How To Transform Boys into Men
A guest post from a fraternity leader about the vital primal elements of the pledge process and the improvements needed to reinvigorate Greek Life
Comrades: The war on fraternities is one front of the war on men. Greek life is under siege as powerful rites of passage that build resilience, forge bonds, and filter for commitment are demonized and eliminated. One of my readers has authored a brilliant guest post reflecting on his experiences as a fraternity leader. He explains the purpose of the pledge process and how beneficial stress can preserve the meaningful challenges that help boys turn into men.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”
To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
-G. K. Chesterton
Our young men today are in crisis. Boys are falling behind girls from kindergarten through college and beyond. Young men are detaching from work, wives, and children. Men account for nearly three-quarters of “deaths of despair,” with a suicide rate four times higher than women’s.
This is not a new phenomenon. Covid made things worse, but these trends were already firmly in place decades ago. Yet we continue to double down on the same failed solutions, especially on college campuses. More “zero-tolerance hazing policies”, more safetyism, more treating our young men like helpless boys who must be protected from the big bad world. Since masculinity has been deemed toxic, fraternities have been targeted for sanctions and eradication on campuses across America.
In reality, our sons need the opposite. They need more beneficial stress, stronger brotherly bonds, and deeper ties to meaningful organizations that uphold the freedom of association to maintain standards of excellence. Like many problems of modernity, our ancestors figured out the solutions long ago. We have chosen to disregard them. Now is the time to bring back those traditions and rebuild the fraternal institutions that forged millions of American men into our country’s greatest leaders.
The root of the problem is that our society does not understand the fraternity pledge process. In our confusion, we are destroying the infrastructure that transforms boys into leaders of men. Much of what is considered hazing is a series of ritualistic traditions that:
1) Strengthen individuals by pushing them outside of their comfort zone;
2) Bond them together by having them overcome challenges as a team;
3) Instill a deep appreciation for the organization by requiring sacrifice to join;
4) Filter out those who cannot meet or maintain group standards.
These traditions are features of human social organization, not bugs. Attempted prohibition only serves to push the phenomena underground, where it becomes more illegible and precarious. We claim to be protecting our young men from harm, but instead wee have stripped them of a crucial set of tools needed for their proper development. This has contributed in large part to the ongoing mental health crisis of younger generations.
While pledging and hazing occasionally devolves into dangerous abuse, those cases are rare exceptions. Administrators use any incident as the impetus to terminate all fraternities. We as a society would be better able to minimize the risks by accepting the natural male inclination towards these behaviors, educating our young men about them, and channeling them productively.
Having spent more than two decades as an alumnus advisor for my undergraduate fraternity, I have witnessed firsthand how our lack of understanding of these concepts has deprived our young men of the transformational process needed for their proper transition to independent adult life. It is of crucial importance that our progeny and the institutions dedicated to serving them recognize why and how these practices occur. Only then can they calibrate best practices that maximally benefit all involved.
Beneficial Stress
The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.
The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.
Good timber does not grow with ease,
The stronger wind, the stronger trees,
The further sky, the greater length,
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.
Where thickest lies the forest growth
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.
- Douglas Malloch, Good Timber
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Unless you have firsthand experience with hazing as fraternity alumnus, collegiate athlete, or military veteran, it can be difficult to comprehend how such a practice could confer benefit upon the person experiencing it. Media depictions often highlight extremes of humiliation and abuse. Movies like Animal House or Dazed and Confused portray hazing as bullying, done solely for the selfish pleasure of an older member exerting power over a younger initiate.
But these portrayals ignore something crucial. Humans respond to stress with adaptation because we are uniquely antifragile - we need stress to grow and thrive. Our immune systems only strengthen and develop to the extent they’re exposed to pathogens. A child who contracts chicken pox may break out in hives for a few days. In fighting off the infection the body learns to produce antibodies, ensuring permanent immunity upon future exposure. Similarly, children who grow up on farms are far less likely to develop allergies or asthma thanks to early exposure to a type of bacteria commonly found in farm dust.
Likewise, when we exercise by lifting weights, we are actually breaking down our muscles at the cellular level. We prompt our bodies to rebuild them even stronger than before, leveling up our physical capabilities to match the stressors placed upon us. Once again, stress is a crucial ingredient for our transformation. Our muscles will only grow to the extent that we challenge them.
The scientific term for this phenomenon is called eustress - literally “beneficial stress,” the opposite of distress (“bad stress”). The natural world is replete with organisms that depend on eustress to survive. For example, Hyalophora cecropia, North America’s largest native moth, spins a tough silken cocoon prior to its metamorphosis. When the time comes to emerge, the new adult moth squeezes fluid from its swollen abdomen into its crumpled wing veins. This hydraulic pressure causes the wings to fully expand and stiffen, eventually allowing the moth to break free from its cocoon. If the cocoon is cut open to help it slip out without a struggle, the wings remain small and limp so that it can never fly.
Our modern concept of “hazing” fails to differentiate between eustress and distress as all stress is now classified hazing. The Stop Campus Hazing Act, signed by President Biden last year, defines hazing as any act tied to initiation or membership in a student organization that creates a risk of physical or psychological harm - above the reasonable risk encountered in the course of participation in the organization, regardless of a participant’s willingness.
While that may seem right and proper at first glance, the devil is in the details. What is considered the “reasonable risk” of pledging a fraternity? Who gets to determine that? Not the pledge in question. Despite being legal adults who are free to risk their lives by joining the military or take on enormous student loan debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, the law expressly prohibits students from consenting to anything could be construed as hazing.
Here is concrete example of how easily this can go awry. The fraternity I pledged during undergrad had a local tradition of having pledges stand up on chairs in the dining hall to tell jokes to the brothers while they’re eating dinner. For the typical pledge, this is more difficult than you might imagine. Almost all of them stumble awkwardly through their first few attempts. They don’t speak loudly enough, or they forget the punchline, or in some cases they get so blustered they’re unable to finish the joke at all. The second they mess up, they have dozens of brothers heckling and teasing them – a stand-up comic’s worst nightmare.
As the weeks go by, they improve considerably. By the end of their pledgeship, boos and hisses from unimpressed brothers are replaced with raucous laughter throughout the room. The pledge (or his parents, or peers, or local university administrative officials) might at first think this is solely for the vindictive delight of the active brothers, with no higher purpose than to emasculate and humiliate the pledge. Then it comes time for the young man to deliver a presentation to his class at the end of the semester, and like a moth emerging from a cocoon he finds himself a confident, eloquent public speaker. He discovers that presenting to a classroom or boardroom is a breeze compared to the hectic environment of the fraternity dining hall.
Several years ago, an employee of our fraternity’s national headquarters bureaucracy saw this tradition. We quickly received word from headquarters to immediately cease the practice. They considered this to be a form of psychological hazing that may cause the pledge to spiral from embarrassment, to anxiety and depression, and potentially to suicide. It may sound ridiculous, but this is only one of numerous examples of how misunderstood most hazing practices are. Like the compassionate entomologist who unknowingly dooms the moth by cutting open its cocoon, in aiming to eliminate all risk and provide a “safe space” for our young people we are actually often undermining the very development structures they need to grow and thrive.
Building a Bond
Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
-Rudyard Kipling, The Law of the Jungle
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. – Proverbs 27:17
No man is an island unto himself: the way of men is the way of the gang. Since time immemorial men have lived and worked together as a team, whether venturing forth into the unknown to hunt and provide for the tribe or defending it from attackers. This history has left an indelible impact on our psyche. Thousands of generations of men were selected for their ability to form an integrated unit and persevere through difficult circumstances to accomplish their goals.
From ancient hunter gatherers coordinating to stampede buffalo off a cliff, to members of a Greek phalanx locking shields for a collective attack, to modern smokejumpers parachuting in to control a wildfire, a group’s cohesiveness was a matter of life and death. One weak link could break the chain. A high level of trust was crucial for ensuring group success.
Given our history as a social species dependent on tribal unity for survival, it is no surprise that fraternal pledgeship often centers on tasks that necessitate the full effort of the pledge class in order to succeed. It is well-documented in our that goal-oriented group activity (in particular shared hardship) works as a powerful bonding agent because it triggers several social and neurobiological mechanisms all at once:
Costly signaling of commitment: Showing up and sticking around, especially when times get tough, is a signal that can’t be faked or easily acquired, so it creates a reliable basis for trust and future cooperation.
Mutual aid and earned trust: When members must rely on each other to complete tasks or achieve objectives, each successful assist becomes concrete evidence that partners are dependable, which increases confidence in team cohesiveness and reduces concerns about potential free-riders.
Identity fusion with psychological kinship: Shared affect collapses the boundary between the self and others; fused members will sacrifice more readily when helping the group feels like helping the self.
Narrative and meaning-making: Hardships become origin stories; shared mythology provides long-lasting cohesion and a template for future challenges.
A fraternity alumnus once told me, “Women bond face-to-face, but men bond shoulder-to-shoulder.” For women, catching up on the phone or over coffee may be sufficient to build or maintain a bond, but men simply don’t function like that. We need shared activities, ideally linked to the group’s purpose, to build the scaffolding of trust and camaraderie. For men, friendship is tested in the forge of hardship, not in the comfort of convenience.
Without the high-cost signals of real effort, an individual’s commitment to the group remains ambiguous. Fewer chances to pitch in and help means trust grows slowly. Without any group accomplishments to highlight, identity never shifts from “me” to “we,” depriving the group of the opportunity to rewrite personal identities into a new collective.
When I was pledging my fraternity, one of our most arduous tasks was the “build party”. For over a month, the pledge class had to work together to create the entire infrastructure for a massive themed party in the house’s backyard. The significant planning and coordination involved tested us both as individuals and as a pledge class.
We learned how to plan, budget, and build a large scale project. More importantly, we quickly learned about each others’ characters. Who among us could be counted on to show up early or to stay late? who would put in work and who would shirk it? Who would approach a challenge with an ambitious plan? Who would whine and complain instead of getting things done? It was exhausting work, but the payoff was more than worth it. Not only did we get to host an amazing party that we assembled with our bare hands, but we found our pledge class bonds stronger than ever thanks to hundreds of hours spent working as a team towards a worthwhile goal.
Traditions like this are becoming increasingly rare. If a fraternity still even has a pledgeship period, it is likely too short to encompass such a large-scale project. The use of power tools is deemed too risky (what if someone gets hurt?!). Rather than being viewed as an opportunity for the pledge class to bond, many fraternities prohibit pledge-class only activities. They claim it promotes a culture of dominance and subservience. Instead, all members should share equal rights and responsibilities from the beginning. Not only does this deprive the class of valuable opportunities to come together as a group, it also robs them of an opportunity to invest in the organization they’re about to join. Ironically, this reduces their likelihood of remaining involved.
A Labor Loved
That which we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. — Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Easy come, easy go. – English proverb
In an attempt to mitigate liability, most national chapters are shortening or eliminating pledgeship. They are also limiting the number of activities pledges can participate in or the amount of time they are permitted to spend with the chapter while pledging. While this may reduce risk the same way never leaving your house will reduce your risk of being involved in a car accident, it also destroys one of the primary sources of value for the brother-to-be: the labor he must expend in order to join the group.
Once again, science is here to remind us of the ancient truths we moderns have forgotten:
Effort Justification: People who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something value it more highly than those who attain the same thing with minimal effort. The higher the entry price, the harder people work to convince themselves membership is special.
The IKEA Effect: Labor results in increased valuation. Those who assemble their own furniture value it more highly than identical pre-assembled pieces (I can assure the reader that the same concept applies to fraternity parties).
Scarcity Signals Value: Things in scarce supply are rated as more desirable than those in abundant supply. Giving away the full benefits of brotherhood to a new recruit on day one reduces its scarcity and cheapens it in the eyes of the chapter.
Sunk Costs: Those who have invested a significant amount of time, money or effort into an endeavor are much more likely to continue it compared to those who have invested little.
Some critics claim that having pledges do “grunt work” like cleaning the chapter house or running errands for brothers is demeaning and abusive. But there is a reason pledgeship is often referred to as “the best time you’ll never want to have again,”. Even tedious, mundane tasks like mopping the floor or scrubbing a toilet can contribute to a heightened sense of appreciation for membership once the pledgeship process is over. Extreme cases aside (e.g. mowing the yard with a pair of scissors might be overkill), labor isn’t abuse – it’s a psychological engine that forges lasting commitment to the fraternity.
The Importance of Filtering
Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company,
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill.
-William Butler Yeats, To A Young Beauty
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
– Matthew 7:18-20
In Judges 7, Gideon is called by God to deliver Israel from the vastly superior Midianite army. God warns that if Israel wins by sheer numbers, they’ll credit their own strength rather than divine aid. So Gideon stages a test at the water’s edge. He selects only 300 men who cupped water in their hands and lapped it up, while dismissing everyone who knelt down and drank directly from the river. With just those 300 men, Gideon directs a night raid and secures a stunning victory.
Such is the power of filtering. Just as Gideon’s tiny band proved more reliable and cohesive than a vast untested horde, a fraternity that filters out recruits who lack shared values, resilience, or discipline ends up with a smaller but stronger brotherhood. While recruitment lengths and processes vary from campus to campus, many universities limit fraternity rush to only a handful of days or a week prior to the start of the semester. Chapters and potential new members alike have little time to determine how suitable a fit each is for the other. We can ace a job interview but then fail miserably at the job itself. The same concept applies when “vibing” with a potential pledge compared to seeing how he performs during hardships.
Gideon knew that simply asking his men “Who among you is a skilled warrior?” would not yield the same results as actively testing them. The way his water test identified the men most alert to their surroundings is analogous to how a proper pledgeship will assess pledges for qualities like perseverance, loyalty, or creativity. This ensures only high-quality recruits make it through the new member process, while limiting the wasted resources spent on recruiting and training individuals who won’t stick around. The process benefits the rest of the pledge class by enhancing the trust, confidence, and dedication of those that remain, resulting in an initiated group strengthened by mutual respect and proven capability.
If my Biblical example of ancient wisdom is not enough, once again we can point to modern research to back up our findings:
Barriers to entry improve organizational quality: High “entry costs” like rigorous interviews or probationary tasks not only attract people whose values already align with the organization, but they also weed out those whose do not, leading to more stable, homogenous cultures and lower churn over time.
Person-organization fit predicts entry and stay: Applicants’ perceived fit with organizational values strongly predicted both acceptance of offers and longer tenure. In other words, those who survived a tough screening and felt “this is for me” were markedly more likely to stick around.
Higher person-organization fit correlates with significantly lower turnover: This is the goal of any strenuous filtering process: lower turnover and greater organizational commitment.
Fit drives positive behaviors: A stronger “fit” not only reduces quitting but also boosts performance, citizenship behaviors, and satisfaction. Rigorous entry tasks amplify these effects by ensuring those who make it through genuinely resonate with the group.
In order to properly judge a tree, we must give it time to flower and fruit. Unfortunately, our modern insistence on minimizing risk at all costs deprives our young men of this valuable filtering tool. We insist organizations accept whatever seeds are planted, regardless of the quality of fruit they may bear later on, and then we wonder why these organizations continue to decline.
Recommendations
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
"...whether it's SEALs or any high-level military operation group, whenever you're dealing with people that have done something that's extraordinarily difficult, there's like a rite of passage that you guys have gone through, that a lot of people think is missing from particularly young men in our society and culture; there's no real moment where you recognize that you've done something incredibly difficult and you've actually become a man."
"It almost seems like society is pushing it the other direction, where that shouldn't exist or it should be avoided."
-Joe Rogan and Andy Stumpf, JRE #1885
In the Joe Rogan podcast episode quoted above, Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf describes a 2022 incident related to a routine training exercise involving SEAL trainees being exposed to CS gas. A video of this exercise went viral and received social media outrage at how painful and miserable it looked. The Navy investigated to ensure no “hazing” was taking place. While the investigation ended up merely refining existing safety protocols rather than abolishing the CS gas training outright, the episode highlights the central issue regarding our society’s view of hazing: a complete lack of understanding as to why men might voluntarily undergo stressful and potentially dangerous challenges.
To quote Stumpf:
"...it looks horrible, because it is horrible. And the point of that training is, it's supposed to suck. It's supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to be exposed to that in a controlled training environment...the first time you experience that shouldn't be in a combat zone."
Just like boot camp is designed to prepare soldiers for the battlefield, fraternity pledgeship is designed to provide a transformative experience that prepares young men for the challenges they will face in the real world. Given the real world is not a risk-free “safe space,” instead of focusing on eliminating all sources of stress and risk from pledgeship, we should instead harness stress wisely and use it to strengthen our young men. Properly executed, after initiation they may be strong enough to withstand any unsafe space they encounter.
While there is much work to be done in pushing back on our overly-feminized culture of “safetyism,” here are four recommendations that would go a long way towards getting us back on the right track:
Rewrite hazing statutes to separate eustress from distress.
Our society chooses not to constrain all drivers to a speed limit of 10 mph to eliminate traffic fatalities because we are willing to compromise on perfect safety for a significant amount of utility. We should similarly acknowledge the benefits to be had in allowing our young men to push themselves beyond their comfort zones in the pursuit of self-improvement, while acknowledging that doing so will entail a certain measure of risk. A blanket ban on any act that creates stress treats standing on a chair to tell a joke the same as forced alcohol poisoning. Governing bodies should borrow from occupational safety models and ask two questions: Does the activity have a clear developmental purpose tied to the organization’s mission? Is the risk proportionate and manageable with informed adult consent and competent supervision? Activities that pass both tests belong in a “protected eustress” category insulated from criminal penalties.
Educate young men on the “why” of pledgeship and the fine line between challenge and harm.
Rescue beavers who have only ever lived indoors still act out the dam-building process, despite having never witnessed or being taught about dams before. The behavior is built into them. Likewise, the desire for men to form groups based on achieving certain ends is as old as humanity itself. Every young man who aspires to join a group will yearn to prove himself worthy of admission. Every group worth joining will naturally aim to select the best candidates available, maximize their potential, and ensure their allegiance to the group. Denying this reality and insisting young men abandon these motivations will not make them disappear. We need to educate our young men about the nature of their reality and what to expect from the world of other men, so they know what they’re getting in to from the beginning. Universities already mandate risk management trainings like alcohol-safety courses. They could add a Pledgeship Literacy module that:
1) Explains the psychology of stress-based bonding and growth;
2) Walks through case studies showing where good intentions went off the rails;
3) Gives would-be brothers a vocabulary including eustress, distress, informed consent, duty of care so they can self-police before things go awry.
Publish and promote high-quality pledgeship blueprints.
National fraternities, ROTC programs, and outdoor-leadership schools have decades of safe, effective rites of passage: back-country service projects, timed teamwork challenges, exercise programs, public-speaking gauntlets, skills-share teach-backs, charity fundraisers that require real sweat. Create an open-source repository (think “GitHub for initiation tasks”) vetted by alumni, risk-management pros, and student representatives. Chapters that adopt or adapt from the repository could get insurance incentives or rewards from Fraternity HQ, while those who deviate would be left out.
Treat our young men like the adults they are.
We trust 18-year-olds to drive motor vehicles, vote in elections, and risk their lives in the military. We should extend the same adult agency to their decision to join fraternities or other student organizations. Provide honest briefings on risks, then let them choose and own their outcomes. Replace the blanket “no one can consent to hazing” clause with an informed-consent standard, much like the one that governs contact sports. A combat athlete can sign a waiver, strap on pads, and knowingly accept the risk of a broken nose in a boxing ring. What he can’t consent to is being hit with a pipe outside the rules. Pledgeship should follow the same logic. Spell boundaries in writing, require every participant to affirm them, and hold leaders criminally liable only when they step outside those agreements. This respects young men’s autonomy while still drawing a bright legal line against genuine abuse.
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you are involved in various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But you must let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.
- James 1:2-4
Stories from my pledge experience:
A mother loves a boy. A woman loves a Man.
It takes men to make a man. Great article!