Rule No. 62

A group's right to run its own affairs includes the right to run them into the ground, and A.A. kept that right on purpose. Bill W. told the story (A.A. Comes of Age). In one town a newly sober promoter sold his group on a building: a club, a meeting room, a clinic, a loan office upstairs, three corporations and "sixty-one rules, regulations, and by-laws". Members who disagreed wrote to New York. The answer was that "each A.A. group could manage its own affairs as it liked, provided it did not harm surrounding groups." Headquarters warned them anyway, and then: "As it had a right to, this very autonomous group ignored our warnings." It crashed. Afterward the promoter mailed every group a card headed Rule No. 62, which read: "Don't take yourself too damned seriously." Bill's verdict: "Thus, under Tradition Four, an A.A. group had exercised its right to be wrong." The Long Form (Big Book, p. 563) leaves a group its own conscience, even a mistaken one. Notice who did not step in: New York. Nobody rescued that group by taking it over, so the group learned. Today a group in trouble is offered rescue by a program that will run it from then on. Test it tonight: if your group made a bad call, ask who would fix it, the members or someone from outside.