I legitimately don't know what Fraternity is and why it's normal in America and why these dudes are standing like this.
In America you have most of the rights of a citizen at age 18, but there is a massive class disparity and pressure to strive for upward mobility. Some gatekeeping is done systematically by university credentials (half of adults have attended university while one third have a bachelor's degree).
Within the university itself, there are groups that have well-developed economic connections, the same organizations that perpetuate class sortition. This sort of thing happens organically anywhere that it is permitted. Wealthy people find each other and make organizations that allow them to socialize with other wealthy people, and take advantage of poorer people. A key ingredient is alcohol: in the US, the age to buy and possess alcohol is 21, so students under that age need a connection to get it. With property, access to alcohol, and social connections, fraternities can easily pull off parties that are appealing to young adults who are looking to be superficially transgressive, to fit in, and to meet people.
An American frat becomes this coveted in-group identity that people are selected for by either wealth or subservience, which is where hazing comes in. The fraternities and sororities also have a lot of power over the norms of masculinity and femininity.
In my experience, frat parties are extremely boring, usually with overplayed music playing way too loud, alcohol and unknown other fluids spilled all over the floor, and dozens upon dozens of people that are very conventional and devoid of personality.
Super real American anthropologist here. I have a degree on American culture, except don't ask to see it. The paper as well as the university that gave it to me fell into the ocean. I do not recall which ocean.
This here appears to be a form of trance that is induced by the consumption of an alcoholic concoction not too dissimilar to the baijiu we have in the civilised world (I believe they usually have something they call "Clamato" mixed with something they call "Natty Lite", but it can also be made with "Four Loko" and "V8 Vegetable Juice". The etymologies for all of these words are lost to time) during a coming-of-age ritual known as "hazing", believed to stem from getting into a drunken haze off of "moon shine" (also similar to baijiu) and shooting each other with flintlock pistols (which also produces a smoky haze) as a pastime in medieval America.
These men largely hail from villages and hamlets from the countryside (although not exclusively) and congregate around a "college" (which may be a loan word, it's uncertain if any education is mandated by these colleges, as the youth can simply threaten the shaman-tutor for being "woke" and "infringing on their beliefs" and automatically succeed in the class), whose main purpose is to produce (unpaid) athletes for the entertainment of the elders in a congregation called "March Madness", which I believe is an homage to an archaic custom where they forced their youth into the jungles of Vietnam and "march" forward into spike pits or develop "madness" from PTSD and the conscription.
This gives me "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" vibes and I love it
In Western Europe, fraternities shape about 70% of the political class. They break down your morals and make you do horrific acts so that if you’d ever betray the ruling class, they will have enough material to discredit you. They are not primarily social clubs. Their core function is to create an elite class that helps its members get in powerful positions and protect their financiers, the capitalist class.
I've never heard of frats in western Europe akin to anything that the US has. England and some other places love posh boarding schools, which is not at all the same as a frat. It's shitty in other ways.
David Cameron fucked a pig in his frat, the event was called "Piggate" when it was leaked to the press. The European fraternities are just more up-market, called "societies" and "clubs" and styled in overtly upper class ways compared to what the americans style them as. It's the same thing though.
Compared to American frats they're quite different though. The societies and clubs like that (which are mainly an English thing) are more like an expanded skull & bones society, as far as I understand it. American frats, from what I know of them, are present at basically every college and much more accessible that the secret societies for the wealthiest kids in England - or whatever the variant is in other parts of western Europe.
I've never heard of Gamma Phi Delta in Berlin College (because I think colleges are very much an Anglo thing?) having some big hazing scandal or whatever.
If the argument is just "clubs for rich people exist" then yeah? But that's not really helpful for OOPs question.
Calling a toff club a “frat” sounds weird. It would be like if John Cena started talking about opening up the bonnet of his car.
a lot of the university experience implies living away from your friends and family for the first time. fraternities/sororities are a way for the affluent and generally disagreeable people to pay for instant access to a large social network of people from the same demographic (unlikeable, parents have money).
of course you can't only pay to get in, because then minorities might get in there and ruin the whole brand... so existing members gatekeep the "secretive" process behind made up rituals of humiliation to prove loyalty and drive out anyone who might have some self respect.
they are to be avoided like the plague. never join. never go to any of their functions. avoid their houses. every fucking year, kids die from alcohol poisoning due to their "brothers". not to mention all the sexual assaults. "greek" culture is a menace of elitism and sadism. and it's just politically connected enough to be constantly normalized while its excesses are covered up and ignored.
better to be a geek than greek.
better to be a geek than greek.
damn, I'd totally forgotten about this phrase but it's what everyone said at my university in Canada. Before I arrived the school had ended most of the frats because of the vile culture they generated, and the couple which were allowed to exist had to jump through hoops and had high public behavioural standards. Even then, everyone outside the frats hated them due to the whole '"greek" culture' you described
Looks like the last scene of the Blair Witch Project
US fraternities are the burger version of UK boarding school noncery. At its core, a frat just a social club for drinking, social networking for careers after school, and organized sexual assault of female classmates. The latter activity replaces the british pederastry since frats are college only and most US colleges are co-ed.
Freshmen wanting to join a frat ("prospects") will "rush" it during "rush week" which always involves dangerous levels of alcohol consumption and arcane hazing rituals, as seen above.
I have very little context here, but I'm guessing the ritual is to stand completely still in a dark wet basement while a stereo randomly blares scary noises from the other room. Any prospects that react are eliminated and can't join the frat.
For an entirely different flavor of toxic american culture see Sororities.
Having to get tortured to build a network is something.
And the new entrants take away from this that they get to do it to others once they're in! Should help people understand why student debt relief is seen as inconveniencing people who already had to pay back their student loans.
At first its way more about having friends assigned to you and access to all the "cool" parties and all the overly intoxicated young women there. Some sororities are sometimes partnered to a frat and encourage sex with members of that frat. Sometimes its a requirement to get in.
The best thing I've been told about frats is they force you to cooperate with people you'd otherwise hate, which is something I've heard unions do as well.
Take me with a grain of salt though. I was never in a frat and my college forced all "Greek Life" organizations to cut national ties decades ago.
Some sororities are sometimes partnered to a frat and encourage sex with members of that frat. Sometimes its a requirement to get in.
Excuse me, what the heck?
Why would anyone join? And how does this not become a national scandal and get shut down?
Well its never a national rule so its always localized to the specific chapter when one becomes a scandal. But also Greek life is heavily institutionalized within most college systems and there are powerful alumni. Every school have a long reputation of trying to make sex scandals go away as quickly and quietly as possible.
But also that requirement is usually presented as a challenge to the prospect to accomplish on their own. To prove you're the right type of hot to be in our clique etc. Many young women will volunteer for this.
Some sororities are sometimes partnered to a frat and encourage sex with members of that frat.
Fun fact: This goes back to Leland Stanford wanting to do eugenics with students at Stanford University and encouraging matchmaking to breed ubermensch by encouraging top performing students to pair up. Yall should read Palo Alto a History of California Capitalism and the World, that book is fuckin bonkers. I'll try to find a PDF when I get home.
Frats aren’t above pedastry either, many of them deliberately try to get local high school girls to attend their parties.
Frats are gangs for jocks who want to pretend they're nerds
it's actually very funny that they refused to move because surely the cops were fellow fraternity members just also participating in the hazing 
the frat guy just continuing to drink a beer while very clearly trying not to get arrested for having 50 18yos standing shirtless in a dark basement.
one of my friends who rushed one of the party frats at the number 1 party school in our area used to tell me a story about how, when he was a pledge, they made all of them sit in their frat-house basement and listen to the chorus of Revolution 9 on repeat (which, if you don't know, is just 'number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine' over and over) apparently for hours one night. they had to keep drinking the entire time and weren't allowed to turn on the lights or use the bathroom & apparently several of them pissed themselves. i always believed him (because he was the type of guy who wouldn't lie if he knew he could get a laugh out of a true story)
anyways i'm like 99% sure they were doing some sort of even more heinous variation on that but it is extremely funny that they have SO MANY pledges in there lmao. like even my friend, the way he described it, it was only like a dozen of them for a single night - like 12 hours max. why why why 50 of them be in there and believe so strongly that the cops are also hazing them groupthink at its strongest
you know the epstein shit? frats are like a microcosm of that in every university across the country but they mostly assault their classmates or groom highschoolers.
Fraternity is how yankees reproduce, they all get half naked in a damp basement and congeal into a big heap snail-style before laying egg clutches in the bottom floors of parking garages. These Americans probably just finished laying their eggs when discovered.
What a lot of people don't understand is how distinctly these biological characteristics affect the ecology of the local biome. Because they're so reliant on car infrastructure for mating and reproduction, yankee ranges select for such infrastructure. When you look at a desolate, car infested place like Texas, we must remember that God didn't make it that way, it was the goddamned yankee.
the goddamned yankee.
spits
A fraternity is a college club. Young men join them to make friends, party, and form connections that may help their careers down the line (the female version is known as a "sorority"). A "pledge" is a young man in college who wants to join the fraternity, and pledges often have to go through a period of hazing in order to be accepted as a full member. This sometimes results in abuse scandals, like what you see here.
You might ask yourself "why would anyone submit themselves to torture", well fraternities are pretty vital to rich kids to land jobs outside of school.
I was in one for a few months, but it was a new one with like 10 of us and the hazing was stealing crosses from the local KKK chapter so we could have a bonfire and drink beer.
Overall not too bad, there were a couple of weird guys, but that was one of the only ethnically diverse ones on campus lol
The pledge week was funny too, all the other ones had like a civil war era sword or some other legacy bullshit and these guys were just all laying around hungover with sunglasses on. When I asked them what their deal was they said "we like drinking and fucking with the local KKK"
I was in one for a few months, but it was a new one with like 10 of us and the hazing was stealing crosses from the local KKK chapter so we could have a bonfire and drink beer.
Okay in this instance I will allow it, carry on.
Europs and Britons when seeing a relic of distinctly European culture in the US:
Imagine a Hamburg steak...
These are literally incubators for the future generations of the ruling class.
Oh that's just cracker gitmo
culture
See this is the problem with your question right here, 
doesn't have a culture
is a cult and once you understand that everything else makes a lot more sense
Buddy, I've lived here going on almost 37 years, and even I don't know what the fuck is going on.
It's where future Epsteins are created.
Well, Epstein-lite. It's more like where all his clients were created. For all of his disgusting and disgraceful qualities he actually had real social skills, which as an American Jew meant he was exiled to the cultural and economic periphery (like many European Jews, historically) where he was recruited by Mossad and unfortunately ended up flourishing to the detriment of all.
College Fraternities aren't really exclusively American and Fraternal University groups and similar organizations have been around for a while. Lenin was in the Russian equivalent of a Frat, I think Marx too.
Historically, a lot of it was about social support for young men at university, many of them were far from home and have never lived alone and Universities often didn't provide housing or food as much back then, or if they did it was often poor quality, so getting into a Frat was a way to get three hots and a cot. And also they're just social clubs, you can hang with other dudes and party, make connections that can pay off later in life. Like most clubs they have weird traditions and shit. It's kind of like Boy Scouts for 18-25 year old men, so less camping and more drinking.
Weird social clubs like these used to be more common in general. Is there a weird old dive bar in your down called like "The Eagles Lodge" or the "Fools Order"? Yeah that's cuz before Xbox and Netflix it was a lot more popular to do weird shit like go to a club where you all wear Moose Hats or whatever. It wasn't even just a male or upper class thing, there were clubs for women and one's with more working class backgrounds.
The really weird shit you see now is almost more because University became more accessible, Frats became less needed and therefore more exclusive, and generally just began attracting a more toxic, hyper-masculine, often upper middle class, background of men who's rituals got more culty and destructive.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
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