Truths to Counter the AA Cult #3: AA is About AA, Not Sobriety

From The Orange Papers:

1. Alcoholics Anonymous isn't just about quitting drinking:

   • Alcoholics Anonymous is really about Alcoholics Anonymous.

   • Alcoholics Anonymous is also a cult religion, one that uses alcoholism as a hook to get people to join. (The sister organization, Narcotics Anonymous, uses drug addictions in the same manner.) A.A., N.A., and all of the other 12-Step clones have the goal of getting everyone to practice "The Twelve Steps", which include commandments to seek knowledge of, and carry out, the will of God, as they hear God dictating His orders. The cofounder and leader of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, plainly declared:

     At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God...
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 77.

     And:

     Remember that we deal with alcohol — cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power — that One is God. May you find Him now!
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, pages 58-59.

     A.A. began as a branch of another cult religion called "The Oxford Group", which was the creation of an evil fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who actually admired Adolf Hitler and praised the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad".

     Dr. Buchman declared,

           "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler...
           The world needs the dictatorship of the living spirit of God.   ...
           ... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship."
     The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, pages 68-69.

     The cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, were both enthusiastic true-believer members of the Oxford Group cult, and they simply adapted Buchmanism to their own ends when they created Alcoholics Anonymous. For all practical purposes, Alcoholics Anonymous is simply Frank Buchman's cult religion dressed up in a different suit of clothes.

   • And, for all practical purposes, Bill Wilson was a fascist, just like Frank Buchman, and Bill was pushing a fascist philosophy (and A.A. still does):

     Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, page 100.

     Why all this insistence that every A.A. member must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.'s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant?   ...
     Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. ...
     Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 24.

     (The "conviction" that Wilson was talking about there is Frank Buchman's practice of making new converts find themselves guilty and 'convict' themselves of lots of sins.)

     Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. Though some of us resisted, we found no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon became as open minded on spiritual matters as we tried to be on other questions. In this respect alcohol was a great persuader. It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness. Sometimes this was a tedious process; we hope no one else will be prejudiced for as long as some of us were.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Pages 47 and 48.

     If you disagree with Bill Wilson's crazy cult religion, then you need to get beaten into a state of reasonableness...

     [A.A. members are] impersonally and severely disciplined from without.
     Private letter, William G. Wilson to Dr. Harry Tiebout, 9 Nov 1950, quoted in Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, by Ernest Kurtz, page 129.

     We alcoholics are undisciplined. So we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined.
     The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William Wilson, Chapter 6, Into Action, page 88.

     Really now. Such masochistic grovelling.

     We saw we needn't always be bludgeoned and beaten into humility.
     Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, page 75.
     

     In 1955, at the A.A. twentieth anniversary convention, Bill said of alcoholics,

     They would not stand for the rather aggressive evangelism of the Oxford Group. And they would not accept the principle of "team guidance" for their own personal lives. It was too authoritarian for them.   ...   In other respects, too, we found we had to make haste slowly. When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get "too good too soon."   ...   The Oxford Groups' absolute concepts — absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love — were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets.
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, (1957), pages 74-75,
     and
     Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Ernest Kurtz, page 46.
     

     So Bill Wilson was feeding his favorite Oxford Group "principles" (cult dogma) to the new alcoholics a little bit at a time; giving them just as much as they would tolerate, but not enough to drive them away. Bill was just gradually converting them to his "authoritarian principles".

     And then Bill Wilson sang the praises of dictatorships:

     Therefore we [AA] have the full benefits of the murderous political dictatorships of today but none of their liabilities.
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, pages 105—106.

     The full benefits of murderous dictatorships? What benefits? Benefits for whom? And what liabilities of murderous dictatorships does Alcoholics Anonymous not have?

     In A.A. there is active still another form of association, a form of which the world is today in great doubt. It has its virtues, nevertheless, especially for us of Alcoholics Anonymous: I am speaking of dictatorship. In A.A. we have two dictators, and we profit and grow through both. One is John Barleycorn, who is never very far from the elbow of each of us. The other is the Father of Lights, who presides over all men. God is saying to us, "Learn my will and do it." And John Barleycorn is saying to each of us, "You had better do God's will or I will kill you!"
     Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, (1957), page 225.

     Note how Bill Wilson bemoaned the fact that dictatorships had gone out of fashion. (After World War Two, the western nations had "great doubts" about the "virtues" of dictatorships.) But Bill was a faithful keeper of the flame — he was keeping the dream alive — people could still "grow and profit through dictators" in Alcoholics Anonymous.
     (Also note that in Bill Wilson's idea of a "profitable dictatorship", Bill Wilson always got to be the dictator, and he also got all of the profits, too.)

   • The A.A. religion pushes a concept of God that is worse than medieval.
     • According to A.A., God is a fascist dictator, an authoritarian, vindictive Old-Testament-style patriarchal God Who will kill you with a painful slow death by alcoholism if you don't
       • believe in Him, and
       • surrender to Him, and
       • constantly confess your sins to Him, and
       • grovel before Him, and
       • Seek and Do His Will every day.
     • According to Bill Wilson, God uses "the lash of alcoholism" to drive people into the A.A. religion, where they will find endless "Serenity and Gratitude" while working as slaves of God.

   • The manual of Alcoholics Anonymous is also named Alcoholics Anonymous, but is popularly called "The Big Book". All of Chapter Four of the Big Book, "We Agnostics", covers just one subject: how all agnostics and atheists must be converted to having the same religious beliefs as the author Bill Wilson. (It is not about how to quit drinking.) Wilson actually instructed people to abandon human intelligence and reason, and embrace blind faith in "the realm of the spirit". And then the recruiting manual in Chapter Seven of the Big Book teaches that other people's religions are inferior to A.A. beliefs, because those other religions didn't keep those people from drinking. (As if the goal of all religions is to keep people from drinking.)

   • The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are not "spiritual principles", they are cult practices that Bill Wilson got from Dr. Frank Buchman's Oxford Groups. The Twelve Steps are a recipe for building a cult religion, not a formula for quitting drinking:
     • The Twelve Steps do not even tell you to quit drinking, or to help anyone else to quit drinking, either.
     • The Twelve Steps don't even mention sobriety, recovery, or health, but they do mention surrender to the cult, and going recruiting for the cult, and guilt-inducing confession sessions.
     • The 12 Steps also mention God, directly or indirectly, in 6 of the 12 steps. The Ten Commandments of Judeo-Christian religions mention God fewer times than that — only 4 or 5 of the 10 commandments refer to God, directly or indirectly¹ — but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.
     • Seven of the 12 steps, Steps Four through Ten, are designed to induce guilt in members by having them make long lists of every sin they ever committed, and every fault, moral shortcoming, and defect of character they have, and then they have to confess it all to another member and God. Then they make another list of everybody they ever hurt or offended, and confess that, and try to make amends. And then they have to repeat the whole process again, and again, for the rest of their lives.
     • The Twelve Steps tell people to surrender their wills and their lives to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and to pray to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and then the Twelve Steps tell people how to pray and what to pray for, but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.

   • Twelve-Step enthusiasts declare that the Twelve Steps will cure anybody of anything, just like good old-fashioned snake oil. They claim that the Twelve Steps are equally appropriate for everybody from alcoholics to drug addicts to gamblers, from compulsive shoppers to emotional wrecks to rape victims, from divorcees to diabetics, from schizophrenics to fat people. The 12 steps really do have just as much to do with being a rape victim as they have to do with being an alcoholic — absolutely nothing.

     The 12-Step true believers can make such sweeping grandiose claims about the broad applicability of the Twelve Steps because those Twelve Steps are not really about alcoholism at all. The Twelve Steps have absolutely nothing to do with alcoholism; they are all about converting people to belief in a cult religion, and then recruiting more new cult members and indoctrinating them. That's what those practices did for their creator, Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman, and that is what they still do. So the 12 steps really are equally applicable to everything from drug addiction and alcoholism to compulsive shopping and being a rape victim, because The Steps have nothing to do with any of those things.

   • Even the children of alcoholics are supposed to do the Twelve Steps in organizations like ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), Al-Anon, and Alateen. Obviously, the Twelve Steps can't really be a program for quitting drinking, because those children don't drink alcohol, and they never have. Yet the wives and children (and even close friends) of alcoholics are all supposed to be indoctrinated into practicing the guilt-inducing Twelve Steps, just because they have some relationship with an alcoholic and have supposedly been infected with a "spiritual disease" called "co-dependency".