Our Story

Abstract

Abstract This stage-setting chapter introduces a way to address more effectively our mounting social, economic, and environmental challenges: the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens. Transcending conventional analyses of human societies, as well as familiar categories such as right versus left, religious versus secular, or Eastern versus Western, it proposes that how our brains develop—and hence how people think, feel, and act—largely hinges on where a time and place fall on the domination-partnership social scale. Drawing from a rich variety of disciplines—from biology, psychology, and anthropology to chaos theory, gender studies, and neuroscience—it shows connections that are still largely ignored, including the interaction between biology and culture and the relationship between the social status of the majority of humanity—women and children—and the expression of our human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. The authors also share their backgrounds and what led them to question popular assumptions and explore alternatives in light of the urgent need to exchange a domination-oriented narrative for a different story based on life-enhancing partnership principles such as equality, care, compassion, and sustainability.