Chapotraphouse

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

These are literally incubators for the future generations of the ruling class.

Oh that's just cracker gitmo

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

Frats are gangs for jocks who want to pretend they're nerds

Buddy, I've lived here going on almost 37 years, and even I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Looks like the last scene of the Blair Witch Project

I was in one of these years ago during my brief stint at an American university. Hazing wasn’t this bad but I did have to chug galleons of milk that made me puke and did pushups on a floorboard with splinters sticking out.

The life itself is glamorized heavily and you do get a sense of camaraderie. They’re known to throw some of the biggest parties on campuses and they can help you with jobs later on in life with the connections you can make in them.

Europs and Britons when seeing a relic of distinctly European culture in the US:

Imagine a Hamburg steak...

Americans (i.e. Burgers) are raised in a very atomized cultured. Many Americans prefer the solitude of the automobile to socializing with other Americans. We can see this from their concept of the 'drive thru,' which allows the American to indulge in their national past-time of eating grease and drinking 'big-gulps.' If they have to socialize, they like it to happen under strict and predictable conditions. The fraternity, which must not be confused with fraternizing ('friendship' is an unfamiliar concept in the land of the Burger), is a way for the American to mimic the experience of the schooling system, allowing them to navigate the unfamiliarities of the social world through familiar hierarchies and known structures. Physical punishment is sometimes incorporated as a way to externalize the inner anxieties of the American, and to make visible the invisible hierarchies they are 'big-gulping' their way through.

Source:

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.

It's where future Epsteins are created.

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

You really wanna bake your noodle, people pay six figure loans for this

There's are several documentaries about Fraternities i can recommend

Animal House, Revenge of The Nerds, The Skulls...

CW: SA, heavy drinking, violence, general skeezy behavior

the current frat brothers had to do gay shit to get in the frat so now they do too