The Opposite of a Patriarchal Dominance Hierarchy

What would an egalitarian partnership-oriented society look like?

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

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…