can offer help in ways AA cannot.

When you read up on the history of AA, the original “higher power” was psychoactives:

Between 1933 and 1934, Wilson was hospitalized for his alcoholism four times. After his third admission, he got “the belladonna cure,” a treatment made from a compound extracted from the berries of the Atropa belladonna bush. Also known as “deadly nightshade,” belladonna is an extremely toxic hallucinogenic.

After taking it, Wilson had a vision of a “chain of drunks” all around the world, helping each other recover. This “spiritual experience” would become the foundation of his sobriety and his belief that a spiritual experience is essential to getting sober. It was also the genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Later, LSD would ultimately give Wilson something his first drug-induced spiritual experience never did: relief from depression. He would come to believe LSD might offer other alcoholics the spiritual experience they needed to kickstart their sobriety — but before that, he had to do it himself.

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/alcoholics-anonymous-lsd-bill-wilson

That lead to AA, but what actually “cured” Bill W was LSD, because it messes with pattern recognition in our brains and can literally “break” the cycle of dependency.

But by that point AA was already up and running and in control it other people. People who didn’t want a permanent cure. They wanted lifelong members to the program.

Modern AA won’t fix the underlying reason people abuse alcohol, it just replaces alcohol with the meetings.

The root problem is depression, and depression is a rational response to modern society, because modern society is fucked.