Denial and the idolatry of uniqueness — "Gately’s snapped to the fact that…"
Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else.
Context
Gately's whole practical theology of the disease, worked out over a mundane car-tow: early-recovery Denial is an incapacity to imagine the consequence landing on oneself, an idolatry of one's own exemption from the rules that govern everyone else. The addict who watches another get towed or splattered never doubts the difference that spared him — he only ponders it — and so learns nothing except the hard way, by having it happen to him. This is the book's clearest statement of why the Program has to break the specialness-plea before anything else can start.