http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/you-cant-make-me-or-...
However, that doesn't mean AA doesn't work for some people.
I have read somewhere it has a 10% success rate, so we can't ignore that for some people, as flawed as it might seem to some, it does work.
Powerlessness is just about "I dont have power over X" where x=other people, other circumstances, etc etc.
All you have power over is your OWN actions. And thru that you gain immense power.
The steps are just about clearing out the shitty character your developed lying and cheating your way to get high/drunk... So you can start making decisions without trying to cover up 100 other shitty decisions.
The higher power thing is just about not being so self centered and framing the world from a point of view where the addict isnt in the center of it, but a participant equal to all others.
Theres lots of crazy everywhere, and AA attracts alot of them. But people who have found true freedom outside of addictions thru the process. And many people just build new frameworks to be assholes with.
How many of those are people that would have successfully quit on their own, but instead of trying to fix it themselves when they realized they had a problem, almost immediately went to AA?
I don't think a 5-8% success rate is really indication on its own that AA provides any positive benefit
An addiction researcher put it like this:
> If the consumer's sole motive for changing his level of patience is to escape an allocation that is dictated by his first order preference (including time preferences), but that contradicts his second order preferences, he will not be able to achieve this by rational means.
The researcher proposed that it might be possible to escape this conundrum by seeing patience as valuable in itself. If you only value patience because you'd like to escape your addiction in the long term, you won't succeed, because you do in fact value the thing you're addicted to more in the short term.
Yet, can you just choose to value patience in itself? What things you value can force you to change the things you value? Isn't it all dictated by our biology anyway, even if it isn't a disease?
There are a lot of paradoxes about willpower. It may not be something you can think yourself out of, no matter how smart you are. It's not really surprising Robert Smith threw his hands up and decided he needed a miracle/supernatural help to break out of it.
But maybe this is all the more reason to try to solve addiction as a social problem, not on an individual level as a problem of willpower (or disease).
If you mean reasons that make sense, sure, of course there's a reasonable explanation for why religion is so prevalent throughout history.
If you mean reasons that involve benefit to humans, I'm rather skeptical. There may be, but the mere fact that it's common doesn't mean that there must be. Cancer and broken bones are pretty common too.
So I agree with you. I too am skeptical being human is beneficial to being human, it's just that I'm not really sure what we'd do without it, either.