the majority of the Greek Life atmosphere revolves around paying for friends and joining the hive mentality.
I vehemently disagree.
I didn't pay for friends with my dues. You know what I did pay for?
I'll give you my moist poignant fraternity memory, that happened during my sophomore year (pledged as a fall freshman):
I was working late on a stats assignment (probability theory) with another brother, who I always looked up to. He was one year older than me, but we were taking this class together. We were both shit at this subject and it was about 2:00 AM as we were maybe halfway through the assignment, at most. The two of us, at the kitchen table, poring over every reference/equation/theorem we could find in the textbook trying to solve one problem at a time.
Eventually, one of the other guys from my year came down from his room, red-faced and just laid out flat on the couch. His motion went straight from stairs to face-down with his head on a pillow. First thought: probably drunk. Second thought: what's that sound?
When I pushed him aside off the couch, he was crying. I gave a nod to the older brother I was working with, then picked my boy up and walked him out to our back-porch so we could talk. He told me he had just gotten off the phone with his family, and his brother was being deployed to the Middle East. His brother would be leaving within a week, and he was beside himself because he couldn't go home to say good-bye. There was a major project or presentation that he had to turn in, and he couldn't go back to be with his family.
He cried and cried, and I cried with him, for hours. We sat on the floor outside (about a year later we finally got a goddamn bench for that porch) and ruined at least one shirt and a pair of pants in the puddle created by our window AC unit. I just kept my arm around his shoulders, and we talked. Talked for a little bit about his family, talked for a little bit about his school work, talked for a little bit about his favorite TV shows. Just talked.
It was past 6:00, maybe even close to 7:00 AM when we finally went back inside. I had long given up getting sleep, or getting a halfway-decent grade on the assignment I had been working on. I was collecting my book bag and gauging whether it was too early in the semester to use my "drop" on an assignment when I noticed that there was an extra set of papers next to where I was sitting. Before he finally called it a night, the older brother finished the assignment on his own, then wrote out on a separate sheet the solutions to the problems for me to take a look at. In a sleep-deprived stupor, I transcribed the solutions onto the end of my work, took a shower, then got ready for classes.
That was the kind of brotherhood we shared, one night out of seven days a week. One night out of 16 weeks a semester. One night out of 4 years of school. And one night that cemented my bond with my brothers.
Don't fucking tell me our "Greek Life atmosphere" is about joining some kind of hive mentality. We pursue that connection, we commit to that connection, because we know that they'll do the same for us.