For the past fifteen years, we have been running an experiment as a society. The hypothesis is that inclusivity is the optimal way to organize people, culture, and institutions. Academics, politicians, and celebrities have championed it. Organizations have rewritten their mission statements around it. The idea is simple and appealing: open every door, lower every barrier, and let everyone in.
I want to argue the opposite. I believe exclusivity is a superior model for how society and culture grow and flourish. Not because some people deserve less, but because the things we value most only exist because someone drew a line around them.
The Question I Stopped Asking
I have a set of questions I ask almost every stranger I meet. One of the most powerful I have ever asked is this: "What do you think people want most?"
I stopped asking it. Not because the answers were boring, but because they were too revealing. People would answer quickly, without thinking through the implications, and what came out were some of their most guarded fears, desires, and shortcomings. The question works like a hack into someone's mind. It did not feel fair to keep using it.
Here is what I learned. When a beautiful person told me that people want love and security most, I started to understand that love and security were likely missing from their life. When a wealthy person told me people mostly want money, I heard a scarcity mindset, someone who was either not experiencing abundance or was afraid of losing it.
Every answer was a desire. And desire, universally, points at what a person does not possess. If they had it, they wouldn't want it. People want what they do not have, and they fear what they do not understand.
That observation is the foundation of this essay. Because if desire is born from absence, then anything that is available to everyone, all the time, without condition, cannot be desired. It can be used. It can be consumed. But it is not usually desired.
Scarcity Creates Value
Consider the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Oscars. These are among the most demanded events in the world. People pay thousands of dollars for a seat. Millions more watch from home, and brands spend fortunes for thirty seconds of their attention.
Now consider a high school championship game. On the right night, the play on the field can be just as dramatic as a World Series game. The athletes care just as much. The finish can be just as close. But you will never sell those tickets for thousands of dollars, and the stands will not always be full.
The difference is not quality. The difference is exclusivity. Only two teams reach the Super Bowl. Only a handful of films are nominated for Best Picture. The scarcity of entry is what creates the value of being there, and the value of watching. If every team made the Super Bowl, there would be no Super Bowl. There would just be football.
This is the core problem with inclusivity as an organizing principle. If everyone is part of a group, and every form of organization accepts everyone openly, then there is no desire to get in and no real value in being there. Membership that costs nothing means nothing.
AI and the Entropy of Software
Nowhere is this playing out faster than in my own industry.
People like to say AI is a democratizing technology. That is true. It is also flooding the market with SaaS platforms, games, and applications. Anyone with an idea can now essentially speak software into existence. The result is a world of software that is oversaturated, and that world isn't going to become less saturated.
Entropy tells us that organized systems move toward disorder. High grade energy gets used first, and every new unit of energy becomes more expensive to acquire. Apply that to software in the age of AI. Every new participant adds noise. Every new app competes for the same finite resource: human attention. The system trends toward chaos, and the cost of standing out, measured in dollars, time, and effort, keeps rising.
So how do you escape a system that is decaying at an accelerated rate? You cannot out-shout the noise. There will always be someone louder with a bigger budget. The only way out is to move away from inclusivity and toward exclusivity.
That means private applications. Private data stores. Private groups. Invitation-only access. Waitlists that actually mean something. When you create a boundary around your platform, you create pressure on the outside of it. Pressure creates demand, and demand creates value. The open field is where products go to die. The gated garden is where they grow.
The Exclusivity We Already Celebrate
Here is what strikes me most. We say we want an inclusive society because it is more beautiful and more just. Yet many of the institutions we treasure most are exclusive by design, and we would never want them otherwise.
Take marriage. A marriage is a beautiful thing: two people who will love, suffer, grow, learn, and build a permanent bond that becomes a family. But part of what makes a marriage beautiful is that it is exclusive. Would a marriage be better if it were inclusive? Would a family be better if it were open to anyone who wanted to join? Would a religion be better if it included every other religion, or would it simply cease to be a religion?
Follow the logic further. Would a nation continue to be a nation if it erased its borders and became inclusive of the entire world? At some point, the thing being "included into" dissolves, because there is nothing left to define it.
Or take something lighter. If pizza became inclusive, and allowed rice as a base, then pasta, then broth, it would not be a more welcoming pizza. It would not be pizza at all. I can't drag a stick across a canvas and call it a classic Renaissance painting while ignoring every rule of Renaissance painting. The rules are not an obstacle to the art. The rules are the art.
Exclusivity is what defines the borders of a thing. And the borders are what make it that thing.
What Exclusivity Is Not
This argument is easy to misread, so please be charitable in your reading.
Exclusivity is not cruelty. It is not a claim that some people are worth less than others, and it is not an argument for denying anyone equal treatment under the law, basic dignity, or the chance to earn their way in. A high school athlete can join a Super Bowl winning team. A startup can build something worth joining. The Oscars do not exclude people, they exclude work that has not yet met the standard.
This distinction is so important. Inclusivity, as it is often practiced, confuses access to opportunity with access to the outcome, or otherwise stated equality of outcome or opportunity. It says the door should be open to everyone, and then quietly removes the door. Exclusivity keeps the door, keeps the standard, and lets the standard do its work. The best exclusive institutions are demanding, not arbitrary. They tell you exactly what it takes to get in, and they mean it.
That clarity, when applied equally, is a gift. A standard gives people something to aim at. It gives effort a direction and achievement a meaning. Remove the standard and you do not lift anyone up. You simply remove the summit they were climbing toward.
Exclusivity Is Beautiful
Defining a thing is what gives it the ability to be beautiful.
Chaos is not beauty. Only order has the potential for beauty. A melody is beautiful because it excludes the notes that do not belong. A poem is beautiful because it excludes the words that do not serve it. A building is beautiful because the architect decided what it would not be.
People like to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I agree, and that proves my case. The beholder has to define what is beautiful. Every act of seeing beauty is an act of selection: this, and not that. Definition creates order, and order creates exclusivity. You can't have one without the other.
An inclusive definition of beauty, one that includes everything, is not a more generous definition. It is no definition. And a world without definitions is not a more welcoming world. It is a world where nothing is worth wanting.
Conclusion
By asking strangers what people want most, I learned that desire lives between what we have and what we don't. That gap is not a flaw in human nature, it is the engine that keeps us building, competing, committing, and creating.
Inclusivity, taken as the organizing principle of everything, tries to close that gap by handing everyone everything. But the gap does not close, the value just evaporates.
Exclusivity keeps the gap open. It preserves the things worth wanting: the marriage, the faith, the championship, the craft, the product people line up to join. It gives society something to aspire to and culture something to protect.
The border is not the enemy of the beautiful thing. The border is what makes it beautiful.