Political | Alcoholics Anonymous is a model for reactionaries

Life is a war against entropy, and AA resists entropy.

Tom X Hart
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read

The historian Robert Conquest’s second law of politics states: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

The tendency to resist this drift, effectively organisational entropy, is quite rare. The Church of England, the British secret service, and the BBC are three organisations that have exhibited leftward capture and drift over the decades.

There are many more examples from across the world.

There is an organisation that has escaped this tendency: Alcoholics Anonymous.

How does Alcoholics Anonymous resist leftward capture without being explicitly right-wing?

The answer is threefold:

  1. Members of AA are bound to secrecy about the specifics of their membership, fellow members, and activity in AA. This limits the potential for people to virtue signal about their membership and problems. This, in turn, reduces the potential for organisational entropy through a Puritan-type “purity spiral”. There are many people who brag about their problems with alcohol and drugs, and they are – particularly if they are celebrities – rewarded for doing so in the mass media. This form of bragging or one upmanship is entropic and detaches a person from reality; it is a leftist phenomenon. AA cuts this dead by being secretive.
  2. Members of AA are required to acknowledge that they are helpless in the face of their drinking. They acknowledge that they are subject to a force greater than themselves, and that their well-being depends on accepting the existence of this force. We can call this force God, nature, reality, logic, or Gnon. The name doesn’t matter, but what matters is that we are helpless before it. Leftism holds the view that the world or reality can be remade at will, sometimes by merely uttering the correct pattern of words in order to conceal reality. AA forces people to submit to a higher forces of order and reality, and this is a break on leftward drift.
  3. Members of AA are required to acknowledge in each meeting that, “I am Joe Bloggs, and I am an alcoholic.” This procedure reduces the potential for organisational drift. The nature of the organisation is constantly re-iterated through this affirmation. Accordingly, there are organisations like Narcotics Anonymous and so on, but AA itself does not try to be anything other than a support group for alcoholics. Organisational drift is characteristic of entropy and leftward movement, e.g. a government department starts out trying to regulate drugs and ends up nationalising the country’s entire health service.

Interestingly, AA was partly inspired and encouraged by the depth psychologist CG Jung, who is in turn an inspiration to the current bête noir of the left, Jordan Peterson.

AA also encodes within it a paradoxical insight of the right: the admission of helplessness before forces greater than oneself is the first and necessary step towards genuinely conscious control of your life.

The paradoxical nature of truth is a fairly consistent theme, a law of life, that is usually only acknowledged by the right. Here are a few examples:

  1. In order to make meaningful change in your life, you must acknowledge that you are in a mess and powerless to change your situation (AA; Jordan Peterson; CG Jung);
  2. To seduce a woman, you must be slightly disdainful of her. Do not be nice to her. “Treat her mean, keep her keen” (Rollo Tomassi; pick up artists; red pill on women; folk wisdom);
  3. An army should not attack a target by the quickest route, but by the most indirect route. If you want peace, prepare for war (Edward Luttwak; Sun Tsu; Vegetius);
  4. It is only by admitting that you are an egotist and always will be that you can live in a genuinely generous and altruistic way (Alan Watts; Ayn Rand; Spinoza);
  5. If you wish to destroy something then you must praise it, and if you wish to raise it up you must criticise it (Zen wisdom).

This law is also exhibited in the nature of entropy. A decline in the rate of entropy in one area is matched by an increase in the rate of entropy elsewhere. In other words, the creation of order leads to the creation of chaos.

So we find, rather interestingly, a paradoxical unity of opposites that stretches across strategy, war, love, physics, and psychology. It is law summed up some 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Heraclitus: “Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.”

This paradoxical unity of opposites is, of course, expressed rather well in the Tao and Zen Buddhism, but it is also expressed in most religious traditions.


AA’s clandestine nature is complemented by a set of traditions that force a person towards reality.

Secrecy is, in a sense, a form of discrimination. Can you crack the code? If so, you are worthy to belong. Cryptography is a form of elitism, and this is why the rise of cryptocurrency is inherently a rightist phenomenon. Logic is a means to preserve the truth of statements, and it is in this sense anti-entropic and is, in its own way, a code that must be cracked through pattern recognition.

The code – the ordered pattern – is what resistance to entropy looks like.

This is, in part, why we see an intimate connection between neoreaction, computer science, and cryptography. Those who have an interest in creating a logical and ordered system will incline to the political right, and will also incline to the view that there a right way to undertake a task and a wrong way. After all, a computer program is either logically consistent and works, or it is illogical and does not. There is no middle way to fudge in this field.

It is in the social world, unpopular with many people who work with computers, that we find the highest rate of fudge and the highest rate of leftism. Lawyers, journalists, and other sophists are particularly guilty of undermining truth conservation in the social environment.

The primacy of the pattern was recognised by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer saw music as the highest expression of the Will at work in the universe. Music is, of course, an ordered pattern – just like poetry and mathematics and sex.

It is a little corny to write of the rhythm of life, but this seems to be very much what Schopenhauer was getting at. It is in establishing and preserving the code, the rhythm, and the pattern that we can sustain contact with reality and survive. The person who wishes to do away with patterns – to live without music – wishes this to be so because they cannot crack the pattern or code. This applies in economics, love, sex, mathematics, poetry, and so on. There is a code to crack in all these cases, although not everyone is capable of cracking every code or accessing every secret.

I am not suggesting that AA is completely resistant to the forces of entropy. So far as I know, there is nothing that is completely resistant to the forces of entropy. There must be a grain of sand in the gears of the organisation somewhere. However, I think that AA is probably among the most entropy-resistant organisations developed over the last 100 years. It shows relatively little sign of corruption.

AA is a model that right-wing people should think about emulating in their efforts to create legitimate order.

Consequently, for my own amusement, here are the 12 steps for reactionaries:

1 We admitted we were powerless over reality – that our lives and societies had become unmanageable.

2 Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to reality.

3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our deviations from reality.

6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these delusions about reality.

7 Humbly asked Him to remove our cognitive biases and social status induced signalling behaviour.

8 Made a list of all persons we had deceived, and became willing to be honest to them all.

9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10 Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were detached from reality, promptly admitted it.

11 Sought through logical and honest speech to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to people who have deviated from reality, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

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