The heroes that we know saw the establishment, the faux authority, the rigged hierarchy based on patriarchy and gerontocracy in their respective societies—and they bucked it. The greatest leaders tore down systems that created oppression and built monuments to themselves on top of the scrap heap, triumphant.

Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Gandhi, 2Pac, Mother Theresa, The Ramones, Jesus Christ and Pussy Riot—someone told them all to fall in line and get above the oppression by climbing slowly above the oppressed.

They all let out a resounding fuck you.

Heroes, leaders and great men are not born by just sitting there and taking it. Fraternities are.

Fraternities are, combined, every bad thing known about American culture. Nepotism, hazing, ignored cultural appropriation and ethnic stereotyping, artificial barriers to entry, empty suits, disregard for newer and better ideas solely for the sake of it, institutionalized anti-intellectualism, gender stereotypes, gaggles of men going to the gym together, and Coors Light.

It should be no surprise that the founder of SnapChat counts himself among them. It also shouldn't be a surprise that, as leaked text transcripts revealed yesterday, he regaled to his fraternity brothers at Stanford University the time he pissed on a woman post-hookup. And it shouldn't be a surprise that his brothers outed him for cash once he achieved independent success in an app bubble and didn't include them in it.

The argument for fraternities is always the same thing: Networking for future jobs. Networking is a great way to staff up when an employee can vouch for a former coworker's ethics and effort on the job. But, save for some menial clerical work or doing of the dishes, there is nothing that translates from a fraternity to a positive work environment.

A bad work environment, though? There's plenty of that. Rules for the sake of rules, almost clichéd and ridiculous bossdom, ladder-climbing politics, and a party-line-or-death style of idea creation—those are all there.

Frats, instead, serve as feeder systems for jobs that are not based on merit or even friendship, but by connection to an amorphous machine that requires the dissolution of personhood and independent thought.

This is, if you haven't been paying attention, exactly what's wrong with everything in America right now. The feeder system is no stronger than its appendage on Wall Street, where the ethos imparts to look out only for yourselves and your brothers, even if it happens to be creating an irreparable class divide.

Not your brothers as in everybody on this Earth, like great men intend. That just means your frat brothers.

Instead there is just this and this and this and this and this. All of these hazing instances—from hot sauce on genitals to the old trick of forcing someone to drink until she passed out—happened in the last two weeks.

Thank God our greatest thinkers did not encounter frats. Barack Obama was not in a fraternity. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not frat members.

And they couldn't have been. Why? If Bill Gates had to worry about a gallon of milk challenge instead of creating the personal computer, we wouldn't have it.

Sometimes you have an idea before it's your time. We're all starting to figure out, as a society, that your time is not uniform. The only thing holding us back are hierarchies that exist just to prove that hierarchies must exist.

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