The Myth of Selection, Marginalisation and Exclusion

Remember you had finished your schooling and thinking of engineering as a career. The Gold Standard was IITs or one of the Ivy League universities. Only the creme de la creme got in there.

This is, in a way, a process of Artificial Selection, Marginalisation or even Social Exclusion. In this kind of social exclusion, individuals are denied, by filtering, access to resources that would be available to another group (in the above case, the people who qualified). The result of this exclusion/ marginalization is that excluded individuals are prevented from access to otherwise superior facilities/ resources.

The assumption is that by excluding a group, the benefits accrue to those who have not been excluded. And thereby the former are at a disadvantage.

This process of Artificial Selection is workable when the availability of a resource is very limited. For example- a vaccine in limited quantities for COVID

But in this day and age when we are all about building interactions, relationships and communities, the opposite is true. By not granting the opportunities, the non-excluded people cannot contribute, thereby is the fault. Today, the world itself progresses only when everyone contributes and when a group cannot (due to lack of opportunity), the elite world will also suffer.

Broadly put, we don’t need more of the labour class. We need more educated people, more qualified engineers, programmers etc. The more of them, the more everyone stands to gain

For a cricket team to be a team and be successful, you need a mix of batsmen, fielders & bowlers broadly. You cannot have a team that only has batsmen or bowlers.

For lack of any other better method, exclusion is the best way to get the best persons available. ( I also practice Exclusion of a different type though). But exclusion not at the cost of the overall growth. 

Organizations and governments have recognized the need for inclusion and give opportunity for us, not just as a way of uplifting a particular class but also as a way of increasing the capabilities of people. It has been shown that shared prosperity increases with inclusion and not the other way round.