Spirituality, Business Acumen, and Propagation

It occurs to me that the spiritual people I know who lead very happy fulfilling lives are in the minority.  They make these changes and love life so much that they want to go out and help other people make similar changes in their lives.  But the community remains small.  Shouldn't something so wondrous and beautiful spread like wildfire throughout the population until people everywhere are beatified by it?

Why are the idols we worship businessmen and politicians - the ones who have business acumen and succeed at garnering money or power. This is because money and power are two of the main accepted measuring sticks of success.  But happiness is also an accepted measuring stick of success.  There's a disconnect here, and the source of the disconnect is power.

What is power?  In essence it is the ability to influence: to influence people, and thereby events and outcomes. Money and power are closely intertwined, and very rarely do you have one without the other.  Money however is merely a king whereas power is the emperor.

Happiness however has naught to do with money or power.  It provides neither the ability to influence people directly nor the ability to buy that influence.  Thus, in the PR war of "what is success" and what defines "successful," happiness, although given lip-service, is never trumped by money or power.

There's another element at play here, and it's an even more insidious one.  Many of the people who acquire money or power do so at the expense of happiness.  Some are simply naive workaholics who have learned to overachieve in order to cover up intrinsic shame and unhappiness: many of Bradshaw's type A overachievers fit this profile.  They are trying for happiness via success at acquiring money or power, but don't realize that the happiness needs to start much closer to home and in much more humble beginnings.  However many are people who consciously gave up happiness for money or power.  This happens either through a conscious life decision to pursue money or power at the expense of pursuiting a more humble happier life, or through the use of deception, lies, and trickery.  It is this last group that actually has an agenda at suffocating happiness in others.

Why this dissertation?  All of the above is fairly common knowledge or at least feels like common sense.  Because it seems to me there must be a way to better propagate spirituality and the happiness that's associated with it.  Business acumen and spirituality don't have to be at odds. I have this notion that power and the acquisition of power plays a little fast and loose with morals and that in so doing, it loses a lot of the strength of spirituality.  When I refer to business acumen, I refer to the instinct of truly successful businessmen who understand how to acquire power.  But again, although it feels like they are at odds, I don't think they have to be.  I think there must be a way to use business acumen to propagate spirituality in a good way.

It scares me that the more I think about this the more I think about the conservative Christian movement.  That is not the model I'm looking for.