If you think financial capital is all you need for happiness, think again. According to Danah Zohar, a physicist, philosopher, and management thinker, and Ian Marshall, a Jungian-oriented psychiatrist, capitalist culture and the global business that extends from it are not sustainable. Zohar and Marshall call for leaders to use their "spiritual intelligence" to create spiritual capital. They define spiritual intelligence as the core sense of meaning, values, and purpose by which we live, and they recommend this intelligence be used to build wealth—thus generating spiritual capital.
The authors say that accepting the notion of spiritual capital also means rethinking some conventional philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. Their book offers a couple of scenarios. The first chapter describes capitalism in its traditional form—materialist, amoral, focused on shareholder value, isolationist with no awareness of long-term consequences. The second chapter describes a culture that incorporates spiritual capital: This would be a values-based culture where wealth is accumulated to create a profit while simultaneously working toward a higher purpose that emphasizes stakeholders who include the human race, present and future. The authors devote the remainder of the book to the process of moving toward a culture of spiritual capital. They illustrate the principles associated with achieving spiritual capital at both the individual and societal levels.
Their book draws from areas of science including chaos theory and neuroscience. Readers may be surprised to learn that scientists have recently noticed interesting activity in a part of the brain's temporal lobes, dubbing this area "the God spot" because it seems to trigger yearning for deeper meanings in life.