Of all the super-heroes, it is perhaps Batman who best represents for us the spiritual poverty of the so-called "real world" -- a psychic desolation which was brilliantly rendered in the very first of the Batman movies. The cathedral of Gotham, against which the last struggles between good and evil are acted out, is dusty, dirty, crumbling, and obviously deserted. The citizens of Gotham, dressed in drab grays and browns, look to entertainment to distract them from their dull lives. Only the Joker, in his brilliantly colored garb, seems to have any fun, though it's largely at the expense of the other inhabitants.

The citizens of Gotham are petrified and paralyzed when things go wrong. Even their police force cannot protect them against the uncertainties of life. When threatened, all they can do is shine a light into the sky, as if in search of God, and trust to the black-costumed Batman to rescue them.

Before we wake up, before we seriously commence to work the last three Steps, we tend to be exactly like the citizens of Gotham. Although we're sober and try to behave ourselves, the antics of the Joker still seem more attractive than the dulness of the "good" Batman and his alter-ego, the insufferable Bruce Wayne. We want our own way and do all we can (within the constraints of Program, naturally) to get it. And when things go wrong, we resort to prayer-lists of demands to correct them -- our equivalent of shining the light into the sky in a desperate search for a God who will fix things our way.

When we do wake up, we realize that this entire scenario is an absurd myth. There is no "evil" or "good" -- at least, not in the way our insane egos try to create them. Most of all, there is no savior from the sky that can swoop in and make everything all right again. And that's because there's nothing wrong to begin with. It's not life that's the problem -- it's our insistence on living in Gotham that causes all the trouble. Once we venture out with the help of Steps 10, 11 and 12, we find that, although life may be insecure and unpredictable, it is at least live-able without the meaningless intervention of a supposed super-hero.