The S-Anon Ninth Tradition reads: Our groups, as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. This Tradition, like all the others was adopted from Alcoholics Anonymous. AA provides a wealth of information about the traditions in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. The article on Tradition Nine is reprinted, in full:
Tradition Nine
“A.A., as such,
ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible
to those they serve.”
When Tradition Nine was first written,
it said that “Alcoholics Anonymous needs the least possible organization.” In
years since then, we have changed our minds about that. Today, we are able to
say with assurance that Alcoholics Anonymous—A.A. as a whole—should never be
organized at all. Then, in seeming contradiction, we proceed to create special
service boards and committees which in themselves are organized. How, then, can
we have an unorganized movement which can and does create a
service organization for itself? Scanning this puzzler, people say, “What do
they mean, no organization?”
Well, let's see. Did anyone ever hear of a nation, a church, a
political party, even a benevolent association that had no membership rules?
Did anyone ever hear of a society which couldn't somehow discipline its members
and enforce obedience to necessary rules and regulations?
Doesn't nearly every society on earth
give authority to some of its members to impose obedience upon the rest and to
punish or expel offenders? Therefore, every nation, in fact every form of society, has to be
a government administered by human beings. Power to direct or govern is the essence
of organization everywhere.
Yet Alcoholics Anonymous is an
exception. It does not conform to this pattern. Neither its General Service
Conference, its Foundation Board, nor the humblest group committee can issue a
single directive to an A.A. member and make it stick, let alone mete out any
punishment. We've tried it lots of times, but utter failure is always the
result. Groups have tried to expel members, but the banished have come back to
sit in the meeting place, saying, “This is life for us; you can't keep us out.”
Committees have instructed many an A.A. to stop working on a chronic
backslider, only to be told: “How I do my Twelfth Step work is my business. Who
are you to judge?” This doesn't mean an A.A. won't take advice or suggestions
from more experienced members, but he surely won't take orders. Who is more
unpopular than the oldtime A.A., full of wisdom, who moves to another area and
tries to tell the group there how to run its business? He and all like him who
“view with alarm for the good of A.A.” meet the most stubborn resistance or, worse
still, laughter.
You might think A.A.'s headquarters in
New York would be an exception. Surely, the people there would have to have
some authority. But long ago, trustees and staff members alike found they could
do no more than make suggestions, and very mild ones at that. They even had to coin a couple of sentences which still
go into half the letters they write: “Of course, you are at perfect liberty to
handle this matter any way you please. But the majority experience in A.A. does
seem to suggest . . .” Now, that attitude is far removed from central
government, isn't it? We recognize that alcoholics can't be dictated
to—individually or collectively.
At this juncture, we can hear a
churchman exclaim, “They are making disobedience a virtue!” He is joined by a psychiatrist
who says, “Defiant brats! They won't grow up and conform to social usage!” The
man in the street says, “I don't understand it. They must be nuts!” But all
these observers have overlooked something unique in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve
Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.
His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in
authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles.
The same stern threat applies to the
group itself. Unless there is approximate conformity to A.A.'s Twelve
Traditions, the group, too, can deteriorate and die. So we of A.A. do obey
spiritual principles, first because we must, and ultimately because we love the
kind of life such obedience brings. Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s
disciplinarians; we need no others.
It is clear now that we ought never to
name boards to govern us, but it is equally clear that we shall always need to
authorize workers to serve us. It is the difference between the spirit of
vested authority and the spirit of service, two concepts which are sometimes
poles apart. It is in this spirit of service that we elect the A.A. group's
informal rotating committee, the intergroup association for the area, and the General Service Conferences of Alcoholics Anonymous for A.A. as a whole. Even our Foundation, once an independent
board, is today directly accountable to our Fellowship. Its trustees are the caretakers and expediters of our world services.
Just as the aim of
each A.A. member is personal
sobriety, the aim of
our services
is to bring sobriety within reach
of all who want it. If nobody does
the group's chores, if the area's telephone
rings unanswered, if we do not
reply to our mail,
then A.A. as we know it
would stop. Our communications lines with those who need our help would be broken.
A.A. has to function, but at the same time it must
avoid those dangers of great
wealth, prestige, and entrenched power which
necessarily tempt other
societies. Though Tradition Nine
at first sight seems to deal with a purely practical matter, in
its actual operation it discloses a society without organization,
animated only by
the spirit of service —a
true fellowship.
