No Other Authority

Tradition Four is about who runs a group's business, and the rumour that it means what happens in this meeting stays in this meeting hides exactly that. Read the Long Form before anyone explains it to you (Big Book, p. 563): "With respect to its own affairs, each A.A. group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience." There is nothing in it about secrets. A group's own affairs are its business: the time, the place, the format, the money, who serves and for how long. The Big Book's own history of the Traditions says it in five words (Big Book, p. xix): "each group was to be autonomous". Autonomous means self-governing: the group makes its own decisions and answers for them. Whatever a room decides about privacy, that is not what this sentence is about. When Four is taught as a rule about keeping quiet, a room learns to keep quiet and never learns that it can vote. Then whoever actually runs the meeting, a facility, its staff or one strong old-timer, never has to face a group conscience at all. Today the slogan is read aloud at the close of meetings that have never once held a business meeting. Test it tonight: ask someone in your room what Tradition Four says, then show them page 563.