Is Exclusion Necessary?

The act of excluding a person, or a group of people from a community or even a group of friends has always been looked down upon.  Exclusion is believed to be rude because it is the act of not accepting a person or a group of people based on a quality that do or do not encompass. A “clique” is a group of people who are private and not accepting of people who are different. As I have examined intentional communities throughout the last two weeks of my Utopia class, I have begun pondering the idea that exclusion may be the only way to create a successful utopian community. Many people, such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, created intentional communities that did not have any criteria that a person needed in order to join the community. Thus, the community ended in failure because of a lack of organization and order within the community. In many intentional communities that do not have criteria, there is an overflow of people that have the same job specialty which causes there to be a shortage of people that know how to grow crops, for example. I believe that in order to create a utopian society, there must be a list of criteria, and a way to organize the jobs that will create a well-rounded and well established society. Although there is the idea of acceptance within the United States, if the goal is perfection, acceptance cannot be something that is considered while creating the society. Perfection is created by striving for the good, and abandoning the bad. Despite the fact that exclusion is hurtful and unkind, it must be something that is a part of a utopia, as the goal is to create a perfect society, not to create a society full of imperfect and unsuitable people.