I've been thinking a lot, lately, about blood pacts as a mechanism for forming solidarity behind what would otherwise be questionable sorts of causes. I first thought of blood pacts and bonds of complicity in relation to pledging frat brothers during their hell weeks, but certainly I can think of many historical examples as well.
In IB World History last year, we studied 'Communism in Crisis'. I remember reading one remarkable article which provided a sort of sociological and psychological analysis of Lenin's Red Terror and later waves of terror in the Soviet Union. Soviet terror pretty quickly brings to mind ballin Stalin, but I'd argue that Lenin used it to a much more important cause than garnering solidarity to the party: he formed the fucking Soviet Union, after all!
Simply, the article's thesis was that Lenin's Red Terror was intended as a mechanism to forge complicity within and behind the empire: the terror that the Cheka employed in rooting out dissidents in the empire was not (indeed, could not be) openly contested by any Russians; but this simply made them complicit in the amoral acts that they knew were being carried out.
This complicity bound them to assent to any future acts, moral or amoral, that the empire (at least, it soon seemed to become another one) might carry out. Complicity in initial extreme acts is binding for future state actions because, citizens who did not protest this initial brutality were implicitly pledging support to the regime in whatever it might thenceforth decide to do. If they did not protest these extreme inhuman acts then, how can they protest anything more or less objectionable in the future without appearing spineless, dubious, and even inhuman?
The success of the blood pact throughout history; and its continuing successes; are highly indicative of how we value human dignity. As rightly we should! But this concept of dignity is co-opted and liquified and re-molded to suit the needs of other bodies trying to manipulate our sentiments. We will go to great lengths to maintain our dignity, but I would argue that we lose it in these efforts sometimes.
This is the mentality of forging a blood pact: debilitation of the idea of personal choice, often to the extent of robbing people of their senses of humanity and individuality; through extreme publically-known displays of brutality and terror, amoral acts like murder and torture of dissidents. Blood Pacts seem to me to be multi-purpose mechanisms: firstly in the bonds of irretractable complicity that I already discussed, and secondly in creating an all-permeating atmosphere of fear where the people start to police themselves and where the personal psyche is, at its most extreme, demolished; at its least, compromised. Fear warps the human mind, until we begin to lose the boundaries between reality and falsity, and we lose any motivations for personal initiative to better the human condition. At the opposite end of the scale from jingoism, this is the counter-threat of terrorism: especially state terrorism.
Kanan Makiya writes about this sort of terrorism in his documentation of the Ba'thist party's rise to power in Iraq in the 1950s and 60s. Saddam Hussein pulled a brilliant maneuver in the show trials of 1968, binding the Iraqi citizens not to complicity with the party, but the party to complicity with its new leader: Makiya writes that this was an ingenious maneuver that even Stalin would not have the gall to perform.
Fear as a mechanism of psychological enslavement is widely observed throughout history. Considering a Hobbesian state of nature, fear is what debilitates the development of humane...HUMAN... values and sentiments; and though he certainly does not seem to think we are inherently capable of these feelings, he acknowledges that agreements and some sort of cordiality based on contracts can be formed once we have surpassed the state of nature (and must be formed in order to leave the state of nature). So a constant fear of attack, murder, and property theft debilitate us in a state of nature such that we cannot enjoy or even begin to understand basic human values like empathy, kindness, generosity, and virtue.
This is a phenomenon we can also observe in a 'Republic of Fear', as the one Makiya is describing in Iraq: fear essentially pulverized the psyche so that Iraqis began to police themselves, stopped standing up for their fellow humans suffering under inhumane acts. Indeed, they even began to lose their sense for what WERE inhumane acts. Fear blurs the lines between true and false, right and wrong, safe and unsafe, sane and insane. It breaks down the walls between your head, your perceptions: reality; and the reality being fed to you in your republic of fear.
But I can think of fear as a force in apolitical circumstances as well. I'd like not to dwell on myself as a victim in any sense of the word, but I think Kajal, me, and many other children of Indian parents (who probably only aptly notice this phenom juxtaposed against my 'normal' American frriends' upbringings) have been raised in not republics but households of fear. Not to any extent of Ba'thist corpse dismemberment and televised abuse but perhaps in an even more deep-seated, creeping psychological manner that permeates all of our interactions afterwards.
I'd like to propose, firstly, that my parents, and a lot of Indians and other victims of an outward-looking fearful or stressful upbringing, were subject to threats and fear throughout their childhoods. Not so much blood pacts through terrorism, but their parents used what would be considered mild forms of verbal and physical abuse in the U.S. as everyday acceptable methods of parenting. So they liquified some sense of individuality and confidence which Americans value and strive to preserve in their sassy (obnoxious?) children; very early on. Liquify it and re-mold it to obedience; somewhat retarding individual growth, but perhaps developing a more communally-oriented aspect of their persons. Though this is a hard part of your self to exercise when thousands of miles away from your closest kin.
In the same way their fear-riddled upbringings retarded some of their emotional and personal growth, I believe fear retards the growth of divergent opinions in societies. And this is one reason that the blood pact mentality of institutionalizing fear has been so successful in the past: see Stalin, Hussein, HItler; and continues to be succesful today: see frats, the army.
As happy as the groups which make up frats and the U.S. army might be, they aren't exactly known for their vibrant political life, or for voicing any sorts of drastic different opinions on the reg. (you might challenge me here with the recent speaking up about don't-ask don't-tell and PTSD and sexual assault coverings-up). But I challenge you to find anything like that in frats, despite their army-mentality and large group size.
I don't really know what I think of Greek life, and a lot of times I am the unfair critic. I didn't grow up in a preppy white southern family built on business who prizes networking enough to shell out hundreds of dollars a semester just for me to pledge a sorority. (See: unfair bitter critic). Recently, though, I felt really bad because I called a kid douchey for getting a Sigma Epsilon tattoo, when he went on to explain that his parents are twice divorced so Sig Ep is his only real family, the only place he's really felt at home. Let me just say that I think that's atypical and understandable, if not pretty cool. I acknowledged that I can be a quick one to jump to conclusions; although he's definitely discovered his penchant for brotherly bonds through yet another psychological mechanism (not that that is a problem.... there's obviously a psychological mechanism underlying EVERYTHING).
Anyways, I don't know if it's fair to assign some sort of qualitative value to the reasons people have for entering Greek life, but I can relate more, if not respect more, his family-bond sort of reasons for pledging, than those of many a University of Virginia frat brother I've met. A lot of UVA brothers are great people: intelligent, personable, kind, and whatever else...But they, and others, pledged in family name, or to fit in more to the UVA stereotype, or to make business connections. I can't demerit reasons purely because they seem self-serving. I think to do so would be pretty hypocritical. But I respect my Sig Ep tattooed friend's reasons for pledging and inking, and at the very least find them heartrending. :'(.
But I have always wondered at the sort of blind brotherly love and respect for ambiguous, if not sometimes abusive, authority, that UVA frat brothers enjoy. If they didn't enter into their frats seeking an emotional replacement for family, why would some of them also progress to get their letters permanently branded into their flesh? (Yeah, literally branded). The shit they put up with, I tell you. Obviously I don't know half of it. But I digress. All I'm trying to say is there's got to be something more that is cementing their blind submission and solidarity. A bunch of kids met in the most awkward circumstances possible, didn't know shit about one another beforehand, and then became the sorts of people who would break their backs or their daddy's banks working to pay their pledge fees, or go on to donate money and entertain a literally eternal bond with their fraternity.
This is not something I think I have exactly observed in sororities. What's different?
Well first and foremost, the pledging process for frats and sororities is ludicrously different. I think the hell that frats put their pledge classes through every year is a way of forming a blood pact within the fraternity. My friend Alex told me about one pledge process at a particular frat at UVA that I can't remember the name of (and shouldn't, anyway) called the 'Ring of Fire'. It's worse than it sounds. The older frat superiors had their pledge bitches arrange themselves into a circle, and drop trou. They then proceeded to pour hot sauce on their manhood. The first pledge to squeal had to chew a habanero pepper; chew, not eat, no water, etc. Pretty bad.
This is the sort of forced situation prime for fomenting blood pacts. None of the pledges, to the best of my knowledge, dropped the pledge process based on this task. It is a disgraceful thing to quit pledging. A boy will be ridiculed if not ostracized, even if frats are technically supposed to take pains to make sure that this doesn't happen.
As far as the fear component of terror involved in blood pacts that I discussed earlier, frats do something called a 'line-up', where they basically line the boys up and, one by one, pulverize their self-esteems. (At least, that's what it sounds like). Described by one pledge brother who lived in our building, they 'stand you there and tell you everything that is wrong with you'. Even physical appearances are fair game. This isn't overt terrorism, but it is a psychological terrorism that builds in the pledges an initial inferiority dependency on the frat superiors: a dependency that fills in the void of what used to be their hard sought-after adolescent self esteem. Therefore, frats also exemplify the fear-induced psychological liquification and re-molding which I noted also occurred in Iraq (Makiya's 'Republic of Fear').
The idea of blood pacts in the army is something I'll have to consider later, because I know even less about the army than I claim to know about frats. But I can draw a lot of parallels between the fraternity mentality and the army mentality, not least the eternally binding brotherhood, blind respect for one another and for figures of authority, and bonding through shared experiences, good and bad. They even use some of the same exact shared experiences, like line up and boot camp.
I think the idea of bonding through shared experience is the most powerful and emotionally endowing part of being in a frat or in the army. It's like how you bonded with your closest friends in adolescence, but taken to a whole new level. And it's only weirder because a lot of these shared experiences are strategically maneuvered into existence by your superiors, rather than happened upon by chance; I find this creepy and untasteful. Frats and armies are both organs which have mastered the art of molding the human psychology and the science of initiating blood pacts on a level far more human, relatable, and accountable than those methods used by Lenin or Saddam Hussein. Their methods are commendable in their uniting power, curious in their brainwashing power, and, ultimately, unnerving in their sheer power itself.
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