These OWS people seem so much more inclusive than tea partiers

For Tea Party members, the world will always remain full of persecutory others (Obama’s the devil!!) while OWS holds out the promise of community, no, of communities of difference. The effort after inclusiveness can be so dramatically full of sympathy and concern for others that you may feel the movement respecting your subjective experience before they even know what their own point of view is. But if you knit together the union worker and ex-hippie, the college student sharing some shade with the cop, you find a belief that working together instead of against each other presents the very real possibility that people will end up not as triumphant winners but as people with enough—and in a radically inclusive networked world enough is, well, enough.

Of course, moving from the psychology of protest to specific policy recommendations is the responsibility not of the protestors whose message needs to be heard but of political leaders. And I want to note that there’s something profoundly anti-capitalist about the critics of OWS. It’s a movement about which capitalists, real capitalists who work hard and smart, have nothing to fear. Oligarchs, on the other hand, should be afraid, very afraid. Entrepreneurs and corporate leaders will find a way to make money and allocate capital so that jobs are created even in a workable financial system. Sure, breaking-up the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and K Street will change the rules of the game, but it won’t end the game. Maybe wealth disparity will shrink, maybe CEOs will make slightly less relative to average workers. But the entrepreneurial spirit will still triumph. Who knows, just like Steve Jobs emerged from the ethos of 1960s radicalism and spiritual-seeking, perhaps the 21st century’s next great industrialist will emerge from the Zuccotti Park tripod tarps and all-inclusive General Assembly in which everyone has a say.

As for me, obviously, I’m inclined towards inclusion, relationship, and sadness rather than exclusion, competition, and suspiciousness. And I know lots could go wrong. Extremism and fools, even violence, are all possible. But the essential message of getting Wall Street money out of K Street pockets, of realizing that corporations are not people, of treating people like people, of letting capitalists win over oligarchs all together means hope can once again perch in the soul. More than anything else, OWS is helping facilitate a shift in psychological values from more—and then more more—to enough, from the destructive envy of raging at someone who has more to the genuine satisfaction of appreciating what one has. It just may help us get to the point that we realize we are all in this together, that we’re all playing in the (American) band: