The Going Rate

Imagine a group that solves its Twelfth Step problem with money. Nobody wants the 2 a.m. calls — a drunk on the phone who needs somebody to come — so the group votes to pay forty dollars a call to whoever goes. It works immediately. The calls get answered. Now watch the next year, because this mechanism has nothing to do with anyone's motives. A price now exists, so there is a going rate. Which means the man who goes out at 2 a.m. for nothing is no longer a member doing what members do — he is a man working for free in a room where that job pays. He looks like a mug, or an amateur, or someone angling for something. So he stops. Not out of greed. Out of arithmetic. And the newcomer who would have gone next year never starts, because he has learned that carrying the message is a paid position and he has not been hired. A.A. ran this experiment more than once and wrote down the finding: "Every time we have tried to professionalize our Twelfth Step, the result has been exactly the same; our single purpose has been defeated." Not sometimes. Exactly the same. A Fellowship is nothing but people doing for free the one thing that cannot be bought.