This mentality is not "proper" behavior for "civilized" humans.
Greed seems to play a large part in Conrad's description of the imperialism in Africa. Conrad describes the colonialists as "hunters for gold or pursuers of fame." Even Kurtz is possessed with greed, although from what Marlow hears before he actually meets Kurtz, he was not always so. Kurtz becomes so obsessed with the ivory that he rapes the land for it using his army of crazed natives. On a smaller scale, Kurtz is demonstrating Imperialism and Conquest using the natives. He rules them and uses them for his own purposes, all the while using the excuse that he may be "civilizing them", but in actuality he begins to despise the "brutes" that he is so ready to exploit. The manager and indeed almost all of the white settlers and traders in Africa at that time had profit in mind. The "traders" gave the natives useless items in exchange for ivory and other profitable materials, taking advantage of them horribly. Conrad describes the traders as giving the natives cheap manufactured goods in exchange for the precious items of .
their land. This also does not seem like the behavior of "civilized" humans, and Conrad is trying to point this out.
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Kurtz, as previously stated, started his own smaller scale of imperialism using the natives. Conrad links this back to the imperialism of Europe with the statement that "All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." This suggests that Conrad abhors not just the Imperialism of the Belgian Empire that Marlow sees first hand, but Imperialism in general as put forth from Europe. Kurtz's madness seems to have manifested itself both from isolation and from power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no one had more power in that part of Africa than Kurtz. He was leading armies of natives who saw him as a god, and he had no one there to oppose him. Of course he was powerful, and he liked it.
