,000 years of authoritarianism are a male creation, founded in war. Since women play such a small part in war, their position underwent a sharp decline. Soon they were at the "bottom" of society; as Slater notes, even the "lowest" male could be a dictator in his own home.
"Perhaps the males in some communities became intoxicated with the power potential of animal breeding" and took to a more bellicose life. Whatever the causes, authoritarianism began to appear as a dominant social form in many parts of the world 5 or 6,000 years ago - in the Far East, North Africa, India, and the Middle East -- and has continued to be the prevailing mega-culture ever since, spreading to Europe, Africa, Meso-America and most of Asia. We begin to find kings, social classes, slaves, standing armies, weaponry, torture, and human sacrifice. Gods are put over goddesses, wives begin to pay deference to husbands and sons to their fathers.
This change introduced nothing other than the Nietzschean Will to Power with its metaphors of struggle, conquest, and victory.
In a chapter entitled "The Breakdown in Evolution - A Dominator Future ", Eisler makes this extraordinarily important point:
"When the elected leaders fail to solve economic, social, and political problems, people look to others for answers. The androcratic mind, valuing above all rank-orderings [and conditioned to equate right with might] tends to answer such questions with violence and strong man rule."
Like the "strong father" of childhood who will "take care of things", it has often been suggested that the great psychic appeal of a totalitarian future is its promise of a strong leader. Certainly, a mind socialized to submit to male authority will tend to turn to this "protection" in times of crisis. But there is another reason for the strong appeal and great danger of modern totalitarianism.
"What we may now see, through our repossession of our lost past is that, in its methods of control and basic structure, modern totalitarianism is the logical culmination of a cultural evolution based on the dominator model of social organization. Be it rightist or leftist, Christian or Muslim, the totalitarian solution is nothing more or less than an updating of the androcratic solution."
Eisler believes that the stark reality is this: androcacy, which she proposes as an alternative to the more dated term "patriarchy" (and defined as a social system ruled through force or threat of force by men) cannot meet today's central human tasks - the survival of our species and the development of our unique potentials. She argues that it cannot meet this requirement precisely because of its "inbuilt emphasis on the technologies of destruction [and] its dependence on violence for social control".
Eisler reminds the reader of the fact that -- in all their various guises -- totalitarian solutions continue to "make sense" to many people in our world. This is not, she argues, because such solutions offer any viable or realistic answers to the mounting problems of our times. The attraction, she maintains, lies in the entrenched power of androcratic and neo-androcratic symbols and myth.
Eisler makes another very significant point -- one that has far-reaching implications:
"One of the most important lessons to be learned from the rise of modern totalitarianism is that it can be a fatal error to underestimate the power of myth."
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