Tradition Four (Short): Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.
Tradition Four (Long): With respect to its own affairs, each A.A. group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience. But when its plans concern the welfare of neighboring groups also, those groups ought to be consulted. And no group, regional committee, or individual should ever take any action that might greatly affect A.A. as a whole without conferring with the Trustees of the General Service Board. On such issues our common welfare is paramount.
Bill Wilson learned: "Nowhere in AA is there to be seen any constituted human authority that can compel an AA group to do anything...After struggling a few years to run the AA movement I had to give it up--it simply didn't work. Heavy handed assertion of my personal authority always created confusion and resistance."
Bill Wilson elaborates: Tradition Four is yet another confident declaration of mutual trust and love as it flows from each AA group to the other. We give each group full autonomy, the undisturbed right to manage its own affairs. To make this condition doubly permanent and secure, we have guaranteed to all AA groups that they will never be subjected to any centralized government or authority. In turn each group agrees that it will never take any action that could injure us all. Rarely indeed has any AA group ever forgotten that precious trust.
"We had discovered that there was perfect safety in the process of trial and error. So confident of this had we become that the original statement of AA tradition carried this significant sentence: Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an AA Group provided that as a group they have no other affiliation. This meant, of course that we had been given the courage to declare each AA group an individual entity, strictly reliant on its own conscience as a guide to act...Every group has THE RIGHT to be wrong."
Bill Wilson said: "...let us look more closely at Tradition Four. The first sentence guarantees each AA group local autonomy. With respect to it's own affairs, the group may make any decisions, adopt any attitudes that it likes. No overall or Intergroup authority should challenge this primary privilege. We feel this ought to be so, even though the group might sometimes act with complete indifference to our Tradition."
Bill continues for emphasis, to describe a most extreme, outrageous example of departure from typical behaviour: "For example, an AA Group, if it wished, may hire a paid preacher and support him out of proceeds of a group nightclub. Though such an absurd action would be miles outside of our Tradition, the group's 'right to be wrong' would be held inviolate. We are sure that each group can be granted, and safely granted, these most extreme privileges...hence we say to each group, you should be responsible to no other authority than your own conscience."
Bill Wilson was often criticized for this laissez-faire attitude. Immaturity, lack of responsibility, promoting anarchy with a resultant dilution of our program were some criticisms. His answers to such criticisms were consistently simple: "...almost anarchistic...a structure that actually invites deviation, knowing in advance it will fail, because we have the coercives of continuous drunkenness, insanity and death...because the penalty for enough deviation is drunkenness, and the penalty for drunkenness is insanity or death, we think that this is sufficient. We don't have to supplement God's work of correction."
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