Back when I first started my IT career, in the previous century, I became puzzled as to how some companies were able to make non-open standards and persuade a majority population to adopt them. How was it justice that competing products were locked out by incremental ‘improvements’, breaking third party compatibility? Ultimately, who or what was actually being excluded? And did this behaviour extend into other aspects of life?
One cannot exclude others in any way, to do so give them a reason to find or create something better, which is not obligated to include the originator. One can only exclude oneself.
The illusion is that we tend to believe that we are entitled to own or control something within or about others, and it is often done by some sort of exclusion. This creates an imbalance that becomes a greater burden over time, and eventually overcomes us in some form of backlash. If we choose to step back and observe the very thing that grew on the counter balance, we can finally see what the real effect of the exclusion was and whom is actually affected by it.
So when a software company decides to change implement proprietary extensions on a platform forcing user base to only adopt their offerings, the converse is also true in that those users may not want to be constrained in their choices and would choose an alternative.
An example of this is requiring use of client side extensions such as activex in order to be able to use a proprietary wiki platform automatically omits itself from being deployed into heterogeneous environments where the entire workforce cannot utilise it properly due to some users’ systems not having that extension available.
A government decides to make alternative medicines and healing systems ineligible under private health cover, and health insurance companies promptly drop reimbursements for these systems. A person considering private health cover now has less incentive to do so, using that money to spend directly on those systems provides better value.
In this regard, private health insurers have excluded themselves providing service to and collecting money from a portion of the population. A government that supposedly wanted to regulate preventative health systems just gave up its ability to do so.
A pair of lovers from two different observant religions or caste systems are proclaimed to have forbidden love by their families and marriage is not endorsed. The lovers cut all ties with those families, run away and settle down without family support.
The ideologies of those families excluded the lovers from being genuine, and end up with losing all influence in the process.
Your guest list for your party includes friends that are known to not get along. To exclude one for the benefit of the other can only induce resentment.
To avoid exclusion, invite them all and make them aware that all groups are welcome and that the choice to avoid contact has to be their own.
It is one thing to exclude oneself from something, creating a boundary often necessary to facilitate healing; and another to exclude others. How do the exclusions you create impact your life?
as above so below 