Hazing Hell

Why is it that in every gathering of human society, from a girl's summer camp to a fancy private boarding school for boys, that people feel the need to create the hierarchy of hell?

I've been reading the autobiography of a classic English scholar -- and even the bare hints he's given of his schoolboy life at some British boarding school, circa 1910, sound horrifying similar to the way inmates behave in a maximum security prison.

Newbies are forced to do menial and humiliating tasks for the more senior members, and even in the most strait-laced-appearing of places, homosexual relationships are rampant, as means of promotion or survival.