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Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2014 16:55:45 (answered 12 July 2014) Hi Orange, Thank you for your work in compiling so much information showing that AA is not the only way. As a person who no longer chooses to use drugs or alcohol but still interacts with a number of people drinking the Kool Aid, I am often frustrated by the total refusal to engage in an objective discussion about our common problem. As far as I can tell from my own research, the AMA voted to classify alcoholism as a disease in 1956 for insurance billing purposes. However, the 1998 Rush Study found that only 12% of doctors consider alcoholism to be "100% a disease". Even when I was using, I have always believed drug/alcohol abuse to be a matter of choice (I enjoyed your analogy of the cost/benefit analysis). If we as a society start classifying bad habits, moral weaknesses and outright criminal behavior as "diseases", where do we draw the line? Nail biting? Overeating? Pedophilia (I am powerless over children and my life has become unmanageable, etc.)? The most common response I receive is, "well yeah, but alcoholism is a disease and the cure is AA and it works 100% of the time if you work it correctly". As we both know from Vaillant, the NIAAA and even AA's own triennial survey, the real success rate hovers around 5% after one year. I have even met a man who works in a local treatment center who claims his success rate is "81%" but will offer no documentation or method of statistical analysis. I also suspect that he has not updated his figures in over 3 years. What do you say to someone who is convinced that AA's low success rate is due to the participant "not working the program correctly"? Also, one of AA's popular slogans is "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". This quote is often misattributed to Albert Einstein but I cannot locate any instance of him writing or speaking such words. If this is true, why do we see countless people trying AA over and over again until "they work it right"? Lastly, do you know of any demographic surveys or any type of general census for AA participants? I suspect that the perpetuation of the cult mentality is most likely driven by a combination of the youth and lack of education which seems to be prevalent in my local AA community.
Your thoughts would be much appreciated, Sent from my iPad
Hello Ed,
Thanks for the letter and the questions.
Starting at the top:
Yes, that is one of the common identifying characteristics of a cult.
Cult members never want to objectively discuss the dogma, beliefs,
tenets, practices, and standards of the cult. They may say that they do, but
what they really want is you to agree with everything that they say.
That shows up in the Cult Test in several ways:
Wow. That's a lot of them, isn't it?
And actually, the AMA did not call it a "disease" then, they only called
it an "illness".
I found this statement on the AMA web site, in
the history of the AMA:
Oh, an "illness", huh? Not a "disease",
like the Steppers have been telling us? Those words are not the same thing.
There is a big difference there.
Food poisoning is an illness too, but it isn't contagious, or
hereditary, or incurable.
The AMA was simply responding to some very noisy A.A. lobbyists who
insisted that alcoholics were misunderstood.
And yes, they were probably after the health insurance money too.
From 1956 to 1992, the AMA had an undefined "illness". They had never
said just what "alcoholism" was. Finally, in 1992, they allowed a
joint committee of two A.A. front groups to write a definition of "alcoholism,
the disease". The definition is so goofy that it does not even say
that alcoholism is caused by drinking alcohol. They never said what
causes it.
Look here:
Two A.A. front groups wrote the AMA definition of "alcoholism".
And the AMA certainly did not endorse the A.A. idea that "alcoholism"
is a "spiritual disease" which only a "spiritual experience" will cure,
so A.A. pulls a quick sleight-of-hand trick there, and claims that
the AMA agrees with A.A. They never did. How could they? That would mean
that you should hire a priest, not a medical doctor, to cure the disease.
By the way, the AMA is not the final authority on medical issues, or
even a trustworthy organization.
The AMA is just a private club for doctors, and its main goal is to
make more money for itself and its members.
The president of the AMA who built it up into the big organization that
it is — Morris Fishbein — was busted for racketeering.
He ran a scam where pharmaceutical companies had to buy big expensive
full-page advertisements in his JAMA (Journal of the AMA) or else
he wouldn't approve of their medications.
Here are some
links to articles about that.
Oh yes. Eventually, everything bad can be a disease.
Being greedy and refusing to pay your workers a decent wage is
"acquisitionitis".
Cannibalism is merely an "eating disorder".
Murdering people whom you don't like, or with whom you disagree,
is "hypercriticality".
Stanton Peele wrote a whole book about that, The Diseasing of America.
"It works IF you work it" is a textbook example of
Lying With Qualifiers
, which is a cheap, common, propaganda trick.
And logically, it's a meaningless statement. Vanilla ice cream also works
if you work it correctly.
So does knitting. Just always eat ice cream and knit instead of drink alcohol.
It works 100% of the time if you work it right.
Yes, that is a common treatment center trick. They only count the
"graduates" because only the "graduates" worked
the program "correctly" — meaning, that they quit
drinking and drugging. So they are
cherry-picking, and only counting their success stories.
The truth is, only 10% or 15% of the patients
(or not "patients", but "clients") at a typical
treatment center actually "graduate". With that trick, they
could claim a 100% success rate, but that would sound unbelievable,
so they settle for numbers like 80%. Then they do no
follow-up surveys. How many of their success stories are still clean
and sober a year later? They never reveal that.
You would think that for $20,000 or $40,000, you should at least
get a guarantee of a year clean and sober. But no.
Now what do you say to them? Nothing that I know of. They know what kind
of a terrible failure rate they really have, but they won't admit
that out loud.
They won't be that honest. Thus, a frank and truthful conversation is
impossible.
Now you can talk to them about counting ALL of the incoming patients,
no matter whether the patients "work a strong program", but they
don't want to hear it. Being honest like that would ruin their numbers
and spoil their advertisements.
You could tell them that the proper way to test any medication or
treatment is
a Randomized Longitudinal Controlled Study,
but I know that they won't do that in order to get valid statistics.
And of course, "working a strong program" and "doing it correctly"
are just euphemisms for "quit drinking" and "quit drugging".
So it's the same old trick of claiming the credit for the people
who quit their bad habits, while disavowing any responsibility for
those who don't. Thus the treatment program actually does nothing.
People have to quit drinking and drugging as a matter of choice
and their own will power, and then give the credit to some quacks
who charge a whole lot of money for double-talk and nonsense.
I don't know whether Einstein said it either. I know that I've seen some
quotes that attributed the saying to him, but it could be a misquote.
Once one of those misquotes gets started, it spreads like crabgrass.
Like the misquote attributed to Sir Herbert Spencer about "contempt
prior to investigation". Spencer never said it, but it was printed
in the Big Book, so now many people think that he did say it.
(Look here for the whole story of that misquote:
Survival_of_a_Fitting_Quotation.pdf.)
And yes, trying A.A. again and again, and imagining that it will start
working the next time around, is insanity.
Honestly, really, how could an old cult religion from the nineteen-thirties
work as a cure for a "disease"?
Ah, now that would be interesting. I don't know of any such surveys.
The A.A. headquarters likes to brag that all kinds of people make up
A.A. —
people that range from the local butcher, baker, and carpenter to doctors
—
but I've never seen a real demographic survey of A.A. members.
Like you, I suspect that lack of education — and even hostile
anti-intellectualism — would be a common characteristic.
The closest thing that I know of is a study done by a trio of
psychiatrists and psychologists
who analyzed A.A. members and found that they ranged
from mildly disturbed all the way up to full-blown psychotic, and
only 10% of the A.A. members could be classified as sane and normal.
We should also consider mental illness as one of the causes of
cult mentality. Look here:
Disturbed Followers.
And while we are considering the causes of cult mentality, I'm reminded
of this quote:
That leads into all of the various reasons why people join cults and
insist on believing in cults, ranging from buying a guaranteed ticket
to Heaven, to fear of death or madness, to enjoying being part of the
in-crowd, to enjoying the fantasy that they are doing something great,
and much more. We discussed all of that several times before. Look at:
orange-letters40.html#LauriJean
and
orange-letters107.html#why_cult
and
orange-letters402.html#why_cult.
Have a good day now,
== Orange
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2014 20:42:35 (answered 12 July 2014) Loved your article. I've been destined to fail at staying sober since I quit going to meetings. I found the opposite to be true. I'm calmer, saner and living in the world as a "normie". I'm not obsessed with being weak and one drink away from a drunk. I just don't drink. I laughed all through your words and found many so sad.
Thank you,
Hello Lisa,
Thanks for the letter, and I'm happy to hear that you are free
from the cult and doing better now.
So congratulations for both your sobriety and your escape from
the lunacy.
So have a good day, and a good life now.
== Orange
[ Link here =
http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters407.html#Gamine_H ]
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 14:47:43 (answered 17 July 2014)
Why Astrology is fake in 20 sentences!The gravity that affects biological life (fish migrations, ocean tides) comes from different sources. The big 4 planets have less than 1% influence on us and their combined nodal cycle is hundreds of years long so there isn't a mentionable, cyclical influence. In short, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus have a negligible effect on Earths life! They are too far away and their gravity does not affect us, period! Read a scientific journal.
The Moon is the only significant celestial gravitational source. Gravity affection from above is approximately 80% lunar, 20% solar, and a tiny portion, jovial planets. To find correlational data we have two difficult tasks. One is to perfectly graph chronologically and geographically, the Moon's fluctuating gravitational influence and the other is to do a 40 year, double blind, unethical and impeccable study of thousands of pregnant women and their children, on every latitude, longitude and elevation. The second will never happen unless someone finds remarkable correlational data and publishes it. Good luck convincing respected neuroscientists, pediatricians and astrophysicists that lunar gravity influences prenatal, neurological personality development in a detectable and harvestable way. The first task, to graph lunar influence, sounds reasonable, but it's a dead end too.
The lunar apogee and perigee (distance), its revolution, and its nodal cycle (18.61 years) make any correlation pointless. The Moon also has fluctuating gravity of its own according to region. The amusing zodiac charts (western and eastern) are not divisible into an 18.61 year timeframe. A cyclical, lunar gravity graph will never correlate to human neurology. Why?
Hello again, Neil,
Thank you for that. That's a nice bundle of rational thought for the day.
So have a good day now.
== Orange
[ Link here =
http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters407.html#Patrick_D ]
Date: Jul 2, 2014, 10:09 AM Hey guess what I am still sober! Wait I forgot AA does not work. Better run down to the bar. :) Just poking a little fun on your article. I was reading it again and I still stand on you have so much talent but choose to write so negative about a movement that has saved millions of lives. AA has killed no one. It is a simple program I have never met anyone too stupid for the program but people like you (smart in a good way I mean it) make it harder than it is.
Sober and Happy In Columbus
Hello again, Patrick,
Thanks for the response. Congratulations for getting your life together
and staying sober. I'm genuinely happy to hear that you are doing well,
and keeping yourself sober.
But of course your sobriety doesn't prove anything
about A.A. working.
It's like, suppose somebody joined Scientology and then spent all
of his spare time at the Scientology Center
holding two tin cans that are connected to a meter, and confessing all
of his sins to his Case Supervisor (C/S), and also telling his C/S
about every injury that he ever suffered.
Then he wrote to me and bragged that he was still sober, so that proves
that Scientology really works.
No it doesn't. Scientology is just another
fraudulent cure for whatever ails you, just like Alcoholics Anonymous.
If a Scientologist is sober, it's because he is controlling his own
behavior and not drinking alcohol. And the same thing applies to A.A.
members too.
By the way, both William Griffith Wilson and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard were
certified lunatics (their psychiatrists said so), and they both
imagined that they had invented a great new cure that nobody else
was intelligent enough to see, and they both founded cults that
maintain that they have the only cure for a human problem.
A.A. is not harmless and it has harmed a great many people. Have you read
the A.A. Horror Stories
yet?
And also see the
A.A. Suicides
and the
A.A. "No Meds" Horror Stories.
And A.A. has not saved millions of lives. In fact, A.A. has killed more
people than it has saved.
A.A. merely steals the credit for the few people who, like you, quit drinking
and stay quit by using their own will power and determination.
And A.A. refuses to take any blame for the millions of people who are
hurt more than helped by A.A., and who suffer and die. That is called
Observational Selection,
which is a common propaganda trick where a conman only counts the hits
and ignores the misses.
The slogan about "Nobody is too stupid to get the A.A. program, but
some are too intelligent," is actually very revealing. You have
to be a "low-information voter" to believe in the ravings of
the lunatic William Griffith Wilson.
But then again, you also have to be a "low-information voter"
to believe in the ravings of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the founder of
Scientology, so you are in good company.
Have a good day now.
== Orange
[ Link here = http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters407.html#Patrick_D2 ]
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 09:47:35 (answered 18 July 2014) I am sitting in am aa meeting right now my home group anniversary there are over 120 people in the room more than 40 percent have 10 plus years we just did a count down. Another 30 percent had over 5 and yes 30 had less than 1 year. Yes people have died that I knew in the program. Your premise of true alcoholics are better without aa is laughable. Your stats continue to skew the truth. Yes people die in aa there are tracked so people like you can track them. You are better without aa is laughable. When alcoholics don't get treatment within aa or another program based treatment that outlines a better way of living will not recover. The true alcoholics that don't pursue treatment die you just don't count them in your stats. How many kill themselves from depression caused by alcoholism? How many car accidents and people die? How many unintentional drug over doses? Over eating? Obesity? The list of things true alcoholics die from is end less they are just listed under something else. How people have you heard that have died when they say they just lost the will to live! Many many of these are people that died from untreated alcoholism. Where are there people in your studies?
One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor and medical Doctor George E. Vaillant of Harvard University, who was also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless — that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested — a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
Patrick D.
Hello again, Patrick,
I'm not skewing the numbers, you are. You are again engaging in
Observational Selection.
You have not counted all of the failures who are not there at
your meeting. You didn't count a single suicide who is now in the
ground, rather than at your A.A. meeting.
You didn't count a single relapser who took the "powerless" doctrine
literally and drank alcohol uncontrollably.
You didn't count a single one of the people who stopped taking her medications
on the instructions of her sponsor and ended up in a mental hospital, or dead.
You are only looking at the survivors of the cult.
You began your letter by writing,
What you are describing is a filter. Only those few sober people remain out
of the thousands of people who came and went in the last 10 or 20 years.
You are only seeing one side of the picture. On the other side are the
missing A.A. failures.
You never went to the meeting at the graveyard to count all of the A.A.
failures, did you?
By the way, a group that has that high of a percentage of old-timers
is very unusual. Where are all of the newcomers? Where is the next
generation of A.A.?
Apparently, A.A. is shrinking down to a museum of old-timers.
This sentence makes no sense:
Who tracks the people who die in A.A.? Nobody that I know of. Please show
me the records. I want to see all of the numbers.
The A.A. headquarters most assuredly does not track A.A. fatalities,
or A.A. murders, or A.A. rapes. They won't even admit that such things
are happening.
This is grossly untrue:
Alcoholics recover without A.A. or "treatment" all of the time.
I've already referred you to that information. Apparently you don't read
things that you don't want to learn. Here it is again:
Now this is untrue, and a gross distortion of the facts:
The true alcoholics that don't pursue treatment die you just don't count them in your stats. How many kill themselves from depression caused by alcoholism? How many car accidents and people die? How many unintentional drug over doses? Over eating? Obesity? The list of things true alcoholics die from is end less they are just listed under something else. How people have you heard that have died when they say they just lost the will to live! Many many of these are people that died from untreated alcoholism. Where are there people in your studies? People who die from obesity are not dying from "alcoholism". Unintentional drug overdoses are not caused by "alcoholism". People losing their will to live is not alcoholism. (In fact, the A.A. confession routines in Steps 4 and 5, and the constant put-downs in A.A. make many people lose their will to live. Suicide is rife in A.A.) And people who are depressed often turn to alcohol to try to fix the problem; "alcoholism" is not the cause of their depression. That was Bill Wilson's problem — he was a chronic depressive even before he took a single drink. He suffered a year-long bout of depression when he was just a child, when his mother left him with his grandparents. Bill's first 3-year-long bout of clinical depression was while he was still in high school, when his girlfriend Bertha Bamford died, which caused him to flunk out and not graduate from high school. Long periods of clinical depression were a recurring feature of Bill's life. The worst was an 11-year-long period from 1944 to 1955, while Bill was allegedly sober. "Alcoholism" is not a catch-all ailment that causes all other medical conditions. Often, it's just a complicating factor where people self-medicate with alcohol, vainly trying to fix what is broken. And what you call "true alcoholics" do not die from lack of A.A. or treatment. As I just showed you, most of the successful recoveries happen without any A.A. or any treatment. And yes, people do count all of the alcohol fatalities. The government is constantly supplying us with numbers. And I have reported many, many times that the annual death toll from alcohol — just in the USA — is over 100,000 per year, plus another 13,000 from automobile accidents. And the death toll from tobacco, which Bill Wilson said is okay, is 430,000 per year. On the other hand, the death toll from marijuana is near zero. People are counting everything. Then you quoted me describing Dr. George Vaillant's Project CASPAR results, and asked, where are the people in Vaillant's studies? You mean now? Probably somewhere around Boston. How should I know? I'm in Oregon. Ask George Vaillant. As a true believer member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a former member of the Board of Trustees of A.A., I'm sure that he will be happy to tell you all about it. You can contact him through Harvard University. Write to Prof. George E. Vaillant, c/o the Psychiatry Department.
And you can try reading his book,
The Natural History of Alcoholism: Causes, Patterns, and Paths
to Recovery. You have apparently
already seen my analysis of his book, here: Please read it again, and again, until you understand what Dr. Vaillant was saying about A.A. treatment:
Not only had we failed to alter the natural history of alcoholism, but our death rate of three percent a year was appalling. Have a good day now. == Orange
[The next letter from Patrick_D is here.]
[ Link here =
http://www.orange-papers.info/orange-letters407.html#Ian_R ]
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 05:40:34 (answered 17 July 2014) Hello Orange, It has been a while and I see you have published my ramble on the old testament, just to clarify a couple points you picked up — My analysis of some parts of the ot are quite standard biblical scholarship, being "the documentary hypothesis", which is simply that the ot was written over hundreds of years by a multitude of different authors and schools of thought, these are:
1. The Yahwists, who refer to God as "yhw"; At one point Ellohim and Yahweh would have been separate cults and merged fully only around 600bce, in captivity in Babylon. The first five books of the ot have fairly late authorship and (look at all those rules!) indicate a settled people with a rather involved cult of worship. Under the documentary hypothesis, the OT was compiled in babylon from obviously older sources — around 600bce. So, the OT is not fiction, it just can't easily be read as history since it is compiled long after many of the events and there is so much drift (and each tribe is telling slightly different stories — that is why Goliath is killed by two different people: each tribe claims the kill). Anyway, the ancient Hebrews would not have had a very fixed idea of history — these are the stories of the tribes and all. They do care about meaning. Job is considered the oldest book because the literary structure is so primative, because it resembles other wisdom liturature of deeper antiquity and because the cosmology is God vs the Dragon, which is an older cosmology than genesis. I occasionally like to break out actual biblical religion in AA meetings, always to debunk the 12 steps (which my rabbi regards as — harmless, ok, questionable, apostasy). Oh, how they hate that. I like to begin "I had my rabbi review the 12 steps (and they get mushy in anticipation); he judged it pagan worship. Haha. It is a great conceit of Bill W's that christian-ish Oxfordism is a new, universal religion suitable for all. For God's sake; it is not even Christianity. Yeah, you get to name your own God (which is apostasy for me!) but what of it? Bill W. has defined the attributes of God. A sort of saving God that does stuff for you. I rather stay sober in my own religious tradition. I hate the imperial reach of AA, and most any sane Jew sees it as a Protestant-lite tent meeting from jump. Plus, Bill is a necromancer and we ought to stone him to death. I do not make many meetings these days. The passive-agressive thrill is not worth the tedium. Cheers, Ilr
Hello Ian,
Thanks for the history lesson, and the laugh. I can just picture
the A.A. members drooling in anticipation of what your Rabbi would say
about the 12 Steps: "Yes, the 12 Steps are completely compatible with
Talmudic teachings." NOT!
Pagan worship, huh? That sounds about right.
And stoning Bill Wilson to death for all of the millions of people whom
he has hurt sounds too kind.
Calling the A.A. God "a saving God" really sounds like an
understatement.
The A.A. God is Santa Claus.
He will give you a new car, and a new wife, and a new job, and money,
and a better apartment, and everything:
I've heard a lot of such talk in A.A. meetings, how "Higher Power"
gave her this, and that, and arranged things so that she would benefit.
I even had a guy who was trying to recruit me as his sponsee
telling me that it was wonderful that God had arranged things so
that I was so poor and down and out that I was eating out of
Dempsey Dumpsters.
(The idea being that such poverty kept me from drinking too much.)
By the way, your history of the Old Testament reminded me of a lecture
on the orgins of the Gospels that my friend "Dewisant" messaged to me one day:
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 21:31:15 (answered 17 July 2014) Further to that — I notice when you talk about Moses and the ot you make a typical error. The 614 commandments (of which stoning necromancers and bashing your enemies heads are top picks) are only binding on the children of Israel: gentiles are not expected to follow Mosaic Law). Gentiles get by on the much less rigorous 7 commandments to Noah — the Noahide Laws. When people seek to fuss with religion they tend to pick the dumbest things in the ot and combine them with the dumbest of the nt. They thence ask you "am I going to hell because I eat shellfish?". No. The dietary laws are only binding on Jews and you can read the ot 1mn times and you will discover there is no mention of hell. Jews do not beleive in hell. Cheers, Ilr
Okay, thanks again. And have a good day now.
== Orange
[The next letter from Ian_R is here.]
Last updated 31 July 2014. |
