Fake It Till You Make It: lip-service and deprogramming — "the Program might be more like…"

The program's answer to the charge that it's a brainwashing cult: yes, sort of, but the brain in question is already occupied. Belief is not a prerequisite — you say the slogans before you mean them, "until you start to believe it" — because sincerity is treated as an outcome of practice, not its precondition. And Gately reframes the cult worry directly: if the Disease's Spider has already colonized the mind, then AA is less a washing than a "deprogramming," undoing a possession rather than installing one. The candor is the point; the theme never pretends the surrender isn't a kind of reconditioning.