Greed is gooder: The further decline and steep falll of civilization since Gordon Gekko

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

-- Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987

The weird thing is that if you follow the link and re-read the famous movie monologue, Gekko's idea of "greed" is actually quaint and rather all-American when you compare it to the kind of BS that takes place in the 2010 real-life version of Wall Street. If you remember the movie, the issues involved corporate raiders, yes, but at least companies that actually made or did productive things -- like manufacturing paper products (yes, how quaint) or flying and maintaining airplanes.

How did we get from there to here (huge h/t Culture of Truth):

For these young Wall Street types, Tourre embodies the culture of the financial world and offers a road map for success. He's the real-life Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street: the cocky alpha male who writes e-mails in which he calls himself the "only potential survivor ... standing in the middle of all of these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades." He's a doppelgänger to Michael Lewis's autobiographical protagonist in Liar's Poker, who sells bad products to unknowing chump investors, and he's becoming a cultural icon to his contemporaries because they empathize with him. One of them could just as easily have been the salesman on the Abacus deal, if only they had been that smart or lucky. "There's a self-serving role in this. If what he did is wrong, then what they do is wrong on a daily basis," says Adam Galinsky, professor of ethics and leadership at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "It's not wrong to them, because it's the water they swim in."