Within just a few weeks of joining my sorority, an older member approached me in the campus Starbucks — “the largest Starbucks by square feet in the world,” the student tour guide had boasted on my campus visit, to my awestruck approval. No doubt the older member had noticed me sitting in the pumpkin-spice latte holding pen fondling my newly treasured Tridelt sweatshirt. She heard I was a public relations major, she said, and wanted to help integrate me in the enormous communications school.

It is hard to overstate the impact this woman had on my college experience and later employment prospects. At the time she was the “agency director” of the campus’s premier communications extracurricular, a student-run PR firm that glistened on résumés. Her approval fast-tracked my acceptance into the program, I’m sure, which accepted only a few dozen students. By senior year, I was the agency director and had — I can only assume now — three solid job offers because of it.

This type of networking is a major function of sororities and fraternities, but that wasn’t why I joined. At eighteen, I joined for all the most humiliating and human reasons — my concerns were shallow, selfish, superficial. I was not thinking about my labor market prospects or elite reproduction. I was thinking about the fact that I wanted to be at once special and assimilated. I wanted acceptance from and association with people who I sensed — in some proto-class-conscious way, nascently alert to its hierarchy but not yet disgusted by it — were better than me, a kid from a no-name town in Kentucky known only for its sprawling Amazon regional fulfillment center. And I wanted to get drunk with boys!

But my experience — being plucked out by a high-achieving and generous older member then ushered along the path to accolades and social capital — is indicative of the particular privilege inherent to the Greek system, which can transform the metaphoric big city into a close-knit small town. The mechanism is far less organized than outsiders may assume. There’s no formal process by which alumni committees funnel applications through the side door of Fortune 500 companies. The power of membership is softer, more discreet — less outright patronage than fast-tracked human resources. For those with hiring power, it’s a sanctioned way of assuring “cultural fit,” identifying applicants who’ve been exposed to the same milieux, traditions, and, it should be said, socioeconomic background as yourself.

It’s telling, then, that one of America’s last enduring civic institutions in an era otherwise characterized by alienation is a social club predicated on reproducing class and racial hierarchy, culled from an already-elite subgroup of the population with the time and money to spend on a college education.

But some scholarship on the topic suggests the correlation between participation and career advancement is spurious; that kids with the sort of wealth and access that can lead to illustrious job prospects also tend to be the kids who end up in a sorority or fraternity. It was a reduction in grade point average that was associated with membership, the researchers found, and they were unable to identify any causal “Greek salary premium.” My experience demonstrates how it can grease the wheels of campus involvement, but the benefits are far more tenuous at a population level. And the oft-repeated-by-universities statistics about the success of members (e.g., “all but two presidents”)? Also vastly overstated. The real figures, across every vaunted category listed above, are closer to one in four, not three in four. Still disproportionate representation, to be sure, but far from the majority.

These realities — scant evidence that membership itself actually improves career prospects; a battery of self-aggrandizing, invented statistics that make fraternities look like an impenetrable fast track to a congressional seat or executive boardroom — are all part of the carefully constructed myth. The relationship between Greek life and American privilege is obvious and undeniable, yes, but overstating its benefits, power, and impunity risks further boosting the self-mythologizing. That they’re above both the law and grubby proletarian economic concerns is a powerful component of the legend that persists, in large part, because they have been permitted to. Time after time, the system’s worst offenses are deemed acceptable-if-unfortunate downsides for all that perceived membership upside.

So much about the realities of Greek life and its influence was fuzzy even from the inside, mixing the real with the unreal as mythology often does. Before rush week even began, I heard rumors that Phi Mu’s initiation involved nakedly sitting atop a running washing machine and having whatever jiggled circled with a Sharpie. Tridelt’s supposedly involved swallowing a live goldfish. Those were both false. Other rumors swirled about a shadowy cabal-like meta-fraternity called The Machine that drove political outcomes in both student government and Alabama state politics. This was true: Senator Katie Britt, famed owner of an enormous diamond cross necklace and an unsettlingly bare kitchen, was the Machine-backed student body president at the University of Alabama in 2003.

It was and is an insular world of bizarre rituals and rigid intragroup hierarchies, and it surprises me in retrospect how seamlessly I became fluent in its language and assented to its terms and conditions; how quickly a sort of Capitalist Realism–style foreclosure of alternatives made it seem like the only viable option.

This disorienting blend of fact and fiction seems most relevant to me now: that Greek life brings advantages but fewer than you might assume; that it is uniquely harmful, and yet is, in many ways, no different from every other elite institution with too much money. After all, a poisonous cocktail of nepotism, grotesque wealth, and unpunished sexual violence aptly summarizes the president of the United States, a man who has turned all of Washington into the fraternity he never had.

I had been permitted to enter this world, I can see now, but only conditionally. That acute sense of conditionality thrummed beneath my time there — my membership conditional on my parents’ continued willingness and ability to pay and my acceptance conditional on my continued ability to conform to social norms that were harder to define, most of all a slippery but narrow vision of modern Southern womanhood.

But what I remember most about that time, humming beneath the raucous roar of tailgates and lifted Chevy Tahoes, was the loneliness. It was usually muffled by the bluster and grandiosity my participation seemed to afford me, but sometimes, on the rogue Sunday night, it crept in.

In other words, the broader cultural alienation existed within this structure, too, a simulacrum of solidarity that sent me searching in adulthood for the real thing. In this way it would come to resemble my experience navigating the economy writ large, the creeping, inescapable knowledge that the advantages I was being sold were more often than not predicated on many more people’s exclusion from them.

This unshakable discomfort is what led me to embrace a socialist politics, a vision for the world that offered a sturdier and more scalable means of belonging and flourishing conditional only on something none of us can afford to lose but that the status quo so creatively degrades: our humanity.