Denial and the idolatry of uniqueness — "It’s like a kind of idolatry…"

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.