1. We admitted we were powerless over
alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable
Powerless? you got to the meeting.
And unmanageable compared to what? – you keep forgetting to get an
oil change, or can't stop beating your spouse?
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
This assumes it was insane to drink in the first place, an extremely dubious assumption .... otherwise “self-medicating” wouldn't be intelligible. Capitalism is a power higher than ourselves, and so is widespread superstition, not to say the weather, the second law of thermodynamics, and the porn industry.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and
our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him
Wait? What “will”? I thought
our unmanageable lives made us helpless? There is no evidence that
God, i.e. “him” even exists, much less she, it, they, them is in
any position or has the inclination to handle anything we turn over
for day-to-day operations.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral
inventory of ourselves
As long as you do not make a
searching and fearless inventory of whether the steps make sense.
We've been told already what to search for: our helplessness, its
terrible effects on our loved ones, and for some personal
understanding of an entity named as God who it may take a very long
search indeed to discover. No one would be an alcoholic unless this
level of self-assessment was too painful to undertake in the first
place. It amounts to a required “confession” which might be
helpful to some or many or might not. Moral Inventory? – On any
disease model of breaking a leg while skateboarding, would it be
necessary to inventory any moral aspects of the symptoms and injuries
caused? Is there a moral component to losing
your balance? With genetic or pathogenic-driven diseases, there is
rarely if ever a moral component. Even with AIDS and lung cancer,
unprotected sex doesn't give you AIDS, the virus does, and smoking
doesn't give you cancer “morally,” your body's susceptibility to
lethal cell mutation does. If AIDS and lung cancer had cures,
unprotected sex and cigarette smoking would cease to be causal
factors, much less moral factors vis a vis their present
consequences.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and
to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
No philosophy or religion can
agree on the “exact nature” of human wrongs even in the abstract,
so blabbing to others about your wrongs will almost always be
providing inaccurate information. Also, God is supposed to be aware
of what we think, so its redundant to “admit” anything to
them, it, she, they.
6. Were entirely ready to have God
remove all these defects of character
If alcoholism is in remotely analogous to a disease, character defects cannot have anything to do
with its course. What does being “ready” mean if (a) there is no
God, and (b) any God(s) are often defined as having the ability to
intervene – by say removing character defects – regardless of our
being “ready” for it. Is being credulous about a nonsensical
system of alcoholism treatment a character defect? And if it were,
wouldn't that mean, this step alerts us to be ready to quit meetings
at the whim of God(s)?
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our
shortcomings
We have
shortcomings whether we like it or not. They are numerous and varied.
For all we know some may be there for a reason. And why “humbly”
-- fake humility (the biggest category of this trait) is not just
dishonest and deceptive, it's worse than alcoholism. It's much safer
to booze than to pretend to be humble. If the step means “risk
recognizing your inherent frailty and notice it in others too, so
that you stand a chance to activate innate and inherent compassion
within your self,” why not say this.
8. Made a list of all persons we had
harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
The concept of “amends” is
absurd. Any tragic thing we've done that significantly harmed
another, can never be made up for. Where are people suppose to turn
themselves in to serve their penitence? Can money do the trick? List
of “all” we've harmed – that'll be a cinch, do we have to jot
down the name of every sweatshop worker in Harbin we exploited when,
drunk one night, we bought a T-shirt made in China? How do we know
for sure, that those in our family or circle of friends aren't to
blame for driving us to drink? How on earth will we be able to tell
the difference between the harm we did due to being human versus due
to being drunk and human? Can we be absolutely sure, we would not
have done less harm “sober” than drunk in every case? Get out
your Chinese manufactured hairshirts for this impossible step
9. Made direct amends to such people
wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
Since you cannot in principle make
amends for anything significant, this step is nutterly useless; if
the infraction wasn’t big enough to be unnameable to making amends,
then the harmed have probably or might well have forgiven the
trespass already.
10. Continued to take personal
inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
Nervously keep checking for
character defects, annoying habits, inadvertent slights, and anything
that might conceivably upset others – without regard to whether
they have a basis to be offended, harmed, or annoyed. Great idea!
Keep internalizing that critical parent. Admitting when you make a
mistake is always a good idea – it cannot have much to do with
booze. In fact, it can be easier to admit when you're wrong when
you're inebriated.
11. Sought through prayer and
meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood
Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to
carry that out
Waste time with useless ritual,
mirroring rather than contradicting one of the soothing and pleasant
aspects of drinking .... brilliant. We have no “conscious”
contact with God. If any contact exists, it coming from the other
direction. Knowledge of his will? Power to carry it out? What if he
wants you to drink and release enough inner psychic strangulation so
that you can write world famous poetry?
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs
Not much of an awakening to reckon compassion and fellowship might help people stop
over-boozing – as it might help human beings do anything. I wouldn't describe importing religious shame and self-shaming, original sin, confession, absolution, penitence,
even indulgence sales of a sort, and protestations of faith into the
system as an awakening
If anyone thinks adhering to the soul-destroying doctrines of Christianity more thoroughly and rigidly can help people reduce or stop wanting and then having a gulp of booze, they are denying the sliver of free will which is almost surely needed to reduce or stop their drinking. If some concept of "grace" provides this nugget of will, then people are denying themselves the credit for a reasonably tough accomplishment. If my analysis holds, adherence or use of or belief in the 12-Steps will hurt a person's chance to recover, and balancing that with the positive effects of the compassion and fellowship that can exist at the meetings, you'd expect AA to do no better or worse than any other system. And indeed that prediction is what the record reflects. In turn this implies that if the shaming and self-denialist aspects of the program were dropped from the ritual of meetings there would be some non-trivial chance the program would become more helpful to people in distress.
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