Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP FOUR

or unconscious fears, is the basic breeder of most human
difficulties, the chief block to true progress. Pride lures
us into making demands upon ourselves or upon others
which cannot be met without perverting or misusing our
God-given instincts. When the satisfaction of our 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 more 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 while ours are not. We eat, drink, and
grab for more of everything than we need, fearing we shall
never have enough. And with genuine alarm at the pros-
pect of work, we stay lazy. We loaf and procrastinate, or
at best work grudgingly and under half steam. These fears
are the termites that ceaselessly devour the foundations of
whatever sort of life we try to build.

So when A.A. suggests a fearless moral inventory, it
must seem to every newcomer that more is being asked of
him than he can do. Both his pride and his fear beat him
back every time he tries to look within himself. Pride says,
"You need not pass this way," and Fear says, "You dare not
look!" But the testimony of A.A.'s who have really tried
a moral inventory is that pride and fear of this sort turn
out to be bogeymen, nothing else. Once we have a com-
plete willingness to take inventory, and exert ourselves to
do the job thoroughly, a wonderful light falls upon this