I agree completely. We just can't imagine doing things differently.
Fun anecdote: when I was 16 (with a couple years of experience as a developer) I was working for a company on some PHP codebase and they hired someone with a master's degree in computer science to work on it with me.
10 minutes after the first meeting he set his Skype status to "HELP: can anyone teach me PHP programming"
My take is more judgmental:
Our current hazing rituals persist because people can't imagine how it could be otherwise.