Where were you when #piggate broke? Did you squeal with laughter and disbelief? Did you shamefully recall some embarrassing youthful memories of your own?

Public reaction to Lord Ashcroft’s claims about David Cameron has ranged from shrieks to mere shrugs, but the story also offered a fresh glimpse into the mystique of the elite. Whether harmless or destructive, such rites take place in social contexts that are breeding grounds for unbridled behavior.

“Most social groups have some sort of entry procedure – but some are more bizarre than others,” said Dominic Abrams, professor of social psychology at Britain’s University of Kent, in a beautiful piece of academic understatement.

Getting through extreme rituals in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs, he further explained, can be a traumatic but invaluable down payment for a young, ambitious member. A member’s demonstration of high pedigree combined with base loyalty can win him trust and advancement among his peers for life.

Cameron’s alleged activities took place in the Piers Gaveston student society at Oxford – a group which, according to the Daily Mail, specializes in “bizarre rituals and sexual excess”. The prime minister was also in Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, whose members wear vividly colored, bespoke formalwear advertising their allegiance. Members have in the past been known to trash bars and students’ rooms like common thugs, and one rite apparently required members to burn a £50 note in front of a homeless person.

“As they become more isolated from the wider community, [elite groups] are more interested in themselves than society and they become like a cult – normal constraints are released and they feel they can do anything they want,” said Abrams.

‘The fantasy of the rugged individual’

In the US, the practice of hazing – which involves humiliating, depraved, often violent ceremonies imposed on members or aspiring members of a group – is notoriously common in the military, high school sports teams and college fraternities.

At the extreme end of the scale, group rituals can even turn deadly.

Earlier in September, in the latest case to hit the news, 37 members of a Baruch College fraternity were charged – five of them with murder – after the 2013 death of 19-year-old Chun Hsien Deng during an initiation ritual at a rural retreat.

There, Asian American students had to run a gauntlet of young men beating them in a rite known as the Glass Ceiling, which was meant to symbolize their struggle to break through into the mainstream, according to the New York Times.

“In the US, fraternities and the military have become fertile ground for hazing, while in England the stories of the elite secret societies go back to the boarding schools, where it’s part of a masculine rivalry and a cultural structure that has generally gone unpunished. Freud traces it all the way back to primitive culture,” said Jack Halberstam, professor of American studies and gender studies at the University of Southern California.

In just a handful of many possible examples, army infantryman Danny Chen killed himself in 2011 after relentless hazing by fellow soldiers. In the same year, college band drum major Robert Champion was pounded to death on a team bus during a hazing rite in Florida.

Yale University’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity today remains suspended after “pledges” – aspiring members – marched on campus in 2010 chanting “No means yes, yes means anal”, leading to a federal investigation over the Ivy League college’s “failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment”.

In a rare case of the US re-exporting a vile university society tradition back to the UK, Delta Kappa Epsilon later opened a “colony”, or branch, at Edinburgh University, which soon came under scrutiny for misogyny.

“English masculinity has the genesis of colonialism and class relations, while US masculinity is more about the fantasy of the rugged individual pioneer,” Halberstam said, “but in both cases it’s deeply embedded in structures of class and white privilege – where violence from early Puritan settlers is seen as being for the universal good, while the Native Americans fighting back was savagery.”

Shameful secrets: a policy of mutually assured destruction

In formative rituals, secrecy is paramount.

“These are not just social clubs – these dens are offering their members a lifetime of professional connections, and part of the way secrecy functions is to bind you in an indebtedness so that you all move forward with this shameful secret,” said Jane Ward, associate professor and vice-chair at the department of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ward’s research found that acts such as bestiality or homosexual rape during rituals are actually meant to be an affirmation of a man’s heterosexuality. It says: “I went through this and I am unbroken as a straight man,” she said.

After the Piggate story broke, an online article published by the Leveller attracted a lot of attention. It posited that each secret the members of Piers Gaveston hold is, in effect, like a tiny nuclear bomb.

“Its structural function is as an agreement of mutually assured destruction between the rulers of tomorrow – I know your secret and you know mine, so let’s stay on the same side, yeah?” the article states.

Author Lawrence Jenkins, a British ex-public schoolboy currently living in Durham, North Carolina, told the Guardian that “while nothing bad happened” to him at school, he was very familiar with a the notion of unspoken system of secret-keeping that functioned as a “moral universe” at school.

“It’s this idea of finding out things about each other so you can do them over at a later juncture if you have to,” he said.

Lawrence bitterly complains about the hypocrisy of David Cameron and the London mayor, Boris Johnson (another Bullingdon alumnus), who boast that they have reached their lofty positions entirely on their talents, and not because of their social privilege.

He points out that the Bullingdon Club is said to have influenced Yale’s super-secret, notorious society for the elite, Skull and Bones, whose alumni include both Bush presidents and the secretary of state, John Kerry, and that three of Cameron’s cabinet were Bullingdon members.

Hard work or privilege?

Confusing privilege with talent is an old mistake but one supported by “a cast of thousands” who tolerate the status quo or look away when a light is shone on to the dark side of social advancement, said Hazel Markus, professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

“They [top UK politicians] have this idea that they’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and they haven’t. But most of these people work hard; they are not sitting around eating bonbons,” she said – so they don’t always acknowledge the generations of advantage that have helped them leapfrog the masses.

Markus added that pressure from their families, as well as being trained to suppress emotions from the earliest age as boys – a practice strengthened in the British public (ie private) school system – adds to a sense that they have earned their success entirely through effort and hardship.

Perhaps the image that springs to mind more than imagining the alleged pig scene is the photograph showing the future leaders of the UK in their penguin suits, going behind closed doors to put each other through beastly rituals.

“You think of the boundary between the savagery of The Lord of the Flies and civilization collapsing only when a group is in dire circumstances,” said Halberstam, the University of Southern California professor.

“But it turns out that civilization has only ever been a construct all along.”