Exclusivity

Never join a club whose only real requirement for membership is that you have money if your aim is to be surrounded by respectable people. Anyone can make money. The basest (not to be confused for based) and lowly scum worthy of nothing but contemptuous glances from afar can make plenty of money if they set their wretched hearts to it. Enough money to pay any due, fee, or assessment you can throw at them in a desperate attempt to shut them out through purely financial mechanisms. If joining requires nothing but an exchange of cash for a card you flash at the door, then in enough time you will find yourself amongst the classless dregs of society.

Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club; I am a Costco Executive Member. I enjoy shopping at Costco, at the increasingly rare times it’s not bursting at the seams with riff raff from the world over. But since the only barrier to entry is a modest yearly fee, the clientele is barely more sentient than the public at large. While this is an improvement that should not be scoffed at, money is simply not enough of an obstacle to prevent people I would never otherwise voluntarily associate with from gaining access to the club’s hallowed roster. Proof of membership being required to enter the establishment does little to keep out demoniac street walkers yelling into their Bluetooth headsets while I peacefully load my cart with bulk pallets of Diet Coke. According to Costco they have every right to be there as I do so long as they have paid their dues.

For the longest time I believed that Costco needed to quadruple their membership fees. To keep the afore mentioned riff raff out, you see? But if you’ve ever driven any of the 54.9 miles of the President George Bush Turnpike then you’ll know there is no fee large enough that will prevent you from being utterly surrounded by people who didn’t learn to drive here. Costco, like PGBT, is sadly now full of “student drivers” with enough money to afford a Tesla Model X that they drive as recklessly as their shopping cart full of Kirkland faux fur dog beds they plan to arbitrage on Amazon. When the whole world has been invited to live in your back yard, a result of the relentless demand for the levelling of humanity to mere units of economic exchange discriminated only by their salary, you will find the number of people who can pay to join the club to be inexhaustible, effectively infinite.

They say money doesn’t buy class, it’s true, but that’s only the half of it. Money doesn’t buy politeness, conscientiousness, respect for personal space, an understanding of how one should behave around others, or (God forbid) a shared sense of purpose and identity either. Apologies for the overused rationalist turn of phrase, but money is orthogonal to all those things. The extent to which they ever correlated was because people were filtering along multiple axes at the same time along with income. This gave the illusion of a relationship until it became culturally unacceptable or actually illegal to do so. In other words, there is nothing intrinsic about the relationship between income and desirable traits; it must be intentionally imposed, by a gatekeeper.

One must gatekeep in order to have nice things. Relentlessly. With zeal and arrogance. You must know your worth and the true value of your association and you must never sell it for mere coin. The price must be time and blood, demonstrated taste and proof of work. Failure to gatekeep has destroyed or degraded nearly every social institution that was once worth preserving. The less exclusive the criteria for membership is made the greater the degradation. Oftentimes this loosening of standards has been required by law, but even when it hasn’t been we still see an inexorable slide towards openness. For the law is a teacher, and it has taught us that the only reason a person can be turned away in public is because they cannot afford to pay. So even in private we are increasingly reluctant to exclude.

Today while perusing Google Maps I noticed what looked like a golf course hidden behind a wooded area I occasionally drive by. Attached to the golf course was a country club. Curious, I visited the club’s website. It was tasteful but sparse. A simple contact form, guest information (i.e. dress code), and a member login was all there was to be found. Not a word on how to join. Naturally this only made me more inquisitive. But, being a private club, they have no obligation to indulge my pleb curiosity. Presumably, like many other private country clubs: you just have to know someone who will sponsor you if you want to join. The ultimate form of gate keeping. Exclusion extraordinaire. Without a doubt the membership fees are steep. But I’m not poor, I can probably afford them, even if it’d be a bit of a strain on my budget. That doesn’t matter though. It’s not for me. I don’t know the right people; I have been, perhaps justly, gatekept.

Now, I think I would make a fine member of any country club. I have no problem dressing and acting the part. But it’s their club and they can admit whomever they please. The two sentence description on the home page indicates they’ve been quite successful in keeping their membership rolls full of precisely the sorts of people they want to associate with. Good for them, I say, even if I’m stuck playing golf at the local municipal course, for now.

Unless something dramatically changes in America then for the foreseeable future private clubs with the courage to aggressively exclude the unwanted are going to be the only way you will be able to surround yourself with likeminded, respectful, and similarly classy people you aren’t related to. You can’t gatekeep in public anymore. Even when it’s legal it’s frowned upon. Your only recourse is to charge money. How crass. And worse, ineffective. But still, if you want to keep nice things nice, you must have exclusivity as a top priority for your organization. Which means you must, by some criteria, exclude some who want to join. What those criteria are is ultimately up to you and those you choose to associate with. But your door cannot be open to the public, or else the riff raff will surely find a way in.