“Perhaps I have felt I had a right and an obligation to set the standards for the family and compel those around me to live up to them. In Al-Anon we learn a better way.” (ODAT, 6 September)
Not just the family but the group and wider society.
Occasionally I will have an idea for a meeting I attend that will legitimately enable it to function more effectively, efficiently, and harmoniously.
Usually, however, the idea seeks to alter someone else’s behaviour because I do not like it. That is my real motive. The ‘benefits’ are real but collateral to my purpose. Such ideas I am best off leaving to one side.
Sometimes, meetings even introduce announcements, notices, or other script elements that seek to control members’ behaviour in between meetings or their interactions with each other before and after meetings. Where might that stop? Why not enact a full moral code, checklists of what can and can’t be said and done, injunctions about facial expression and tone of voice? Surely the group would be better if all of the members complied not just during meetings but also before and after meetings and in between meetings in observance of a full raft of moral precepts and suitable customs? Reductio ad absurdum does indeed reveal the absurdity. Provided that the meeting can proceed in an orderly fashion, where common welfare really does come first, the character defects of the individuals attending the meeting and the manifestations of such defects are no one’s business but their own, and not the group’s either. Such injunctions do not work, and they merely oppress and aggravate their objects.
The better way this reading suggests is therefore the opposite: don’t set standards for others; don’t compel others to live up to them.
My job, instead, is to set standards for myself and compel myself to live up to them myself.