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Notes -
With caveats: I am not American, never been to a proper frat/sorority environment in my life as described in the articles etc
But I have gone through a pretty selective elite-adjacent boarding school education in my own country. I have gone through and applied hazing myself and have experienced a lot of the best and worst things such an environment can provide.
At its best, pretty much nothing else in life can provide the type of connection you can build with people with whom you go through some group humiliation ritual with at a formative age. And the rituals are typically not that bad and somewhat fun for even the victims.
At its worst these initiations simply get hijacked by the people with worst sociopathic tendencies. Typically violent for guys or emotionally abusive for girls.
I was in a much more intellectually rigorous environment than what’s described here, but the heavy group pressures to conform to certain modes and looks were definitely omnipresent. And typically it provided most people with a productive script for how to behave at an age where they typically have absolutely no clue.
But also at its worst, it was very heavy on the small minority who couldn’t conform or weren’t accepted for a variety of reasons. Even led to suicide attempts etc. Also such group dynamics are very difficult to control in a top down manner so typically it’s seen as very undesirable by people who desire to do social engineering (in the current context this would be the woke crowd, we had different pressures back then).
Other commenters are totally right about the “race to the bottom” dynamics that happens in such environments and how it can destroy group cohesion and invalidate institutional goals. Especially obviously around sex, alcohol and drugs but also other type of group-defective behaviour such as academic misconduct, honesty, helpfulness towards peers etc. You need social policing. Not because it produces the best outcomes for each specific case (ie it sucks for the girl whose ex leaks her photos), but to protect the group. Especially young people will lack much of a personal moral compass and constantly be probing what they can get away with for personal social advancement. If there are no social repercussions for that girl (and the guy who leaked this stuff!!) then you will have dozens of nudes/racy photos circulating in no time and hogging all the sexual interest from girls who aren’t comfortable with immodesty.
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