I once heard someone at a meeting say that they admitted to their sponsor that they were powerless over alcohol and the sponsor responded with, 'But can you admit you're powerless over everything?'
The notion of omni-powerlessness is prevalent in AA and is groundless for a number of reasons.
Firstly, power is the ability to perform an action. If you can perform actions, even brushing your teeth, you are not omni-powerless. If those actions have effects on objects other than you, you are not powerless over those objects. If you brush your teeth, you have power over your teeth, so you are not powerless over everything, or the barely narrower 'people, places, and things'. More importantly, one can affect other people for good or ill. One can help, hinder, or harm them.
There are obviously actions one cannot perform, and there are entities and processes one cannot affect. Someone, somewhere, is frying an egg, and, unless that person and egg happen to be in my presence, I have no power over them. The observation 'I'm powerless over some people, places, and things and I'm not powerless over other people, places, and things' is obviously true but wordy and trivial, and it's difficult to see what mileage one is supposed to get out of this, especially as the whole rub lies in drawing the distinction between what is and is not within one's power. The mystery at the heart of the Serenity Prayer is reduced to a simple: I can change nothing. I must accept everything. Ta dah!
What is pernicious is less the imbecility of assertions of omni-powerlessness or powerlessness over broad categories and more the fact that this is presented as an AA idea and more specifically a Step One idea. It is not an AA idea, and it is not a Step One idea.
What does AA say about our ability to do good?
He attended church for the first time in many years. After the sermon, he quietly got up and made an explanation. His action met widespread approval, and today he is one of the most trusted citizens of his town. This all happened years ago. (Step Nine)
You can help when no one else can. (Step Twelve)
What does AA say about our ability to do ill?
The alcoholic is like a tornado roaring his way through the lives of others. Hearts are broken. Sweet relationships are dead. Affections have been uprooted. Selfish and inconsiderate habits have kept the home in turmoil. (Step Nine)
The AA message is that we have immense power for good and for ill.
What about powerlessness? Well, let's see how many times it's mentioned in the first 164 pages.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Just once. That's it. Once you get into the stories, the point repeats. Where the object of the powerlessness is mentioned, the object is alcohol (plus direct consequences thereof).
So after reviewing these things and realizing what liquor had cost me, I went to this Higher Power that, to me, was God, without any reservation, and admitted that I was completely powerless over alcohol and that I was willing to do anything in the world to get rid of the problem. (Page 195)
I knew I was powerless over alcohol (Page 287)
I’m powerless over how much and with whom I drink—all good intentions drowned in denial. (Page 330)
God had restored me to sanity, and I took Step Two the very moment I surrendered and accepted my powerlessness over alcohol and the unmanageability of my life. (Page 335)
The steps took me on that path. I had admitted I was powerless over alcohol, that my life had become unmanageable. (Page 346)
It did say I admitted I was powerless over alcohol—that my life had become unmanageable. Most certainly I was powerless over alcohol (Page 354)
I didn’t think I was “powerless over alcohol,” (Page 401)
Wow, those guys at the meeting were right—I am powerless over alcohol. (Page 404)
I had no problem admitting I was powerless over alcohol, and I certainly agreed that my life had become unmanageable. (Page 550)
The only other item mentioned over which the individual has no power is drugs (two instances), and there is one fudged reference to alcoholism as the object of powerlessness on Page 540 (which can be understood, however, to be powerlessness over alcoholism on one's own, as the passage goes on to talk about others having conquered it with the help of AA).
It turns out that AA's position is not that we are powerless over everything, over people, places, and things, over blimps, windsocks, Margery, dahlias, and buttered toast, but over one thing: alcohol. It does not even suggest powerlessness in any other regard.
I've heard people argue that what the authors really 'meant' was that we are powerless over everything or over people, places, and things, but this presupposes that the authors, for some unknown reason, rather than plainly saying we are powerless over everything, were burying this broad proposition in a much narrower one and hoping that everyone would automatically figure it out. Anyone peddling this argument I would not entrust with a shopping list with one item. If one were to send them to a supermarket with a single item, say, a Battenberg cake, they would return with everything they could carry. When reproved, they would say, "I know you said you wanted a Battenberg cake, but I simply knew you meant for me to buy everything." Then they would bat their eyelids alluringly at you and expect praise for this prodigy of service.
Setting aside this nonsense, one might wonder what all the fuss is about. Why does it matter?
It matters a great deal, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the assertion that we're powerless over everything trivialises the very grave fact of being powerless over alcohol. It also hopelessly blanches the notion of powerlessness, as our powerlessness with matters other than alcoholic is so clearly relative not absolute: each object of enquiry lies on a spectrum between complete powerlessness and complete power. I am absolutely powerless over the Turkish lira exchange rate and the weather in Wuppertal and I am absolutely not powerless over my treatment of you; my power over your experience of my behaviour is tempered by your own mental and actual response. This nuance, in turn, relativizes the notion of powerlessness over alcohol: it is no longer an absolute, immovable truth but a negotiable one. That this is not an empty risk is evidenced by circulating notions such as 'choosing to stay sober one day at a time'. The inflation of powerlessness to cover everything whilst turning it into a relative and fuzzy-edged concept (exactly where does it start and stop?) results in the eradication of any sense and ... power ... in Step One. Step One, rather than being the sharp sting of a red-hot brand becomes a barely noticeable smell of burning.
More than that, donning the poncho of powerlessness, embroidered as it is with pseudo-spiritual one-liners, conceals beneath its alpaca folds the mischief of one's own wrongs and the potential of one's own responsibility.
If I'm powerless, I'm not responsible for my life. I'm not responsible for my emotions. I do not have to admit anything. I do not have to change. I do not have to make amends. I do not have to work. I do not have to take direction. I just have to sit there 'knowing God is God' or 'feeling at one with God and others' or recognising 'love is all there is'.
The poncho of powerlessness also forms the basis for victimhood: if I'm powerless, and I'm suffering, and you took certain actions to occasion that suffering, you're the reason for my suffering. The generous recognition of one's own asserted powerlessness is rarely matched by its generous extension to others: the corollary of my powerlessness over others would be their powerlessness over me, from which I would have to infer that no aspect of my life has ever been affected by another person, which is firstly obviously untrue and secondly leaves one with the absurd notion that things in the world happen but without cause and without effect: no one seriously claims that, for instance, a thief does not cause the theft, because he is powerless, that he should not be held accountable because he powerless to stop himself from thieving, or that the theft does not result in the absence of the item stolen. In extreme branches of philosophy and science, the notion that the universe is simply a clockwork mechanism is proposed, but its proponents continue to say they enjoy a cheese sandwich or declare "I love you" to their children and mean it. If they really believed their theories, they could utter neither statement sincerely, because the sentiment is not a real sentiment but a programmed output: there is no one to do the enjoying, there is no such thing as enjoyment, and there is no such thing enjoyed; there are only subatomic particles and forces interacting with each other, with all larger objects mere constructs, a film of photons projected onto a wall with no one to watch it. In other words, to loop back to the starting point of this paragraph, any assertion of personal omni-powerlessness is limited to the asserter, since, if it were declared universal ('Everyone is powerless over everything'), this would lead us either to hold there to be arbitrarily arising events with no cause and no effect or an intuitively implausible clockwork mechanism model for the universe.
So, if the person claiming personal omni-powerlessness suffers (and they usually do), there are perpetrators out there. These usually fall into two categories: authority figures (from parents onwards, and extending into those wielding power in one's life today, so bosses, landlords, even sponsors (!), etc.); and societal groupings. One contemporary fashion going back, it appears, to Marx, is the notion that one's individual situation arises substantially out of the power that some groups have over others by virtue of certain personal characteristics or position. I'm not going to go into this here, but the psychological advantage (and possibly basis) of this philosophy is very clear: the individual is innocent, the fault lies elsewhere, and warfare is just (whether individual or collective).
This is not the AA programme.
To return to some sanity: the insanity described in the Big Book is the insane belief that a drink is a good idea for an alcoholic. The powerlessness lies firstly in the power of this belief to induce concordant action (namely a drink) and secondly in the physical mechanisms, co-opting the mind and the will like a parasite, which make it virtually impossible to stop.
That's what I'm powerless over. That's what makes me an alcoholic.
Some ponchos:
