From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: Vacation Time!
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 13:45:08 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA
Keywords: Ditch Day, vanishing room

In article <1992Jul23.103631.22708@wvus.org> art@wvus.org (Art Nicolaysen) writes:
>(bill nelson) writes:
>> (David LeCompte) writes:
>>: >: a lamp where the door was.  When their friend returned to find
>>: >: the wall, they denied knowing who he was, as sort of existentialist
>>: >: prank.

>and unfriendly-towards-undergrads staffer.  The perpetrators located her
>parking space, and made it disappear by repainting all the white lines
>in the 10-car lot.  Not a pleasant thing to come back to on a Monday
>morning!
>>
>>This was supposedly during a yearly, "underclassmen get even with the
>>upperclassmen" day type of thing. I do not recall all the details. You
>>might be able to find more information in your library.
>
>There is an annual "Ditch Day" held in late May, but the object is for
>the frosh to solve elaborate puzzles left for them by the upper
>classes.  These puzzles/obstacles/degrading feats are known as "stacks", 
>after the ***old*** practice of stacking furniture against the door to 
>keep the frosh out of one's room during Ditch Day.
>
>The revenge aspect only enters in if an upperclassman is caught on campus
>after 9am; the offender is punished by being tied to a tree for the whole day.


   I'm glad I got through college without ever having to deal with any
   of this infantile bullshit.   Nevermind the way it reinforces, and 
   invents where necessary, even *more* stupid group allegiances, identities,
   obligations and similar stuff that our society already has too much of.   

   If anyone in college had ever tried anything like that on me I'd have
   had them in court for wasting my time/tuition, interfering in my 
   education, destruction of property, assault, or whatever else was
   appropriate, faster than you could say "Perry Mason".  

   
   Obligatory libertarian reference:  These kinds of pranks illustrate
   a basic, and often overlooked, problem for libertarianism:  liber-
   tarianism is fundamentally based on the primacy of the individual.
   But humans have an annoying (to me anyway) tendency to seek out 
   group membership and they often seem to **like** to submerge their
   individualism in favor of the group.  Whether it's mass spectator
   sports (e.g., the bleachers at a baseball game), religion, politics
   (witness the fervor by Ross Perot's followers), they like to **join**
   groups and often do things in groups that would seem stupid, embarassing,
   uncomfortable, or just plain unthinkable in any other context. 
   Today poor ghetto kids join gangs and terrorize the neighborhood,
   middle-class men sit around in the woods chanting and beating drums.
   In "Yugoslavia" people kill civilian strangers based on group
   identity.  College kids join fraternities or self-identify not 
   just as "freshmen" and "upperclassmen", but form *loyalties*
   and create *conflicts* (as illustrated above) based on these.


   It has always been these forces which most rob people of their
   liberty and property.   In this century it has been the strong,
   central nation-state, often symbolizing some philosophical "ism"
   -- NAZIism, Communism, Demopublicanism, etc.  If you don't happen
   to agree with the philosophy of the group, too bad.   But history
   shows that in the absence of this there will be something else: the
   mob, the tribe, the church, etc.   It is always *something* -- 
   individualism just doesn't seem to be compatible with basic human
   nature.


---peter


 


   


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