Nobody Can Compel

Nobody can enforce Tradition One on a group, and the rumour that somebody can is one of the ways rooms get taken over. Bill W. wrote in 1947 (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 38): "Nowhere in A.A. is there to be seen any constituted human authority that can compel an A.A. group to do anything." Constituted means officially set up. No office, no committee, no old-timer, no staff member. So why do groups keep the Traditions at all? The same page: "The A.A. groups follow these other traditional principles for the very same reason that the individual A.A. follows the Twelve Steps to recovery. Groups see they would disintegrate if they didn't". Disintegrate means fall to pieces. A group keeps the Long Form's "our common welfare comes first" (Big Book, p. 563) because it has seen what happens when it doesn't, not because someone checks. Today the rumour runs the other way. A facility hands out its meeting guidelines and calls them A.A. rules. A staff member tells a room it will be shut down for breaking a Tradition. None of them has that power, and a group that believes they do has already given its conscience away. Test it tonight: when anyone says your group must do something, ask who in A.A. could make it.