the self justifying status quo

the following bit from the NY Times sparked a few, vaguely related thoughts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html

basically an attempt to make the public feel the pain of those poor wall street bankers who Obama wants to limit to half a mil a year salary (my question, does that include bonuses/stock options/other perks, or just base salary?). The article is almost offensive, boohooing about how it's simply impossible to live the lifestyle of a wall street CEO on only a half a mil. The one interesting point raised is the importance of the appearance of success--arguing that these chaps simply need 1.5 mil just so they can maintain the look of success in that culture, and that this is somehow required for the functioning of western civilization (ok I made that last part up).
I've read a few business type articles lately that pick up on this same idea, and there is something to it. But in both articles what bugs me is the simpering conservatism of such a stance--the outright inability or unwillingness to imagine that we could live differently than we do, accepting fatalistically that this is just the way it is, thus the status quo justifies the maintenance of the status quo (somehow, lurking in the back of my mind is a connection between this thought and the business school students references in this article by Michael Lewis, students who attempt to convince Birkenstock USA to stop being so damned good and nice without giving a thought to what the company will get out of it). This entirely misses the point that Obama and many others have been raising about the Wall St. banking culture, namely that the entire culture needs to change because it is unhealthy in significant ways.
This doesn't do away with the point (one I'm at least willing to consider as valid) that to succeed, we have to conform to certain cultural assumptions of success. What bothers me is that this assumption is taken for granted and then overrides the suggestion that, while we are always bound by social conventions and furthermore that our very lives are webs of social expectations, conventions, etc., this does not mean that we cannot challenge certain of these cultural and social expectations or that all social contracts are equal. Again, the status quo justifies the status quo.
All that to say, such articles remind me how inherently countercultural Christianity is at its root. For us, at least, the status quo does not self justify, the way things are is not the way they ought or even must be. Christianity is also certainly conservative, at least in our hypermodern world bent on reducing reality to its atomized bits to the detriment of those wholes which are more than the sum of the parts (think families, communities, human consciousness and experience, etc.). In this world Christians also paly a conservative role, reminding the world of what we lose when we allow reductionism to destroy the fabric of human existence. Yet even this conservatism is a countercultural phenomenon.