That Powerful Minority

Before there was a Tradition Four, eighteen drunks in a house in Akron already knew that a group settles its own business by vote, and that the losing side can be right. Bill W. and Dr. Bob brought them big plans: paid missionaries, A.A. hospitals, a book. Bill W. wrote (A.A. Comes of Age): "The moment we were through, those alcoholics really did work us over!" They argued it out, and then it went to a vote: "By the barest majority, and over the most strenuous objections, the Akron meeting finally decided that we ought to go for the whole works". The founders didn't decide for them; the room did. And Bill later admitted the losers had seen further: "In later years, I came to be very thankful for that powerful minority." Big business and paid missionaries, he wrote, would have destroyed A.A. The Long Form (Big Book, p. 563) makes that room's way the rule for every group: each is "responsible to no other authority than its own conscience." A group's conscience is its members talking it through and voting, with the minority heard. Today a meeting can run for years without one vote, because its decisions were made somewhere else before anyone sat down. Test it tonight: ask when your group last voted on anything, and who spoke against it.