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world will then turn happy and be free to concentrate on
culture and character. Solely by their own intelligence and
labor, men will have shaped their own destiny.
Certainly no alcoholic, and surely no member of A.A.,
wants to deprecate material achievement. Nor do we enter
into debate with the many who still so passionately cling to
the belief that to satisfy our basic natural desires is the main
object of life. But we are sure that no class of people in the
world ever made a worse mess of trying to live by this for-
mula than alcoholics. For thousands of years we have been
demanding more than our share of security, prestige, and
romance. When we seemed to be succeeding, we drank to
dream still greater dreams. When we were frustrated, even
in part, we drank for oblivion. Never was there enough of
what we thought we wanted.
In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned,
our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We
had lacked the perspective to see that character-building
and spiritual values had to come first, and that material sat-
isfactions were not the purpose of living. Quite
characteristically, we had gone all out in confusing the ends
with the means. Instead of regarding the satisfaction of our
material desires as the means by which we could live and
function as human beings, we had taken these satisfactions
to be the final end and aim of life.
True, most of us thought good character was desirable,
but obviously good character was something one needed to
get on with the business of being self-satisfied. With a
72 S T E P S E V E N
proper display of honesty and morality, we'd stand a better
chance of getting what we really wanted. But whenever we
had to choose between character and comfort, the charac-
ter-building was lost in the dust of our chase after what we
thought was happiness. Seldom did we look at character-
building as something desirable in itself, something we
would like to strive for whether our instinctual needs were
met or not. We never thought of making honesty, tolerance,
and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.
This lack of anchorage to any permanent values, this
blindness to the true purpose of our lives, produced another
bad result. For just so long as we were convinced that we
could live exclusively by our own individual strength and
intelligence, for just that long was a working faith in a
Higher Power impossible. This was true even when we be-
lieved that God existed. We could actually have earnest
religious beliefs which remained barren because we were
still trying to play God ourselves. As long as we placed
self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power
was out of the question. That basic ingredient of all humili-
ty, a desire to seek and do God's will, was missing.
For us, the process of gaining a new perspective was
unbelievably painful. It was only by repeated humiliations
that we were forced to learn something about humility. It
was only at the end of a long road, marked by successive
defeats and humiliations, and the final crushing of our self-
sufficiency, that we began to feel humility as something
more than a condition of groveling despair. Every newcom-
er in Alcoholics Anonymous is told, and soon realizes for
himself, that his humble admission of powerlessness over
S T E P S E V E N 73
alcohol is his first step toward liberation from its paralyzing
grip.
So it is that we first see humility as a necessity. But this
is the barest beginning. To get completely away from our
aversion to the idea of being humble, to gain a vision of hu-
mility as the avenue to true freedom of the human spirit, to
be willing to work for humility as something to be desired
for itself, takes most of us a long, long time. A whole life-
time geared to self-centeredness cannot be set in reverse all
at once. Rebellion dogs our every step at first.
When we have finally admitted without reservation that
we are powerless over alcohol, we are apt to breathe a great
sigh of relief, saying, Well, thank God that's over! I'll nev-
er have to go through that again! Then we learn, often to
our consternation, that this is only the first milestone on the
new road we are walking. Still goaded by sheer necessity,
we reluctantly come to grips with those serious character
flaws that made problem drinkers of us in the first place,
flaws which must be dealt with to prevent a retreat into al-
coholism once again. We will want to be rid of some of
these defects, but in some instances this will appear to be an
impossible job from which we recoil. And we cling with a
passionate persistence to others which are just as disturbing
to our equilibrium, because we still enjoy them too much.
How can we possibly summon the resolution and the will-
ingness to get rid of such overwhelming compulsions and
desires?
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