[kipchak]

Maybe it's something like a much milder kind of historical human sacrifice, where the intuition is that greater sacrifice means greater reward. This is useful in some cases such as delayed gratification but is harmful when the sacrifice is seen as directly producing the desired gain.

Generally there's a correlation between sacrifice and and reward- the "no pain no gain" idea goes back fairly far for example. When the intuition taken to it's logical extreme that the greater the ask the greater the sacrifice necessary, which is where you get something like Moloch.

It's interesting you mention the ladder and hazing - one idea is that human sacrifice was more prevalent the stronger the hierarchy, and that sacrifice helped support the hierarchy and priests in a position of authority, which seems to run parallels to what you're describing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-human-sacrifi...