"For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority --- a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern."
Where does A.A. get its direction? This too, is a puzzler for every friend and newcomer. When told that our society has no president having authority to govern it, no treasurer who can compel the payment of any dues, no board of directors who can cast an erring member into outer darkness, when indeed no A.A, can give another a directive and enforce obedience, our friends gasp and exclaim, “This simply can’t be. There must be an angle somewhere.”
Twelve Steps
and
Twelve Traditions
~
If there was any one Tradition that gave me pause when I first became a member of AA, it was this one. I knew what my anarchist tendencies were and I doubted any two or more people could be cohesive enough about anything to be affective. My experience was that, no matter the stated ideal, there was always a leadership in the background of any organization, tribe or loose affiliation claiming such an egalitarianism. This idea of a “group conscience” seemed to me to be that the way AA enforced that leadership. I was painfully aware that any group can be manipulated out of fear or self-interest and the "group conscious" was the mechanism for control in the Fellowship. The movie Zardoz showed one example of how this would work: its ruling clique simply “vibed” miscreants out of the community. I watched and waited to see whether this would happen in AA; not so much out of cynicism, but to sort out who it was that pulling the strings. I have been in the Fellowship less than one month away from fourteen years and I haven’t sorted out that covert leadership yet.
geo 4,863
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