"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-- that our lives had become
unmanageable."

Who cares to admit complete defeat?  Practically no one, of course.  Every natural instinct
cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that , glass
in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that
only an act of Providence can remove it from us.
	No other kind of bankruptcy is like this one.  Alcohol, now become the rapacious
creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands.  Once this stark
fact is accepted, our bankruptcy as going human concerns is complete.
	But upon entering  A.A. we soon take quite another view of this absolute
humiliation.  We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps
toward liberation and strength.  Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out
to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.
	We know that little good can come to any alcoholic who joins A.A. unless they
have first accepted their  devastating weakness and all its consequences.  Until they so
humble themselves, their sobriety -- if any -- will be precarious.  Of real happiness they
will find none at all.  Proved beyond doubt by an immense experience, this is one of the
facts of A.A. life.  The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit
complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole Society has sprung and
flowered.
	When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us revolted.  We had approached
A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence.  Then we had been told that so far as alcohol
is concerned, self-confidence was no good whatever;  in fact, it was a total liability.  Our
sponsors declared that we were the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that
no amount of human willpower  could break it.  There was, they said, no such thing as the
personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will.   Relentlessly deepening our
dilemma, our sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to alcohol -- an allergy, they
called it.  The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us:  first we were smitten
by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and then by an allergy of the body
that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process.  Few indeed were those
who, so assailed, had ever won through in singlehanded combat.  It was a statistical fact
that alcoholics almost never  recovered on their own resources.  And this had been true,
apparently, ever since people had first crushed grapes.
	In A.A.'s pioneering time, none but the most desperate cases  could swallow and
digest this unpalatable truth.  Even these "last-gaspers" often had difficulty in realizing
how hopeless they actually were.  But a few did, and when these laid hold of A.A.
principles with all the fervor with which the drowning seize life preservers, they almost
invariably got well.  That is why the first edition of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous,"
published when our membership was small, dealt with low-bottom cases only.  Many less
desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the
admission of hopelessness.
	 It is a tremendous satisfaction to record that in the following years this changed. 
Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the
garage, began to recognize their alcoholism.  As this trend grew, they were joined by
young people who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics.  They were spared that
last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through.  Since Step One
requires an admission that our lives have become unmanageable, how could people such
as these take this Step?
	It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had hit to the point
where it would hit them.  By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that
years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no
mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression.  To the doubters we
could say, "Perhaps you're not an alcoholic after all.  Why don't you try some more
controlled  drinking, bearing in mind meanwhile what we have told you about
alcoholism?"  This attitude brought immediate and practical results.  It was then
discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of
our malady, that  person could never be the same again.  Following every spree, they
would say to themselves, "Maybe those A.A.'s were right...."  After a few such
experiences, often years before the onset of extreme difficulties, they would return to us
convinced.  They had hit bottom as truly as any of us.  John Barleycorn had become our
best advocate.
	Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first?  The answer is that
few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. 
For practicing A.A.'s remaining eleven Steps means the  adoption of attitudes and actions
that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking.  Who wishes to be
rigorously honest and tolerant?  Who wants to confess their faults to another and make
restitution for harm done?  Who cares anything about  a Higher Power, let alone
meditation and prayer?  Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.'s
message to the next sufferer?  No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme,
doesn't care for this prospect -- unless we have to do these things in order to stay alive
ourselves.
	Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A., and there we discover the
fatal nature of our situation.  Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to
conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.  We stand ready to do anything
which will lift the merciless obsession from us.

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