Nationalism at societies’ scale

Warwick University is home to more than 200 societies. All of which are trying to get as many members as they can in the huge school of freshy fishy that has arrived on the piazza. You’re probably already tired of being harassed by so many different people who desperately try to sell you a dull concept, or try to make you feel like a particular activity will definitely improve your university experience. Beware, some of them are janus-faced. By the way, if you drop the ‘j’, the point is still made. Roughly.

A lot of societies feel strongly about how their members should represent them. Compulsively trying to defend their circle of souls on the most trivial issues is what could be considered a standard behaviour in the “societies world”. As such, they will voluntarily force a cohesive dynamic to be imposed upon the group of fresh meat integrating the formatted whole.
Which obviously gives way to an artificial homogeneity. Different strategies apply, varying in intensity across the wide panel of societies registered. The first degree of what could be called society nationalism is the obvious sweat-shirt with name under the invented logo. That just hooks you. You’re part of a group now. In case that campus room felt a bit cold and lonely, at least now you know you belong to something. Now this is all okay, man has always been gregarious, and freshers certainly don’t join them half-heartedly. So where’s the coercion?

That’s when the higher degrees of society nationalism come into play. Past the sweat-shirt and the weekly socials, some societies go further in their artificial cohesion programme.
Sports societies, for example, have used the necessity of having tracksuits to play their particular sport in order to format all members of their clubs, and thus their societies. They all dress the same. One thing making you come out of the uniform lot is the pair of white initials printed on your prisoner’s uniform. As if, grinning, the Lord of All Societies conceded one unique shiny beam of hope in the prisoner’s heart to keep him unaware of the iron cage surfacing around him.

It’s one thing to join a group for what it defends, what it represents, or the activity it proposes. However, some seem to join societies or clubs and very rapidly get entangled in the whirlpool of society nationalism. Forced mannerisms, coercively integrated habits, all these things that the poor little fish on its own would never have executed, he now does, considering his actions to be a passport to the society’s general recognition.

It’s hard. It’s hard to see innocent people, eager to integrate a group, who will do anything they think is deemed honourable by the peers in order to have what he considers to be an identity, a feeling of ‘we-ness’, and a sense of ownership to a particular group of people, who from the outside look more like having a very restrictive wardrobe than a certificate of coolness made of fabric.

Of course, the Boar is not telling you not to join societies, or that all societies are a North Korean microcosm. But we should all beware of those that regard their members solely as dependent representatives of their colours and banners, only because they see other socs as potential threat and would rather go down the route of self-ostracism.