Alcoholics Anonymous as a Cult
Scorecard, Answers 31 to 39.
by A. Orange
(To go back and forth between the questions and the answers for Alcoholics Anonymous, click on the numbers of the questions and answers.)
31. Dishonesty, Deceit, Denial, Falsification, and Rewriting History.
A.A. scores a 10.
A.A. is immensely dishonest:
* A.A. practices deceptive recruiting.
* It masks and hides the true nature of the organization by saying that it's "Spiritual, not religious".
* It tells newcomers that "Our goal is to help you quit drinking", rather than "Our real purpose is to make ourselves of maximum use to God". (The Big Book, 3rd & 4th Editions, page 77.)
* A.A. hides the ugly details of its history from newcomers and faithful old-timers alike. A.A. doesn't want to admit that the real spiritual, theological father of A.A. is Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, a renegade Lutheran minister who founded a cult religion called "The Oxford Group," and who admired Adolf Hitler, and who believed that a great world government would be having Christian Fascist dictators running all of the nations of the world.
* And A.A. doesn't want you to know to what extent both William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith were enthusiastic converts and happy true believers in the evil fascist cult religion that Frank Buchman created.
* And A.A. really doesn't want you to know that Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob merely adapted Frank Buchman's cult religion to their own ends when they created Alcoholics Anonymous, and that, essentially, Alcoholics Anonymous is Buchmanism.
* Bill Wilson started the tradition of hiding A.A.'s Buchmanite cult religion roots while he was writing the Big Book. Bill purged the Big Book of almost all references to the Oxford Group, and of every single reference to Frank Buchman, in order to distance A.A. from the very unpopular Oxford Group Movement. Alcoholics Anonymous is still hiding its Oxford Group cult religion roots today.
* And A.A. is also hiding the intensely religious nature of the A.A. program from beginners, until they are better indoctrinated. A.A. feeds newcomers the real facts by "teaspoons rather than by buckets", and doesn't honestly tell people the whole truth, straight out front, about just what membership in A.A. really entails. That is deceptive recruiting.
* A.A. hides the truth about its founders. A.A. doesn't want you to know what kind of criminals and nuts both William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith really were, so A.A.W.S. Inc. keeps a great mass of historical records and documents locked up and inaccessible to scholars and historians. They even refused to allow ABC News or NBC News teams to search the archives for information. Now Susan Cheever reports that parts of Bill Wilson's life, including his philandering and sexual exploitation of women newcomers to A.A., is "still officially secret", and that embarassing information about Bill's sexual misbehavior "has been excised from the official literature and — for the most part — from the official A.A. archives."
* The definition of sobriety that A.A. uses is false. Neither sobriety nor good mental health require doing Bill Wilson's Buchmanite Twelve Steps. Joining a cult religion and trying to get all other excessive drinkers to join it too is not sobriety or mental health.
* Bill Wilson was grossly dishonest about the A.A. success rate. Basically, he lied like a rug, and fudged the numbers, and hid and covered up the relapses and failures of A.A. members, and exaggerated the success rate by a factor of 15. Bill and Dr. Bob calculated their success rate to be a mere 5% (in Akron, summer of 1935), but Bill wrote in the Big Book that the A.A. success rate was 50%, with an additional 25% recovering later. Then Bill exaggerated even more, and wrote in the Big Book that "RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail, who has thoroughly followed our path."
* Alcoholics Anonymous is still highly dishonest about its success rate, and the efficacy of A.A. treatment. The more moderate members say things like,
"Well, very few people can quit as you did, just on your own, without a sponsor or a support group. A.A. is the broader way that can work for everybody."
That is just the opposite of the truth. Basically, A.A. does not work at all. It does not have a success rate.
A.A. ignores those facts, and just persists in repeating the chant that "A.A. is the proven way, the one that works, the most cost-effective treatment, the one that is enormously successful, the one that has saved millions, the best alcoholism treatment program in the world, the only treatment that works."
* Wilson claimed that "Alcoholics Anonymous requires no beliefs", but that was and is totally untrue — just a lie intended to fool people into joining his cult religion. It is impossible to work the Twelve Steps without believing in the Alcoholics Anonymous version of God — a dictatorial, micro-managing old-Testament patriarch Who will kill you if you do not believe in Him and follow His dictates, and Who will bless you with Sobriety if you do (as well as answering your prayers and granting your wishes).
See the file on "The Bait-and-Switch Con Game" for several of the ways in which A.A. hides from newcomers what beliefs are really required:
o First, the bait offered to the prospective new member ("prospect") is a promise of complete religious freedom, and then the switch comes later, when the new member finds that he must accept the A.A. beliefs and discard his own.
o First, the goal is to quit drinking, and then the goal is to believe in God and serve God.
o First, any religious beliefs are okay, and then only Mr. Wilson's religious beliefs are good enough.
o First, it's "God as we understood Him", and then it's "You don't understand God."
Also see the file, "A.A. and Religious Faith" for an analysis of Bill's fanatical rant against agnostics and atheists, which declares that they must all be converted into true believers in his "faith" by giving up their human intelligence and their rational, thinking minds. (That is not a joke or an exaggeration.)
* A.A. declares that religious conversion of the newcomers is not the goal, when it is obviously the goal:
Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of them began to talk of God.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, William G. Wilson, pages 27-28.
From great numbers of such experiences, we could predict that the doubter who still claimed that he hadn't got the "spiritual angle," and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.
The Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience", page 569.
* Then there is "The First Woman to become sober in A.A.". Marty Mann was not the first woman to become sober in A.A. She was the first woman to stay sober. The first woman to become sober in A.A. was Florence Rankin, who wrote the story "A Feminine Victory", which appeared in the first edition of the Big Book. Unfortunately, the Twelve Steps didn't really work for her, either, for very long. She relapsed, and disappeared. (She is said to have committed suicide in Washington, D.C..) So Bill Wilson quietly removed her story from the second edition of the Big Book in 1955, and A.A. started yammering a new party line about how Marty Mann was the first woman to achieve sobriety in A.A.:
Our first woman alcoholic had been a patient of Doctor Harry Tiebout's, and he handed her a prepublication manuscript copy of the Big Book.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, page 18, and The A.A. Way Of Life, William G. Wilson, page 302.
That statement contains two lies:
1. The woman patient of Dr. Tiebout who was described in that quote, Marty Mann, was not the first woman in A.A.. That is obvious and undeniable, because another woman, Florence Rankin, had already written her story and put it into the first edition of the Big Book that Marty Mann was reading while she was in Blythewood Sanitarium. Marty's story didn't get into the Big Book until the second edition, after Florence had relapsed and disappeared. But Bill Wilson didn't want to admit that the first woman in A.A. went back to drinking, so he constantly repeated the lie that Marty Mann was the first woman in A.A..
(Today, they sometimes carefully add deceptive qualifiers like: "Marty Mann was the first woman to achieve long-term sobriety in A.A.",
or, "Marty Mann was the first woman to successfully quit drinking in A.A.".)
2. The book that Dr. Tiebout received was not a prepublication manuscript; it was a multilith printing (like a mimeograph) without any copyright notice in it. Bill Wilson was so eager to make some quick money off of the book that he invalidated any possible copyright on the book by prematurely printing and selling multilith copies of the Big Book for $3.50 each (without the permission or knowledge of anyone in Akron). The author of the story "ACE FULL...SEVEN ELEVEN" was so outraged by Bill Wilson's dishonesty that he demanded that his story be removed from the book. Then, when Bill Wilson realized the seriousness of his error that permanently voided the copyright on the book, he fraudulently applied for the copyright in his own name, claiming that he was the sole author of the book, and that he owned a publishing company called "Works Publishing" (which did not exist). But it was too late; the copyright was already invalid, and it still is. Nevertheless, ever since then, Wilson repeated the story that the first printing was just a few "prepublication" "review" copies that didn't count, and that did contain a copyright notice. Dr. Bob's daughter, Sue Smith Windows, says that Bill Wilson was lying.
That "revisionist history" routine is just totally typical of A.A.. They have little or no respect for the truth, and change or hide their history whenever and however it suits them. (It reminds me of Stalinist Russia, where they rewrote the history books every time Stalin changed his mind about something.)
Eventually, 15 years after Bill Wilson's death, the A.A. staff revealed this detail:
The name "One Hundred Men" fell by the wayside because of the objections of Florence R., at the time the only female member. (Her story in the first edition was "A Feminine Victory." She later returned to drinking and died an apparent suicide in Washington, D.C.)
PASS IT ON; The story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world, "anonymous" (really, A.A.W.S. staff), 1984, page 202.
(But then the new story about how the "Alcoholics Anonymous" name was selected conflicted with the old version of the story that said that alcoholics were superstitious and afraid of the number thirteen.)
Dr. Robert Smith, 1949.
And speaking of Doctor Bob's daughter Sue Smith, the "council-approved" A.A. book Doctor Bob and the Good Old-Timers, written by the anonymous staff of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., contains a total cover-up of her story. According to that book, Sue Smith and Ernie Galbraith, who was A.A. Number Four, were in love, and got married against the wishes of Doctor Bob. That is a deceptive half-truth. Sue Smith [Windows] wrote in her own book Children of the Healer: the story of Doctor Bob's kids, that Doctor Bob forced the disgusting constantly-relapsing philandering older alcoholic Ernie Galbraith on her in order to break up her romance with her high-school sweetheart Ray Windows, whom Doctor Bob didn't like. Then Ernie seduced the innocent teenage girl Susan and took her for himself, which isn't what Doctor Bob had in mind. so Doctor Bob whimpered and cried that Ernie had "double-crossed him." See the item "Disturbed Gurus" for the story of Doctor Bob using Ernie to get rid of Ray Windows.
Doctor Bob was a textbook example of a petty tyrant — Doctor Bob was a grovelling toady to anyone superior to him, like his wife as she searched his pockets for hidden whiskey bottles (read his story in the Big Book, "Doctor Bob's Nightmare"), but Doctor Bob was an autocratic tyrant to anyone weaker than him, like his children, or sick, detoxing, alcoholics whom he made surrender on their knees before him in the hospital.
Doctor Bob was so inconsiderate of the health and lives of others that he even operated on patients after drinking alcohol and taking "goof-ball" tranquilizers to get himself in shape to operate — to stop his hands from shaking so badly.
But that isn't the picture of Doctor Bob that the A.A. organization routinely publicizes.
Bill Wilson was not very accurate or realistic when describing himself, either:
* He had a habit of saying that he was poor and starving, and not getting any money for all of his hard work, while he was really grabbing all of the A.A. money that he could get his hands on. Speaking of which, the official A.A. story of the publication of the Big Book is a work of fiction.
In the Big Book, Bill wrote:
"None of us makes a sole vocation of this work..."
The Big Book, William G. Wilson, 3rd Edition, page 19.
But Bill did. He never worked a straight job again. Bill arranged A.A. finances so that A.A. supported him comfortably for the rest of his life, with a beautiful house in the country and a free Cadillac car... Bill and his wife Lois were living so high that Lois even had a private secretary, Francis Hartigan, who wrote a biography of Bill Wilson. And Bill had numerous mistresses on the side, and he even used the A.A. headquarters to give them employment. That doesn't quite match the public image of the poor recovering alcoholic, poor as a church mouse, completely self-sacrificing, just living to help other suffering alcoholics, now does it?
* The strangest comment on Wilson's morality has to be the item that comes from Bill Wilson himself. Bill made a large set of autobiographical tape recordings before he died, and two biographies were written using them, Robert Thomsen's Bill W., and the Hazelden Foundation's Bill W., My First 40 Years. In that Hazelden book, we read:
There will be future historical revelations about Bill's character and behavior in recovery that will be interpreted, by some, as direct attacks on the very foundation of AA. Bill often wished he could be just another AA member with no trace of notoriety. But such revelations will, in the end, only reinforce Bill's humanness and, most important, the extent to which Bill acted to the best of his ability to protect AA from himself.
Bill W., My First 40 Years, "William G. Wilson" (posthumously ghost-written by Hazelden staff), Hazelden, page 170.
What a crock. Considering what we already know, we can only wonder what horrible things AAWS is still hiding in their sealed archives. They often claim that Bill's constant, outrageous philandering proved his "humanness", but that's a pretty lame rationalization. And Bill didn't try to protect AA from himself. He robbed A.A. blind and did whatever the hell he pleased, A.A. be damned. The old-timers even had to form a "Founder's Watch Committee" just to follow Bill Wilson around and watch him, and keep him from publicly embarrassing A.A. yet again by thirteenth-stepping all of the pretty young women who came to the meetings. Bill was such a blatant philanderer that he would take two women to an A.A. meeting, and seat them one on each side of him, and spend the whole meeting with his hands on their legs. Bill Wilson was also a sexual predator who showed no concern for the welfare of the pretty women who came to A.A. seeking help for a drinking problem.
Bill Wilson did not protect A.A. from himself.
