Full of Wisdom

A group gives Tradition Four away most easily to someone it admires. Picture the man who arrives from another city with twenty years and a voice that fills the room. Within a month he is explaining how his old group did it, which readings are proper, who should be allowed to share. Nobody voted him in. The group just starts doing what he says, because he sounds like A.A. Bill W. described him (A.A. Comes of Age): "Who is less popular than the old-time A.A. full of wisdom, who moves to another area and tries to tell the group there how to run its business?" Bill said such men "meet with stubborn resistance, or worse still, laughter." That resistance is the Tradition working. The Long Form (Big Book, p. 563) makes the group "responsible to no other authority than its own conscience," and a visitor's experience, however long, is advice, not authority. He can bring it to a business meeting and ask for a vote like anyone else. The group breaks Four when it skips that step and simply obeys. Today the voice from away is often a program graduate's, carrying a treatment centre's house rules into a free group as if they were A.A.'s. Test it tonight: ask whether anything your group does started because one person said so.