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Date: Wed, May 17, 2006 07:13 Orange, All you seem to be doing is establishing a string of non-sequiturs. Do you know what that means? There is no logical procession from Point A to Point B.
Hi again, Jenny. Would you care to be specific?
I do not see a "string of non-sequiturs".
A non-sequitur is a chain of logic that contains broken links.
I make specific statements, like that Bill Wilson exhibited most all of the characteristics
of
delusions of grandeur
and
narcissistic personality disorder,
and then I supply a lot
of supporting information and evidence to back up my statements. That isn't a
non-sequitur.
What is your beef against AA? Really now? You little juvenile diatribe reeks of unfulfilled desires. Did you get rejected by some girl? You went to AA, and you didn't get any, huh? You should have stayed, that would've changed my friend. I know this is the case.
Now that is a clear demonstration of the propaganda technique called
"ad hominem".
Don't address the actual issues or answer his statements, just attack the speaker and
criticize irrelevant details. (You forgot to say that you also don't like my
hair style or taste in music... :-)
What is my beef against A.A.? I've answered that already, too.
Start with the file,
"What's Bad About A.A.?"
I will answer you questions below. I am starting to have an affection for you, but only the affection of teacher to pupil. ;) And that is the propaganda technique called "condescension". See below answers. Okay, good. Let's do it.
[from the previous letters:] Orange, You are far too cerebral for your own good.Hi again Jenni, Seriously, you have not established any correlations to anything you say about AA or the Oxford Group and cultish behavior.
Jennie, are you blind? Are you in denial? I wrote
an entire history of the Oxford Group
and showed how all of the beliefs and practices of Alcoholics Anonymous today were
created by Frank Buchman and his Oxford Group. Didn't you bother to actually read it?
I also wrote up
a large cult test
and scored A.A. on it.
Didn't you read that? We have a lot more than just "a correlation" between A.A.
and cultish behavior.
And your current mind-set, the minimization and denial, is a
standard cult characteristic too.
If you want to go by the numbers, a cult is a shared system of beliefs. Does this mean the people who work at the Federal Reserve Bank are in a cult. They have a shared system of beliefs, do they not? Monetary policy, the discount rate, supply and demand of currency. Cult religions usually have strict rigid beliefs about God, AA has no such religious beliefs. In fact, it is not even required. AA's primary purpose is to help people get sober, that's all. The steps are merely suggestions. It has been the experience of those who tried everything and could not stop drinking by their own accord, that following the AA 12-Steps gave them sobriety they would not otherwise had. In order for me to take you seriously, you must establish a similarity between the goals of AA and the goals of another well-known cult, like Jonesville or the Jehovah's Witnesses or something similar. You haven't done that.
Jennie, don't be absurd. The Federal
Reserve Bank isn't a cult. There is much more to a cult than just a
"shared system of beliefs". That is the propaganda trick called
"The Fallacy of One Similarity".
Just find one or two points of similarity between two different things, and then
triumphantly declare that they are just the same.
Read
the Cult Test.
There are 100 characteristics of cults listed there.
Group-think
and
some shared beliefs
are just two of them.
By the way, there is still a big difference between shared beliefs and
unquestionable, unchallengeable irrational dogma, like cults and A.A. have.
And yes I have shown the similarities between Alcoholics Anonymous and
cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Jim Jones's People's Temple.
You just didn't read it. Read
the Cult Test, the entire thing, questions and answers.
If you open a new window by right-clicking the number, you can even do a side-by-side
comparison of other cults to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Oh, and don't overlook Synanon. It was founded by a guy who got his cult training in
Alcoholics Anonymous, and then he decided to use a lot of the A.A. practices to set up
a program for drug addicts. It was another disaster.
You are continuing the denial routine with this:
"AA has no such religious beliefs."
More standard cult propaganda:
"The steps are merely suggestions."
This is quite inaccurate too:
You just like that fairy tale about
the desperate loser alcoholic who "just can't quit drinking", and who has
"tried everything and failed",
stumbling into the A.A. clubhouse and finding salvation, sobriety, and God.
"A.A. is the last house on the block."
The truth is that the vast majority of people who quit drinking do it
alone, without A.A., but you don't see them because they don't stumble into
the A.A. clubhouse.
And again, A.A. is not the accumulated experience or wisdom of a bunch of
people who quit drinking. It is a repainted branch of Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult.
2. Why would degenerating into irrationality be "for my own good", or to my benefit? Please give an example of how AA thinking is irrational and I will glad swat that down too. A.A. thinking is loaded with irrational garbage. Read the Cult Test, item 7, "Irrationality" 1. How could behaving in a brainless manner be good? Once again, please give an example of how AA's are brainless, and I will oblige. Right now, it appears that it is you who are being brainless, really irate more than anything. Good? Did I say that acting in a brainless manner was good? I said that it was damaging and kills people. That is one of the big problems with cults.
[from the previous letters:] Just yesterday, a friend and I were talking about how both Frank Buchman's Oxford Group cult and Hitler's Nazi Party, which Buchman praised, were extremely anti-intellectual. They promoted their organizations with great emotionalism and hoopla, and giant spectacular meetings and rallies, and they encouraged everyone to stop thinking and just feel and believe.Credibility is always on the table at a debate, always Orange. What is your credibility on the subject. Your obviously very young, probably a student, not much life experience. You know we always have to question our sources, so your motives must be questioned too. Why would some random guy just start attacking AA out of the friggin blue. Hobby? No no, I think not, that would be pathetic. Vendetta? Oh, most certainly. But why? A girl, most definitely a girl. Unrequited lust is the source of this debate, I think. Sad, very sad.
Again, you are trying to use the condescension propaganda trick along with a few more
ad hominems —
"obviously very young,
probably a student, not much life experience... Unrequited lust..."
Actually, I am counting the months until my 60th birthday, and I have had more
experiences than I even care to list. (But I will say that I was married and my son
is now 29.)
I don't
"start attacking AA out of the friggin blue", either.
Read
the introduction.
It's all there.
You haven't actually bothered to read much
of my web site at all, have you?
You keep asking questions to which I have already given the answers.
You are griping and complaining about things that you haven't even read.
So I would just run circles around you, obvoiusly. And no, I don't need to reference fancy Latin terms. And there you are demonstrating the standard A.A. cultish anti-intellectuality. Do you think that you are making a valid point by complaining about a few Latin words? Why don't you just learn something for a change? "Ad Hominem" is only two words, and they aren't hard to pronounce. It's pretty easy.
[from the previous letters:] I can just use my own power of reason, something you don't possess yet. You are stuck forcing logical deductions out of concepts that don't exactly proceed into a valid point. You lack the power of inductive reasoning. *Inductive reasoning* is the process of reasoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning) in which the premises of an argument support the conclusion but do not ensure it. I have already shown you inductive reasoning in my past answers.
No you haven't. Where? Get specific. What is logical about bragging about not having
any evidence that A.A. actually works, but being sure that it works great just the same?
Here is some inductive reasoning:
Excuse me while I induce some more. AA uses the term "Alcoholic" to describe a person who cannot stop drinking no matter what they try. It is also used to describe a person who, when they drink, cannot stop drinking until they are extremely intoxicated or passed out. This of course is not debatable, as it is clearly what AA defines an alcoholic as. If you want to debate the use of the term "Alcoholic", that is laughable. There is no known monpoly on language. New words are added to Webster's every year. Definitions are amended and in some cases actually changed. Oh but please indulge me.
Excuse me, but what is that nonsense? Are you saying that you are changing the
meaning of the word "alcoholic"?
You don't get to just rewrite the dictionary so that words mean whatever you want them
to mean. (That is the cult trick of
"Loaded Language", redefining
words at will.)
Since you brought up the subject,
A.A. uses three very different definitions of the word "alcoholic", and
freely uses them interchangeably, which is unfortunate because it confuses several
different things:
By the way, you declared that an alcoholic is
"a person who cannot
stop drinking no matter what they try."
Then there are the vast majority of the successful quitters,
4 out of 5, who do it alone,
without any A.A. at all. Are you going to declare that none
of those alcoholics who quit drinking,
in or away from A.A., was actually "a real alcoholic"?
If you are going to do that, then there aren't very many real alcoholics in this world.
Just the dead ones, the ones who couldn't and didn't quit drinking.
And there aren't any sober real alcoholics in A.A. — if they were able to quit
and stay sober, then they weren't real alcoholics. So,
by your funny definition of "alcoholic", A.A. still has a
zero percent success rate with real alcoholics.
People who drink heavily sometimes go to rehabs and get sober and get on with their life, this is also true and not up for debate. However, it is a known fact that the medical community, that is doctors and psychiatrists, have observed throught the years that there is a type of heavy drinker who does not respond to therapy or drugs or any other conventional rehab regime or method. They keep drinking until they are dead. They do not stop. This has been observed for over a hundred years. AA allows people to achieve soberiety when thus far everything else has failed. Wrong. A.A. does not save those people. Show me the evidence, real hard evidence.. Is this not true? Yes, it is and you know it. The recovery rate for these types of drinkers is about 5%. Excuse me, but that is confused. Are you saying that the spontaneous remission rate in the suicidal alcoholics who kill themselves is 5%, or the spontaneous remission rate in the average alcoholics is 5%? Fact. So this AA thing came along, and these people, this speical type of heavy drinker was all of the sudden not only able to achieve sobriety, but actually became a functioning healthy member of society. There was no empirical data to support this however. AA's method was not and is not scientific.
That's right. There is no evidence to support your grand claims. A.A. says that
it saves alcoholics' lives, but there is no evidence that any of those grandiose claims is true.
Alcoholics who go to A.A. do not quit drinking any more than other alcoholics
who go it alone.
By the way, do you even know what the word "scientific" means?
--
"AA's method was not and is not scientific."
But was the value of science of the face of misery and destitution? Well, what is the value of empiricism in this case?
Now you are clearly demonstrating cultish thinking. (Or non-thinking.)
What is the value of true facts? Your attachment to ridding the world of AA will most certainly have a dire consequence to the families of these special types of heavy drinkers defined as "Alcoholics" (for want of a better term), will it not? They will have to go back to drinking themselves to death because AA wasn't scientific. Good job, Orange.
Where are you getting your numbers? A.A. does not save their lives.
Show me the evidence.
And your accusation that alcoholics will die because I told the truth about
Alcoholics Anonymous is yet another standard A.A. ad hominem attack on critics.
You guys are just so full of them.
The chances of you becoming a Buddhist are slim. What the heck is that supposed to mean? And that is yet another ad hominem attack.
[from the previous letters:] Just keeping it real. So I have given you the basic, most important facts above.
Actually, I am the one who is keeping it real, and you are the one who
wants to discard facts that you don't like,
and who is bragging about being "unscientific".
I have given you a whole lot of real facts about the list of things there.
You are simply going into denial and sticking your head in the sand like an
ostrich and refusing to see:
Alcoholics are sociopaths, the majority of them, I believe. They come in with 20 years worth of problems and many have depression. How can you hold AA respnosible for someone's suicide. Would you hold a doctor responsible for someone's suicide? No you wouldn't. A counselor? No.
Well yes, if someone foists quack medicine and bizarre voodoo counseling on the patient,
and drives the patient to relapse or suicide,
then the fake healer is guilty of malpractice and manslaughter.
By the way, that was a nice put-down of alcoholics. You are revealing the
real attitude of A.A. towards alcoholics — just sneering contempt and condescension —
"just a bunch of sociopaths".
See the file "The
Us Stupid Drunks Conspiracy" for much more of the same attitude towards
alcoholics.
Why AA? Oh yes, let's hold AA to a different standard even though their goals are identical to the doctor and counselor. Wrong. I am not holding A.A. to a different standard. Killing people with voodoo religion and quack medicine and fake faith healing is bad, no matter who does it. I also condemn Scientology, Jim Jones's People's Temple, and Heaven's Gate for the same things. AA has a mehodolgy, which obvoiusly you see as invalid, even though the results speak to the contrary.
What results? You just admitted that there was no evidence to support your claims
of good results:
"There was no empirical data to support this however." The same people who "drop-out" of AA are not made better by a doctor, a pill or a counselor. Fact. I worked in a mental hospital/rehab for 6 years. This is a fact. We sent these people back to AA because they were one of those special types drinkers that medicine and psychology couldn't help. Their case was hopeless. AA was able to save at least half of them. The other half went to jail or died drunk, or both.
Again, show me the evidence. And what is the normal rate of spontaneous
remission in your patients? How many of them would have quit drinking and
got their lives together without Alcoholics Anonymous?
Not coincidentally,
the Harvard Medical School reported that slightly over
half of all alcoholics eventually just quit drinking and save their own lives,
and 80% of those successful quitters do it alone, on their own, without any
treatment or support group or anything.
So all that you are doing is claiming credit for the cases where
people were going to quit anyway — you are trying to claim all of the cases
of spontaneous remission as A.A. success stories. No way.
There is no evidence that A.A. made them quit drinking, or "saved them",
and you just admitted that.
You are guilty of holding AA to a doulble standard of that of conventional medicine. AA's success is being scrutinized even though their end goals are the same as that of the medical commnunity. Remember, it was a doctor who really started AA, not Bill W. It was his work with "Alcoholics" that really got the ball rolling. He had to keep a low profile because it was not scientific. So now you must defend this double standard of yours.
Your history of A.A. is bogus. Bill Wilson and Frank Buchman started
the precursor of A.A. in the
New York Oxford Group — it was "the Alcoholic Squadron of the Oxford Group".
Bill met Dr. Bob in Akron because they were both Oxford Group members.
So was Reverend Walter F. Tunks who sent Bill to Bob.
When Bill and Bob started up their "spiritual cure for alcoholics", it was just another
part of the Oxford Groups. And Dr. Bob had no need to hide his affiliation with
the Oxford Groups, or the religious nature of his new "treatment".
Perhaps you are referring to Dr. William D. Silkworth of Towns' Hospital.
He did not start Alcoholics Anonymous — he just dosed Bill Wilson with a
primitive quack recipe of poisonous hallucinogenic drugs —
the belladonna cure —
which made Bill Wilson think that he saw God.
I am not holding Alcoholics Anonymous to a double standard.
I am holding A.A. to exactly the same standard as
real medicine and real doctors, and that is what is bothering you.
Real doctors use real medicine that has been tested thoroughly
in randomized controlled studies and shown to
be effective. Alcoholics Anonymous is cult religion and quack medicine that
has failed every valid test. A.A. has been
consistently disproven, never proven.
Likewise, real doctors have gone through lots of years of tough medical school,
and have been tested and retested, and the incompetent ones were flunked out.
Then the graduates have to do more years of internship. Heck, watch the TV program ER.
You should know at least a little something about that.
A.A. counselors, on the other hand, meet no such standards of excellence.
Any bozo who claims to have a few years of sobriety can become a sponsor and
start abusing newcomers with quack medical advice and cult religion and 13th-Stepping.
And they do. And that's one of the big problems with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Oh well, have a good day anyway.
== Orange
Hi, I wrote you a note some months ago, but didn't send it. It was a tale of woe from two Winters ago, living-down in a halfway house in central Indiana. Not really sure why I didn't send you that mail, Sir? It was quite a tale, for sure. lol I learned more about AA (downside) than I ever could've ever imagined. Alot of what I read about down there escapes me now... Came back to your site today, and read your latest Letters on your site. Man, what a site you have, Sir ! I love it. Mentioned AA in a Pogo site game room today, and 3 people came-out of the woodwork. I told this female roomie to check your site out... I think she might? :o) The main reason I write you AO, is just wondering why some of your pages are off my puter screen? (have to shift side-to-side) When I was down in Lafayette, at that house, I met this pill-popping alcoholic.... I started to like Him a lot. (not Gay-wise) He was reading books about what AA isn't, and I became totally absorbed with what AA "wasn't." Haven't read anything about It, or you in months cuz I've poured myself back in the vodka bottle over the last year, or so. Boo-Hoo, who gives a flying fluck....lol That kind-of blows my credibility now, doesn't it? Just got tired of being sober.... Look, Orange.... you have a great site ! That's the bottom line, and I hope you break-out of your anonymity soon. You could be a Gillionaire. ;o) You have a great Summer, and catch us all some fish, eh? :o) Andrew V.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the letter and all of the compliments. I hope you are doing well.
I'm glad you like the web site.
About those pages going off of the edge of the screen, yes, another person just told
me the same thing too. It is caused by your screen being set to low resolution,
like 800x600, and me having pictures that are 800 pixels or more wide. That forces
my page to be bigger than your screen.
I will look into some kind of a fix, but it will take some time. If you could fudge your
screen resolution up just a little, even just to 1024x768, that would help a lot.
Take care of yourself, and have a good day.
== Orange
are you sober?
Yes, very. As a matter of fact, I am so clean and sober
that I haven't even smoked a cigarette in five years.
Espresso coffee and aspirin are my big drugs these days.
Have a good day.
== Orange
[2nd letter from Courtney:]
Date: Thu, May 18, 2006 11:48 that's awesome. thanks for e-mailing me back. i'm sober 8 years and have just gone through a really crappy experience with an aa sponsor — long story short, i'm bi-polar and went off my meds (because of aa guilt) and ended up in a mental hospital because i was going to kill myself. she hasn't made amends at all — she was determined that my depression was because i needed to just work a better aa program, etc. (which i do and have for the past 8 years) — and basically i feel like she tried to kill me, and better yet, she sponsors one of my best friends who has a severe neurological disease and this woman has been urging her not to take pain meds. my friend is having tia's, which are mini-strokes.
Hi again, Courtney,
I'm glad to hear that you survived your sponsor. Your friend sounds like she
is in danger.
practicing medicine without a license is illegal. this is what this woman is doing. and i'm really pissed. Yes, really. I'm surprised that no one has ever prosecuted A.A. sponsors for practicing medicine without a license. They have killed enough patients. how do you stay sober without aa? are you happy? have you found peace?
I stay sober because my life is so much better and much happier now than it was when
I was drinking and smoking. I just don't want to go back to that pain again.
I was really sick and in pain; now I'm not.
It has nothing to do with A.A.; it's just like the song that Carly Simon sings,
"I Haven't Got Time For The Pain".
Have I found peace? Yes, I think so. I can't claim to be 100% happy, but then, who can?
In fact, I remember some theologian or philosopher somewhere said that we should not be
completely happy when there are suffering, sick and starving and dying people in this world.
We should be a little bit unhappy about that. Just a little bit.
Nevertheless, I am enjoying life in a way that I never could before.
I while away my spare time by going down to the river and feeding the ducks and geese
and working on my suntan and playing the guitar.
Look here to see my new lunch companions.
my other question is: has anyone ever sued an aa sponsor for giving them medical advice? Not that I know of, but somebody should. Look at this story of a stupid sponsor killing his sponsee. That guy deserved to be sued for practicing medicine without a license and killing a patient with malpractice. i know this e-mail sounds out there, i'm actually a very sane and rational young woman — and i'm doing great now that i'm on my meds again. i've just had it. i've had it with people in aa spouting their opinions on anti-depressants, etc. while i've been told "it's okay that you have to take meds, just don't tell anyone." what? you're kidding right? i've been a very active member of aa for 8+ years — going to 3 or more meetings a week, sponsoring girls, picking up girls from rehab, i've worked the steps twice.... the list goes on. I don't think you are way out there at all. You sound quite sane and reasonable. What is insane is to allow fools whose only training is a few years of practicing cult religion to start working as doctors, psychiatrists, and recovery counselors. They even have the nerve to try to countermand the prescriptions of real doctors. i don't hate aa — i hate people in aa. you're site raises some very interesting issues, though. and since you are an expert in this area, any help you could give, and insight, would be most appreciated. Well, I don't really feel like a fountain of wisdom, but whatever... :-)
thanks for your time,
You are quite welcome, Courtney.
Have a good day.
== Orange
[3rd letter from Courtney:]
Date: Fri, June 2, 2006 11:40 thanks for the great reply. amazingly, that aa sponsor finally did make amends to me last night, so it's apropos i got your e-mail this morning. i've learned so much from this experience — i am choosing to stay in aa, but i am not being silent at all about meds and how wrong and dangerous it is to play doctor in aa. i've had it, and i'm going to shout it out, and i don't care who doesn't like it. as an upstanding young aa member, i think i can make more waves by staying and fighting than running away. oh, and i'm ready to fight. thanks again so much for your time — you have helped me immensely. keep on keepin' on. i'm so glad you're sober, sounds like it's going great. say hi to the ducks! all the best, courtney
Okay, Courtney,
Good luck, keep up the good work, be happy, and have a good day.
Oh, and I will say hi to the ducks.
Check these out.
== Orange
Thank you for your commentary, it gets people to think. I've been sober 11 years in AA.
Hi Carlos,
Thanks for the compliment, and congratulations on your sobriety.
Have a good day.
== Orange
Here is a link I thought might entertain you. http://surrealist.org/writing/handbook4.html The weather must be good there! Hope you are well. J a m e s G
Yes, thanks. I have been interested in
Nori J. Muster
for a while now. I find her adoption of 12-Step
nonsense to be tragic. She's just making the same
mistake again. (She was a Hari Krishna slave for 10
years before.)
These two paragraphs are amazing:
She clearly described the Alcoholics Anonymous cult exactly,
precisely, and then she went into denial and refused to
see that Steppism is a cult religion.
Amazing.
Oh well, have a good day anyway.
Oh yeh, and the weather is great here. 93 degrees and sunny
the day before yesterday, 86 and sunny yesterday and today,
and I'm on my way out the door with my guitar to go down
to the river.
Have a good one.
== Orange
Dear Orange, Will the directions you write for CD burning work for those of us accessing the web-site from Macintosh based systems (e.g. iBooks running OS 10.4-the Apple "Panther" software")? Your directions all appear to be "Windows, "Linux", and Unix intended. While I can read everything perfectiy on my Mac run OS, can I burn a CD of your wonderful information?
Thanks,
You should be able to. It's all just files, after all,
and they basically read just the same on a Macintosh
as on anything else. (There is one real difference —
the carriage-return, line-feed at the ends of the lines.
Linux uses just a line feed, Mac uses just a carriage
return, DOS/Windoze uses both. Happily, your browser
will just ignore the difference.)
Just burn a CD using all of the extensions, like Joliet
and Rockridge file systems to allow very long file names.
That is all very standard stuff.
It should all just work okay.
Have a good day.
== Orange
Orange: I am so glad to see somebody putting out there the facts that Alcoholics Anonymous, and all affiliated entities, will not even discuss. It has been one year since I renounced my membership, after being ambushed in Grand Rapids, Minnesota at a convention by an A.A. member and an Al-Anon member. I told them they were wrong to try and convert people to their way of thinking, even when they want nothing to do with it.
Keep it coming, P.S. — there is a big A.A. convention happening in Bloomington, Minnesota over Memorial Day weekend, maybe somebody should show up handing out alternative view pamphlets? Just an idea.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for all of the compliments. Alas, I've been playing in the sun and I'm a little slow here.
Memorial Day just happened. Oh well, there's always next year.
In the mean time, one thing that you can do is send emails to your Senators and Congressman
to insist that the government test drug and alcohol treatment programs,
and not pay for any more that don't work. That will blow the 12-Step nonsense out of
the water fast, because A.A. has never passed a single valid test.
See the page that describes how to email your politicians,
here.
And have a good day.
== Orange
How long have you been putting this information together? Thanking you in advance for your reply. Jon
Hi Jon,
It's been a little more than 5 years now.
Have a good day.
== Orange
Orange: I understand you must be very busy with this website. But there is a question that still nags at me: what the hell was Bill W's motivation? Did he think: "How can I get loads of people under God control?" Or: "Wow, this Oxford Group jazz could really save loads of alcoholics? why don't I do mankind a great big favour and save alcoholics this way?" Or was it: "Mankind is so evil, they deserved to be punished with dogma and a brutal God (then laughs evilly ha ha ha)"? Was it an evil act, or was it a good act? My just is still out. But, eitherway, I fucking hated my time in that mind melting cult, and I thank you for giving me the info to make me wake up and get a life. James
Hi James,
Thanks for the question. That's a good one.
And thanks for all of the compliments, and I'm glad you are feeling better now.
With a question like this, I can only make an educated guess. I can't claim to
be able to really get inside his head. I never met him. He's dead. I can't talk to him
now and pick his brain. So all I can do is pick up on hints and impressions and
see what the historical facts indicate.
So here goes:
One of the most driving forces in Bill's life was his inferiority complex.
Bill Wilson spent his whole life trying to prove that he was just as
good as — or even better than — everybody else. That seems to have developed into
a full-blown
narcissistic personality disorder
during his childhood.
Self-aggrandizement was Bill's lifelong career.
In his autobiography, Bill Wilson even bragged that in his childhood,
he kept the whole town agog with his
amateur radio accomplishments, and he claimed that he was the first American
to ever make a working boomerang.
He also claimed that his childhood exploits "marked me out for
distinction" early in his life.
Bill's (probably alcoholic) father abandoned the family,
leaving Bill with his mother and sister.
Bill's mother then left the children with her parents, Bill's grandparents, so that she could
study healing in Boston. Bill felt that she had also abandoned him, so he really got
his head twisted around on that one. He went into a year-long period of depression.
Bill seems to have had a full-blown narcissistic personality disorder by that time.
Periods of terrible chronic clinical depression is a hallmark of NPD.
Narcissists are either on top of the world, giddy, the "Number One Man", or they are
at the bottom of the garbage heap, feeling that they are worthless.
Long periods of clinical depression were also a recurring feature of Bill's life.
(The worst was an 11-year-long period from 1944 to 1955, while Bill was sober.)
The truth is, Bill Wilson always had good care. He wasn't abandoned by his mother.
She did the best thing that she could do at the time.
Bill's grandfather was kindly and
compassionate, and Bill always had the best and most expensive toys of any kid in
the town. But Bill felt that he had been dumped.
Bill's grandparents sent him to the Burr & Burton Seminary (a
former seminary), a private coed school in Manchester, Vermont. There,
he managed to get himself elected the President of his class.
But then his girlfriend Bertha Bamford died suddenly from
a brain tumor and Bill went into a 3-year-long depression, and he failed
to even graduate from high school.
Bill's mother wanted Bill to go to MIT — the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology
— and become an engineer, but Bill totally failed the entrance exams.
After a make-up year of high school, Bill went to Norwich University,
a very small military academy in Northfield, Vermont, that would take
anybody with a high school diploma. Bill did even worse there.
See the full story of Bill's education
here.
Bill was in danger of getting kicked out of Norwich, but World War I came along
and saved Bill from the disgrace of non-graduation.
Bill enlisted in the Army. His ROTC experience at Norwich got him a Lieutenant's commission.
Before he was shipped off to Europe, Lieutenant Wilson hurriedly married the village spinster,
a girl several years his senior, Lois Burnham.
Bill got into the war late enough that he didn't see any action.
His biggest wartime experience was pulling his pistol out of its holster
and pointing it at his own men, and demanding that they obey his orders.
Nevertheless, Bill bragged that he had passed the test of war and came out of it
a real man.
After the war, Bill odd-jobbed for a while. He thought of being a lawyer,
and took some night school courses in law. But that wasn't his cup of tea.
Bill found his greatest success in touting stocks. He investigated companies
and guesstimated their potential for increase, and then recommended them to rich speculators
on Wall Street. He met with some success in doing that, and soon Bill was living the
high life. He got in with a gang of stock market manipulators who did what Bill misnamed as
"Ponzi schemes".
They were actually pump-n-dump schemes. Bill rationalized that it was okay because
the stock that they pumped and dumped went back up later anyway.
(See PASS IT ON, pp 74-76, 85-86, and 90-91, and Bill W. by Robert Thomsen,
pp 146-147, 152-153.)
Bill made a lot of money, but was never able to keep any. As soon as he got money in his hands,
he had to be seen eating in the finest (and most expensive) restaurants with "the
best people". He inflated his status to "New York Stock Broker", something that he
never was. And it was during this period that Bill developed a serious drinking problem.
The Crash of 1929 ended the party.
During the Roaring Twenties, Bill had had no trouble picking stocks that would go up,
because everything was going up with "irrational exhuberance".
But after Black Monday, nothing was going up and
Bill was out of luck. He worked for a friend who was a broker on the Toronto Stock Exchange
for a short while, but Bill drank himself out of that job and he was penniless again.
The nightmare period began. Lois worked in Loesser's department store in New York
city to support the both of them while Bill stole money out of Lois's purse to
buy more booze. From 1930 to 1934 Bill was basically drinking to die. He went through
Charlie Towns' upscale detox hospital four times, paid for by Lois's brother-in-law
Dr. Strong.
There, Bill got the specialty of the house,
a poisonous quack recipe
that featured enough belladonna to keep the patients hallucinating.
The last time around, in December of 1934, Bill thought he saw God.
In the previous month, something else had been happening: Bill's old
high-school alumnus and drinking buddy Ebby Thacher had joined a cult
religion — the "Oxford Group" — and he was trying to recruit
Bill Wilson. Bill resisted
their anti-intellectual babble
at first, but knowing that he was going to die from alcohol, he began
reconsidering things. Ebby took advantage of the situation to take Bill
to Sam Shoemaker's church, Calvary Church at Fourth Ave and 21st St.,
where Bill was exhorted to "give himself to God". Then they
sent Bill to Towns' Hospital to get detoxed.
The Oxford Groupers worked on Bill day and night, indoctrinating him with all
of the standard O.G. propaganda, and filling Bill's head with pseudo-religious
clap-trap. When the hallucinogenic drugs took effect, the result was predictable —
Bill "saw God".
Bill also soon decided that God had chosen him for a special mission — to save all
of the alcoholics in the world (or so he said).
Here we have an interesting juncture: Bill had a choice between believing that he
had been stupid and foolish in the past,
when he was drinking himself to death, or believing that his
drinking career had simply been God's way of preparing him for a special mission.
Bill chose to believe the latter, and he considered himself
"uniquely useful" for helping other alcoholics.
Yes, I guess a lot of people would prefer to believe that they are one of God's
Chosen People, a man with a special mission from God,
rather than just another derelict old drunkard who has been foolish.
Bill immediately turned into a religious fanatic, and spent all of his time
proselytizing and seeking converts. He moved a bunch of alcoholics into his (really
Lois's) house, where he was sure that religion would sober them up.
The alcoholics did everything from steal and sell his best clothes to commit suicide
in the kitchen oven — everything except get sober, that is.
And Bill didn't succeed in getting a single Oxford Group convert out of the bunch, either.
Bill made another stab at getting and keeping a straight job. He got in with a group of guys who
were trying to pull off a hostile take-over of a rubber manufacturing equipment company
in Akron Ohio (where the Firestone family had their famous tire factory).
The scheme didn't work, and Bill found himself left behind in Akron with a weekend to kill.
Fearing that he would drink, he called Reverend Walter Tunks, who was the most
ardent Oxford Group preacher in Akron. (It is likely that Bill was given Tunks's name
by Rev. Sam Shoemaker in New York before coming to Akron, because Tunks was one of Shoemaker's
converts. The story about how Bill luckily called an Oxford Group minister
by picking his name off of a plaque is probably apocryphal.)
Tunks connected Bill with Henrietta Seiberling, another Oxford Group member,
who arranged for him to meet a derelict alcoholic doctor in town,
Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, who was also an Oxford Group member.
The two of them, Bill and Bob, really hit it off, and they decided that they could save alcoholics
by converting them to the Oxford Group cult religion. So they started recruiting
at the local hospital. Bill was so sure of his messianic role that he didn't
bother to actually ask the alcoholics whether they wanted to get converted:
So, after a summer of recruiting in Akron (leaving Lois wondering what happened to
her husband), Bill became the leader of his own O.G. sub-group,
"The Alcoholic Squadron of the Oxford Group",
in New York City.
But that created another problem: The Oxford Group didn't like Bill Wilson setting
himself up as a leader without the cult leader Frank Buchman's permission,
which Frank had not given. When Frank's lieutenants told Bill to stop working with
alcoholics, Bill refused to obey orders,
so they basically just pushed him out of the Oxford Group.
Bill kept on recruiting and enlarging his group in New York, while Dr. Bob
continued going to Oxford Group meetings in Akron, and making alcoholic converts
there. One of Bob's converts was Clarence Snyder, who went and started
a group called "Alcoholics Anonymous" in Cleveland.
In 1938, Bill decided that they needed to write and sell a book about recovery
from alcoholism, in order to make some money. (Bill was chronically unemployed and
dead broke.)
It was to be called "100 Men: The Story of How 100 Men Recovered from Alcoholism".
(Even though there were only 40 A.A. members total, in all three groups — New York, Akron,
and Cleveland, and lots of them relapsed.)
See
the stock prospectus, here.
In the book, Bill made a lot of extreme exaggerations and told outright lies
about how well his Buchmanite program worked.
My favorite is where Bill Wilson pretended to be his own wife, and wrote that
the little women were jealous of A.A. because A.A. and its book had cured their
husbands of alcoholism in only a few weeks (before the book was actually
written or published):
Bill was obviously engaging in a lot of self-promotion and promotion of A.A. in order
to sell the book and make some money.
Did Bill know that he was lying? Yes,
at times he certainly did,
but he felt entitled to do so to "save alcoholics".
That's a classic characteristic of a narcissistic personality disorder.
That creates a problem with
circular logic, of course: "It's okay to lie and grossly exaggerate the A.A. success rate in order to promote Alcoholics Anonymous, because A.A. should be promoted because it's such a wonderful organization that has saved so many alcoholics." The rest is history. Bill spent years grandstanding and promoting both Alcoholics Anonymous and himself. Through chicanery and deceit and back-stabbling a partner, he managed to steal the Big Book copyright and then trade it for an income for life. Bill devoted his life to writing books about Alcoholics Anonymous, and then promoting it some more. So, back to your original questions:
Oh well, have a good day anyway. == Orange
Last updated 6 January 2014. |
