TL;DR
Riane Eisler told The Good Men Project that forgiveness can be important, but forgetting historical violence can leave people less alert to how domination takes hold. In an interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, she connected her memories of childhood and Nazi persecution to a lifelong question: whether domination is inevitable or can be changed.
Riane Eisler said people should try to forgive but not forget, arguing in a Good Men Project interview that remembering historical violence matters to recognizing how domination can recur. The Austrian-born American systems scientist and human rights advocate told interviewer Scott Douglas Jacobsen that her memories of Nazi persecution and childhood helped shape research challenging the idea that violence and domination are inevitable.
Asked how forgetfulness relates to partnership ethics, Eisler said she believes people should seek forgiveness without erasing what happened. She said she has not been very successful in forgiving the Nazis because of her background, while also expressing a desire to forgive. She described perpetrators as people conditioned to hate and follow orders within a hierarchy of domination. Her point, she said, is that forgetting such events can obscure both the danger of domination and the possibility of a partnership alternative.
Eisler also discussed how memory changes and remains incomplete. She said aging can bring forgetfulness and that trauma can affect memory, while cautioning that she did not know enough about childhood memory development to explain it. Her own recollections are “spotty,” she said, naming sensory memories of blue velvet curtains and her mother’s arm, alongside the heartbreak she remembers when Mitzi could no longer work for a Jewish household.
Asked what memories are essential at age 95, Eisler said she was unsure that people retain only what matters. For her work, she said, the lasting question is how human beings can show care and sensitivity while also producing violence and indifference. Her research, she told Jacobsen, has sought to connect evidence across human history and daily life to examine whether domination is inevitable.
Memory as a Guard Against Domination
Eisler’s comments frame forgiveness not as erasing wrongdoing but as something that can coexist with remembering it. That distinction matters in personal relationships and in public accounts of persecution: remembering can help people identify the conditions and hierarchies that enable harm, while forgiveness does not require declaring that harm insignificant.
The interview also links an individual’s recollections to Eisler’s broader argument about social organization. Her work contrasts partnership systems with dominator systems and asks whether care and equality can shape institutions and relationships. The interview presents this as Eisler’s perspective, not as a new research finding or a policy proposal. It offers readers a concise account of how she connects personal history to an intellectual project about changing social norms.
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Eisler’s Partnership Framework
Eisler is best known for The Chalice and the Blade, which the source says has reached its 57th U.S. printing and has 30 foreign editions. Other books identified in the report include The Real Wealth of Nations and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
The report describes Eisler as president of the Center for Partnership Systems and editor-in-chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. Jacobsen’s questions range from artificial intelligence and memory to childhood recollections, but the discussion returns to the central question in Eisler’s work: how to understand the coexistence of human capacities for care and cruelty.
““In principle, you forgive, but you don’t forget.””
— Riane Eisler
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Limits of Memory and Evidence
The interview is a reflection on Eisler’s experiences and ideas, not a study testing how memory, forgiveness or partnership ethics operate across populations. The source does not provide a publication date, and it does not report new findings, institutional decisions or changes to Eisler’s work. Eisler herself said she could not explain how childhood memory develops and described her recollections as incomplete.
The conversation also does not establish a single definition or practical test for forgiveness, nor does it examine how individuals should respond to particular cases of harm. Its claims about domination and partnership are presented through Eisler’s framework and personal account. Readers should distinguish those reflections from independently demonstrated conclusions about memory or trauma.
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Further Discussion of Partnership Ethics
The source gives no scheduled follow-up, policy action or research milestone. Jacobsen closes by saying he expects to see Eisler the following week, but the interview does not specify what they would discuss. For now, the development is the publication of her reflections, which leave the central question open for further inquiry: how societies can remember violence while building relationships and institutions organized around care rather than domination.
social justice and partnership ethics
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Key Questions
What did Riane Eisler say about forgiveness and forgetting?
She said people should try to forgive but not forget, because forgetting can make it harder to recognize how domination and violence happen.
Why did Eisler discuss the Nazis?
Eisler connected her background and memories of Nazi persecution to her difficulty forgiving and to her interest in how people become conditioned to hate and follow orders.
What is Eisler’s partnership framework?
Her work contrasts partnership forms of social organization with dominator systems. In the interview, she said her research examines whether domination is inevitable and argues that social arrangements can change.
Did the interview report new scientific findings?
No. The source presents an interview about Eisler’s memories and ideas; it does not report a new study or scientific result.
Source: rss
