You don't have to join a fraternity in college. Or a sorority, for that matter, if you're a woman. You're free to do whatever you want. It's not required.
If you do join, you can even set boundaries for how far you're willing to go during hazing. If something bothers you, then walk away and shrug it off. At the end of the day, it's all voluntary. Most social groups are, and what's great about that is that it is part of a free society. You're an individual with individual preferences, individual limits, and individual associations.
But imagine if you weren't allowed. Imagine if that decision to associate or not was made for you, and in an official capacity by the state.
If you thought, "Well then, that's not a free country," then you're correct. A free nation is defined, at least in part, by free association. If you were an authoritarian looking to seize control of the populace in some fashion, that'd be one of the first things you'd eliminate.
Predictably, people with statist twitches in their brains are watching the Cornell case and suggesting that we destroy that very right. As my colleague Kyle Becker noted, Bill Maher — who can't decide if he wants to get something insanely right or insanely wrong with no in between — suggested that, as a result of the Cornell case, Greek Life organizations should see the dumpster:
Whatever the eventual outcome of the Cornell investigation, the accounts of heavy intoxication, drug use and group sexual activity at a fraternity house ought to concern parents sending their children off to college.
Maher cited 128 hazing-related deaths since 2000 as another reason to abolish fraternities. He even suggested sororities should go, too, although his description of them as "b*tch factories producing the Karens of tomorrow" was a vintage Maher line.
Banning Greek organizations outright is a sweeping proposal. But why should universities continue giving fraternity and sorority houses so much freedom to operate with lax supervision?
I won't go too far into the case specifics because that's been done to death, only to say that it sounds like some people got together to be degenerates and, as a result of their degeneracy, they're winning degenerate prizes.
What I care about is that these were individual decisions made by a group of individuals, but for some reason, these decisions have become consequential for concepts outside the event, including the idea of free association, and I personally have a huge problem with that. My position is that if Greek Life is creating chaos more than it creates net benefits (it doesn't), then people should choose to be a part of it or not on their own. That decision should not be made for them.
I also have a hard time swallowing the idea that fraternities, in general, create monsters out of men. Maher stating that a young man is only one fraternity away from being a character in Lord of the Flies is off by a country mile. Plenty of men's organizations don't devolve into drug/alcohol fueled pits of degeneracy and violence. The scene around frats is often young men with newly discovered freedom, raging hormones, and their best friends around them.
Can this lead to trouble? Yeah, sometimes the best kind. In the end, more often than not, nobody gets hurt, and everyone comes away with memories they'll look back on fondly for all their years. Very rarely does it end in the disaster that is the Cornell case.
And that, I think, is worth understanding. Sometimes bad things are going to happen. Heinous things that disgust and repulse you, but until it becomes a steady pattern that truly starts to affect society on a macro scale, it should never result in us handing over our freedoms. That is emotional thinking, not logical.
The bottom line here is that we shouldn't allow people, especially the left, to weasel their way into our hearts and begin encouraging us to give up our freedoms. It may seem like a moral end they're aiming for, but I think that we all know the real agenda by now.
Keep the focus on individuals facing consequences for their individual actions.
