Once "Democracy" is Bought, Can We Buy it Back?

When I looked at how much money was spent for each delegate on Super Tuesday of the 2012 Republican Presidential primary, I could not help but think back to some of the work we did in the Spiritual Intelligence Action Research Project (SIARP).

The concept at the basis of SIARP was that in the most basic or primal sense everything has a spirit--American spirit, spirit of capitalism, spirit of democracy, spirit of money, spirit of truth, the human spirit. Using the broadest possible definition we said in SIARP that a spirit is simply the invisible essence of a thing that acts in another dimension of a multi-dimensional universe.

We constructed the concept of spirits acting in another dimension as a means of looking at the complex nature of reality in the age when scientists are making discoveries that suggest that the entire universe, at its most basic level, might be just one infinite, eternal, unified, super-symmetric field, and that every manifestation or phenomenon on earth has a corresponding existence in a dimension where everything is connected, where "we are one," as they say in almost every spiritual tradition, in one way or another. It is a dimension where, literally, "everything is everything," as they say on the street.

A sub-concept that we spent a lot of time researching is that spirits, of course, connect in ways, which are by judgments we make in the human dimension, sometimes beneficial, and sometimes malevolent towards us as observers. The manifestations and resulting phenomena create the reality we live in, collectively and individually. The idea is that if you look anywhere you can see the spirit of anything mixing with the spirit of anything else, if the mixture affects us enough or if we are discerning enough.

There is no more easily discernable ways for us to observe the power of the spirit of money mixing with the spirit of democracy than in one phenomenon, Super Tuesday, March 6 of the Republican Presidential primaries in 2012. The candidates and the super PACs that support them combined to spend a little more than $12 million on television advertising,

Because of judgments we make in the human dimension, money mixing with democracy is not beneficial. Like any sore places there is a temptation to pick at the one that came to consciousness on Super Tuesday. Former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney emerged from Super Tuesday winning 208 delegates at a cost to his campaign and super PAC of $36,380 on advertising per delegate won, according calculations based on NBC First Read.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and his Super PAC Winning Our Future, spent a slightly higher amount, $38,541 per delegate won. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and his super PAC Red White and Blue Fund spent $19,000 for each of the 84 delegates won on Super Tuesday. And Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) spent only $102,000 on ads for his 21 delegates, which comes to only about $4,857 per delegate.

Of course I thought first of what a cash-strapped American family could do with $38,000 dollars. That hurt! And then we all have to look forward to the pain of the general election. If Governor Romney wins the Republican nomination and faces President Obama in November 2012, "spending for the 2012 presidential election is forecasted to grow to $4.9 billion," writes Cary Hatch of the Washington Advertising firm, MDB Communications, Inc.

Money will have badly degraded the spirit of democracy, the American spirit and therefore the human spirit, in our judgment. The usefulness of viewing the world with Spiritual Intelligence is that it gives us a way of seeing how the spirit of money's malevolent effects is inseparable from its beneficial effects. And the best thing for us to do, individually and collectively, is to enlighten and follow our own spirit in faith believing that we already have what is beneficial so that we can receive what is beneficial. The result will always be forward movement in an evolutionary sense.

George Davis is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and the creator of the interactive, world-sourced, digital series, Barack Obama, America and the World. His spiritual spy novel, The Melting Points, will be published next month.