Who is standing in the way of the life-sustaining society?

Businessman and corporate consultant Robert Greenleaf has a sobering answer;

"Not evil people. Not stupid people. Not apathetic people. Not the 'system'. Not the ... reactionaries. The better society will come, if it comes, with plenty of evil, stupid, apathetic people around and with an imperfect, ponderous and inefficient 'system' as the vehicle for change. Liquidate the offending people, radically alter or destroy the system and in less than a generation they will all be back.
The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent and vital people and their failure to lead. Too many of us settle for being critics and experts. There is too much intellectual wheel spinning, too much retreating into research, too little preparation for and willingness to undertake the hard and high risk tasks of building better institutions in an imperfect world, too little to see the problem as residing 'in here' and not 'out there'. In short the enemy is good people who have the potential to lead but do not lead. They suffer, society suffers."


Quoted in 'Developing Ecological Consciousness' by Christopher Uhl (p.348)