KJS DC 3.26

Even if I didn’t have a daughter, I’d still want more women in power. Given the way the world is going, it’s the most obvious thing – I believe.

I don’t care how manly you think you are. The path we’re on is not sustainable and it is blowing up in our faces while we ignore the one variable we haven’t tried – which the research is clear on.

Before we go on, Swords Down: we’re not saying female biology produces better leaders. That’s not the argument. The argument is that cultures that empower women make better collective decisions.

Electing more women isn’t just about the women. It’s a signal of a society’s values and its capacity to govern for the common good. You can’t separate those things.

Look at where we actually are. We have polarization with no movement toward a middle that produces results for everyone. We have class warfare dressed as capitalism. We have a government run by hedge fund men doing insider trading in plain sight.

We spend $20 trillion a year on the cost of violence globally — and it is a hundred times more expensive to react to conflict than to prevent it. Yet we keep playing whack-a-mole, building giant armies that protect power, not people. We bomb without talking. We send people to die for governments that don’t care for their own citizens. Massive civilian casualties. Crimes against the future.

Basic needs unmet for most of humanity while a handful of men with archaic power playbooks still rule the direction of the entire planet.

From the top to the bottom, we are vertically subject to whatever gets pushed down harder.

That’s the system. They say war is right. We strap up. They say less taxes for the rich. We comply. They say history should read like this. We go along because our basic needs are just barely being met and that feels like governance. It is not governance. It is management of a population by domination.

I don’t want that anymore.

And I’ve always wondered: what if it wasn’t.

So what am I waiting for….

This is for everyone who thinks women don’t deserve more leadership, more power, more say across the board. You are wrong. You may believe that because of your upbringing, your culture, your own unresolved issues with the opposite sex. I’m not trying to change what you believe. Believe what you want. I’m just telling you — you are flat out wrong. And the cost of being wrong is being paid by everyone.

What history of human civilization clearly shows is that our dominator culture wasn’t always the case – and doesn’t work well for mostly everyone. With this shift in human history came warfare and environmental destruction!

Anyway…

I was at a Vote for Your Daughters event last night. I’ve been showing up around this existential campaign in part because it stops me from thinking about any of this as political argument. It takes me right out of the game. Aims me forward.

Even if it an obvious thing, you don’t have to believe it. But, to never try something that you know might work, when you need it: what is that – self sabotage?

I worked for Ted Turner. He had a standing policy — at least half his senior leadership had to be women. I never forgot that.

During the pandemic, peer-reviewed research from Liverpool and Reading universities found women-led countries locked down earlier and had significantly fewer deaths.

Later analysis found the deeper variable was egalitarian societies — countries that elect women also build more trustworthy institutions, invest more in collective wellbeing, and govern for the long term. Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, Finland, Iceland, Norway. They moved faster, communicated more clearly, and kept more people alive.

*Egalitarian societies — decades of research suggest countries that elect women also have more equitable institutions, more trust in government, more collective behavior.

Rianne Eisler’s classic archaeological work Chalice and the Blade offers us hoards of archaeological evidence from Çatalhöyük and Minoan Crete showing partnership-oriented societies — not matriarchies, but genuinely egalitarian ones — showed no signs of warfare for over a thousand years and no evidence of extreme wealth hierarchy. The shift toward hierarchy, toward ranking by sex and race and power, is what gave us war as a norm and extraction as an economy.

The book is 35 years old and reads like it was written last Tuesday. If you read that in college it would have opened your mind to this idea that we don’t have to live like this and it’s not effective. Dianne should make a kid’s book: it helped shape the man I am today.

I don’t know about you, but what I want from my leaders is just that: ‘no signs of warfare’, ‘no evidence of extreme wealth gaps’. That’s not radical. That’s what governance looks like.

As a parent. I want to preserve for all children at least the inheritance I’ve enjoyed. That means, the water, the air, the democracy. Not my 401K. I want my kids to grow with people who see inheritance that way. Not as wealth. As world.

The shift away from partnership — toward domination, toward ranking by sex, race, and hierarchy — is what gave us war as a norm and extraction as an economy. That shift correlates, archaeologically, with the emergence of both organized violence and environmental destruction. These are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different clothes.

Look at this Cabal that has formed around this administration. Almost entirely male. Almost entirely white. Governing not for communities but for control. This isn’t a coincidence. Dominator societies share a core configuration: authoritarian rule, ranking of male over female, institutionalized violence, and stories that present hierarchies of domination as natural or divinely ordained. That’s not a political description. It’s archaeological. We’ve seen it throughout history and it ends the same way.

The argument for more women in office isn’t about gender essential-ism. It’s about what kinds of people get selected, elevated, and trusted when a society is healthy versus when it’s captured.

Right now we have a government that looks like it was assembled from the dominator template — it is governing that way – for extraction, for consolidation of power at the cost of reduced rights for all.

This system isn’t broke; it’s fixed. It’s hard to believe and impossible to unsee.

The counter to domination is not just better men leading.  It’s a different model of power entirely. The chalice, not the blade. Partnership, not domination. Long-term, not transactional. Community first, not me first.

This dominator culture for 5,000 years has given us war as default, an extraction economy and a planet in crisis.

Vote for daughters. Your Daughter. Run for office. Fund a woman’s campaign. Show up for a new model of governance that produces better outcomes, and deeper roots.