Initially, I will be describing the macro-level shift toward partnership. Later in this essay I'll try to boil this idea down to basics by examining the texture and flavor of a two-person partnership in more detail.
The reality is that for Millenia our societies have been based on obedience and a power-over dynamic. We have been conditioned from early childhood, through schooling that has reinforced compliance and acquiescence - often punishing students for questioning procedures or authority.
We also need to realize that, after five thousand years of the dominator model, creating a partnership-based society will be like learning to walk again after a debilitating illness. In this sense it is not an exaggeration to consider that we need "rehabilitation," or that as a species we will be a bit like a child taking its first steps.
So, I see this exploration as "starting from scratch," assuming nothing, and slowly penetrating into the possibility of building back better.
Where We Came From: We are a "Partnership Species"
As a species, according to anthropological and archeological evidence, 99% of our time on earth - literally millions of years - was spent in small hunter-gatherer bands. We moved with the seasons, living with one another very close to nature. We gathered the food that grew wild, hunted in packs as wolves do, and fished. And in this tribal existence our survival depended more than anything else on cooperation - on our social intelligence.
The Abrahamic religions may be speaking of these times when referring to the days of Eden.
Our cultural evolution continued as we discovered that we could use tools.
Although estimates differ, there is a general consensus that our departure from Eden gradually took place between approximately 10,000 B.C.E. and 3500 B.C.E., as people in Europe and the Middle East began to plant crops and nurture flocks. We settled into agricultural communities and began to develop the material and social technologies distinctive to our species. We learned to domesticate plants and animals, store food for lean times, design and construct buildings, weave clothing and baskets, make pots, design and construct buildings, and organize under institutions of law, government, and religion.
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