Title: One Mandate, Two Worldviews, Seven Generations
Subtitle: The Kincentric Alternative to "The Conservative Promise"
Subject Classification:  Indigenous Studies, Society and Culture  
BIC Classification: JFSL9, JH, JF
BISAC Classification: POL042020, POL010000, POL030000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Publication date: 17 Aug 2026
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-988-2
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-989-9

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Description

One Mandate, Two Worldviews, Seven Generations offers both a diagnosis and a direction for healing. It exposes the worldview assumptions about power, humanity, truth, and our relationship to the natural world that Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise has put forth as the blueprint for Trump's administration and its goal to permanently reshape the United States government and, by extension, the wider world. With complementarity in mind, the author systematically identifies the worldview principles embedded throughout the Mandate, such as hierarchy over egalitarianism, an emphasis on rights over responsibility, and anthropocentrism over kincentrism, reflected in direct quotes from the document itself. The result is simultaneously a rigorous analysis of the ideological architecture behind Project 2025 and an invitation to imagine governance, education, law, and relationships through a fundamentally different lens at a moment when the dominant worldview is accelerating toward ecological and social collapse, and an alternative has never been more urgently needed.

Biography

Author(s):  Four Arrows is Professor Emeritus, Fielding Graduate University. An internationally recognized scholar on the kincentric worldview and decolonizing education, he has authored 27 books. Named an educational visionary by AERO, his book Teaching Truly was selected by the Chicago Wisdom Project as one of 20 essential books.

Reviews

"The times in which we live often fail assessment, and certainly so when considered with the techno-rationalism of what Four Arrows astutely identifies as the Dominant Worldview of our day and age. It fails because it has become unhinged from the pulse of life. The terms that best describe it include hyper-competition, hierarchy (and specifically patriarchy), man first (in both interpersonal relations and relations with nature), singularity (in both cultural norms and the drive toward techno-feudalism), and spirit as a matter of team attitude rather than of the sacredness in all things. In fact, Four Arrows describes no less than 51 fundamental relational arenas of this worldview and relates them to the Kinship Worldview — a kin-centric ontology that hinges on life, a sense of the sacred, and a way of interbeing with all things that he calls on us to remember. To re-member. To bring forward our membership in the Great Hoops of Life as our ancestors knew to do. To re-member our essential relatedness and our interwinglement with the pulse of life. What Four Arrows provides is perennial wisdom, brought into contemporary relation, and offered as sacred medicine for the healing of humanity with both the living world and the world of spirit from which we have lost our way. With it, there is hope that we may re-learn to human well, once again."
- Alexander Laszlo, Ph.D., the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research

"A stunning visionary for our times, Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) has spanned generations, cultures, and central ideas about being human in a dark and difficult age in this critically important book. A True Olympian... A Horse Whisperer, Shaman, and Critical Scholar, Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) and his work give us hope as we realize how our dominant perspectives have colonized a kinder, gentler world."
- David Willis, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology Emeritus, Soai University, author of Our Human-Centeredness Is Killing Us: A Case for Indigenizing Diversity Education

"Abuse of nature, including fellow humans, is how Western colonial perspectives (the dominant view) have come to power and threaten all life. Individual unhealthy competition in unsustainable, unjust economies, based on lies about our past, present, and future hopes, stains our legacy as a species. Four Arrows reveals deep truths to be rediscovered and recontextualized as we reindigenize ourselves."
- Peter Whitehouse, MD, PhD, Intergenerative Transdisciplinarian Professor, Case Western Reserve University, and Ambassador of Planetary Health, Johns Hopkins University

"In this time of crisis and transition, Four Arrows offers both moral clarity and practical response to the blueprint for Trump-era devastation of social and environmental protections. He reveals how colonial, extractive systems have deliberately obscured earth-centered wisdom to protect the status quo of the one percent. Beyond critique, this book returns us to a proven worldview for thriving in relationship with a living earth. It is deep medicine and dynamic kindling for critical consciousness. Read it, use it, and let it guide the work ahead."
- Core Founders (Sox, Ketu & Kelsey) of ProvenSustainable.org

"Our unfolding catastrophes seem enormously complex; and yet all of these complexities share a common root, which Four Arrows reveals for us in his always-empowering way."
- Peter Barus, author of Extinction at the Dawn of the Attention Age.

"I have followed Four Arrows’ scholarship for many years and have long admired his willingness to ask questions that most of us never think to ask. In this ambitious and deeply thought-provoking work, he invites readers to look beyond the headlines of contemporary politics and examine the worldviews that shape how we understand ourselves, one another, and our relationship with the living world. Drawing upon Indigenous wisdom, decades of scholarship, and a profound respect for our shared humanity, Four Arrows reminds us that there are older, more relational ways of living that challenge the fear, competition, and separation so prevalent in our time. His exploration of the Kincentric Worldview offers not simply a critique of the present, but a hopeful vision of what becomes possible when we rediscover values of reciprocity, community, compassion, and our responsibility to future generations. This book offers an important and timely invitation to think more deeply, live more consciously, and imagine a more humane future."
- J. Cynthia McDermott, Professor Emerita, University of Arizona, author of Beyond the Silence: Listening for Democracy

"Four Arrows had a Near-Death Experience on an uncharted river in Mexico that I dreamed of seven years before I met him. Coming out of this encounter left him with a different worldview which he now shares with others through his writing which pushes us forward to a different way of seeing the world that allows us to know it more truly while accepting its mysteries. I highly recommend this man’s writing to all who are open to an alternate reality."
- Tom McCallum (White Standing Buffalo), Cree Elder, Story-Teller, Poet, Sundance Chief

"One Mandate, Two Worldviews, Seven Generations is a powerful, innovative, and timely book. Four Arrows offers practical ways for empowering readers to respond, with informed agency, to a world facing catastrophic environmental and social collapse caused by living in ways that forget our intrinsic connection with Nature. This situation is exacerbated by the present US government’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ framework, which Four Arrows identifies as a blueprint for establishing ‘a corporate-backed dictatorship’ in America and globally. Using this clear-and-present danger as a focal point, he demonstrates how his life work on techniques of deep self-knowing can be activated by all readers to awaken and enact their agency to foster the wellbeing of all people, the living planet, and our non-human relatives."
- Brian Spittles, Ph.D., author of Psychosis, Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations

"Four Arrows expertly illuminates the methods and mechanisms of the Dominator Worldview that keeps most of us in a negatively reinforcing hypnotic trance. This worldview, as Four Arrows explicates, manifests in the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther and Project 2025. He goes on to fearlessly expose the problems with the Democratic Party's Project 2029 response, as it is also embedded in the Dominator Worldview. Neither can rise to correct the problems associated with the last 10,000 years of human history. This book is a must read for anyone seeking to understand our political climate, its harms, consequences, and the path to correction through engagement with the Dominator Worldview's alternative, the Kinship Worldview. As Four Arrows makes clear, worldview drives everything."
- Susan L Herrmann, PhD, Author of Breaking Up with the Patriarchy: Decolonizing Our Lives and Returning to Kinship Worldview

"Having known and valued Four Arrows (Don Jacobs) for over 3 decades, I can attest that his 28 (!) previous books, important talks, celebrated teaching, and now One Mandate, Two Worldviews, Seven Generations are exactly the antidote and way forward and backward (to primal wisdom) so needed within a world of increasing darkness. He is unafraid to pinpoint how the inflating paradigm of hyper-materialism and separateness (from Spirit and Nature) has devolved into the Heritage Foundation’s vision in the era of Trump, Putin, Xi, Kim, and other authoritarian conquistadors.Four Arrows has always called for understanding the “kinship with all life” understanding so prominent in our (ab)original roots. He has long promoted the need to appreciate our oneness with each other and with all species. He reveals the path for restorative balance and provides the healing alternative to the voices of separation and what might be called apartheid consciousness. In my view, it is important not only to read this book, but also to apply it ... as he has done. It is obvious that time has run out unless there is both a turning and a returning. I strongly recommend this book and its map for planet Earth’s regeneration."
- Tom Cooper, Professor Emeritus, Emerson College, Harvard, and the University of Hawaii, author of A Time Before Deception: Truth in Communication, Culture, and Ethics