omniharmonicDominator Culture
Dominator culture, a term drawn from Riane Eisler’s work on partnership versus domination models of civilization, describes cultural systems organized around hierarchical control, extraction, and the systematic subordination of people and nature. It encompasses patriarchy, white supremacy, class exploitation, and ecological destruction not as separate oppressions but as expressions of a single underlying logic: the belief that some beings exist to serve the purposes of others.
The concept is useful because it names the pattern beneath the symptoms. Why do economic systems extract from ecosystems and communities? Why do governance systems concentrate power in elites? Why do cultural systems devalue care work, indigenous knowledge, and ecological relationship? Dominator culture identifies a common root: a civilizational orientation in which power means power-over rather than power-with, and in which the purpose of social organization is to funnel resources upward rather than to nurture the well-being of the whole.
Dominator culture connects to the story-of-separation as its ontological foundation — the belief in fundamental separateness makes domination seem natural. It relates to wetiko as the psychological pattern that drives domination, and to collective-trauma as both the cause and consequence of living within domination systems. Decolonization involves dismantling dominator culture in its colonial expressions. The entire project of regenerative civic innovation — participatory-democracy, economic-democracy, commons-governance, bioregionalism — can be understood as the construction of partnership-culture alternatives to dominator-culture institutions.