Let me be the first to congratulate you on reading my new column. I say this because, in my experience, outright cockiness seems to be the tone best fit for winning friends and influencing people at this school. It's all about caring less. All apathy all the time. And let me be clear that I ain't knockin' it, just making observations those kinds of "deep thought" observations that only come to mind in the middle of the night (hence the title). You know, deep thoughts like "Why do the utensil machines have multi-purpose' spoons but just seemingly single-purpose forks and knives? Where do they put zoo animals during the winter? I wonder if the Rob Zombie dude from EBAs intentionally looks like Rob Zombie. Maybe Jim Wright used to pay off Giaccone, and Kim just never got the memo. That has to be it, right?"
But I can save those questions for other columns, because they are either mysteries from the beginning of time or I'm too lazy to look on Yahoo! Answers right now. Instead, I'd like to share my expert analysis on the aforementioned culture of apathy and where I decided it comes from.
There seems to be a push at Dartmouth to achieve this ideal persona, one that is much more exaggerated among men and the fraternity culture in particular. Yeah, I know you want to stop reading now that I've pulled out that little over-pampered baby fostered by PC academia that is the buzz-phrase "fraternity culture." But my purpose is not political it stems solely from my hyper-developed fascination with human nature that sometimes leads me to watch marathons of trashy reality TV shows for hours on end. Simply put, we're all animals in different ways, and this is just one of them.
My theory is that it all began with coeducation. When women came to the College, it wasn't just outright misogyny that made them feel largely unwelcome. Coeducation threatened entrenched traditions of the social life that we still hold dear today, including Winter Carnival. Dartmouth men used to bus in their dates from women's colleges around the area, and the anticipation of these big weekends as well as the tradition of male road trips to women's colleges were seemingly ruined by the presence of Dartmouth women domestic models are far less exciting than imports, you see. The women did not aspire to be the ideal feminine counterparts represented by the female visitors. Instead, they attempted to adjust as invisibly as possible, to avoid any radical changes to the norm that would invite further backlash. They blended.
Meanwhile, the pledge term of sorts that freshmen had been subjected to by older male students in order to mold them into Dartmouth men became entirely absorbed into the fraternity pledge term, a deeply valued tradition whose function is hotly debated, but in essence the purpose is to forge a sense of brotherhood through the sacrifice of individual will and integrity. The ego is destroyed, and in its place emerges a less vulnerable communal identity. Along with the individualistic mindset of singular will go the trappings of insecurity a conscious sense of self requires moments of self-consciousness, after all. This idea of self-sacrifice for the sake of the group is nothing new or even categorically wrong the same mindset forms the basis of our military. Selfhood and personal will must be forgone for the good of the larger working whole. In some ways we can become fuller people through the abandonment of a singular ego in favor of a communal mindset, a group mentality.
But the loss of self-consciousness is dangerous to undertake. Yes, you can achieve the studied indifference that is at first indistinguishable from real self-confidence. But it demands apathy towards yourself as an individual, an internalization of self-degradation that you in turn project onto others. You devalue your own body through "hard guy" acts I would never (and probably could never) accurately enumerate here, and from there proceed to devalue the bodies and selves of others, even resent those seemingly self-righteous and overly entitled individuals who are always whining about what they deserve. Curiously, you become selfish without having any real self-consciousness, because subjective emotionality is for the weak, and you don't have time to care about the weak. You don't even really care about yourself, because you just don't matter. Nothing matters. Whatever. Sorry for partying. Numbness and invincibility are essentially interchangeable when it comes to their external expression, after all.
I took a class with a female professor who was a student here during the early days of coeducation, and she once remarked humorously that she didn't really mind singing the "Men of Dartmouth" alma mater, because, as she explained, "They were saying they had rocks for brains! We didn't want to be included in that."
I get it now. To fully achieve the ideal Dartmouth persona, you must be stone, inside and out. Don't care, just found the answer to my zoo question.
