Like many things in life, extreme or absolute thinking can be detrimental. One more recent example is the idea of inclusion—everyone should feel included. Now, this idea comes from a well-meaning place, as before groups of people were excluded for the arbitrary reason of their race, sex, or country of origin. However, there is a trade-off to inclusion: to include everyone and everything into a group, you cannot hold any standards or principles. That is why there are groups to begin with: people within the group all agree to principles and standards of behavior, and people outside the group do not—because they do not, you cannot treat them in the same way because they have not agreed to the same rules.
You see this all the time in family and friend group situations where, because of the association, people try to keep a relationship with a member of the group after years of mistreatment. Eventually, even the strongest bonds are broken by betrayal, mistreatment, and abuse. When you can’t uphold certain core values, ethics, principles, or standards, then you can’t maintain group membership. That’s the way it has to be, or selfish people will exploit the system.
Unfortunately, many sheltered people have not seen this kind of behavior (or, possibly, they are the abusers) and so think that everyone should be included all the time for everything. Again, this is good where if you can uphold the standard or adhere to the principles, no arbitrary characteristic should disqualify you. That has been abolished for decades. But exclusion based on qualifications has to exist at some point. After all, you can’t have someone who is unable to walk play in the National Football League. Not only would that be dangerous for everyone, but it’s unfair and would require such a monumental change to the way the game is played that it wouldn’t even be the same sport anymore. It’s not that people who play football are bad people; it’s just impossible to include everyone without the standards being completely dropped.
We are seeing this issue in schools. For the most part, both parties in the U.S. acknowledge that education in the country has major issues. But the solution of moving children up grade levels without the requisite skills—or even giving them diplomas—doesn’t make them any more skilled or qualified for jobs; all it does is devalue the degree because it doesn’t signify anything anymore.
Similarly, if you lower the bar in the military, professions, or universities to accommodate more people, the quality of the work gets worse. A large portion of Harvard’s high standing is not that their education is the best but rather than they only select the best people. They don’t have some magical education that’s a hundred times better; they can just keep the pace of learning high because of the highly capable students.
This kind of issue can be seen everywhere as innocuous as co-ed softball teams. It’s supposed to be for recreation, but people want to win and so they have to set things like a minimum number of women who have to be on each team (because a team of all men vs. mostly women would be grossly unfair due to biological advantages) to prevent exploitation of the rules to win. Sadly, rigging a co-ed softball league is about as immoral as a team of adults playing a team of children in terms of having an unfair advantage, yet it doesn’t seem to have the same social stigma (I could see the societal humiliation placed upon a team of adults playing kids when it’s not for laughs like the Seinfeld episode where Kramer fights children in Karate class).
So, it’s strange that the simple topic of what or who is included in something is a highly political topic when it should be as simple as anyone qualified where there isn’t an unfair advantage, but that’s where the difficulty comes into play. Who defines “qualified”, and who defines “unfair advantage”? People can’t agree on whether professional sports should allow steroids or not (though most people agree it should be allowed or disallowed and not for some and not for others). Wrestling and mixed martial arts have weight classes because size is a definite advantage in these sports, while baseball, football, basketball, and other sports don’t because skill, speed, and agility can often offset the size advantage. However, there is a de facto height bias in basketball because the taller you are, the closer to the basket you are and the less resistance you receive that could block your shots. Yes, the occasional Muggsy Bogues can make it, but they have to be exceptional. Full inclusion in the NBA would require shorter people to have to play despite the fact that they have an intrinsic disadvantage in the sport.
I don’t have solutions to any of this, mind you (and they would be political/ethical positions, so I will stay out of it). I can only point out the reality that exclusion exists for two reasons: to avoid including people who can harm you or make you somehow worse off or disadvantaged in some way. This is important for the police or firefighters, for example: only someone who can save you from a mass shooter or pull you out of a burning building should be in positions who are responsible for those tasks. To put someone unqualified in those roles isn’t just illogical—it would kill people. But, at the same time, you can easily say that you’re excluding someone for one reason when it’s really for another: because you don’t like them for either their personality or their immutable characteristics. Doing it for the latter is bad, obviously, but even personality differences might be a legitimate reason because a team might perform better as a group with more cohesion (Bill Simmons famously called this The Ewing Theory when he noticed that star players that got injured would result in the team performing better if the team worked better together as a result). So, you’re stuck with the idea that exclusivity is not just desirable (for social status benefits, for example) but necessary in cases where only the best should be participating.
I understand that life and the world are unfair—I’ll never play in the NFL or win a “best hair” award, for example. But that’s life. We live in a world where you are stuck with some basic biological realities but then get to choose what to include and exclude from your life experience. You have to: there’s a reason why people who include social media in their lives are less happy. The human mind and body were not equipped to receive a lifetime’s worth of tragedy and conflict every day of their lives. You might have personally experienced a couple major incidents in your life, but now you see major news every day churning out like a machine. Exclusion is necessary to stay sane and live your best life.
The unfortunate reality is that means that. Some people will get excluded from things they don’t qualify for despite it not being their fault, and others will have to change their behavior to qualify despite all of the platitudes being told to everyone that you’re perfect just the way you are. The irony is that the people touting this idea of extreme inclusion are some of the most exclusive people in the world: you have to think in an exact certain way or are banished, and you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or your group or event can’t exist. So, by including everyone, you exclude almost everything. And because you can’t have standards, you end up having double-standards: some people are expected to work or behave in a certain way, and other people are not. While that works to some extent to the small fraction of people who are truly incapable of contributing to society in a meaningful way, it ends up creating the very bigotry that the people fighting against it claim to be eliminating: different standards based on race, sex, country of origin, or other immutable characteristics. Instead of eliminating the discrimination, they’re just perpetuating it or flipping it.
The main takeaway from this post is that words have meaning, but people like to take a word and make it mean “all things good” and demonize anyone who against the extreme interpretation as “all things bad”. All things in extreme doses can be bad; drinking too much water will kill you. Similarly, to include everyone in a group, you have to hold them to the same standards. There are adults and children, mentally sane and mentally ill, and other dividing lines that separate how rules are applied based on capability. Those are required because you can’t include children who don’t know how to talk yet in the voting process. When you try to include everyone, you either lower the standards for everyone, which makes the group ineffective and essentially meaningless, or you hold different standards for different members of the group, which will generate a sense of unfairness if the members follow different rules but are equally capable.
As with anything, you have to decide what works for your life. But just know that there’s no magical solution in this world where everything gets better and nothing gets worse when you make a change; life is full of trade-offs. If you want to include more people in a group that requires certain qualifications, you have to lower the standards or principles to fit people who would otherwise not meet them; when you do that, more mistakes will be made in those groups. If you can sustain the same level of performance with more people, then you can include them without issue…but if you lower the bar, then you face a worse group or a double-standard, either of which will cause the group to deteriorate at best or disband at worst.