Truths to Counter the AA Cult #9: AA Is a Program of Rigorous DIS-Honesty

 

From the Orange Papers

A.A. flat-out lies when it says it is a program of rigorous honesty; it is just the opposite — a program of rigorous dishonesty:

1. • A.A. begins every meeting by reciting a list of Bill Wilson's lies that declare that the Twelve Steps work great, and that failures only happen because alcoholics are bad people, "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves" (Big Book, page 58):
     "RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path."
     

     The truth is, they see it all of the time. It is actually Alcoholics Anonymous that is "constitutionally incapable of being honest."

     "Fake It Until You Make It."

     "Act As If..."

   • When A.A. says "Keep An Open Mind," what they really mean is "Keep A Closed Mind", and blindly refuse to see anything wrong with "The Program", A.A. beliefs, or the crazy teachings of Bill Wilson.

   • When A.A. says "Keep An Open Mind,", what they really mean is,
     "Stay Gullible, and believe whatever we tell you. Heck, it might be true; you never know."

     The only idea that they really want you to be open to is the idea that A.A. is right about everything — the idea that the "spiritual" A.A. program with its Twelve Steps is a really good cure for alcoholism, one that actually works.

   • A.A. practices deceptive recruiting. It hides its extreme religiosity from new prospects, the "babies" and "pigeons". The Big Book recruiting manual, chapter seven, specifically instructs recruiters not to emphasize the religious element of the program. Bill Wilson's other writings tell recruiters to reveal the truth to the prospects and newcomers only a little bit at a time, doling out the truth by "Teaspoons, Not Buckets."

   • A.A. falsifies its history. A.A. has been doing that since the very beginning, when Bill Wilson hid the Oxford Group roots of A.A..

   • A.A. is a dishonest religion that says that it isn't a religion while it back-stabs and undercuts the other religions.

   • Like most cult religions, A.A. practices "Group-Think", and forbids any criticism of "the program." That is just the opposite of rigorous honesty. Like most cults, A.A. believes that it has unquestionable truths, even God-given truths, so it considers any criticism of its founders, their teachings, or the organization to be invalid — automatically invalid and untrue, because their truths are God-given.

   • Thus, A.A. calls its critics "AA-bashers" (ad hominem), and imagines that everything "AA-bashers" say is always wrong, and can be dismissed out-of-hand, because they are just AA-bashers. By this circular logic, A.A. can never be wrong, and criticism of A.A. can never be correct. And the true believers can avoid having to think, or take any criticism of A.A. seriously.

   • A.A. also enforces the Group-Think in another way: they will delist any group whose meetings do not conform to the standard formula to the satisfaction of the central-office elders. That means that the non-conforming group gets no referrals from the central office hot-line, and it isn't listed on the lists of meetings, and it doesn't get found by visitors or prospective new members, and it is just generally shunned. The group just gets cast into limbo. That threat is generally enough to enforce conformity.

   • I shouldn't have to be writing all of this stuff, these "Orange Papers". If A.A. were really "a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty" like they brag (in the Big Book, page 58), then they would have written and printed all of this information themselves, many, many years ago, just so that everyone would know what the real truth is. Instead, the A.A. headquarters keeps the archives of old documents and records sealed, locked up, so that no investigative journalists or snoopy scholars can learn the truth. They wouldn't even let the NBC News or ABC News teams take a look in the archives.

     And now Susan Cheever, who was allowed into the archives so she could write a fawning uncritical hero-worshipping biography of A.A. founder Bill Wilson, reports that the A.A. headquarters is "excising" from the official Alcoholics Anonymous archives all of the embarrassing information about Bill Wilson's sexual exploitation of women newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous. That sure as heck isn't "rigorous honesty".