CIVILIZATIONS by Robert K. Greenleaf

“Civilizations have risen and fallen before. If ours does not make it, perhaps when the archeologists of some future civilization dig around among the remains of this one they may find traces of the effort to build a more caring society, bits of experience that may give useful cues to future people.

It is a reasonable prospect that, in the civilization that succeeds ours-whether it evolves from ours in a constructive way or whether it is reconstructed from the ruins after long dark age—those future people will be faced with the same two problems that confront us now:

(1) how to produce as many servants as they can from those who, at maturity, have the potential for it; and

(2) how to elicit optimal service from such group endeavors (institutions) as emerge.

And, unless some unforeseeable transmutations in human nature occur along the way, those future people may be impeded by the same unwillingness to use what they know that marks our times.

Knowledge may be power, but not without the willingness, and the release from inhibiting mind-sets, to use that knowledge.”