Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous

The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the thought was expressed that there might be a God personal to me this feeling was intensified. I didn't like the idea. I could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence, Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature but I resisted the thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway might be. I have since talked with scores of men who felt the same way.
- Bill Wilson, Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

 

When we value people we tend to value them based on our own needs, desires, experiences, and hopes. When I decree that for me Bill Wilson—co-founder of and prime mover behind Alcoholics Anonymous, beginning in the early 1930s—is the most important man of the 20th century that is doubtlessly in large part because I am a low bottom alcoholic with three kidney failures behind him (one of those culminating in a brief across-the-boards organ shutdown), a blood transfusion, and a long and demystifying experience of having found nobody who doesn’t have the same problem who understands or even cares (emergency room doctors especially despise alcoholics, doubtlessly due to overexposure). Often when we alcoholics relapse the people we love or depend on the most are quite furious with us, which ends up being just another thing to drink over, though usually we get it; that doesn’t help us at all with respect to explaining what we are going through or why our conduct/behaviour is so cataclysmically wretched. In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous the alcoholic condition is described as cunning, baffling, powerful. I’ll say it is! Meetings are a central part of the program. It is where we go to identify instead of comparing. I have come into contact with many a soccer mom whose story is remarkably similar to my own, which would not likely happen in a workplace or at a swanky nightspot. Bill Wilson was a New York stockbroker with a good but rapidly diminishing reputation who, already a problem drinker, dove deep into the abyss following the huge market crash commencing in October of 1929. His salvation arrived, to the awe of those who were certain he’d soon be dead or in the nuthouse (especially the medical professionals who’d seen him at his ever-worsening worst), primarily because he found a way to embrace, though previously agnostic, a personal God while at the same time bolstering his spiritual fortitude through work with others alcoholics whose conditions were especially grave. When Bill connected with Dr. Bob Smith of Akron, Ohio while visiting that city, asking after alcoholics who might be in especially bad shape, a doctor Bill had phoned up randomly pointed him toward Dr. Bob, who was definitely the worse for wear…Alcoholics Anonymous as a not-for-profit operation immediately began to adopt a concrete form… 

The first A.A. groups met at Bill Wilson’s apartment in New York and a good deal of those in regular attendance got sober and stayed that way. A.A. gradually expanded and in the early years success rates were extraordinary. By 1941 the Saturday Evening Post caught wind and passed the message on to Americans of all stripes. People took note. Bill Wilson was an eminent fellow who had the luxury of taking private meetings with people like Carl Gustav Jung and John D. Rockefeller Jr.: the former believed that in localizing alcoholism/addiction as an explicitly spiritual disorder and developing a workable framework for treating that disorder, A.A. had literally changed the world; the Rockefeller Foundation offered an obscene amount of money to A.A. as such, but Bill rejected it flat-out, the seventh tradition of A.A. stipulating that any given A.A. group “ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.” Naturally, it was the original core A.A. group in collective unanimity that came up with the steps, the traditions, and the texts that would comprise the first edition of the Big Book. If the groups that spawned out of that original group that met in Bill and his wife Lois’s apartment had much higher statistical success rates than A.A. has today, operating as it does on a planetary scale, that is largely because Bill and Dr. Bob made a point of scouring hospitals for alcoholics on death’s doorstep, and these men and women were overwhelmed by such agony and terror that they were willing to do just about anything to alleviate the suffering. Some folks say that rock bottom is simply where you stop digging, and there’s no small amount of truth in that, but it is also true that if you are totally ruined and absolutely debased you may be more inclined to take strenuous measures to save yourself. That is certainly my story. I am exactly the kind of alcoholic Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob would have found, in all their unvanquishable compassion and mercy, in some random godforsaken hospital somewhere. The meetings will help you stay sober, but it is the program itself that is the fundamental grounding operation and design for living: we admit that we are powerless over alcohol and all persons, places, and things beyond our control; we turn our will over to God or some great majestic cosmic power and stop steering the careening wagon our woebegone, hellbent selves; we identify our defects of character and past misconduct, undertaking at a measured and thoughtful pace to clean up the mess we have for a good long time been making; we pray, meditate, and learn to be of service to others. What we get in turning over our will and our lives is nothing short of a second life…just like those fuddy-duddy born again Christians, by God!

Bill Wilson with Hubert M.