To the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman, many A.A.'s can say, "Yes, we were like you -- far too smart for our own good. We loved to have people call us precocious. We used our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of folks on our brain power alone.
"Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn't do.Knowledge was all powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking. The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers.
"But John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die."
