There are a couple of terms and metaphors to describe this. For terms I would like you to consider the term “cognitive dissonance”. For metaphors I would like you to consider alcohol and tobacco.

First the metaphors: Sororities and fraternities are a lot like alcohol and tobacco, they are things that people will do regardless and they are things that will hurt many and will consume some. However it has been found that the best way to limit the damage is through government control and regulation. At least with control the negative effects can be mitigated. Sororities and fraternities represent the consequence of human weakness; students come to college as “fresh fish” and are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to loneliness and to the influences of their fellow students. They are likely to lose their way. When sororities and fraternities slip away from close oversight they begin to kill and injure their pledges in hazing, they commit acts of destruction against the community and they destroy the lives and least of all the academic prospects of their members. They become examples of the mayhem and brutality of “The Lord of the Flies”. But they are things that can’t be banned; they can only be driven underground. The solution is regulation and “adult” supervision by the university. So they are like alcohol and tobacco.

The second is this term “cognitive dissonance”. Sororities and fraternities run on cognitive dissonance. The term cognitive dissonance is used to express what happens when someone forces themselves to say something that they know is not true. After a while they believe the falsehood over the truth. The original psychology experiment that coined the term involved having people sell a drink that was formulated to taste vile. After a brief time selling the vile drink (which if memory serves me contained ipecac to ensure that it not only tasted bad but made people feel sick also) the people who were making the sales pitch began to think that the drink tasted good. The reversal of the person’s opinion in defiance of their own senses was caused by the individual resolving the cognitive dissonance between their actions and what they knew. The short answer is that if you have a really awful organization or club, the best way to make people believe they like it and to develop loyalty in them to the awful organization is to have them recruit for the organization. The other really good tried and true way to do this is to submit them humiliation and physical unpleasantness, then the person has to similarly resolve the cognitive dissonance to why they have allowed themselves to be abused in this way, and then as with the similar Stockholm syndrome they will decide that their captor, their torturer their tormentor is instead a noble person who loves them.

So which are you, the one serving the Kool-Aid or the one who has swallowed too much? Or perhaps you can instead have an existential moment and see that these are not things of indelible good but rather the product of human frailty that need to be controlled and continually reformed and their destructive proclivity to consume their members and to harm other can and should be instead channeled into attempts to produce a positive outcome or at least produce no harm.