Decades ago a one-time Polish actor named Karol Wojtyla sat down in a screening room to watch a new film by Oliver Stone titled “Wall Street.” Wojtyla found most interesting the caricature of a wanton capitalist and corporate raider named Gordon Gecko, who memorably tells a young acolyte that greed is good. While at the time focused on lifting the pall of atheistic communism from his homeland and all nations in the Soviet orbit, the film, he believed illustrated the dangers posed by the opposite extreme — rule by wealth and material excess to the exclusion of all else. He imagined this as a threat to discretion, spirituality, and basic humility, cornerstones of civil society, or so he suggested in countless speeches and tracts. Though a profound conservative, he nonetheless worried that the acquisition of things would become the new opiate of the people, replacing a dependence that the founders of communism ascribed to religion. With Elon Musk dancing atop his boardroom table to celebrate his newfound status as a trillionaire — and there are others like him, including a somewhat-less-wealthy president — the Pole’s most troubling concerns have been realized. Greed is in all shapes good, as is a society mesmerized by consumerism. To paraphrase a leading techno-oligarch, corporations are “kingdoms” that provide the world with a plethora of “beautiful things.” In such a landscape, the standards of restraint and modesty have no meaning. Let greed be greed no matter the eloquent Pole’s warning. He is dead, his last breath drawn in 2005, and if you wish to find his tomb, visit the Vatican crypt and look for the name Pope John Paul II.