Fear & Pride

For pride, leaving to self-justification, and always spurned by conscious or unconscious fears, is the breeder of most human difficulties, the chief block of true progress. Pride lures us into making demands upon ourselves or upon others which cannot be met without perverting our misusing our God-given instincts for sex, security, and society becomes the sole object of our lives, then pride steps in to justify our excesses.




All these failings generate fear, a soul-sickness in its own right. Then fear, in turn, generates its own character defects. Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied drives us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized and ours are not. We eat, drink, and grab for more of everything than we need, fearing we shall never have enough.

We loaf and procrastinate, or at best work grudgingly under half steam. These fears are termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of whatever sort of life we try to build.

Various excerpts from 12x12, Alcoholics Anonymous, p 59

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