I would concede that AA is a cult but it is beneficial.
To be fair, I have heard that this often depends on how rabid the contingent you have personal experience with is.
This guy might not agree with you so handedly about the "beneficial" aspects...
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SOUR GRAPESJack Marx
Many years ago I became concerned enough about my drinking to attend a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. From the moment I stepped out of the meeting and onto the street, I felt it had worked something of a miracle on me, the type of miracle the movement is famous for. Many years later, I stepped out of an AA meeting onto the exact same street, determined, as I am today, never to return. What happened in between is a drawn-out rendering of that day in my youth when I decided, after six violent hours of bruising bones and feeling like a loser, that there was no shame in admitting that riding a horse was not for me – especially when the horse itself was a thug.
AA, as a doctor once told me, is "an evangelical movement about saving souls". At its core it has a good heart – it wants to save people from their demons. But, as with the death penalty, McCarthyism, the Conquistadors and other such crusades against evil, the pious ambitions of AA make the movement blind to its own hooliganism. As disinterested in individuality as the SS, and unaccountable for its actions as the KKK, AA preaches, bullies and lies to achieve its ends, and it does so with all the righteous impunity of a secret sect. Unlike other religious cults, however, AA's victims are those who escape from its grip and return to society, their brains so laundered by fundamentalist claptrap that a glass of beer can take on the menace of a loaded pistol. That I eluded such a fate myself is thanks to nothing but sheer good luck – those not as fortunate as I can't tell us about it, their stools at the bars and chairs in AA inhabited by new people entirely disinterested in tales of the dead ones who went before them.
AA began in 1935 when New York stockbroker Bill Wilson and proctologist Bob Smith agreed to hand over responsibility for their sobriety to each other. Their personal triumph over booze was documented in
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), still worshiped by the fellowship as the Islamite does the Koran. Six decades later and the basic principles of AA haven't changed at all; go to meetings as often as you can, follow the "12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous" and you'll get sober.
Before I stepped into AA I was in undoubtedly in strife. I'd become a slave to booze and was drinking against my will. I'd wake each morning and plead with myself not to do it again, the afternoon finding me with a beer in my hand, as if the morning and all its thoughts had been a mere dream between drinks. One half of my life was out of control, and AA was the only door I knew. It didn't occur to me that I might benefit from visiting a doctor, an error that grinds at me to this day.
At my first AA meeting I was asked to "share", to stand in front of the crowd, declare myself an alcoholic and tell my own pathetic tale. This I did, squirting a few as I went, and the evening ended like a scene straight out of
Fight Club, with warm embraces and encouraging words. From a distance, it's easy to be cynical about such stuff, but after so long of feeling like I harboured an embarrassing secret, to be welcomed not in spite of that secret but because of it was a relief one really has to experience to fully appreciate. That I remained completely sober for the next ten months is testament to the power of the moment.
I learned a lot from AA in that first year. I learned that alcoholism was not just lousy behaviour, but "a disease", recognised as such by the World Health Organization. I learned that most of my friends were alcoholics and didn't know it. I learned that AA, with a success rate of over 70 per cent, was the only proven way to stay sober, that the medical profession knew next to nothing about alcoholism, and that there were no drugs invented that could help us. I learned that drinking in moderation was impossible for me, and that willpower was useless, the "disease of alcoholism" born of spiritual delinquency. My salvation could only come from a radical transformation of my personality, which would occur once I had ascended the 12 Steps and "handed my will over to God".
Most importantly, I learned that any doubts I had about any of this – any reservations I may have harboured about whether I really belonged in AA – were naught but symptoms of the disease. "Denial", they called it, and alcoholics were always in it. My great uncle stopped drinking of his own free will the day he was married and never touched another drop. He, AA revealed to me, was a "dry drunk", "in denial" of his need for AA till the day the old sucker died. And to think I worshiped him once upon a time…
Looking back, I can see that I had problems with AA right from the first meeting – a lot of what I was hearing struck me as good old-fashioned, five-star bigotry. But I was sick, nervous and worried, and when you're hanging from the edge of a building you don't care if it's Hitler who extends his hand. You'll do him the courtesy of listening to his horseshit if it means he's not going to let go.
So that's what I did for nearly five years. I tried, as members often advised me, to "take what you need and leave the rest". I turned a deaf ear to the daggy desk-calendar wisdom, the smarmy new-age sloganeering, the rogue hard-liners who'd corner you outside the meeting and tick you off for not attending regularly enough. Like many other "recoverers", I relapsed and relapsed again, returning each time to AA more desperate and confused than before. And I noticed something else, too; my drinking mind had become suicidal. Where once I had woken each morning with a hangover the size of Belgium and little else besides, I was now waking with a sense of complete hopelessness and unsalvageable remorse, the words of the
Big Book in my head:
"Those who do not recover are…men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates…they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average."
And, of course, there was this "God" business, the central creed of AA that says I must, whether I like it or not, have faith in a "higher power". The fellowship went to pains to assure me that this deity need simply be "God as you understand him", a force I recognised to be greater than my own. As one member suggested, "God for you can be the bus that goes past the bottle shop without stopping", and for a while I took that on board. But after a few months of praying to public transport I feared I was developing problems that not even AA could fix.
One night, the duplicity of AA became impossible for me to ignore any longer. A 30-something fellow got up and told of how he kept bumping into his old drinking buddies. "I see them in the street," he said, "with their cool clothes and their fancy cars and their spunky girlfriends on their arms, and I think to myself, 'Yeah, yeah…see you in AA!'"
As this utterance stirred howls of self-satisfied laughter from the brethren, I realised what a blind delusion AA was after all. Here we were in some miserable scout hall at 8pm on a Friday night, dipping stale shortbread into styrene cups of International Roast, listening to bore after bore and their monotonous drinking stories, and we were 'the enlightened', we were the champions. What utter rot. In a city swinging with music and dancing and laughter and boys and girls falling in love, we were the big losers, and anyone who didn't realise that was in denial alright.
I began to question my involvement with this crowd, and in the next year or so, with naught but a telephone and the library to guide me, I did a little research into where I'd been spending my evenings.
Alcoholism is not a disease, and the World Health Organisation has never declared that it is. The "disease concept of alcoholism" was popularised by E.M. Jellinek, a doctor of questionable credentials who was hired by AA in the 1940s to tell the world what the fellowship wanted it to hear. AA's success was nowhere near 70 per cent, the most reliable figures (from the 1989 Triennial Alcoholics Anonymous Membership Survey, in fact) showed that only five per cent of members remained in the fellowship beyond one year, and what happened to the rest was anyone's guess. I learned that medical science had discovered a great deal about addiction since the 1930s, and that had I gone to a doctor instead of AA all those years ago, I might have been prescribed Campral, or Antabuse, or Naltrexone, drugs that enjoy moderate levels of success in treating problem drinkers – levels of success that AA could only dream about.
But why would AA lie? How could a non-profit organization, whose sole purpose was to help people, do society - not to mention its own membership - the disservice of defrauding it?
The answer is that there is no organization in AA at all. There is no visible hierarchy to be consulted, or called to account, or induced to control the preachings of its membership. There is a central committee out there somewhere, renting the halls and buying the shortbread and coffee, but for all intents and purposes AA is its membership, the sick people who come for relief. It's a nifty, egalitarian idea and one of which AA is very proud, but no clearer example of the lunatics running the asylum can be found in modern western culture. When one staggers into AA, weak, impressionable and desperately in need of help, one's liberators come not as dependable professionals, but as fellow sufferers who, by their very own definition, are spiritually damaged and morally irresponsible, their lives hostage to "a disease" over which they have no control. And I know through my own experience that it is not the well-adjusted members who pounce upon the new AA enrolments, but the zealots, whose lives drained like baths when they pulled the plug on their drinking. It is they who seek validation from the conversion of the 'unenlightened'.
For these people – the loudest revellers at the AA party – alcohol is the most important thing in the universe, even more crucial to existence than it ever was in the bars. Every aspect of life, be it romance, career, even your own children, must take second place to your relationship with booze. How you are coping with that relationship is paramount, and is the only thing the fellowship wants to hear about. In essence, AA is like a gathering of stalkers – while someone else is out there happily married to Martini, this flock of rejects is rocking back and forward in their chairs, obsessing about how hung up on the bitch they've been for years.
AA works for some people, but it doesn't work for most. That's fine. Where it becomes almost criminal is in the fellowship's dogmatic insistence that those for whom it does not work are losers in the face of God. Exactly how many poor, desperate souls have ended their lives with a head full of AA bogeymen we will never know.
My ultimate salvation came at the hands of another human being – a girl I fell in love with, who decided I was worth marrying, for some reason. It was a lucky break, and one that AA warned I should never, ever accept. It's just transferring the problem, they say, and should that girl ever go I'll just fall back into the arms of alcoholism again. It's just the sort of lifeless, loveless spite you'd expect from a crowd who were happy to fill their evenings with talk of something they can never do. One might just as well say I should never have bothered being born, for one day I will surely lose this beautiful life of mine, and then what am I going to do?
I still drink from time to time, though it no longer dominates my life. Having a home and a family who loves me was, it seems, what I was searching for all along. Sometimes I'll go for weeks without a drink, and some nights I'll drink way too much. I still think about sex as if I'm a teenager, still avoid hard work where I can, still lie to protect myself and I get violent urges when I hear a song by Supertramp. But those things fall under the broad category of 'my personality', and for all its failings I've grown quite fond of it. And anyway, if I did want my personality changed – if that's what I were seeking rather than just control over alcohol – I wouldn't entrust the transformation to the thoughts of a Wall Street gambler and a man who peered up people's arseholes back in the '30s.
The last time I went to an AA meeting was years ago. Afterwards, outside the hall, a woman approached who recognised me from my first meeting of years before. She asked why she hadn't seen me in a while, and I replied that these days I had a wife and a little boy, "…a pretty full life".
She narrowed her eyes, took a drag of her cigarette, blew a cloud of smoke into the air and muttered darkly:
"Maybe you should be concentrating more on your alcoholism."
