It’s a long chain sunk-cost-fallacy. It starts with going to a party at the house and seeing all the guys and their camaraderie and realizing you are on the outside of that. Who doesn’t want to belong somewhere? You can build your own friend and family tribe over time but a frat gives you a whole community at once, a name, a gathering place, a permanent association that they tell you you will carry through life. Some of their dads are also still members. So you think wow and try to join. They say you’ll need to prove yourself. You don’t want to back down of course.

So you go through a few trials and chores. And from that point on, every chore or trial they hit you with is an opportunity to quit, but then everything you put into the previous chores and trials will be wasted so you persist. And ultimately, when you are inducted to the group, you value that more because of what you suffered to get it. It turns out value goes both ways deep in the human mind: something gives you great pleasure, it’s valuable if it can keep doing that. Something you now possess cost you great pain to get, it must be valuable and you’d better hold onto it so you don’t need to go through that again.

And then it’s on to the sadism and power flexing of putting others through it, secure in the knowledge that it won’t harm them because you endured it.

This is just a weird human social phenomenon that pops up no matter how many times it is banned. How do you get someone to join a group and stay loyal? Put them through hell to get in. They’ll never want to invalidate that investment.

Well, almost never. I did have one friend in college who went through the entire ordeal of rushing a frat and then on the day they were inducting members, he stepped up to the podium to be named a member and told them all to go fuck themselves and walked out forever. But I think he was the exception.