Pain rituals: A thread.
So there was this girl I used to talk to who lived in the Philippines, where at the time she was in first-year university. Now in the Philippines, apparently there's a sort of subject-based system of "orgs", which are sort of guild/fraternity hybrids.
You can go to school to be educated in molecular biology, say, but if you want the good connections for jobs in the future you'd better join the proper biology-centred student organization. So this girl was going through her initiation and telling me what was involved.
Now, I'm not so versed in hazing rituals, but to me it sounded like torture. They'd cover them in water and flour and make them stand for hours in the middle of the night. Make them crawl through mud, screaming at them about how they'd never make it, they ought to give up now.
Psychological stuff. This girl was blindfolded and given a baseball bat, told her best friend was right in front of her and to hit her as hard as she could or flunk out. She swung and heard her friend scream. Later found out it was a dummy; friend had been told to scream on cue.
They'd find out which older members the newbies found attractive, and then get those members in particular to insult and mock them. Make them beg and debase themselves. It was messed up. This is a few years ago so I'm probably messing up some details, but you get the idea.
Now I, socially and psychologically conscious intellectual that I am, was pretty horrified by this. I told her this sounded pretty abusive to me and she shouldn't submit to it, orgs be damned. I said no organization that does that can possibly be good for you. She disagreed.
She said once they got through the initiation, it was like family. The closest bond you'd ever had with people. Everyone knew that everyone else had been willing to go through utter misery to be there, and that made you trust each other. Clearly you'd give anything for the group.
Sounded like a cult to me. Because cults do that. But since then I've been trying to get under the question: WHY do cults do that? And why is it effective? And why does this pattern seem to pop up everywhere in human societies?
From scarification to gloves of bullet ants to fraternity hazing, humanity seems to continually find use in these painful initiations. When militaries need to bond a group of soldiers so that they'll die for each other, a miserable and abusive boot camp is the order of the day.
The case of fraternities is interesting to me because it seems like we in the west have otherwise dispensed with the notion of the painful initiation. And yet these groups have reinvented it. Like it was a latent program in humanity just waiting for its context.
So I'm still mostly on the side of "yeah no, don't torture people to make them love each other." And yet it seems there's something adaptive about this. Though maybe not to the CURRENT environment: Steeling oneself to suffering was arguably more necessary in the Hobbesian past.
I guess I just wonder if we're losing some part of the human experience with this simple idea of "suffering = bad". And whether that's where our fascination comes from with things like hot pepper challenges, or Jackass, or that guy who takes ice baths.
If something is meaningful, it's worth suffering for. We may well have a heuristic that flips that around: If we DIDN'T suffer for it, it's not meaningful. We jettison the suffering and accidentally jettison the meaning.
Or maybe I'm off my gourd and armchair philosophizing and you see this thread as a dangerous advocation of abusive behaviour. In which case I dunno, flay me in the comments or something. Maybe I'll find the experience meaningful. /thread
