Endogroup sublation

The first of the two ways a will is lost to an endogroup, the other being sublation to the endo-ideal at its centre. Both are forms of traumatic bonding and both are commonly produced by the same event. Initiation rituals take anima from the person being initiated and distribute it to the endogroup including the initiate, which builds a strong group animus at the direct cost of the individual one. The person emerges holding a share of something larger and nothing of their own, which is the transaction the rite exists to perform. What distinguishes this form from endo-ideal sublation is durability. A will given to a group survives the loss of any particular figure, since the group persists and can replace its centre, whereas a will given to a person is exposed the moment that person falls. That makes endogroup sublation the more stable arrangement and the harder one to reverse, and it is why militias and other extreme endogroups with less vulnerable idols outlast movements built around an individual. The individual animus is not merely subordinated in the process but destroyed, which is the difference between sublation and obedience. Someone following orders retains a will they are choosing not to exercise. Someone sublated to an endogroup has had theirs absorbed into a larger one and has nothing left to withhold.

Initiation has been studied since Arnold van Gennep's rites of passage and Victor Turner's work on liminality, and the costly signalling literature reads painful initiation as a mechanism for producing commitment, with Aronson and Mills demonstrating that severe initiation increases liking for a group. Research on military and gang socialization documents the same effects. All of these treat the outcome as strengthened attachment or altered belief. Marsh treats it as a transfer with a quantity, which changes what is claimed. Costly signalling says the initiate values the group more highly afterwards, and endogroup sublation says something was taken from them and is now held elsewhere.