Riane Eisler on Fibonacci Numbers, AI, and the Search for Truth

Riane Tennenhaus Eisler (born July 22, 1931, Vienna) is an Austrian-born American social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, attorney, and author. As a child she fled Nazi-occupied Austria with her parents in 1939, lived seven years in Havana’s industrial slums, and later emigrated to the United States; she went on to earn a B.A. (magna cum laude) and J.D. from UCLA. Eisler is best known for The Chalice and the Blade (1987), which introduced her “domination vs. partnership” framework for analyzing social systems. Her latest book is Nurturing Our Humanity with anthropologist Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press, 2019.

In this dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler discuss the mystery of Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio, patterns visible in seashells, galaxies, and human anatomy. Eisler emphasizes their educational value as universal truths, while Jacobsen notes cognitive and computational limits in fully grasping them. The conversation turns to AI, where Eisler warns of deepfakes eroding trust in truth itself. They contrast nature’s enduring order with AI’s convincing fabrications, underscoring the need for critical education.

Interview conducted October 4, 2025, in the afternoon Pacific Time.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would you like to discuss for this special session today?

Riane Eisler: I would love to discuss Fibonacci numbers, as I recently revisited them.

Jacobsen: Oh, interesting.

Eisler: There are mysteries we still cannot understand. One of them is why these patterns appear everywhere. If I were a physicist or mathematician, I would want to know why. In my book on education, Tomorrow's Children, I wrote about this.

In middle and high school, young people can be introduced to the extraordinary fact that mathematical patterns, or ratios, repeat themselves across seemingly unrelated natural forms: hurricanes, sea waves, galaxies, DNA, seashells, seahorses, ram's horns, pine cones, even the proportions of human limbs and the reproductive rate of rabbits.

The ratio of one radius to the next larger is always about 0.618, and the ratio of a larger to a smaller is about 1.618. These patterns, discovered by Egyptian and Greek thinkers such as Pythagoras, were called the golden ratio or golden spiral. Leonardo Fibonacci showed the same principle in his famous series of numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and so on.

When you add adjacent numbers—say 2 and 3 to make 5, or 3 and 5 to make 8—the ratio of these pairs approaches the golden ratio. Fibonacci described this as a natural growth progression, tied to the Greek phi, or the creative order of the universe, related to logos, the root of the word "logarithmic."

Students can connect this idea to the movie “Contact,” where the alien message could only be decoded through the "universal language" of mathematics. But here's the deeper point: this underlying pattern has not been studied nearly enough, and, frankly, I'm not sure humanity even has the mental capacity to grasp it fully.

Jacobsen: There are certain limitations there. It's also the contours of our thought, too. Certain things will pop out more easily depending on our habits of mind. Computers crunching numbers certainly help us see farther, but even they have their limits so far, right?

Eisler: But computers are today being used by AI—so-called artificial intelligence—to present falsehoods as truths.

Jacobsen: Because they can represent those patterns very convincingly. In a way, AI does something similar to Fibonacci’s sequence: it builds complex images out of simple repeated steps until you think you’re seeing nature itself.

Eisler: Very convincingly. Someone just launched videos of Nixon, for example, saying things he never actually said. But there he is on television, speaking those words—thanks to AI.

Jacobsen: Have you ever seen an excellent painting in a gallery with little people in the background? You walk up close and realize it's just three or four squiggles. This is the modern, more sophisticated version of that—a very convincing fake. But the difference is, the squiggles never claimed to be reality.

Eisler: I find it somewhat unnerving, to tell you the truth, because what's being called into question is truth itself. And truth is what gives those universal patterns—whether in shells, galaxies, or mathematics—their stability. When that ground is shaken, education must play an even greater role in helping young people distinguish enduring truths from manufactured illusions.

But, as I bring out in all my books, education is very different depending on where a society falls on the partnership-domination scale. In the United States, we today clearly see the conflict between movements challenging traditions of domination – from the “rights of Man” movement against monarchies and the “rights of Women” movement of the 1700s and 1800s to today’s Environmental movement – and the regression to domination, to more authoritarianism, fear, and violence. Here we also see an attempt to muzzle educational institutions, from book burnings in grammar schools and libraries to attempts to silence any dissent in universities and colleges.

Everyone of us must pay attention to this struggle between domination and partnership worldviews, especially in education!

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and the Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media companies and outlets. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.