People who identify as conservatives seem to be instinct-driven to manifest the seven deadly sins--i.e. man's natural inclinations become obsessive. How that happens, how the instincts to protect, accumulate, emulate, associate, assimilate and even rest turn into obsessions is unclear. Perhaps it's frustration, growing out of an inability to achieve, which prompts repetitive effort, until the impulses become fixed as habitual expressions of anger, envy, greed, gluttony and lust. And while sloth may be the saving grace holding destruction at bay, perhaps pride salves the ego to make the frustration more bearable
What seems pretty clear is that the obsessed are impervious to the perception of enough as enough. There is never enough. If the obsessed are not to literally self-destruct, someone else has to intervene and set boundaries for them.
Is there an out? Perhaps for the individual endowed with some natural talent, whose repetition eventually overcomes frustration and brings success. Then, though the obsession becomes manifest as an inimitable social virtue, it may still leave the obsessed individual unsatisfied. Geniuses who self-destruct are not an uncommon event.
One almost has to wonder if the early analysts of economic behavior (exchange and trade for monetary gain) weren't inadvertently focused on people obsessed with behavior they couldn't successfully engage in themselves--people who accumulated capital because their productive and creative capacities were essentially nil. In other words, perhaps our economic theories are based on the endeavors of people who accumulate, because they can't make anything for themselves.
Perhaps we need to revise that old slander, "people who can, do; people who can't, teach" to read "people who can't, leach."
What is Willard Romney but an obsessive accumulator of other people's money? Oh, and a good talker.