The Sentence That Only Works If It's True

P-43, A.A.'s own pamphlet on the Traditions, sets down the sentence a member can say and nobody else on earth can: "No, I'm not a social worker. I don't get paid for talking with you. I'm doing it because it's the best way to stay sober myself." That sentence is the entire product. It disarms the man on the other side of the kitchen table, and for one reason only — it is true. Take a fee and you can still say the words. They are just not true any more. The Big Book named the conditions before there was a Tradition to protect them: what reaches the new prospect is that there are "no fees to pay, no axes to grind, no people to please, no lectures to be endured." Then, a line later, the finding that should end every argument about scaling this work: "None of us makes a sole vocation of this work, nor do we think its effectiveness would be increased if we did." Not that we shouldn't. That it wouldn't work. The unpaid member is not a budget version of the professional. He is a different instrument, and what gives him his power is exactly what a paycheque would remove. A.A.'s service offices do pay people, properly, for real jobs. But for the newcomer a staff member takes to a meeting that night, P-43 is exact about the wage: "they are paid only with their own continuing sobriety."