Anonymous Alcoholics

It’s time to turn this thing on it’s head. This is my new name for the movement. I think perhaps we misunderstood the drunk guy in the corner who gave us the title for our book. He was repeating over and over “anonymous alcoholics anonymous alcoholics anonymous alcoholics” and of course we heard it backward – “Alcoholics Anonymous”… of course we put ourselves first and we put our anonymity – our humility – second. And here we are – 85 years later and we are in a world of shit. We have been using the upright triangle and circle (the blade, in ancient societies) as our symbol, when in fact, our true movement, according to our principles, should be reversed (the chalice).

I go into depth in a post about the Upside Down Triangle.

My purpose for this blog is to just put this out there for others who are seeking an answer to the demise of our beloved Fellowship. I am one Anonymous Alcoholic putting out some things to consider, and I will remain as anonymous as anyone can be on the internet. I won’t ask for donations either. God is my Employer.

There is a way to restart AA at any time anywhere – all you need is 2 or more willing alcoholics. Those 2 or 3 hopeless drunks have to be willing to go to any lengths for victory over alcohol. So far, as a Fellowship, we have not been willing to put personal gain aside. This is evidenced by the death of AA that we are witnessing in our meetings, our groups and our service structure.

To do so, you would need to use the 12 Traditions of AA. You would need 2 or more members who were willing to put egos aside to learn to use the Traditions as a guide. I will show you how to do this in this blog. See the Links below the posts for the Guide.

First I am addressing How To Think… because we have been so dumbed down in our society, we have lost the ability to think the way Bill W. and Dr. Bob did when they started this thing. Because we were not educated in Critical Thinking Skills, we have lost the ability to know how to apply our principles. And how to stand up for them has become seemingly impossible.

Next I go through How To Think About Each Tradition… you will see them listed in order in the site map at the bottom of the page.

I am going to try to give exercises so that you can start to get the Traditions under your skin. We all know WHAT to think about the Traditions because of the way we read the 12×12 and AA Comes of Age, hanging there on the wall, but most of us don’t know HOW to think about them. This is evidenced in how AA is today. Not only do we not know how to think or how to think about them, and thus how to apply them, but many of us suffer from extreme fear of standing up for Principle. This will also be addressed.

The reason for us not know how to think, has to do with the removal in our education system, of Critical Thinking Skills. What used to be a part of public school education and the liberal arts, has been sanitized from education, leaving us pretty dumb’ed down in 2020. I am including links to these old ways of learning in the Reference Material page, as well as a link to one post I wrote about using the Trivium to understand Spiritual Principles.

Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob were educated in this old way. This is evidenced by Bill, after 2 years of drinking a fifth of Bathtub Gin a day (stronger than Everclear), being able to read Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, in Towns Hospital. I can’t even read that book, now, 28 years sober. Getting off Facebook alone, 6 weeks ago, has restored my ability to read without skimming.

Integrated Methods of Critical Thinking and Apophatic Inquiry are required to automatically understand how to apply the 12 Traditions. We use apophatic inquiry when we do the 4th Column of our Inventory. p. 64 Alcoholics Anonymous, “We searched out the flaws in our makeup which caused our failure.” Where have I been selfish? dishonest? self-seeking? frightened? – these are questions of apophatic inquiry, from which we discover that which we ARE underneath that which we are not. Apophatic Inquiry looks for what a thing is not, to find out what it is.

Answers to questions like “Why was this taken out of our education system?” are for YOU to do the research about if you would like. Some links on the Reference page might get you started.

My sponsor knows how to think about them, and he taught me. He is a passed Trustee – sober over 52 years – age 86. He came in to AA in 1967 – I guess I was about 5 years old then – had just had my first sip of wine… Anyway – that’s the purpose of this blog… to help others learn how to think about the Traditions so that when you need to start AA over again, you can use this as a guide to get you started.

I am doing this for myself while I wait for the people willing to help me start AA over, to show up in my ‘hood and to stay sober I hope it helps someone.

You have be willing to go to any lengths to make AA work. So far, I have not met many of those. The lengths I foresee that people would have to go through are #1 putting aside personal gain for our common welfare. This would require stringently following steps 10, 11, & 12, one day at a time, and especially embracing the groveling humility of the work. But it’s awesome! I love living that way, myself. Bernard Smith talks about it in AA Comes of Age and I quoted him here – if you want to know what it used to feel like back then.

Alcoholics Anonymous, the “movement”, has lost it’s way. The fish rots from the head. Our general service office is completely corrupt and out for a profit at this point. Others have come before me with this point of view. You can read indepth about what our GSO has been up to at this website.

Anonymous Press was created also out of concern that our books would not be available in their present form due to the degradation of our message by our Office and Board of Trustees. We lost our copyright to the first and second edition of our basic text due to negligence on the part of our Office. It is for our greater good that God let this happen, so that we can print our own books if need be without violating copyright laws.

We would not be signing up for Google for Non-Profits if we were humble, or had not let our “great blessings spoil us” (Tradition 12) and we may never have been so. They (our Delegates, our Office Staff, and our Board) too would have to be using our Traditions in a stringent manner, if they were not to be in this situation and it is an Act of Will (big W Will) and very uncomfortable for us even recovered alcoholics, to stand up for principle in the world as it currently is. We are generally cowards. I know I am. And I avoid this type of discomfort like the plague. Most AAer’s won’t admit to being cowards, we just obviously are because we are not willing to feel scary feelings, to stand up for our principles. Our Principles can’t stand up for themselves!

I don’t think the founders realized what an influence outer society actually had on us as an early movement. American Society in 1939 was principled. Society today is completely immoral. We leaned a lot on the principled nature of society and because we did not take that into ourselves, as American Society deteriorated, we as a Fellowship have deteriorated and we have become a support group for people who don’t want to drink.

For us long-timers, we can see it, but most of the ones I talk to don’t understand, don’t see our own personal responsibility, and usually are happy to blame something outside ourselves like “treatment”. What we don’t realize is that it was our own dropping the ball that created the need for treatment. Now we have lost our 12th Step Work. How many people reading this today have ever gone on a real 12th Step Call?

From my point of view, it is because following the 12 Traditions is too inconvenient and time-consuming for the modern version of the recovered alcoholic. The Traditions interfere with things we want to do – like open a business with our sponsor. Most long-timers who have gained a relationship with A Power Greater Than Themselves, God, through the 12 steps, have a following, and they don’t want to give up that feeling of hot air being blown up their assholes to realize the Truth on a daily basis.

Get as offended as you like. I am not going to be nice or pull any punches in this blog. That’s what I have to do all day long in meetings – practicing attraction rather than promotion. The people I might attract here through this blog are finding it because they are fed up with what they see in AA today and are seeking an experience of depth and weight.

Our co-founder Bill W. was a drunk just like me, and he created high ideals for us to follow without being able to practice them all himself. I can blame Bill all day long – for creating the Reserve Fund, for having mistresses, for wanting to add the Vitamin Therapy into the program after having had the Traditions accepted by the Board, for guarantying destruction from within the movement by asking a Rockefeller for support – but he had feet of clay like me. I can’t blame him because I am surely doing the same things and can’t see them in myself. That’s why I need others. That’s why AA needs all of us, using our principles together, to see in each other our destructive tendencies as reflected through our Principles.

Bill W. did a fine job, but it’s time now for us to stand on our own 2 feet, with God, and adhere to the Principles better than he was able to. That was the challenge he put forth – Do As I Say Not As I Do – IS our calling in AA. To each individually adhere to this Principles rather than looking at our brother or sister alcoholic and seeing where they fall short as a guide to what we don’t have to do.

Our whole society today practices placing personalities before Principles. This is a necessary stage of becoming recovered – that I trust my sponsor with my life and that I do what they tell me to do. But it is only a stage. It’s risky business and I have had a lot of bad experiences because my sponsors have had feet of clay and egos and I have taken some very bad advice… but I did not drink. I learned what a grave responsibility I have been given as a sponsor and how I must adhere exactly to what the book, Alcoholics Anonymous says when helping another alcoholic to achieve sobriety.

To figure out what is going on in AA, today, I have had to use outside literature on Morality and Natural Law because our Fellowship has lost all that was naturally a part of AA in the beginning, so I make that suggestion to anyone seeking to find the essence of AA – to study and search out basic Spiritual Principle in History.

I am not a proponent of the Bible. That book does not work for me because I see too many human hands in the translations and elsewhere. That does not mean that I don’t have a relationship with my Creator – I do! But the Bible is not my book. I created a Reference Page on this blog for the Authors and other resources that work for me. Many of them are Christian Mystics who are able to glean great spiritual Truth out of the Bible. The 11th Step tells me that I am to look to see where religious people are right and to make use of what they offer. And that’s what I have done. And you should too.

I have found a lot of the teachings found in the early influencers of AA, what became the New Thought Movement, The Oxford Group Literature, and present day researchers of Natural Law and Hermetic Principles. Simply, Natural Law is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. I am including a page for References for outside literature because of Tradition 10. This is information I have found that has helped me. These are books and podcasts I have used to reconstitute lost principles that were once the foundational teachings heard and discussed in the AA Fellowship.

I am asked to take a moral inventory. That means that I am asked to look at my Natural Law violations: Murder/Assault, Rape, Theft, Coercion, & Trespass. There is a Right and A Wrong in AA as well as in the world. I have had to read outside literature to find out about these basic principles from present and past authors and presenters because the only literature in AA that talks about it is the old literature that is slowly being culled.

Solipsism has become rampant in the AA Fellowship of late.

Solipsism is a philosophy – the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist. It is an extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption. Alcoholism.

Solipsism in the AA Fellowship is “my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth”.

No! There is The Truth and it IS what has actually happened. We find that by looking at the 4th column of our Inventories and we live that by making direct amends to the people and other sentient beings we have harmed.

First things First – means Principles first. This used to be an AA slogan – but people of today do not know what the First Thing is – it’s Principles. Principles must come FIRST, and that means- before personalities (Tradition 12). We appear to still be in our teenage years in AA and those old-timers who have a following of groupies around them are still in their mental teens. The groupies are giving these Bleeding Deacons the power to run their groups – like daddy – to take care of their treasuries – to provide coffee ready-made, etc – and our society outside of AA has bred a few generations of ready-made King babies who don’t want to become inner monarchs – instead want to depend on a parental figure to take care of them -whether that be the government dole or an AA Guru. What we don’t see is that we are flushing our movement down the toilet for incoming alcoholics. When followed, our AA principles make individuals who’s only authority is God and Principles.

So that is what this blog is about. How I was given a gift of a way through the Steps & Traditions that works, if anyone is interested. The Concepts, by the way, are nothing more than The Traditions, at the Conference level. Old-timers that create smoke and mirrors talking about the Concepts to mesmerize their lemming followers are simply narcissistic psychopaths who care only for feeling good in the moment and not for the future of AA.

This is for AA which has given me my life and for which I am eternally grateful.