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Scorecard, Answers 21 to 30. by A. Orange
(To go back and forth between the questions and the answers for Alcoholics Anonymous, click on the numbers of the questions and answers.)
Half of every meeting is spent listening to the earlier converts "sharing" the message that A.A. and the Twelve Steps saved their lives, and brought them infinite bliss and happiness, and Serenity and Gratitude. And I have never, ever, heard one person "share" the message that the Twelve Step program didn't work for him or her. The A.A. faithful do not bring the dead bodies in from the grave yards, to hear their stories. And the A.A. members act like the people in the story "The Emperor's New Clothes" while delivering their testimonials. People happily brag that the Twelve Steps have worked for them, and made them into wonderful happy new really spiritual people who are joyously close to God. If someone says that the Steps aren't working for him, then he is just confessing that he isn't spiritual, and he isn't working a strong program, and that God isn't favoring him. So no one wants to admit that he is the only one for whom the Twelve Steps are not working... While sharing, people also like to beat up on themselves and praise their sponsors:
Many A.A. members are extremely absorbed in A.A.; for some, "the program" is their entire life.
I decided I must place this program above everything else, even my family, because if I did not maintain my sobriety I would lose my family anyway. While some A.A. members are balanced and do have a life of their own, far too many others make the recovery program and "being in recovery" their new lifestyle. Rather than recovering from alcoholism, and getting on with their lives, they plan to spend the rest of their lives "in recovery", and they have no goals in life other than to be "in recovery" and nurse their sobriety, and "work the program." There is an immense difference between recognizing that you cannot ever drink alcohol again, for the rest of your life, because you will go nonlinear and get re-addicted if you do, and spending the rest of your life "in recovery", declaring that you cannot ever recover. The difference is that in the first case, you do recover... Some people are so obsessed with being in Alcoholics Anonymous that they have to go to a meeting every day, or they feel like their life will go to pieces. Some people do two or three meetings a day. For them, Alcoholics Anonymous is simply a new addiction, and that is not at all healthy. Bill Wilson even declared in the Big Book that membership in A.A. was a new dependency, to replace dependency on alcohol.
"I know I must get along without liquor, but how can I? Have you a sufficient substitute?
Therefore dependence, as A.A. practices it, is really a means of gaining true independence of the spirit. The A.A. apologists argue that being addicted to A.A. is an immense improvement over being addicted to alcohol. And the N.A. enthusiasts say much the same thing, that "Being addicted to N.A. is better than a heroin addiction." If that's the best that can be said for those programs, then that is damning them with faint praise. "It beats shooting heroin." Yeh, right.
"He will be less likely to drink again, and anything is preferable to that."
I've talked with ex-wives of alcoholics who stayed married to their husbands while they were drinking, but who had to divorce them after the guys joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became obsessed with "the program." The women said that they had to get divorced, because they didn't even have husbands any more; they had lost their husbands to Alcoholics Anonymous. Even A.A.-founder Bill Wilson reported the problem:
After the husband joins A.A., the wife may become discontented, even highly resentful...
Thanks to A.A., he is now away from home more than when he drank...
Their publicly-visible purpose is to help people quit drinking; their secret purpose is to promote their proselytizing fundamentalist religion, to get people to Seek and Do the Will of God (as they define it, of course.) In drug and alcohol treatment programs, the counselors (who are A.A. and N.A. members) say that they are there to help people, but they are really there to push the patients into their cult religion. They rationalize their actions by saying, "Well of course we should do that. We are helping the patients. We are saving their lives. Everybody knows that A.A. and N.A. are the only way to survive that disease. Nobody can do it alone. Everybody needs a Higher Power to make him quit. The Twelve Steps are how we recovered, and it's how everybody else will recover, too."
The same is true of
all of the other
Twelve-Step groups; they
all pretend to cure something, but they are all really just
pushing the same old weird Buchmanite / Twelve-Step religion:
At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God...
This is a tricky one. Unlike many religious cults, A.A. does not aggressively recruit on the street corners or in any other public places, nor do they go door to door like some annoying religions that we all know about. The Twelfth Step requires members to recruit new members, but that is done in a low-key manner.
What is not low-key is the practice of using
the legal and health care systems to
force people to go to A.A. meetings.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a coercive religion that routinely uses
the court system, judges, parole officers, and
treatment counselors to force people to attend its church services.
The judge says,
"Ninety meetings or ninety days!"
and A.A. is more than happy to play along. As one wag said, "A.A. is in the position of a snake who is being force-fed mice. Not that the snake was all that unwilling." Those treatment counselors who force people into A.A. meetings are usually A.A. members, and the judges and probation officers sometimes are. But more often, the judges and probation officers are just good, well-meaning people who have been led to believe that A.A. is a wonderful moral organization that gets people off of alcohol and drugs, and is a good moral influence on alcoholics and drug addicts. They believe that for several reasons:
In addition, recruiters routinely
visit drug and alcohol detox and rehab facilities -- if they
don't already own and run them -- and
play mind games on people who
are sick and detoxing, and tell them,
This is even documented in the Big Book: "You've been trying man's ways and they always fail," he told me. "You can't win unless you try God's way."
A.A. defenders invariably deny it, but court-ordered attendance is most assuredly the fault of A.A., and N.A.. They encourage it: the A.A. and N.A. true-believer drug and alcohol "recovery counselors" (Twelfth Step recruiters) tell the judges and parole officers that A.A. and N.A. are the only things that work, and that giving people "treatment" -- based on the Twelve Steps, of course -- and sending people to A.A. or N.A. meetings is the best thing to do with them. "And besides, getting those drunks and dopers praying will be good for them." A.A. and N.A. could stop it immediately, by telling the courts that they do not want any coerced referrals, and that they will not sign any more court slips. But they aren't about to do that, because they would lose one third of their new recruits if they did.1 The Little Red Book of Hazelden (yes, a clone of the Communist Little Red Book of Chairman Mao) specifically teaches recruiters to indoctrinate judges, police, doctors, and other officials as part of the proselytizing work. It says that faithful A.A. members can "carry the message" by:
11. By telling the A.A. story to clergy members, doctors, judges, educators, employers, or police officials if we know them well enough to further the A.A. cause, or to help out a fellow member. Then that book even goes on to tell recruiters to teach the judges, police, doctors, and other officials just what kind of people A.A. wants coerced into attending its meetings:
By educating doctors, the clergy, judges, police officials, and industrial personel regarding the type of people A.A. can help, we will avoid flooding our ranks with an unwieldy preponderance of nonalcoholics. So much for the lie about how A.A. can't help it if the judges, parole officers, doctors, and therapists force people to go to A.A. meetings. And Hazelden is merely echoing Bill Wilson's instructions. In a 1939 letter from Bill to Earl T., a founding member of the Chicago A.A. group, Bill wrote:
By educating doctors, hospitals, ministers along this line, you will surely pick up some strong prospects after a bit.
Theoretically, The Eleventh Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous, which states that A.A. is a program of attraction, not promotion, bans such proselytizing. But A.A. members do it anyway. Even Bill Wilson himself as much as told A.A. members to ignore Tradition Eleven in order to build up the A.A. organization:
To reach more alcoholics, understanding of A.A. and public good will towards A.A. must go on growing everywhere. We need to be on still better terms with medicine, religion, employers, governments, courts, prisons, mental hospitals, and all enterprises in the alcoholism field. We need the increasing good will of editors, writers, television and radio channels. These publicity outlets need to be opened ever wider. That is a program of promotion, not attraction. And Bill Wilson and gang did break the Eleventh Tradition whenever it suited their purposes, making radio broadcasts, and touring the country, grandstanding and promoting A.A.. Bill Wilson got his story and picture printed in the newspapers so many times that by 1944 he was the most famous "anonymous" person in the USA. And then he and Marty Mann even went and testified before Congress, pushing Alcoholics Anonymous as the solution to the nation's alcohol problem. That's promotion. And that's also breaking anonymity. Likewise, Alcoholics Anonymous has been practicing coercive recruiting since Day One. The book Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers describes how Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson shoved their new "treatment" on A.A. Number Three, Bill Dotson, when he was in the hospital:
... they thought it a good idea to have a preliminary talk with his wife. And this became part of the way things were done in the early days: Discuss it first with the wife; find out what you could; then plan your approach. It should be noted, as well, that the alcoholic himself didn't ask for help. He didn't have anything to say about it. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob actually felt entitled to shove their Oxford Group cult religion cure on other alcoholics regardless of the patient's wishes or beliefs -- the patient didn't get any say in the matter. (That is still the attitude of many so-called counselors and therapists today.)
Bill Wilson constantly complained that alcoholics exhibited immense selfishness, and Bill's solution to the problem was to get everybody working "selflessly" to recruit more A.A. members:
Selfishness -- self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. ...
But he will be curious to learn why his own convictions have not worked and why yours seem to work so well. He may be an example of the truth that faith alone is insufficient. To be vital, faith must be accompanied by self sacrifice and unselfish, constructive action. Those terms, "self sacrifice" and "unselfish, constructive action" are so vague and generic that they could mean anything that Mr. Wilson or A.A. want them to mean. And Bill usually wanted them to mean, "Go recruit some more members for our little 'fellowship'."
And there is a guilt-inducing accusation implied there: "Your
faith isn't vital because you are selfish." Note that getting new cult members out recruiting soon is called "actionizing", and it's a common cult characteristic. Actionizing is just another flavor of the propaganda stunt called "self-sell" -- get people to sell themselves on whatever you are trying to sell them. New cult members sell themselves on the cult and its dogma while trying to convert others, so the cult benefits from such recruiting activities twice -- the recruiting work gets the cult more new recruits, and it also helps to indoctrinate and convince the recent recruits. A hidden aspect of all of this recruiting is that A.A. is actually an enormously selfish program. The talk about getting rid of selfishness is hypocritical. Everything in the A.A. program is about "my sobriety." Members go recruiting because they are taught that they will loose their sobriety -- they will relapse and die drunk -- if they don't spend all of their spare time recruiting. So they are doing it for themselves, not for the other alcoholics. The cult-speak of A.A. reinforces the idea of recruiting all of the time:
See the web page
"Recruiting Mind Games"
for more information on the aggressive and deceptive recruiting practices
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Margaret Thaler Singer lists this item as one of the key characteristics of a destructive cult. The group does not tell newcomers what the group is really about and what will be required of members if they join. Cults usually have dual purposes -- they advertise one purpose to the public, and keep their other purpose hidden. Alcoholics Anonymous has a hidden agenda. It advertises that it exists to help people quit drinking, but its hidden goal is to convert them to Bill Wilson's Buchmanite religious beliefs:
To some people we need not, and probably should not emphasize the spiritual feature on our first approach. We might prejudice them. At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God... So the real purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is to get people to Seek and Do the Will of God. Quitting drinking seems to be a secondary goal. But they don't tell new recruits about that in the beginning. They just emphasize the need to quit drinking. Bill continued, rationalizing why A.A. members should hide the religious nature of Alcoholics Anonymous from outsiders while doing the 9th and 10th steps:
It is seldom wise to approach an individual, who still smarts from our injustice to him, and announce that we have gone religious. In the prize ring, this would be called leading with the chin. Why lay ourselves open to being branded fanatics or religious bores? We may kill a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message. When Bill speaks of "a future opportunity to carry a beneficial message", what that really means is, "a future chance to recruit the individual who still smarts from our injustice." Bill was always scheming to enlarge his cult. In chapter 7 of the Big Book -- the A.A. recruiting manual -- Bill Wilson told recruiters not to alarm new prospects by talking about the intensely religious nature of the Alcoholics Anonymous program:
Stress the spiritual feature freely. If the man be agnostic or atheist, make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God. Why stress "the spiritual feature" freely? Because you aren't supposed to stress the religious feature. Keep on yammering, "It's spiritual, not religious" when the prospect says, "I don't want to join a religion." (Note how Bill implied that non-members were "prejudiced" and "confused" about religion.) The statements: "make it emphatic that he does not have to agree with your conception of God" and "Don't raise such issues" are instructing the recruiter to deceive the prospect, to hide the intense religiosity of Alcoholics Anonymous from him. In the end, the prospect will have to agree with A.A. about God. It is impossible to work the Twelve Steps without believing in the A.A. version of God. But newcomers are not told that up front. Bill Wilson taught that the recruiter is to dole out the truth about the Alcoholics Anonymous program only a little bit of the truth at a time, only as much as the prospect can handle, just a teaspoonful or less, but never more:
...drinkers would not take pressure in any form, excepting from John Barleycorn himself. They always had to be led, not pushed. They would not stand for the rather aggressive evangelism of the Oxford Group. And they would not accept the principle of "team guidance" for their own personal lives. It was too authoritarian for them. In other respects, too, we found we had to make haste slowly. When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get "too good too soon." The Oxford Groups' absolute concepts -- absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love -- were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets. Notice that just wanting to quit drinking was not nearly good enough for Bill Wilson -- the newcomers to A.A. also had to share Bill's extreme religious beliefs -- which were those of the Oxford Group -- but Bill Wilson hid that fact from the newcomers. And then Bill even sneared at the newcomers who do not wish to join his cult religion, by saying that they didn't want to get too good too soon, and implying that they were wrong for not liking the authoritarian fascism of the Oxford Group. Hiding the true nature of A.A. has been the standard recruiting strategy since the very earliest days of Alcoholics Anonymous. The A.A. history book Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age describes the debate surrounding the creation of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, where the early members debated about how much truth to tell to the public:
Fitz wanted a powerfully religious document; Henry and Jimmy would have none of it. They wanted a psychological book which would lure the reader in; when he finally arrived among us, there would then be enough time to tip him off about the spiritual character of our society. ... As umpire of these disputes, I was obliged to go pretty much down the middle, writing in spiritual rather than religious or entirely psychological terms. So, Bill says, he compromised and downplayed the religious nature of the organization, and only told part of the truth, in order to "lure the reader in":
(Also note how neatly Bill Wilson blamed his dishonesty on the other A.A. members, rationalizing that he had to do what they said.)
See the web page
"Recruiting Mind Games"
for the details of those deceptive recruiting practices.
A.A. also uses numerous bait-and-switch stunts to deceive newcomers, and get them to "keep coming back" until they are sufficiently indoctrinated to be told the real truth. Like: telling people that "It isn't religious, it's spiritual", or telling people that they can have any Higher Power, or any God as they understand Him, and then, only later, revealing the fact that a new member must believe in a very specific kind of dictatorial God who will receive confessions and miraculously remove "defects of character," including the desire to drink alcohol; a God Who has a very strong Will and Who literally dictates orders to members -- those members who sit quietly and listen for God to broadcast his dictates. And then the newcomers find out that they are supposed to spend the rest of their lives following the orders of that Dictator, and they are supposed to spend the rest of their lives dependent upon A.A. for instructions in what to do and what to think. That's quite a progression, from complete freedom of religion to complete slavery.
"Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world..."
See the file on "The Bait-and-Switch Con Game" for many more ways in which A.A. hides from newcomers what membership in A.A. will really entail, including:
Lastly, institutional A.A./N.A. routinely advertises itself as the best and only successful drug and alcohol treatment program, without ever revealing that the expensive treatment program is little more than an indoctroduction to the A.A./N.A. 12-step cult religion, and without revealing that the "treatment" works about the same as no treatment at all.
You just do not tell jokes about Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob Smith, or the core principles of A.A.. A.A. claims to have a lot of humor -- they brag about it -- because they laugh a lot about other things; you can tell all of the "stupid drunk" jokes you want, you can laugh at yourself all you want -- self-deprecation is almost a requirement, and you can tell jokes about your friends. But thou shalt not tell jokes that directly poke fun at A.A. or its program. And thou shalt not ridicule the more illogical, irrational, stupid, or absurd parts of the A.A. dogma. (Hint: try some of my jokes out on them. I hear that A.A.-indoctrinated drug and alcohol counselors have a fit when they see them...) The stern leaders say, "That isn't funny. This isn't a joking matter. People die over this stuff." Exactly correct. And lack of genuine humor is one of the things that is killing people.
Being able to tell the truth presupposes that there are people who want to hear the truth, and who will tolerate hearing it, and there are far too few of those people around. There are many things you can't openly share in meetings, starting with:
If that doesn't start a war, try:
You know what fireworks will result. If you can actually calmly, sanely, rationally, discuss these issues like some sober, mature, adults, then you have found a wonderful group that I've never heard of. (Or else you walked into one of the secular, rational recovery kinds of meetings, like SMART or SOS or WFS...) Note the glaring contradiction between not being able to tell the truth and the constantly-repeated claim that success in Alcoholics Anonymous requires "grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty." (The Big Book, page 58.) That hypocritical statement is read out loud at the start of every A.A. meeting.
You must become a stepper. You new last name will be "alcoholic", as in "Hi. My name is Harry, and I'm an alcoholic." No matter what you thought of yourself before A.A., you will end up talking about yourself in terms of your resentments, being "powerless" over your "disease", selfishness, self-seeking, spiritual diseases, "sitting on the pity pot", and other such "moral shortcomings" and "defects of character." One of the standard A.A. slogans is "Don't compare -- Identify!"2 The newcomers are supposed to eventually come to consider themselves to be alcoholics no different from all the rest of the membership of A.A.:
(The sociologist Milton A. Maxwell, Ph.D., was a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc..)I was in the A.A. program about 9 months before I could admit I was an alcoholic. I really did not like that word. At meetings, the speakers talked about what they had done, the jails that they had been in, the institutions, jobs they had lost.Because of this initial tendency to look for differences, the counsel to newcomers has been summed up in another simple phrase, "Don't compare -- identify!" It is through identifying with others that most newcomers to A.A. learn what an alcoholic is and become able to face up to the reality that this is what they are: Likewise, Maxwell also wrote:
Breaking out of one's defensive, egocentric shell and becoming interested in, and involved in, the well-being of other persons is probably the most significant, observable change in orientation which occurs when a person "begins to get the program." Excuse me, but who says that all alcoholic newcomers have "defensive, egocentric shells" and don't care about other people? That is just another A.A. stereotype of "The Alcoholic". Nevertheless, the proper new A.A. clone will proudly declare that he was that way, before he got fixed by the program.
A.A. is nothing but one huge crazy belief system. Bill Wilson hypocritically declared that you don't have to believe anything when you join A.A. -- that you are free to believe whatever you wish, but the truth is just the opposite. First, Bill told the newcomers that they didn't need to believe anything in particular (and then he told them to quit thinking and just be gullible):
Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions. ... all you really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again I say, all you need is the open mind." But then, on the very next page, Bill pulled a bait-and-switch stunt, and declared that the goal of the A.A. program was to acquire faith in his religion, and come to believe in his version of God:
"I must quickly assure you that A.A.'s tread innumerable paths in their quest for faith. ... You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your 'higher power.' Here's a very large group of people who have solved their alcohol problem. In this respect they are certainly a power greater than you, who have not even come close to a solution. Surely you can have faith in them. Even this minimum of faith will be enough. You will find many members who have crossed the threshold just this way. All of them will tell you that, once across, their faith broadened and deepened. Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of them began to talk of God."
Many members crossed what "threshold" that way? In Alcoholics Anonymous, you must come to believe many things:
A.A. allows little deviation from the rules. The hard-core true believers will tell you that any failure to conform to the dictates of the standard A.A. dogma will result in a relapse and dying drunk, and it will also prove that you are diseased and in denial, and they will say that "you are not working a strong enough program." Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our [Bill Wilson's] suggested [required] Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.
A.A. has an easy rationalization for its behavior: "It will save the alcoholics' lives." Also, "It will bring them closer to God," and, "It will get them to Seek and Do the Will of God." A.A. rationalizes a lot of stuff: abusive treatment of new recruits, illegal, unconstitutional coerced attendance, fanatical adherence to dogma, deceptive recruiting, irrationality, and gross distortion of the "success rate", just to name a few items.  to answers 31 to 38.
Footnotes:
2) The Alcoholics Anonymous Experience: A Close-Up View For Professionals Milton A. Maxwell, Ph.D., pages 64 and 93.
Last updated 2 April 2004. |