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Pardon us Mr. Wilson, but we noticed a few CONTRADICTIONS in your program...
Silly Slogans and Other Sayings (A note from your friends at AAdeprogramming... you will want to print out this very long and savory post... maybe read bits of it to your kids when you tuck them in for the night) Slogans, it has often been said, are substitutes for thought. Poor substitutes. Nowhere is this more howlingly obvious than in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the best place to start because these slogans are the condensed fruits of the entire AA and NA philosophy and world-view. If they are found to be wrong, or silly, then the whole philosophical basis that leads to them is more easily called into question. In the same way Ronald Reagan over-simplified the complex by boiling all difficult questions down to seven-second sound bites of infantile naiveté, the denizens of "the rooms" often speak and behave as if life were really reducible to simple and clear, rule-like maxims, aphorisms, sayings, proverbs, apothegms, ritual formulas and slogans. "I'm not up to working the Steps, yet," says the typical AA or NA sap. "I'm still working the bumper stickers." Slogans plaster the walls in meeting rooms. They twinkle throughout the literature. They drop, and gust, and swirl from the lips of speakers like fat wet snowflakes in a Buffalo blizzard. They punctuate the most mundane speeches, and at times buzz out with great energy to fill the stale air, and drop to the floor with a thud, with all the gravity and profundity of revealed truth. But on close inspection, whether under the klieg lights of critical inquiry and examination, or even under only routine interrogation, most of them break down and confess to being one-sided and superficial exaggerations, factually erroneous, or positively absurd. Some people who end up in these programs may not be very strongly equipped to elaborate on these concepts in their own words. Perhaps, in some cases, the provided phrases are more coherent than anything they might concoct on their own. But it is less the mindless repetition of stock phrases that irritates, as much as it is the invalid concepts contained in many of them. Some of them, it is true, have a rational core. They contain a kernel of truth. But it is usually so well buried and hidden under laughable error as to be useless. Trapped inside bromides, canards and platitudes, they calcify and decay: available only to fossil hunters. I hope to help puncture many of these inflated, conceited balloons blown up over the years by so many AA and NA windbags. I want to help strip away the rose colored glasses of silly reverence for error. If the hushed, awed, sacramental, reverential kid-gloves treatment given to the program and the slogans can be whittled away, piece by piece, rampart by rampart, then the core can be laid bare, can be cleansed, can be redeemed from the scabrous crusted cocoon of superstition, magic and nonsense that surrounds it. Many of these slogans are stated as straightforward, simple declarative assertions. The way they are phrased, they often posture themselves as universals, as absolutes, universally and absolutely true in all cases, without exceptions or nuances. They almost never, if ever, use any qualifying terms, such as "some," "many," "most," "sometimes," "often," "almost always," "rarely," "few," "almost never," etc. Instead, in their bald declarative way they either say or imply in a grammatically understood way: "all," "always," "never," "none," etc. These are all superlatives and absolutes. These shrunken ideas exclude exceptions. This is the lazy man's way of reasoning, or rather, an unreasoning way of lazy expression. Bill Wilson even said, in a famous interview, that if he had the chance to amend anything in the Big Book, the only word he would change is the word "Rarely" at the beginning of Chapter Five: "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path..." He would have like to have changed it to "Never." That one concession to balanced thought slipped by ya, huh, Bill? Absolutism sees only black or white, never grey. It sees right or wrong, never "it depends." It is the dogmatists' fondest wish to have a very simple world, in which very simple formulas and slogans will guide all evaluations and actions, relieving them of the very human burden of the agony of thinking, judgment, discrimination and decision making. In that world-view a trait, attitude or emotion can only be either good or bad. But not both. And not neither. Most of these slogans look at reality and human experience in a one-sided way. They grasp one aspect or facet of a complicated piece of reality, take a snapshot of it, say, of a profile, or the back of a head in some cases, and proceed to claim that they know enough to carve the definitive three-dimensional sculpture. This is a grandiose form of conceit. If you don't look at, observe, investigate and test a thing from all sides, from all angles, trying to grasp all of its many aspects and facets, then you are doing a piss-poor one-sided job, and your sculpture will be considerably at odds with the reality. If you think you can take an instamatic snapshot of a complex reality, and "know" it in ten seconds, you're kidding yourself. Real knowledge cannot come from one-sided observation and snap judgments, but only from many-sided, slow, careful analysis and deliberation. Take the actual proposition of a typical slogan at face value. Does it sound right? Turn it around, turn it upside down, take the other guy's point of view, play the devil's advocate. Is there any truth in the opposite of the slogan? Are there important exceptions? If so, then the slogan is one-sided and untrue. Overly simplistic to the point of deception and deceit. True knowledge of a thing comes from investigating and discovering the inner workings of the thing, its true essence. For this an analysis must penetrate beneath the surface of appearances to discover the laws governing the inner motion of the thing or process. What is the inner conflict or contradiction at the heart of this thing or process that makes it tick, what is its driving force? Superficial investigation, that only looks at the surface, at appearances, and does not penetrate into the inner workings, the inner essence of a thing, can never produce the best available knowledge of the thing. Such relatively "incomplete" knowledge is therefore incorrect knowledge. If a slogan tries to sum up a reality, but does so one-sidedly and superficially, then its expression of reality is so flawed as to be almost useless. Sadly, this is the case with most AA and NA slogans. What's worse is that they have been repeated so many times over the years that they take on the aspect of sacred cows. One can joke about them, but not, it seems, really seriously challenge them. I want to do both. The best weapon against smug self-importance is laughter. And a lot of these slogans are real knuckle-headisms. There is no more noble task for critical-minded freethinkers than slaying the sacred cows. The slogans are grouped into broad conceptual categories for convenience, although some of them are examples of more than one category.
A. EMOTIONS ARE BAD
We also learn that while emotions are morally neutral, and that simply having or experiencing a feeling is not bad or a "character defect," we do run the risk of getting stuck in a feeling. If becoming stuck like that creates a permanent attitude or disposition to do harm in other-regarding behavior, we have a moral and ethical obligation to change.
1. THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS ARE CHARACTER DEFECTS.
"Q. Which are the chief sources of sin? A. The chief sources of sin are seven: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth; and they are commonly called capital sins."
"To avoid falling into confusion over the names these defects should be called, let's take a universally recognized list [!] of major human failings -- the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth."
"That is the measure of our character defects, or, if you wish, of our sins."
Well, well, well. The Seven Deadly sins. Whattya know? Firstly, maybe someone can tell me why there aren't six, or eight, or thirteen deadly sins. Why seven? It is, of course, the result of Christianity's arbitrary, medieval, superstitious numerology. Christians were schooled in the seven virtues, seven works of mercy, seven sacraments, seven planets, seven liberal arts, seven degrees of sanctity, the seven ages of man, and the seven deadly sins. They also got a dose of the twelve apostles, the twelve patriarchs, the twelve prophets, the twelve months, the twelve sacred jewels in the vision of John. These numbers were supposed to have a special mystical connections and significance to God. Hmmm? The Twelve Steps? This is hocus-pocus, superstitious, mystically numerological nonsense, on a par with alchemy, witchcraft, astrology, auras, healing gemstones, and other New Age revivals of medieval, pre-scientific superstitions. But, aside from this, what of the seven sins they do pick? This so-called "universally recognized" world-view may be universally recognized by followers of Christian self-loathing, but is almost universally repudiated by modern biologists, evolutionists, psychiatrists, psychologists, the broad range of modern medicine and philosophy. This list of condemnations of human emotions, which exalts blind obedience and submission, may arguably have had some minor survival value for reinforcing the unequal, servile, hierarchical cohesion, and the patriarchal power structure, of the primitive, pre-scientific, war-like and aggressive Bronze Age desert tribe of sheep and goat herders who originated it, but it is now almost the Twenty-first Century. Let's get real. Things have changed. A titanic, world-shattering Social Revolution summed up by the words democracy and individual liberty has occurred since then. Putting this discredited ancient and medieval world-view into practice, as John Bradshaw points out, many parents pathologically cripple their children's emotions: "This is actually sanctified by our most sacred traditions of parenting rules. These rules especially shame children by denying emotions. Emotions are considered weak. "Religion endorses the poisonous pedagogy. Anger is especially considered bad. Anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. These sins send you to hell... Many children are shamed for their anger... As anger is shamed, two things happen. First, anger is shame-bound. Every time the person feels angry, he feels shame. Second, as anger is shamed, it is repressed. Repression is a primary ego defense. Once it is set in motion, it operates automatically and unconsciously. As the anger energy goes unconscious, it clamors to be expressed. As more and more anger is repressed, it grows more and more.
"Virginia Satir once compared this to keeping hungry dogs in the basement. The hungrier they get, the more they try to get out. The more they try to escape, the more we must guard them. The repressed energy grows and grows and finally has a life of its own. One day there is just no more room to stuff the energy. One day the angry energy erupts." So, when anger is shamed in the way AA and NA recommend, it is repressed, and for that very reason more likely to erupt irrationally.
"...In its most accurate teaching, the deadly sin is not really the E-motion of anger, but the behaviors resulting from the judgment often occasioned by anger. Behaviors often linked to anger are screaming, cursing, hitting, publicly criticizing or condemning someone and physical violence. These behaviors are certainly prohibitive. They are behaviors based on judgment, rather than E-motions."
But it is precisely the emotion or feeling of anger that AA and NA condemn and shame as bad, as a "character defect" or a sin. "In Step Four we begin to get in touch with ourselves. We write about our liabilities, such as guilt, shame, remorse, self-pity, resentment, anger, depression, frustration, fear, and denial."
"We sit down with paper and pen and ask for God's help in revealing the defects that are causing us pain and suffering." "...this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit [!]. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die. "If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison." -- Alcoholics Anonymous, p.66 Wow, anger really is a deadly sin, isn't it? Just harboring the feeling of anger makes insanity return! Anger makes you crazy! It makes you drink and die! Imagine what masturbating must do? Yikes! Does it say, "the insanity of alcoholism may return..."? No. It says. "The insanity of alcoholism returns..." Does it say, "and we may drink again"? No. It says, "and we drink again." Does it say, "...we had to accept and learn to appropriately express our anger"? No. It says, "...we had to be free of anger." AA and NA shame anger, along with a long list of other emotions that they misrepresent as character defects, because of their undigested Christianity, and thereby tend to increase the likelihood that these emotions will be repressed to the point of pathological explosion. Way to go, guys! Sounds like a great road to recovery. Onward Christian Neurotics! Now, it is true that our emotions are not always justified or appropriate to the situation. But this is a question of the appropriateness of our judgments about if, when and how to respond emotionally, not about our emotions themselves. AA and NA condemn the emotions themselves, in all cases. To them, for example, there is no such thing as "justified anger." There are, of course, many cases of unjustified anger, just as there are many instances of justified anger. Our feelings toward people or events are often heavily influenced by our beliefs about the situation, our beliefs about the way it should or shouldn't be, and by our exaggerations of the seriousness of the fact that it is the way it is, instead of being the way we think it should be. Often our warped sense of values influences this emotional response. For example: A) Some woman assertively defends herself against a man's browbeating. B) The man believes that women should be silent and barefoot and pregnant in the home. C) He believes further that it is awful if a woman doesn't behave this way. D) Therefore, he becomes angry. An analysis of situations like this will show that often our emotional responses are inappropriate or unjust, because they are premised on incorrect, corrupt, unjust, or unethical values or beliefs. Often we will find out that our emotional responses were inappropriate and unjustified because our understanding of the facts were wrong. A classic illustration that gets used is when we are in a crowded elevator and we feel someone poking our back. We start to get annoyed. More poking. We believe our dignity is being intentionally violated and that this is wrong. We get angrier. The elevator opens and we get off, turning, ready to let the person have it. Then we see it is a blind man with a cane. So, in addition to accepting all our feelings as morally neutral, we also have to learn to examine ourselves and see if the emotional responses are appropriate. For persons wrapped up in self-centeredness, which is generally the case when most of us first get clean and sober, we can expect that a lot of our emotional responses may be inappropriate, exaggerated or skewed. But, the more we acquire a balanced and objective view of ourselves in the world, the more we clarify our ethical values, the more patient we become at gathering the facts before we respond, the more our emotional responses will even out of themselves. In any case, we learn how to feel our feelings and not run and get high. We learn to ride them out. But most importantly, we learn to talk about them honestly, to process them out and not stuff them. We learn that powerful and uncomfortable feelings can be processed and verbalized as a way to help them pass. We learn how to communicate our feelings directly to the person involved, where it seems appropriate, or to share them with others if it is inappropriate to talk about them directly to the person involved. With people we love and with which we have significant ongoing relationships we learn to communicate anger and others feelings warmly and lovingly. To the same extent we cannot feel and communicate our anger, we cannot feel and communicate our love. With strangers, with people we do not love, or with co-workers with whom we often have only a formal and correct superficial relationship, we may not choose to fully and honestly communicate our feelings. If the feelings are about an event which threatens our very survival, dignity and worth, we will often be unable to restrain communicating how we feel, no matter what the cost. In that case, not communicating may not be a reasonable option. But, if the incident is marginal, if our need to share our feelings directly with the person is optional, we should probably make a cost-benefit analysis on such a procedure, maybe with the input of close friends, long before we do it. If we decide not to communicate it directly, we will probably benefit if we talk about it indirectly, with our friends, to get it off our chests. But in either case, we learn not to smile and pretend to "turn it over," while in reality simply stuffing it. We learn that "turning it over" or "acceptance" come at the end of the process, not at the beginning. Here we learn the true, more complex, meaning of "This too shall pass." We come to learn that the human being and its responses to the world can be likened to the music of a violin. The human body is like the body of the violin, the world of external stimuli are like the bow. Our perceptions, needs and instincts are like the strings. Our human reason, beliefs, and values are like the fingers we use to finger the strings. And the sounds that arise are our feelings. If the body is cracked and broken, then no matter how delicately the world bows them, and no matter how carefully we finger the strings, the music will have a painful and distorted sound. No matter how brilliantly we may be able to finger the strings, if the world rushes in with terribly tragic and traumatic bowing, the music will have that harsh and tragic intensity. But if we don't know how to properly finger the strings, then any amount of beautiful, or even mildly vigorous bowing by the world, will lead to unmelodic, discordant sounds and noise. If the strings themselves are stretched too taut, or slackened too loose, then nice bowing and fingering will still produce unsatisfying groans instead of music. Our task in recovery is to create a balanced and harmonious interaction of the various parts. The music, then, may be sweet, joyful or sad, but it will at least be beautiful. We have the least control over the bowing: that is, we are not totally in control of the stuff that the world throws at us. But if we keep the strings in tune, and practice our fingering, and work to strengthen and polish the body, then we can more likely weather the storm of the bow, and by fingering deftly, produce something that is still recognizable as music. The particular tune, melody and key, of course, will be the products of our individuality and uniqueness. So, making a moral or ethical judgment about our own and other people's emotional responses is not as easy as AA and NA try to make it appear. It is not as simple as saying, "Here's a list of the 'bad' emotions. If you feel any of these, it's wrong." That is just another example of the dogmatists' wish to escape the requirement to think. Instead, a balanced, scientific, humanist view would require us to make a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, on a case by case basis, to determine if the emotional response was appropriate to the situation, and whether it was appropriately expressed. Given that major proviso, let's look at a bunch of emotions AA and NA condemn as "character defects," as such. In what follows, when we are talking about their healthy manifestations, we are assuming that they are appropriate to the situation, and appropriately expressed. 2. ANGER IS A CHARACTER DEFECT. Anyone interested in this, should read the very good little pamphlet Releasing Anger, published by Hazelden. In it, it's authors explicitly assert that "anger is not a character defect," in direct contradiction of the NA Basic Text, the AA Big Book and the AA Twelve & Twelve. Even these pro-AA-and-NA recovery gurus know that the AA Big Book and NA Basic Text are crazy and simply wrong on this issue. There are dozens of other books and studies on anger that give the lie to AA and NA simple-mindedness on this issue. Anger tells us what are our likes and dislikes, when our values, basic needs, personal dignity and liberty are being violated. Anger gives us the strength to defend our own boundaries, our own dignity, liberty and worth. Without anger we become doormats and people pleasers, and sink into a state of feeling worthless and unworthy of self-defense. If and when anger becomes frozen and blocked, and is no longer a passing feeling but rather becomes a permanent state of being, when it becomes the way we react to all stimuli, whether it is appropriate or not, then we are in big trouble. Then the state-of-anger becomes a frozen, dysfunctional, unhealthy, psycho-pathological attitude and behavior problem, and must be worked on to be changed. Resentment is the re-feeling of our anger from the storehouse of memory. Many, if not most, memories have emotional associations linked to them. We do not only recall pure factual data, but we recall things in associations with other things and with our feelings about them, in order to give us a picture of their significance or meaning for us. In this light, resentment is not qualitatively or morally different from any other emotion-laden memory. It vividly reminds us of what we liked and disliked in the past, the past events that went into forming our values, and past examples of things that violated our dignity, liberty and worth as persons. Resentment is a form of memory, and memory is the bearer of the temporal continuity of our personality, the repository of the accumulated experiences and knowledge of our being, and the seat of wisdom. Without resentment we will allow people to violate us repeatedly, time after time, and get away with it. Without resentment we should abolish all criminal laws, police, courts and prisons. Without resentment we will always be caught unawares and unprepared for new and freshly packaged violations of our dignity, liberty, values or preferences. Without resentment there would have been no Civil Rights movement, no Ghandian passive resistance to colonialism, no ferocious struggle to topple Hitler, etc. Resentment has been one of the most powerful moving forces in the progress of human history. Resentment is an exquisitely necessary human emotion, and should never be denigrated. The knee-jerk opposition to resentment in most quarters of the "recovery movement" is not based on a clear-headed, dispassionate, scientific view of psychology. This visceral opposition to resentment is, rather, an embodiment of the Oxford Group's and early AA's documented bias toward the Christian religious moral value judgment that people should "turn the other cheek," and "love your enemies." This religious doctrine can reasonably be viewed as an exaggerated, perfectionist, purist, mystical ideal that does not conform to human nature, human experience or human reason. It masquerades as a profound "spiritual" insight, as if "spirituality" was co-equal with self-abasement and masochism. The moral valuation of resentment is similar to that of the urge to get high. We will get the urge occasionally, from time to time, usually in understandable response to uncomfortable stimuli. The urge to get high can be in this case a positive force telling us of some uncomfortable feeling, which we can use as a marker to identify the uncomfortable stimuli in our life. That erupting awareness gives us the option to do something about it. But provided that the urge rises, is felt, and passes away relatively quickly, we are in no danger. If and when the urge turns into an obsession, a prolonged preoccupation, then we are clearly in more danger of using. It is the same with resentment: feeling it can be a positive force. Becoming inextricably trapped in it is dangerous. Hostility is the energy that allows us in thought, principle and deed to marshal active opposition to, conflict with, and resistance to acts, thoughts and principles that are in opposition to our own. It is the energy that motivates and allows us to fight for what we think is right, and to provide no comfort for what we think is wrong. This is the energy that allows us to develop, defend and fight for our values, and to actively oppose conflicting values. It is anger raised to action. Without hostility we are rendered completely ineffective in defending our values. Hostility can cease to be a power and a tool that we use discreetly, and can unwarrantably become a knee-jerk response to all stimuli. We can walk around hostile toward and suspicious of everyone and everything. We can walk around a hair-trigger away from dispute, fights and violence. In that state, simple innocent transgressions by others, such as someone stepping on our foot in an elevator, can send us off. Hostility is a sword we should have and keep sharp, but in its sheath. We should only withdraw it when it is necessary. We should not walk around with it in our hand dangerously and recklessly brandishing it about. Hatred is the emotion of intense dislike in the face of what we consider evil. It is usually the obverse of our love for the victims of evil. It is the energy that can catapult us over the hurdles of fear and prudence in the fight against evil. Combined with the love of the victims of evil, it is often a component part of heroism. Without hatred we are left paralyzed in the fight against evil. Hatred can easily go too far when we apply it unjustly to the good or the innocent, when we falsely and incorrectly mislabel people as evil. It is hard enough to distinguish the good from the bad, and the innocent from the evildoer. But it takes genuine wisdom to distinguish between evil and the simply imperfect and sometimes-wrongdoing human being. Hatred should be reserved for ideas and deeds that are demonstrably evil, and on occasion for people who are unrepentantly and ongoingly evil.
3. SLOTH, OR PROCRASTINATION, IS A CHARACTER DEFECT AND DEADLY SIN.
Very often, also, this condemnation is aimed by the clinically ill workaholic against the normal person when they engage in rest. Many a typical AA and NA ninny, who is used to making miserable snap judgments, often brands someone who thinks things through as a procrastinator. Balance is the key.
4. PRIDE IS A DEADLY SIN.
Pride can be puffed up into superhuman grandiosity and conceit, a sense of superiority toward and contempt for others. This is common, for example, with perfectionist "spiritual giants" in recovery who like to look down from their Olympian heights at the poor peasants below who are still suffering from such wicked "character defects" as lust, anger, fear, shame, and hatred, etc. These giants, of course, often claim to have completely eliminated such base traits from their beings, or to have had them "removed" by supernatural psycho-surgery. As if that kind of self-mutilating, purist perfectionism were even desirable! What AA and NA put forward as the desirable alternative to pride, is Surrender. The noted psychiatrist Erich Fromm made a stunning analysis of this issue. Fromm draws a distinction between authoritarian religion and humanist religion. He says: "What is the principle of authoritarian religion? The definition of religion given in the Oxford Dictionary, while attempting to define religion as such, is a rather accurate definition of authoritarian religion. It reads: '[Religion is] recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control over his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship.' "Here the emphasis is on the recognition that man is controlled by a higher power outside of himself. But this alone does not constitute authoritarian religion. What makes it so is the idea that this power, because of the control it exercises, is entitled to 'obedience, reverence and worship.' I italicize the word 'entitled' because it shows the reason for worship, obedience, and reverence lies not in the moral qualities of the deity, not in love or justice, but in the fact that it has control, that is, has power over man. Furthermore it shows that the higher power has a right to force man to worship him and the lack of reverence and obedience constitute sin. "The essential element in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian religious experience is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, the cardinal sin is disobedience. Just as the deity is conceived as omnipotent or omniscient, man is conceived as being powerless and insignificant. Only as he can gain grace or help from the deity by complete surrender can he feel strength. Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which man escapes from his feeling of aloneness and limitation. In the act of surrender he loses his independence and integrity as an individual but he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which, as it were, he becomes a part. "In Calvin's theology we find a vivid picture of authoritarian, theistic thinking. 'For I do not call it humility,' says Calvin, 'if you suppose that we have anything left.... We cannot think of ourselves as we ought to think without utterly despising everything that may be supposed an excellence in us. This humility is unfeigned submission of a mind overwhelmed with a weighty sense of its own misery and poverty; for such is the uniform description of it in the word of God.' "The experience which Calvin describes here, that of despising everything in oneself, of the submission of the mind overwhelmed by its own poverty, is the very essence of all authoritarian religions, whether they are couched in secular or theological language. In authoritarian religion God is a symbol of power and force, He is supreme because He has supreme power, and man in juxtaposition is utterly powerless... "Humanistic religion, on the contrary, is centered around man and his strength. Man must develop his power of reason in order to understand himself, his relationship to his fellow men and his position in the universe. He must recognize the truth, both with regard to his limitations and his potentialities. He must develop his powers of love for others as well as for himself and experience the solidarity of all human beings. He must have principles and norms to guide him in this aim. Religious experience in this kind of religion is the experience of oneness with the All, based on one's relatedness to the world as it is grasped with thought and with love. Man's aim in humanistic religion is to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not obedience. Faith is certainty of conviction based on one's experience of thought and feeling, not assent to propositions on credit of the proposer. The prevailing mood is that of joy, while the prevailing mood in authoritarian religion is one of sorrow and guilt.
"Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man's own powers which he tries to realize in his life, and is not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man." This insight by Fromm helps us to understand the very specific and limited way in which reasonable people should use the word "surrender," in relation to recovery. It only has to do with unflinching admission and recognition of our constitutional inability to use alcohol and other drugs safely. This is surrender to reality or necessity, not surrender of individuality, individual power or personal integrity, to either superstition, God, God's will, or any form of alien control. But listen to the clinically ill servile self-hatred in the AA Big Book: "Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children..." "We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs... we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn."
"We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: 'God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!' We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him." Yuk! Gag me with a coke spoon. This despicable and embarrassing display of infantilism, slave-thought, and the masochistic-authoritarian personality, is utter abandon to madness and self-hatred. It is interesting, in passing, to note that Bill Wilson, the Wall Street hustler and anti-trade-union activist, envisions his god as "a new Employer." And all the anachronistic "Thys, Thees, Thous, wilts, etc.," display a rather embarrassing and silly messianic Biblical conceit.
5. GLUTTONY IS A DEADLY SIN Occasional over-indulgence is a learning tool. It is the way we discover the limits. Of course, there is the danger of rigidifying this tendency into a permanent and universal mental or psychological state of mind that is unhealthy, as well as unjust. This can be altered.
6. ENVY IS A DEADLY SIN. Taken to the extreme, it can become a self-destructive and paralyzing frozen state, a permanently and universally hostile disposition toward others.
7. LUST IS A DEADLY SIN. If and when lust ceases to be an occasional feeling of arousal in response to specific stimuli, but becomes a constant obsessional preoccupation, one that excludes clear thinking or interferes with one's ability to pursue one's other needs and responsibilities, or interferes with the ability to acquire other real goods, then it has obviously become a real problem.
8. COVETOUSNESS (OR GREED) IS A DEADLY SIN. Ambition, which is the real emotion or attitude of which greed is an exaggeration, is healthy. But ambition taken too far becomes a frozen state of permanent dissatisfaction with what you have. Leaving one never satisfied, always wanting more. But the human species is built in a way that it becomes perpetually discontent with what it has, and is urged and impelled to progress. This urge is often confused with, and condemned along with, greed. Greed involves wanting more than a fair share. What gets condemned is often mere ambition. And this is not such a cut and dried "deadly sin." It requires a concrete analysis of concrete conditions to determine when it crosses over into greed.
9. FEAR IS A CHARACTER DEFECT
"...fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble."
"[fear is] an evil and corroding thread..." Fear is the energy that warns us of danger to our basic needs, survival and security. Fear foretells for us the consequences of our anticipated actions. Fear is the emotion that allows us to develop discernment, prudence and wisdom. Without fear we would walk in front of speeding trucks, sit on hot stoves, spit on karate experts, eat rotten spoiled foods, take unjustified risks, and far more easily commit unjust acts of self-satisfaction at the expense of others. If and when reasonable and realistic fear becomes transformed from a healthy survival emotion into an unreasonable, unrealistic and neurotically irrational fear, when we become afraid of everything, or become paranoid, or become so fearful that we are paralyzed and unable to act, then clearly this kind of fear is very unhealthy and dangerous.
10. GUILT IS A LIABILITY, A CHARACTER DEFECT
Likewise guilt can become neurotic self-blame. It can become a state in which one is guilty and feels as if one has done wrong all the time, even and especially when they are not doing anything wrong. This exaggeration of guilt is usually based in warped values about what is right and wrong. If one believes one's basic drives and needs are bad or sinful, then whenever you satisfy a true need, in addition to shame, you will feel guilty. This is neurotic guilt. Blaming oneself for what others do to themselves, or for how others make themselves feel, is another example of unbalanced, neurotic guilty self-blame.
11. SHAME IS A LIABILITY, A CHARACTER DEFECT The healthy human emotion of shame can easily be transformed into toxic shame, a radical conviction that one is flawed, defective, worthless, bad and sinful. Extremely powerful social, familial and religious forces are involved in inducing toxic shame in people from infancy. This kind of toxic shame leads to self-hatred, self-destruction, self-denigration, self-effacement, self-denial, unhealthy self-sacrifice, and a feeling of self-contempt and shame toward all of our human feelings, urges, desires and needs. This creates a "hole in the gut," a feeling of emptiness and incompletion, which we try to fill with drugs, alcohol, or other substances or activities. We shall have more to say about shame elsewhere, and point out that whole books have been written about toxic shame and its relation to addiction. We encourage people to find them and read them. Some other winners: Joy is the exhilarating energy of pleasure that flows from all our needs being met. It is the reward of and affirmation of life, and tells us all is well. Without joy we would live cramped, drudgerous and brutish existences. Joy, too, however, can become a trap for those who become frozen in it. If we no longer feel joy in appropriate response to the conditions of having our needs met, but feel joy in response to all stimuli, even atrocious tragedy and evil, then we are in trouble. If we go too far and get stuck in joy, and are always walking around smiling no matter what is happening, inappropriately telling all who will listen to "look on the bright side," that we are always "happy, joyous and free," then we will be insensitive to the pain and suffering of humanity, including ourselves. Sadness is the emotion that tells us of a loss of something of value to us. It is, in a sense, a measure of how much we value people and things that our sadness at their loss is proportional. Grief and sadness is the perfectly appropriate emotional response to tragedy and loss. In these situations it is utterly insensitive and inappropriate to urge a person to "look on the bright side," "you should be grateful," etc. Comforting people in pain requires validating their feelings, not invalidating them. It requires care and concern, just being there, listening sympathetically, offering support, and not the compulsion to fix them, or to shame their feelings, preach to them about how they "should" feel, or otherwise try to force them out of their feelings. A scientific, humanist view would ask us to recognize that this world includes evil and tragedy, that the innocent are frequently and unjustly abused and victimized. That often nature and bad luck are cruel. We do not believe that evil is really good in disguise. We know, rather, that it is really evil. But we know that in many of its forms it is an unavoidable reality of nature, and accept it. We do not accept it without protest, or without arduous attempts to ameliorate and remedy the evils we can, especially those of a human and social nature. But, those we cannot, we learn to accept with a sense of tragedy, stoicism, and a willingness to persevere and keep trying. Sadness can become so prolonged and all-pervasive that it does not lift. It can become stuck, overwhelming and paralyzing. These balanced views of various emotions can be extended to the full range of all human emotions. All emotions are morally equal; they are neither good nor bad. They are simply energies which tell us of our likes and dislikes, our values, our needs, dangers and satiations. When they are appropriate to the situation, and appropriately expressed, there's nothing wrong with them. They are the energies that move us to get what we need. We learn that all emotions arise in response to external and internal stimuli and pass away in time in the natural order of things. We learn to distinguish between feelings and behavior. We do not have to act out our feelings just because we have them. There is nothing wrong with being angry at someone. There is usually something wrong with ragefully browbeating them, or physically assaulting them. We do not need to act them in, either, by stuffing them and hurting ourselves.
B. TALKING OUT OF BOTH SIDES OF THEIR MOUTHS:
C. SHAME-BASED VIEW OF THE UNWORTHY SELF -- OR -- SELF-HATRED AND BLAMING THE VICTIM:
18. THERE ARE NO VICTIMS, ONLY VOLUNTEERS: But AA and NA, in their consistent self-blame and self-loathing, repeat such junk food "wisdom" as:
"Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some point in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt." This is the clinical mental illness called neurotic self-blame, masquerading as a road to recovery.
19. NO ONE CAN MAKE YOU FEEL ANYTHING.
Hello? Anybody home? This is an utterly ridiculous saying. Feelings are evolutionarily selected mechanisms for appropriating knowledge about the outside world and giving them some valuation. If there were no regularities in the matter of which stimuli produce what feelings, no cause and effect from the stimulus to the feeling, then these feelings would be utterly arbitrary and chaotic, simply useless from a biological-evolutionary standpoint. And it is not just physical touching that can "make" us feel things. We have measurable and predictable affective-emotional responses even to the facial expressions of others, not to mention having such reactions to words, images, sounds, non-verbal expressions, and the full range of social treatment that falls below the threshold of physical touching. This is an example of an extremely individualist, atomized solipsism which leaks into and all over every piece of thoroughly self-centered psychology: It is based on the Robinson Crusoe-like imaginary theoretical ideal of the individual as some isolated and hermetically sealed fragment, that neither influences anything, nor is influenced by anything. But these same people often claim that these isolated individuals somehow mysteriously have a self-propelled ability to alter reality through prayer, and to call down the aid of higher powers to alter natural law. But at the same time they stoically and blithely endure all external buffeting and insults, and only react by passively changing themselves. Have the people who mouth this lousy slogan ever read poetry? Listened to Mozart? Been made to feel things by art, lovers, enemies?
20. WE MUST FORGIVE ALL THOSE WHO DID US HARM.
21. WE MUST GIVE UP ALL RESENTMENTS.
22. ANGER AND RESENTMENTS ARE THE DUBIOUS LUXURIES OF NORMAL MEN, THAT ALCOHOLICS AND ADDICTS CANNOT AFFORD. You have some case to prove there, Johnny. Two million years of human evolution, billions of people, all had it, but you claim it's all a big mistake. OK. You have an honest face. I guess I have to believe you, right?
23. WHEN WE ARE ANGRY, WE SHOULD PRAY FOR THE PERSON, AND TURN IT OVER RIGHT AWAY, FORGIVING THEM AS IF THEY WERE A SICK FRIEND.
24. WHEN WE ARE ANGRY, THREATENED, FRUSTRATED, HARMED, INVADED, ETC., WE MUST ACCEPT WHATEVER HAPPENS (AS GOD'S WILL).
25. WE MUST ALWAYS ACCEPT THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE.
26. WE MUST TURN THE OTHER CHEEK.
27. WE MUST NEVER SEEK REVENGE, NO MATTER HOW GROSSLY DISHONORED OR HUMILIATED OR ABUSED.
28. SELF-PITY IS AN UNACCEPTABLE EMOTION. As with other things, if you get stuck in it too long, it becomes paralyzing. But some decent period of self-pity is legitimate, surely. Pity is a loving and gentle emotion. One reserved for concern and compassion for people suffering the finality and irreversibility of tragedy. In AA and NA, the almost pathological disdain for "self-pity" is just another example of the shame-based self-loathing, self-abnegating, self-denigrating, self-hatred of Christianity. "O, Lord, I am so unworthy in Thine eyes, that I do not even deserve pity, or compassion. And Lord protect me from the double sin of feeling this love, compassion, and pity toward my sinful and always ever-unworthy self." It is our fervent conviction that if you don't love yourself you can't love others. If you don't identify the wrongs done to you as bad, you cannot identify the wrongs you do to others as bad. If you cannot feel pity and compassion for yourself for the sufferings you endure, you cannot feel the human empathy and pity and compassion toward the suffering of others. If you hold yourself in contempt when you suffer and you feel self-pity, you will hold in contempt the sufferings and need for pity of others. The mystical elitism of shamanism, Bhuddism, Jainism, etc., is of a piece with Christianity in this contempt for the body. They, too, abhor self-pity, in their "super-spiritual" contempt for normal human emotions, drives and needs. "All life is suffering," they say, so why not surrender without protest to it? It is all part and parcel of their philosophically ignorant contempt for this world, with all their attendant escapist pie-in-the-sky promises of rewards in the "after-life," the "other-world," the "higher-realm," etc. Anything, it seems, but this life. Anything but reality. Desperately, anything but our frail, limited, human beings. Self-pity is a totally appropriate emotional response to certain sets of circumstances, e.g., when we are victimized by tragedy. Provided that it is not used to hide behind and dishonestly excuse our own role in our difficulties, it often is a healthy emotion. It is a form of self-love, and an absolutely necessary ingredient of healing. It should arise when called for, and pass away as circumstances change, just as with all emotions, including fear, anger and resentment. As with any of these emotions, if we get stuck in it for a prolonged period of time, if it is converted from a transitory emotional response to given stimuli into a permanent obsessional state of mind, or state of being, in which it becomes our reaction to all stimuli, then (and only then) is it inappropriate. Then we would be in trouble. If we are always crying the blues of self-pity, blaming on others what we are responsible for, then we are in trouble. But when we are innocent, and are ravaged by tragedy, self-pity is, in our view, totally appropriate and necessary. In those kinds of circumstances, to criticize ourselves for feeling self-pity, to criticize ourselves for "not feeling gratitude like I should," to embarrassingly hunt around for some sorry ass evidence that we really brought all this misfortune down on ourselves, to publicly flagellate ourselves for invented, imagined and exaggerated sins, is a frightening example of sick, neurotic self-blame. That way madness lies. Listen to Bill Wilson: "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. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly [never?!] without provocation, but we invariably [!?] find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self [O, horrors!] which later placed us in a position to be hurt."
"So our troubles [not "some" troubles, but "our troubles," which can only presumably mean "all our troubles"], we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it will kill us! God makes that possible [!]. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self [leaving what, may we ask?] without His aid." This is the AA program's answer. This sick, neurotic self-blame for everything, this corrupt, corroded, nincompoop view of human nature and social reality, masquerades as "the answer to all life's problems, emotional and situational." This is a philosophy of self-hatred, self-loathing and self-contempt. "...entirely getting rid of self [with] His aid." This is mental illness, not recovery or "spirituality." By the way, the phrase "self-will run riot" takes on its true and appropriate value when it is clearly seen in this idiotic context of Bill Wilson's messianic Calvinist world view. As John Stuart Mill pointed out: "According to the Calvinist theory, the one great offense of man is self-will." The assumption that self-will has no useful function in human behavior defies not only logic and self-experience, but also large portions of the established literature in psychology and sociology. As a definition of alcoholism or addiction, "self-will run riot" is rankly exaggerated and one-sided, and therefore wrong, false, ignorant and dangerous. Wilson's messianism stands in ironic and hypocritical contrast to the dogma he spewed. But, then, as the Greeks used to say, those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. This almost exclusively "Spiritualistic" interpretation of addiction (which, after all is said and done, is a bio-chemically rooted, compulsive, repetitive ingestion of mind and mood altering chemicals despite adverse consequences), is one-sided -- and therefore wrong.
29. DON'T WISH FOR WHAT YOU WANT, BUT WHAT GOD WANTS FOR YOU.
30. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR, YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT. This slogan is really fueled by a deep, but hidden, sense of envy and resentment.
31. EGO IS BAD AND MUST BE DEFLATED OR OVERCOME OR TRANSCENDED (AS OPPOSED TO RECONSTRUCTED AND HEALED AND BALANCED). Recovery is about healing the ego, rebuilding it on healthy grounds, restoring it to full operational condition. And achieving a balanced, centered view of the relationship of the ego to others and the universe. The false-ego that some of us may have built up as a compensatory defense against our low self-esteem, often needs to be deflated, so that we can reconstruct a powerful, healthy authentic-ego. But that is not what the sloganeers mean. They mean protracted warfare against the ego as such. Remember that old TV commercial for a kids' board game, called, "Operation"? It had a figure of a panic-stricken guy with holes in his body, and you had to try to extract the bones through the holes without touching the metal edges of the holes with the tweezers. If you touched the metal with the metal tweezers, it completed an electric circuit, and lights flashed, buzzers buzzed, whistles blew, and all the kids shouted in delirious shock. They had a great, demented little jingle, that was the gleefully shouted sound track to these half-blindfolded mad scientists torturing this poor guy: "Op - er - ay - shun!!!" Whenever these gurus get up in meetings and start preaching their spiritual psycho-surgery against the ego, all I can think of is seeing them all with surgical masks, holding hands, doing a line-kick in a prayer circle, dementedly singing: "Op - er - ay - shun!!!"
32. I DON'T KNOW HOW I GOT HERE, IT CERTAINLY WASN'T MY WILL, SO IT MUST HAVE BEEN GOD'S WILL. Speak gently to them. Pat them on the back. They need a hand.
33. I KNOW THAT WHATEVER IS MY WILL MUST BE WRONG. "Why, I'm so diseased and stupid, that if it's my will to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that must be wrong! This great spiritual insight has changed my whole life, and I owe it all to AA and these rooms..." This reminds one of the cartoon character on Rocky and Bullwinkle, Captain Backwards. Whatever he said, you had to believe the opposite. But even Rocky and Bullwinkle knew he was a bit odd. Stick with such winners, and you, too, can become a moron.
34. I KNOW I SHOULDN'T, THAT IT'S NOT SPIRITUAL, BUT SOMETIMES I... "TAKE MY WILL BACK" Ahem. You cannot get rid of your will, Johnny. It's hard wired into the organism. You can mutilate your humanity by surrendering control of it to another, but you can't brush your teeth, put on your pants, or wipe your bum without exercising it yourself.
35. I PRAY ONLY FOR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD'S WILL FOR ME. D. FAITH VS. KNOWLEDGE, OR UNREASON VS. REASON:
36. "FEAR IS A LACK OF FAITH."
"...we have found a loving, personal God to whom we can turn. We no longer need to be afraid." Awwww! Isn't that nice? Read me another story, Daddy?
"We do not have to look at our past alone. Our wills and out lives are now in the hands of our Higher Power." Tell me the one about 'Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh, Boy!'
"The more we live our program, the more God seems to put us in positions where issues surface." Why doesn't he put us in positions where money surfaces, Daddy?
37. IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE, BELIEVE THAT I BELIEVE. This slogan is so self-inflated, grandiose, and conceited that grown adults' faces should burn red with shame if they ever utter it seriously.
38. COMING TO BELIEVE RESTORES US TO SANITY. Yeah, right, Buddy... That sounds right. "Before I came to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Jack the Pumpkin King, I was obviously insane. Now that I have come to believe in them, and have become firmly convinced I am Napoleon, I have been restored to sanity. Excuse me, I have to go lead my troops to Moscow..."
39. BELIEF IS SUPERIOR TO KNOWLEDGE. There is no place here for a requirement of faith or belief. What we have available to us is far superior to primitive faith and belief: we have experience, evidence, proof and knowledge. In the normal course of usage we use the words "faith" and "belief" to mean "confidence" in the truth of some facts. In this common usage, the facts are open to testing and verification, and so the confidence can be discovered to be founded or unfounded, warranted or unwarranted. Who can object to these common and pedestrian usages of the words "faith" and "belief?" What is open to objection is the religious use of the words "faith" and "belief." When they are used in this religious sense, they claim to be alternatives to reason as roads to truth. In this sense, they are used to mean methods of acquiring certainty that do not require verification of facts. They are objectionable when they are used to justify mandatory reliance on an unprovable belief in god. This sense encourages naive credulity, and unreasoning belief in what cannot be tested or proved. This is a corruption of the human dignity of reason. This religious sense of "faith" and "belief" is, sadly, the sense meant by their use in the AA and NA program. This sense of "faith" is not only not an admirable virtue, but is an absolute vice. Faith or belief in this unverifiable religious sense, faith and belief in god as the explanation of all things, is almost by definition an admission of a lack of proof, and therefore a lack of knowledge. Faith's inability to demonstrate the proof of its theistic propositions therefore also leads one to legitimately question its ability to demonstrate the sanity of the "true believer." Indeed, this unreasoning belief is an obstacle to truth, because believers generally do not hold themselves open to contrary evidence. They usually "cut the feet to fit the shoes," or arbitrarily try to shoehorn the real world into the narrow molds of their preconceived beliefs. The true believer usually turns a blind eye and a tone deaf ear to clear-cut, provable evidence that he is wrong. And the rigid persistence in a belief, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, is the technical definition of the mental disorder known as a "delusional state." The only basis for legitimately claiming such preferential treatment of ideas is if one can claim that they are more probably true than their alternatives. But once you make the claim of truth, you necessarily must submit yourself to the only warranted test of truth: evidence, experiment and proof. The religious orthodoxies established in the AA and NA programs and literature are put forward as if they were self-evidently true. But they avoid like the plague being submitted to the scrutiny of evidence and proof. They reject this test of truth, and claim "absolute certainty" through supernatural revelation, authority based on such revelations, or mystical intuitions. Such "faith-based" assertions of truth are among the most notoriously offensive and abusive of established orthodoxies, because they impudently hold themselves aloof from the standards of reason or validation. They put themselves forward as if there cannot be any evidence that could ever invalidate or disprove their bald and unwarranted assertions of truth. Or else they treat the very questioning of their validity as a form of blasphemy which is forbidden. Such insulations from testing and proof are suspiciously and curiously convenient for the dogmatist. Such dogmatic rigidities have ever been the stock-in-trade of glassy-eyed true believers. These kind of orthodoxies that hold themselves above scrutiny, investigation and proof are historically among the most dangerous and oppressive dogmas that exist. The establishment of such an ideological orthodoxy also corrupts the vitality and vigor of the thinking processes of the orthodox believers, themselves. They tend to rely on the authority vested in the founding document to show the legitimacy of their ideas, rather than on a well-reasoned understanding of their own or their opponents' position. The comfortable adherence to the orthodox majority opinion is far easier than thinking for oneself, and maybe having to defend unorthodox conclusions. The orthodox believer doesn't need to exert any effort, doesn't need to work at learning, to come to his beliefs. He appropriates them wholesale, in one bite, so to speak, by declaring his allegiance to the fundamental document that contains them -- a "Big Book," or a "Basic Text." His confidence in the legitimacy of his beliefs rests not on knowledge, but on authority. He is not called on to understand, explain, defend or prove his beliefs. All he has to do is prove that they conform to the authoritative document that contains them. And if that document is held to be above reproach, or infallibly exempt from error, or divinely inspired, well, then, that's the end of the bloody argument, isn't it? This can be seen clearly and often when many addicts hold up and thump a Big Book or a Basic Text, in the grandly naive and uncritical tradition of Bible thumpers everywhere, and shout, "It says right here in the book that..." Fill in the blank. Any manner of wrong-headed notions about human nature may be quoted from the book, and the book-thumper says it in that way to indicate that "what I am saying is true, because it says it in the book." Common variations on this dogmatic theme are heard in the all-too-common huffy and pompous intonations that, "...there is no such thing as an individual program. There is only one program. The program laid down in the Big Book of AA," or "in the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous." And the book "tells me that I gotta..." Fill in the blank. E. DENIAL OF HUMAN POWERS:
40. I AM POWERLESS OVER EVERYTHING. "The victim of the physical violence is also bonded to the violence out of shame. In the beginning the victims bond out of sheer terror. But as the abuse continues, their self-worth is diminished. As the self worth is diminished, the victims lose the ability to choose. They become like starving children looking for morsels or crumbs of love."
"Because violence is irrational and impulsive, it is often random and unpredictable. The random quality of the violence sets up what Seligman calls 'learned helplessness.' Learned helplessness is a kind of mental confusion. The people can no longer think or plan. They become passively accepting of their abuse. I can't imagine a more soul-murdering destruction of human life." While the AA and NA literature do not explicitly go this far, they generally fail to limit the idea to any defined structure, thereby allowing its adherents to espouse "powerlessness" as a general principle of existence. It is a very general view among the people in the program.
41. I AM POWERLESS OVER EVERYTHING BEYOND MY FINGERTIPS. The answer is obviously, "no." Resoundingly "NO!" Human beings have power, indeed, many powers: the power to think, to reason, to feel, to perceive, to desire, to choose, to imagine, to invent, to create, to improve conditions, to communicate, to persuade others, to stir and move others, to educate others, to comfort others, and to transform the external world of nature to our own ends. Doctors and surgeons have the power to save lives, fire-fighters to rescue adults and children, teachers to expand young minds, agriculturalists to feed millions, workers to build houses, factories, parks and museums, artists have the power to create art and move people, parents have the power to nurture and educate the young, lovers to brings us tenderness and joy. Some human beings also, quite obviously, demonstrate on a daily basis that they have negative power over other human beings. Police have the power to arrest criminals, handcuff them, and drag them to jail. Judges and juries exercise the power to sentence them to prison. Prison officials exercise the power to confine them and deprive them of their freedom. Murderers exercise the power of life and death over their murder victims. Rapists exercise brute power over their victims. A deliriously high percentage of parents exercise the power of beatings and verbal abuse over their defenseless children. Many frustrated male workers come home from a day of being humiliated by the boss and act it out by exercising dictatorial power over their wives or lovers. Some women exercise tyrannical power over their husbands or lovers. Growing numbers of grown children exercise abusive power over their helpless elderly parents. National armies exercise the power of brute force and technological wizardry to kill and destroy thousands of human beings. The examples of how human beings exercise power over each other are infinite and endless. They are so multitudinous, uncountable, and self-evident as to make any denial of them utterly absurd. Those powers are inherent in the human condition and we cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility to use them wisely by denying that we have them. It is almost embarrassing to have to demonstrate by reason and argument something that is so obviously self-evident to common sense. But the magical-mystical overgrowths in the AA and NA program require that such elementary realities be restated. Human beings, of all the animals on earth, are distinguished and characterized precisely by the fact that they have the power to transform nature to their own preconceived purposes. This is the distinction between autoplastic change and alloplastic change. Autoplastic change is the ability to change the organism to make it adapt to conditions. Alloplastic change is the ability to change conditions to make them adapt to the organism. Humans have both powers. "It's true, Johnny. I heard that somewhere... You could look it up, like." In fact, the power of alloplastic change is our main evolutionary survival tool, and for the benefit of those AA and NA fundamentalists who talk as if they are without much of it, it is called intelligence: the ability to learn and to use what we learn to alter external nature to our own ends to survive. There is, however, just as obviously, no guarantee that we will use that power wisely. That is at the root, for example, of various worldwide military and ecological crises that confront us. Not to mention bad driving. We are required by our own survival interests to use our powers wisely. We cannot do that by sticking our heads in the sand and denying that we have any power. Because when we stick our heads in the sand we tend to become more like that part of us that is left sticking up in the breeze. Once we are well into recovery, to say we are "powerless over everything" or "powerless over everything beyond my fingertips" is sheer unadulterated nonsense. Firstly, it can often be used to exempt us from our moral obligations. For example, you are walking by a subway stairway and see a guy raping a woman, or you see a fire and a child teetering on a window-ledge. Do you say, "Well, I'm powerless over everything, so, I guess I should just kept on walking?" This exaggerated vision of powerlessness is a cop out from the obligation to be in the world, and to fulfill our social, moral and ethical duties. It exempts us from the duty to oppose evil, and thereby aids and abets evil. In this form it is a spineless, cowardly, selfish, and cruel withdrawal from the human obligations imposed on us by living morally and ethically within the world. But, secondly, it is also a form of excuse-making for the sometimes destructive consequences that flow from the exercise of the powers we do have in the world. Can we ride rough-shod over others and then exempt ourselves from all blame or guilt by saying: "I didn't do that. I'm not responsible. How could I be? I'm powerless over everything?" How convenient! This exaggerated inflation of the concept of powerlessness is a denial of our power to harm others. It is a denial of the awesome responsibility that comes with having certain powers over others, such as our children. It is an infantile denial of, and cop out from, the responsibility to have a mature, courageous engagement with the real world, in which we have actively to investigate and assess reality, judge and choose options, and behave with justice to others, and wisdom concerning ourselves. When questioned, many of the people who hold this view of being "powerless over everything beyond my fingertips" reveal that they have a very cock-eyed definition of the word "power." When they are drawn out it seems that what they mean by "power" is magical, or omnipotent, godlike power. Like little Caligulas, if they don't have the god-like power, at the wave of a wand, to magically or miraculously alter reality, then they say they don't have any power. If they don't have the power of a god, then they are utterly "powerless." This is typical of the extremist thought disorders that afflict many addicts: all or nothing. Either I am god, or if not, then I am lower than a worm. Anything, it seems, except being a human being with the limited, though significant and real powers and responsibilities of a human being. The evidence of how each organism shapes and is shaped by its environment, which is the heart of the science of evolution and co-evolution, is a powerful refutation of this keep-it-simpleton argument. It pulverizes the nonsense about being "powerless over everything beyond my fingertips."
42. I AM POWERLESS OVER PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS... This is an assertion that humans only have, or should only exercise, the power of autoplastic change, but not alloplastic change. If we did not have the power to influence other people, what would be the point of "sharing our experience, strength and hope"? What would be left of "the power of love," "the power of art," or "the power of example"?
43. WE'RE ALCOHOLICS OR ADDICTS, SO OUR LIVES WILL NEVER BE MANAGEABLE EVEN AFTER WE ARE CLEAN AND SOBER.
44. NOTHING I'M SAYING IS ORIGINAL. I'M NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP. EVERYTHING I KNOW I'VE LEARNED IN THIS PROGRAM. I DON'T HAVE AN ORIGINAL THOUGHT IN MY HEAD. F. ODDBALL AND KOOKY EXTENSIONS OF SLOGANS TO OTHER AREAS OF LIFE WHERE THEY JUST DON'T APPLY:
45. WE TAKE NO POSITIONS ON OUTSIDE ISSUES, SO I HAVE NO POLITICAL OPINIONS. Likewise, another example of confusing the group with the individual, is when these people define their primary purpose. The minute an individual mistakes the AA and NA single-issue groups' primary purpose for his or her own individual human primary purpose, they immediately truncate and mutilate their own full humanity into a shrunken mockery. This is clearly the talk of ignorance trying to justify ignorance. Any ideology that promotes this kind of political indifference among citizens is an ideology of despair that passively condones and protects all the injustices embedded in the current political and economic system. Real recovery is about becoming a fully functional and involved member of society, and an active citizen: in other words, a human being.
46. I'M AN ADDICT, SO I OBSESS OVER EVERYTHING. Or else, you may be an addict who also suffers from the separate psychiatric disorder of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). But not all addicts do.
47. I'M ADDICTED TO EVERYTHING, SEX, PEOPLE, FOOD, SPORTS, TV, GAMBLING, SCRABBLE, BIKE RIDING, WATER DRINKING, BREATHING, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. G. IGNORANT AND CREDULOUS BELIEF IN MAGIC, MIRACLES AND SUPERSTITIONS:
48. GOD NEVER GIVES YOU MORE THAN YOU CAN HANDLE. "No test has been sent to you that does not come to all men. Besides, God keeps his promise. He will not let you be tested beyond your strength. Along with the test he will give you a way out of it so that you may be able to endure it." 1 Corinthians 10:13. Tell that to the 500 Americans who are struck dead by lightening each year. We bet that was more than their asses could handle, Johnny. Tell that to the 21,000 homicide victims each year in America. Tell that to the 20,000 killed in alcohol-related car crashes. Tell that to the innumerable victims of rape, wife-beating, child-beating, assault, robbery, loss, tragedy and grief. In grief, we "break down" and cry precisely because it is more than we can handle. We seek comfort, support and solace from others precisely because it is more than we can handle alone. Do we recover from such tragedies? Sometimes. Not always. Some people recover, some don't. Some people die. Some people suffer and then die. That is the remorseless logic of fate and existence. This kind of realism is not pessimism, because we should hope and try for the best. But if, at the end of the day, despite our best efforts, that is not what we get, we must accept that we get what we get, anyway. It serves no honest purpose to delude ourselves. This is the only honest thing that can be said about our fate. We courageously try to change the things about ourselves and our world that we can. Sometimes we can succeed. Sometimes we humans make great progress in changing the world: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific-Technical Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, the cure for polio, and other diseases. We can change the world. Very often, an individual is relatively powerless, but in great numbers they can move mountains. But let us never underestimate the profound changes brought about by solitary individuals heroically committed to a good cause. But there are many things over which no amount of effort can grant us control. The inexorable process of death lays low commoner and king. Irreversible tragedies occur with regularity. Accidents. Coincidences. Shit happens. Life on life's terms. We mourn, and we grieve. We skip none of the stages of grief. But in the end, we seek to develop the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. This frees us of an enormous burden of trying to wish it and will it otherwise. The recognition of this necessity is the starting point of a truly operative freedom. If we don't recognize necessity, we are never free to act within its limits, because we will be always entangled in trying to supersede those limits. Figuring out where those limits are is the work of explorers, innovators, inventors and adventurers. Sometimes they do supersede the limits and push out the edge of the envelope. By increasing our powers as a species we expand our possibilities. We have already escaped earth's gravity and will soon land men on Mars. But there are limits that are insurmountable. Discovering where they are is the acquisition of the wisdom to know the difference between the things we can change and the things we can't. With this wisdom, we can commit ourselves to living life on life's terms as mature adults. There is no evidence to suggest that there is a supernatural being who can or does grant us this wisdom or serenity. It is only acquired through effort, courage, and experience, guided by intelligence.
49. YOU MIGHT NOT GET WHAT YOU WANT, BUT GOD ALWAYS GIVES YOU WHAT YOU NEED. You get what you get, period. There is no guarantee you will get what you need, and we have lived vast stretches of our lives not getting what we needed. We recognize the reality of tragedy and evil. We make no effort to wish it away with incredibly naive, glassy-eyed, magical assertions. Likewise, no matter what we choose to do, the outcomes are still heavily influenced by deterministic forces beyond our control, and by the whimsy of chance and luck. It is utterly erroneous to say that, "If I do the right thing the right thing will happen back to me." That is simply untrue. Bad things do happen to good people. There is no cosmic justice or balance. No matter what we do, we are subject to the harsh, remorseless juggernaut of fate. But if we make consistently good choices, healthy and just choices, we greatly reduce the odds of some self-caused bad things happening to us. Surely if we don't shoot dope we won't overdose. But we can still get mugged or hit by a drunk driver.
50. THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES. This is just another version of the supernaturalist, magical viewpoint of AA and NA: "There Are No Coincidences." Indeed! This is a ludicrous, loony opinion. It denies the mathematical and statistical laws of chance and randomness that are so repeatedly demonstrated in daily life, mathematical equations, and scientific experiment. Random chance and coincidence, and their probabilities, account for the fact that the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City never lose. The alternative view requires an insane logical conclusion: if there are no coincidences, then every single, solitary, minuscule movement of every single atom, proton, neutron, quark, gluon, photon, muon, tau, neutrino, electron, and the rest of the elementary sub-atomic particles, as well as every planet, moon, sun, star, galaxy, gas, wind, ripple, car horn, dog bark, bowel movement, homicide, rape, child murder, etc., etc., must be the direct result of an intentional interference and manipulation by an omniscient, omnipotent supernatural being. This bewilderingly deterministic view means that there is no contingency, nothing that could have been otherwise, and also that there is no human free will. If there is free will, a genuine choice about how things will turn out, then there is of necessity contingency, and therefore coincidence and chance. The knuckle-headed magical-miracle, "no coincidences" view denies this. Carl Jung's Synchronicity, Arthur Koetler's The Roots of Coincidence, and M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled are often cited as authorities on this notion. Each of them demonstrates a profound ignorance of simple mathematics, logic, philosophical concepts, and the very meanings of the words they use. Each, in the end, goes over to the supernatural voodoo explanation of things that have far more obvious natural explanations that seem to elude them. All, in the end, while trying to masquerade in the trappings of science, attack science. "Scott Peck's Road Less Traveled The Better"
51. DON'T LEAVE UNTIL THE MIRACLE HAPPENS. Over the last five centuries science has repeatedly proven that there is not the least shred or iota of evidence of miracles. There are no events that cannot be, or are incapable of someday being, explained on the basis of natural law and natural causes, as opposed to supernatural causes. Science is based on the existence of invariant natural laws. Indeed it is the study, discovery, knowledge and use of such laws. Belief in miracles, which are the suspension of such invariant laws, is by definition unscientific.
52. LET GO AND LET GOD. Joseph Goebbels argued that if you repeat the Big Lie loud enough and often enough, some schmucks will believe you. Let go, and Let God, indeed! This is the cowards' way of surrendering responsibility for their own lives. It is an infantile wish to have Mommy and Daddy take care of it. It is the exact opposite of mature responsibility.
53. I SURVIVED OUT THERE SO I KNOW THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A HIGHER POWER LOOKING OUT FOR ME. THAT'S HOW I KNOW THERE'S A GOD. To remedy this illogicality, some addicts resort to an even further exaggeration of grandiosity by asserting that their survival in the face of some other addicts' deaths is proof that they have been "chosen" by god to survive. They proclaim themselves "the chosen." With this insufferable arrogance, we not only depart from science, but from good taste. The various natural causes that account for the survival of some addicts resolve themselves primarily into the incredible resilience of the human organism, and luck or chance. If such addicts are looking for an appropriate place to address their gratitude for survival, one is far more easily and more justly found in a natural source: the thousands upon thousands of generations of human beings who preceded them, who eked out survival and existence in the face of brutal natural conditions, painstakingly developing skills and traits for survival, and to natural selection and evolution for passing on those traits to all the successive generations of humans until they arrived at the surviving addict.
54. GOD "PUT" THAT PERSON (OR SITUATION) IN MY LIFE TODAY FOR A REASON.
55. I'M A MIRACLE.
56. EVERY CLEAN AND SOBER ADDICT IS A MIRACLE.
57. IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, JUST LOOK AT THE ADDICT SITTING NEXT TO YOU. H. ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND HOSTILITY TO FREE CRITICAL INQUIRY:
58. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID We utterly reject the crude and oppressive anti-intellectual attitudes and atmosphere so prevalent in AA and NA. We reject as harmful and abusive the sneering by old-timers, who mumble out of the sides of their mouths, "Keep it simple, stupid." This phrase is abusive, insulting, and insensitive. But we also take it to be often an admission of ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy, and think it is a testament to the power of recovery that such people can stay clean. We would be justified in referring to such abusive people as the keep-it-simpletons. We certainly appreciate the sentiment behind the slogan, "Keep It Simple." We understand it to mean that processes do not require extra-added, unnecessary and superfluous assumptions to explain them. This is what is understood by "Occam's Razor." It refers to a rule put forward in the 14th Century by William of Occam, in England. It is a scientific or philosophical rule that "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily," which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex, provided it adequately explains the process, and that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities. This is one of the bases upon which we dispense with supernatural explanations of addiction and recovery. Such hypotheses, including the hypothesis of God, are unnecessary. On a very practical level, we also understand "Keep It Simple" to mean that addicts should not unnecessarily complicate, or get caught up in elaborate meanderings about, the issue of whether or not to get high. On that subject we agree: "Keep it simple: Don't use, no matter what!" But beyond that we encourage our members to think, to exult in our human power to think, and to explore and analyze everything. Every process is not the same. Some are more complicated than others. Each has its own "minimum level of complexity." To unnecessarily complicate it above this level is to over-complicate it and violate Occam's Razor. But to unnecessarily simplify it below this level is to commit the grave error of over-simplification. Both must be avoided. But people who do not have, or do not choose to exercise, the normal human mental capacities to understand and explain progressively more complicated things or processes, are rightly called simpletons. They may be very nice people, and may stay happy and sober till they die, but they are probably not the people you want to take suggestions from. People who sneeringly insist on keeping our understandings and explanations of all things and processes, regardless of their minimum degree of complexity, below a very primitively low level of simplicity, are rightly called keep-it-simpletons. And this is so regardless of how long they have been abstinent. This ignorant ridicule of intellectual capacities, powers, pursuits, endeavors, curiosities, analyses, explorations, discoveries, and originalities, is an example of the stultifying, traditional faith-based hostility to human knowledge characteristic of religious fundamentalism for the past twenty centuries.
59. DON'T JUDGE, LEST YE BE JUDGED.
60. KEEP THE FOCUS ON YOURSELF, DON'T TAKE OTHER PEOPLE'S INVENTORY.
61. DON'T PUNCH HOLES!
62. DON'T ANALYZE, UTILIZE. The sheer weight of idiocy in this slogan is almost beyond belief.
63. DON'T THINK.
64. GET STUPID.
65. MY BEST THINKING GOT ME HERE.
66. I NEVER MET ANYONE TOO STUPID TO GET THIS PROGRAM, BUT I HAVE SEEN PLENTY OF PEOPLE TOO SMART TO GET IT. Can you prove it? Do you have any studies correlating relapse rates to IQ scores? Any proof of a causal connection? Besides, more stupid people relapse than smart people. Simply because there are so many more of them. The anti-intellectualism in this slogan would make even St. Paul blush. See his Epistle denouncing wisdom as "worldly" and "of the flesh." "Where is the master of worldly argument? Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into folly? Since in God's wisdom the world did not come to know him through 'wisdom,' it pleased God to save those who believe through the absurdity of the preaching of the gospel... My message and my preaching had none of the force of 'wise' argumentation, but the convincing power of the Spirit. As a consequence, your faith rests not on the wisdom of men but on the power of God." -- 1 Corinthians, 1:20-21, 2:4-5 "Excuse me, I have to go lead my troops on Moscow..."
67. I DON'T KNOW HOW IT WORKS, AND I DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS. I JUST KNOW THAT IT WORKS. This kind of vulgar empiricism and savage pragmatism is perfect for slaves, followers and sheep. "Don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain! I am the Great Oz!"
68. IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT! Progress consists precisely of fixing what ain't broke. If we only fixed things that were broke, we would have mere stagnated replacement and reproduction of the old, but never progress toward the new. Firstly, the AA and NA programs and their Big Book and Basic Text are broken, as we have shown above, so they need fixing. Secondly, something can be partly broken and still partly work, and therefore still be in need of fixing. Wanna buy a nice used car, Johnny? Runs great. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Thirdly, for the sake of argument, something can be not broken, can be working perfectly within its primitive and limited design, but can still be replaced by a far superior new version that works far better and for far more people. Inventing a new and better replacement is a form of "fixing" a thing that ain't broke, that still works, after a fashion, but is now outdated by a newer and better model. This is the very heart of the tradition of human progress. Building a better mousetrap. So, while the AA and NA Steps and literature are broken, in their partly broken state they still partly work for some people. But the orthodox believers take this crippled, limping success and howl, "If it partly works for some people it ain't broke, so don't fix it!" Well, it should be clear to any reasonable-minded person that if you fix it up and improve it, it will work ever better and for far more people. The slogan "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a recipe for reactionary stagnation. Anywhere in the world throughout history where such a view has been adopted (such as was the case for centuries in feudal Europe and China) it has abolished all progress, improvement and learning. This attitude pompously asserts that it has arrived at the final answer and nothing needs to be changed or added, ever, that nothing in the way things are right now is wrong or in need of correction or improvement. If this slogan were really so universally "wise," and if everyone followed such "wisdom," we would still be driving the horse and buggy or Model T Fords, pumping water from a well in the front yard, and writing with quill pens. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!!!" No, we would still be living in caves, hunting with spears, and eating raw meat! Far from being a piece of wisdom, this slogan is an exquisite piece of stupidity and ridiculousness. It glorifies reactionary, hidebound conservatism, mummified traditionalism, and it attacks all progress, originality, improvement, and the forward movement of history, knowledge and culture. Just because something works in a half-efficient way, or for a limited number of people, does not mean it can't or shouldn't be improved and fixed to work even better and for far more people. When the Southern states allowed voting only for white people before 1965, the electoral system worked. For white people. "If it ain't broke don't fix it!!!" the segregationists howled in unison. So, yes, several hundred thousand, maybe millions, of alcoholics and addicts have gotten clean and sober through AA and NA just the way it is. But who is to say that if it were fixed up and improved that it wouldn't work much better for many millions more? Who's to say that many of those clean and sober products of AA and NA, in addition to being sober, haven't also been turned into warped and dependent personalities by AA's and NA's self-hating poisonous pedagogy? Is abstinence the only criteria of success? Or is not abstinence plus mental health a better criteria for success? This is only common sense. It applies to improvements in things in hundreds of categories in our everyday lives. We see the evidence for this in all human progress. It would certainly work better for the countless thousands who are driven away each year by the heavy-handed established religious orthodoxy in AA and NA. I. LAUGHABLY UNREALISTIC, GLAZED-EYED, POLLYANNA EXPECTATIONS AND EXHORTATIONS:
69. EASY DOES IT.
70. ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL, BECAUSE A GRATEFUL ADDICT WON'T GET HIGH. However, if you think that a supernatural "God has lifted the obsession to drink or use," and that he gave your always ever-unworthy self this "gift" by "His grace," then I guess you should be "grateful." But I don't see how this kind of illusory self-nullification is going to help you stay clean and sober. On the other hand, if you think that your own efforts are primarily responsible for your staying clean and sober, even though you received some secondary help or assistance from others, then who are you "grateful" to? Yourself? OK. Friends? OK. People who helped you? OK. A program that tells you you're a worthless piece of shit in need of salvation? Hardly. 71. YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL, IT COULD BE WORSE. IT'S REALLY A BLESSING IN DISGUISE. Somebody slap this guy... Hey, Johnny, now you're really gettin' outta line... When something bad or evil happens to us -- such as the death of a child, it really and truly is a bad thing. It is not -- and never will be -- a "good thing in disguise." For if that were true, unless one were exceedingly indifferent to human suffering, the disguise would be so thorough as to permanently obscure and obliterate even a peek of this "good" alleged to lurk beneath. That "silver lining" school of thought is neurotically pre-occupied with defending the reputation of God from any charge that if he is the source and creator of all things then he must also be the source of all bad and all evil that befall our kind. Since they cannot abide that possibility, they are forced back on the absurd defense that there really is no such thing as evil. Evil -- to this brainless and insensitive claque -- is really good in disguise. "But, you, you poor unfortunate," they protest, "are too ignorant or wicked to divine the Creator's ever so subtle intentions. He may be teaching you a lesson. Or giving you a test." How sadistic can this God be? How wicked and evil, to smite the innocent as so much expendable froth, in order to teach lessons or give tests? What evil pedagogy is this, and what but evil lessons can be drawn from it? How does one pass this test? By becoming as indifferent to human suffering as the dolt foisting this impertinent condolence on you? By becoming as mushy-headed, servile and glassy-eyed as the "true believer"? "Be grateful that the other children didn't die, too." Sure. "And while you're at it, be grateful that 400 Mongolian horsemen aren't gang-raping you and razor-blading your wife and kids." The "it could be worse" school of thought is criminally insensitive to the bad that does exist. Since numbers can add to each other infinitely, simply by adding one more to the total, there is no reasonable limit to this speculative and imaginative conjuring away of real and existing evil. While this view may be an understandable psychological trick to protect us from the full brunt of the pain we are unready for, as is denial, the danger of taking it seriously lies beyond a close and invisible boundary. No matter how great, enormous, colossal or gruesome the evil, sheer arithmetic insures that the imagination can fantasize an evil even greater. Why is it, or how is it, simply because we can imagine a greater evil, that this school of thought recommends that our appropriate reaction to real and existing evil or outrage should be gratitude? As opposed to, say, anger, sadness, grief, or mourning? "The Jews should be grateful it wasn't 12 million." This is a kind of moral relativism that liquidates the evil that exists in the name of an abstract, non-existing evil that could be. Since the imaginary, non-existing evil that could be, can always be imagined as greater than the one that actually exists, the one that exists does not really or fully exist. Once again, there is no evil. God's reputation is saved from the blood and dirt of human tragedy. It is also an attempt to invalidate and rob us of our genuine and appropriate human feelings and reactions to evil or tragedy. It is an attempt to say that our loss is insignificant, our pain unimportant, our sadness unjustified, our anger distasteful, and our grief embarrassing. And it barely helps matters to understand where this advise comes from. Its advocates feel so threatened and challenged by your emotions, that they become desperate and anxious to fix you. Your pain and anger frightens them, and their powerlessness to change you, to calm and numb you down, makes them uncomfortable and anxious. So they try to shame your emotions, to shame you for having your emotions, and tell you that "You shouldn't feel that way! You should be grateful." The words "should" and "shouldn't" in connection with feelings are alarm bells. Falsehoods almost invariably follow in their wake. This is another way of saying that some emotions are good, and some are bad. And sadness, anger (that reprobate character defect), grief, even self-pity, are bad emotions. Whereas, gratitude, well now...gratitude is a good emotion. This is another example of dogmatic absolutism run riot.
72. ALWAYS BE HAPPY, JOYOUS AND FREE.
73. MAINTAIN YOUR SERENITY AT ALL TIMES
74. PEACE AND SERENITY ARE THE HIGHEST GOOD "Don't get so excited, Little Johnny! Just calm down and sit still! Look at your sister... She's always so well behaved..."
75. DENIAL IS ALWAYS BAD.
76. THE PROMISES I can't read or hear "The Promises" without thinking of Rodney Dangerfield's last line to the crowd in the movie Caddyshack: "Hey, everybody!! We're all gonna get laid!!!"
77. IT'S OK FOR TODAY.
78. YOU'RE RIGHT WHERE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE. J. JUST FOR TODAY IRRESPONSIBILITY Imagine a United Nations meeting of ecologists, government representatives, and businessmen from around the world. Suppose, too, that AA and NA philosophy ruled the world. Listen, as certain practices of governments and industries are being criticized for insanely and wantonly, almost criminally, using up the world's natural resources. But the terrible effects of continuing in this way won't reach a final crisis until 75 years hence, well past the deaths of everyone present. Now, picture a lobbyist for the wasters and polluters, with 25 years sober in AA, getting up, clearing his throat at the microphone, smiling impishly, and saying, "Hey, Just For Today! Don't project! Tomorrow's a mystery!" This incredibly narrow minded view does not allow its adherents to learn from the past, or adequately, appropriately or justly plan for the future. It is a retreat from historical context that is equivalent to putting out the vision of one's memory with a sharp stick. It is an insult to the human species, which is uniquely human precisely in its ability, unlike other animals, to remember its past and utilize it wisely to learn with each new novel experience, to plan its future. It is selfish irresponsibility toward the future, through an artificial and unnatural focus "just on today." It inevitably engenders and strengthens a narrow, truncated, anti-social, selfish, self-centered world view.
79. ONE DAY AT A TIME
80. DON'T PROJECT
81. YESTERDAY'S HISTRY, TOMORROW'S A MYSTRY, LIVE FOR TODAY.
82. LIVE IN THE MOMENT. There are people with certain types of brain lesions that actually do live in the moment. They are unable to form short-term or long term memories. They can have a whole conversation with you, but forget they ever had it two minutes later. It's a terribly sad and tragic thing to watch. Robbed of their humanity, the ability to reference present sensations by way of memory and imagination. They have to live in institutions because they can't take care of themselves. This slogan advocates that we all live like that. But just listen to the actual horror of that reality, as described in The Mind, by Richard M. Restak, M.D.: "Writing in the Principles of Psychology about a century ago, William James suggested that the key to consciousness is self-reference. 'The universal conscious fact is not "feelings exist" and "thoughts exist," but "I think" and "I feel"' In other words, for experience, thoughts and behavior to become conscious, a link must be made between mental representations of these thoughts and feelings and some mental representation of the self as experiencer. "These linkages exist in memory. An extraordinary example of what happens if the linkages are broke is the case of Clive. Clive is a victim of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, which in his case attacked his right and left temporal lobes and a good portion of the left frontal lobe. Within the temporal lobe, on both sides, is the hippocampus, a structure absolutely critical for meaning. Clive's hippocampus on both sides has been destroyed. Formerly a distinguished medieval and Renaissance musicologist, an organist of virtuosity, and a choral master of renown, Clive now spends his time sitting in a twelve-by-twelve hospital room playing endless games of solitaire and making entries in a notebook. "The entries are always the same. 'Now I am completely awake, for the first time in years.' And each time Clive returns to his notebook and sees what he has written before, he disclaims it. 'I do not know who wrote that. It was not me,' he says. If the similarities in the notations and handwriting are pointed out to him, he gets angry. Here is his wife Deborah's description: 'Clive's world now consists of a moment, with no past to anchor it and no future to look ahead to. It's a blinkered moment. He sees what is right in front of him, but as soon as that information hits the brain it fades. Nothing makes an impression, nothing registers. Everything goes in perfectly well, because he has all his faculties. His intellect is virtually intact, and he perceives his world as you or I do. But as soon as he perceives it and looks away, it's gone for him. So it's a moment-to-moment consciousness, as it were, a time vacuum. And he feels as if he is awakening afresh the whole time. He always thinks he has been awake for about two minutes.' "One of the most poignant moments in the filming of the television series The Mind occurred when Deborah entered Clive's room, and he got up from his chair to greet her with a burst of laughter and happiness that shone all over his face. He greeted her as if he had not seen her in many years. Yet only moments before she had been with him. He had forgotten. To have once been so brilliant, to have accomplished so much, and then to have come to this. 'You're not dealing here with somebody who is demented, who is oblivious, who is gaga,' Deborah said later. 'You're dealing with a perfectly lucid. highly intelligent man who has been robbed of the knowledge of his own life. And he feels deeply humiliated to be put in that position; very, very frustrated. He can't grasp what's wrong with him because even as you are telling him something, he is forgetting the previous sentence. So he can never take in or understand what is wrong with him.' "Dr. Alan Parkin, of the University of Sussex, describes the tragic situation in which Clive finds himself. 'He is extremely different from any normal human being. He has to a large extent lost part of his mind, because part of what we call the mind is our ability to perceive ourselves in a continuum of time. Sitting here, I know how I got here and I know what I am going to do when I leave. Clive does not have that kind of experience. He is just living in the present. So in a sense he feels like a man adrift.' "Notice that Clive's consciousness hasn't disappeared. He knows who he is, and he can recognize his wife Deborah. But his consciousness is reduced to moments. On either side of this brief continuum of time lies a fearful abyss. But to Deborah, who knows and loves Clive, the horrifying brain damage has, mercifully, left an important part of him intact. "Deborah: 'His being, his center, his soul is absolutely functioning as it ever did. The fact that he is so despairing, so much in anguish, so angry, so much in love with me those are all real, human passions. And he is showing them almost to the exclusion of anything else. All he shows us is raw human passion, straight from the heart of the mind.' "Unlike Clive, cursed by being able to live only in the now, we can escape through our minds from the limits of the present. Thanks to mind, we can project ourselves into the future and reexplore the past. We have memory. We can empathize and identify with the feelings and actions of others. We can create works of imagination and art. Mind gives us meaning and direction and the possibility of progress over time. Mind orchestrates the realization of the brain and binds consciousness and unconsciousness together. Mind is the astounding interplay of one hundred billion neurons, and more." Any volunteers to trade places with Clive? This slogan, "Live In The Moment," is a horrific and wicked offense against humanity, against what makes us human. Living in the moment is a curse. Live in the moment! More spiritual psycho-surgery. "Op - er - ay - shun!!! Where's my scalpel, and what does this hippocampus thing look like? Hey, hold that mirror steady, Johnny..." As a matter of fact, haven't I heard a lot of people in AA and NA repeating at almost every meeting, "Now I am completely awake, for the first time in years..."?
83. IF YOU HAVE A FOOT IN YESTERDAY, AND A FOOT IN TOMORROW, YOU PISS ON TODAY. K. PSYCHOLOGICAL ABSURDITIES:
84. FEELINGS ARE NOT FACTS.
85. THIS IS A DISEASE OF THE ATTITUDES.
86. JOY DOESN'T COME FROM MATERIAL THINGS, BUT FROM WITHIN OURSELVES.
"Now I am completely awake, for the first time in years..." L. GRANDIOSE AND CULT-LIKE ASSERTIONS ABOUT THE PROGRAM:
87. "THIS IS A GOD-GIVEN PROGRAM." When one of these folks says this, if all that is intended is to say that it's a really good program, and that the person is really happy it's here, then I can live with it being thrown into that catch-all metaphorical slop-bucket, "a gift from God," along with beautiful women, Häagen-Dazs Vanilla, and the sunset skies over the Red Hook projects in Brooklyn. But if they are being serious, that is, if they mean it literally, and not as an admitted metaphorical exaggeration, then you have to scratch your head and wonder. Well, the best I can figure is that if they're serious, they mean that Bill Wilson with his big two years sober, and the various recently-sober newcomer alcoholics who wrote the AA Big Book, as well as Jimmy K. and the NA Literature Committee that wrote the NA Basic Text, were literally operating under divine inspiration by God when they were writing and speaking. "Yo, that's deep. But pretty dubious, Johnny." "Well, why not? It's, like, a real miracle, man. Waa? It koon't happen?" Where does this stuff come from? Unless they consciously broke out of it, many people who grew up their whole lives being told that the bible, or some other Holy Book, was the "word of God," often seem to develop the quirk of only taking something really seriously if they can be assured that it is straight from the memo pad of God. They thumped their bibles for years on Sundays while suffering from hangovers and the Sunday-drug-copping blues. So, they may have become a little jaded about the bible having all the answers. But now that they're in AA and NA, and they finally get clean and sober, they transfer all their dogmatic reverence from the bible to the Big Book or the Basic Text. It's not enough for a good idea to be of human invention. No. Not for them. For them to follow a program, it has to have the authority and the thumbprint of the supreme being, the creator of heaven and earth, the creator of the entire universe! Besides, if it's "God-given" then they never have to question anything in it. Or answer anyone else's questions. They are freed from having to do their own homework to find out what's true and what's not. If ignorance is bliss in this Orwellian world, then saying it's "God-given" is surely the lazy man's path to serenity.
88. "THE FELLOWSHIP ISN'T PERFECT, BUT THE PROGRAM IS PERFECT." Now, if what they mean by this gem is that the written program is more reliable than people, because people change, but the written text does not, then a plausible argument could possibly be made for it. (It would probably still be wrong, however, on the grounds of lack of subtlety: People give better hugs than books do, and are generally better listeners. But in that grand, melodramatic exaggeration so dear to the sloganeer, this dictum poses the issue as an either/or situation.) Of course, on the other hand, if the text is wrong, then the fact that it is unchanging makes it a positive hindrance. Because at least with people you can argue with them and point out the errors in their thinking and persuade them to change their minds. But the sloganeers don't really mean to allow for this with the text, do they? No, it seems that they really, literally, mean "Perfect." As in, "infallible." Doo Doo Doo Doo -- Doo Doo Doo Doo.... "Submit for your consideration: Johnny Gagootz, heroin addict and wino, finally joins a group to get help and is told that it's program is.... 'Perfect.' Little did Johnny know that he had passed that invisible line into the realm where human fallibility and error no longer exist, where the final truth has finally been achieved and can never be improved because it's 'perfect.' Little did Johnny know he'd be spending a perfect eternity in... The Recovery Zone." Doo Doo Doo Doo -- Doo Doo Doo Doo.... What can I say? At the black tie dinner party, how does one point out the 800 pound gorilla in the middle of the living room floor to the oblivious hosts, without a bit of a snicker? The program, ...how can I say this most generously, ...the program is not perfect. Not Perfect at all. Indeed, very, very far from perfect. The program is the product of fallible humans, and contains merely innumerable errors of fact, biology, philosophy, psychology, science, morals, ethics, etc... "Yeah, well, aside from that, it's pretty cool, though."
89. WE ARE "THE CHOSEN," WE HAVE RECEIVED GOD'S GRACE AND GIFT OF RECOVERY. "Now I am completely awake, for the first time in years..." "Excuse me, I have to go lead my troops to Moscow..."
90. WE CANNOT SURVIVE WITHOUT NA
91. LIVE THE STEPS OR DIE! This exclamatory command also seems to jive really well with the slogans: "There are no 'musts' in NA," or "This is a program of suggestions only." Except, of course, for the little matter that "you have to do it our way or die." Now, if what this slogan is ineptly trying to convey is that, if you choose to work the steps, from among many other possible alternative methods of staying clean and sober, then you will have a better chance of not using, and if you don't use, you will have a better chance of staying alive, then it seems to be an innocuous piece of advice. But it doesn't really say that. And it's tone makes that really clear. What it is saying is that unless you work our group's 12 Steps you will die. Period. Not possibly. Not maybe. Not even probably. No. You will definitely die. At worst, this is a vain and cult-like assertion that the 12 Steps are the only path to recovery. It asserts that AA and NA have a monopoly on recovery, "the o |