“Sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble.” (Page 67, Big Book)
If I were stealing, or engaging in animal cruelty, vandalism, or other manifest wrongs, I would pull myself up short and do something about it.
But, oh how different with fear! How one indulges it!
To class it with stealing is to treat it with the same contempt and impatience, to not put up with it a moment longer.
The same goes for the other chief mental pests:
Resentment, envy, jealousy, grumbling, gloom, contempt, condemnation, cynicism, conceit.
To indulge these is really to be outside the programme, to have not signed up seriously to the overarching principle of living morally, starting with how one occupies one’s mind.
The programme is not something bolted onto a dissolute life, or a dustpan and brush to clean up its worst excesses.
Rather, it is the alternative to such a life.
This means everything, everything, that forms part of that life must go, regardless of my habitual or sentimental attachment to it.
One need not horse-trade over the merits or ills of particular types of belief or thought or mental activity: if they fall within the category of defect, off with their heads.