With consummate skill he works the levers of the party, adjusts to each twist and turn in the official line and ends up a powerful local official, riding high, in a chauffeured car, when the get-rich ethos sweeps over China.
Can the enterpreneurial "get-rich-first" ethos of Chinese modernisation co-exist successfully with green objectives?
The open source ethos runs deep.
But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation.
It, too, was commissioned by a rich bourgeoisie, but it projects this extraordinary communal ethos.
But as the leading figures of the field of biology began intensively finding commercial outlets and get-rich-quick schemes, they helped to change the ethos of the field.
In a country where the gap between rich and poor is enormous, Filipinos say, the jeepney ethos has moved beyond transportation to inspire a kind of subculture of proletarian larceny.
As we have seen in the U.S. in the past few years, the selfishness of the rich and powerful and the institutions that embody their ethos of serving the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else has been hugely destructive.
"The Media Lab's ethos is about making people's lives richer with technology," he said.
The previous pope, Benedict XVI, was born and raised in Germany, and his high aesthetic and intellectual ethos may have represented the last gasp of that rich and self-confident Western European civilization, rooted in Christianity, that gave us Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Mozart.
Though the town is rich in architectural history, Roxbury's character is best defined by an ethos of conservation that has left huge parcels of pasture and woodland undeveloped.
