Evil.

This Wednesday, when we habitually and casually opened our phones to enter into the casino of social media, the first thing that popped up for many of us was a high definition video of Charlie Kirk, a Christian husband and father with controversial opinions being shot on a university campus, slumping over limp as blood spurted from his neck in front of the crowd he was talking to.

Scroll a little further, another video of 23 year old Iryna Zarutska stabbed to death on a public bus by a man whose motive for her murder was that “she was reading his mind”.

Frothing masses rushed to their feeds to turn these news events into snuff film fueled dopamine. They used it as a platform to express opinions of hate and condemnation. They used it as a warning against political conspiracy, and prophesy of impending civil war. They used it as an excuse to call out hypocrisy: while everyone was chomping at the bit to show empathy for (or celebrate the death of) Charlie Kirk, they were failing to show the proper homage and remorse for the other human beings who were suffering all over the world that were being ignored:

Didn't they know that 22 people were killed in Nepal during a youth-led protest against government corruption? That Israel's strike on Qatar killed 6 people, failing to terminate the Hamas leaders they were targeting? Not to mention the other 2,000 in Gaza that were casualties in a "safe zone" during their last strike in Gaza? Who was mourning the children who were killed and injured in Hamilton, Ontario, when an elderly man crashed his SUV through the window of a daycare?

Who was making Instagram stories to talk about them?

Suddenly, the collective was fixated on the shadow of a colossus who has always stood towering over our species: human suffering, death, corruption, hate, and demonic-grade evil signature of our fallen world.

Our modern nervous systems and psyches are not adapted or designed to watch people get violently murdered, and then just go on with our days. I wept and prayed for Charlie, his family, his team, and for the anguish that humanity was collectively enduring, my brain playing the moment the bullet made impact with his soft flesh on repeat. I observed my own thoughts negotiate fiercely to not fall into cynical hopelessness, and dismiss my life's work as insignificant in the face of such omnipresent destitution.

I felt weak, crushed by the grief of my species' suffering, nauseous looking into the dark, obsidian mirror of human evil, and recognizing my own sins and unintegrated shadow peering back at me from the collective chaos.

Whiplash

Just three days prior, I was sitting in beautiful mansion in Kelowna, British Columbia, in a room full of entrepreneurs. Most of them were making $50-150,000 per month in their online communities. The advertising team of the platform Skool were there, masterminding with us on how to scale our businesses and build engaged, purpose-led communities.

Beyond that, we were masterminding on how we could collectively contribute to a movement that set the goal to donate $1 Billion through our entrepreneurial endeavors. We set into motion two major initiatives: integrating a donation feature on Skool, and running the "Giving Games", where instead of competing to see who could make the most money, entrepreneurs would compete to see who gave the most away. The retreat and event that was being hosted led the charge, donating every dollar the hosts made to give $75,000+ to the Ronald McDonald Foundation in BC.

Everyone in the room felt like they were witnessing divine orchestration unfold, carried by auspicious synchronicity, like they were characters in a grand and epic story being written by a higher power whose nature was essentially good. We were all challenged to create visions for our work that transcended jut "business success", and get really deep into what a "God sized dream" might look like.

Just before coming to the retreat, I'd set my own goal of helping 3,000 coaches make $10,000 for free in my new QX Skool community. And yes, while it's part of my funnel that will help my business grow in the long term, what I'm giving aware for free is better than most business stuff I've paid for in the past, and I'm investing $15,000 of my own money into advertising it to get it out to the right people.

I'd decided the real reason I had committed to being a business coach (aside from the fact that I was awesome at it, and I loved watching people win) was that for every person that I helped get their work out into the world, I was creating a ripple effect.

I was helping people help people. Resourcing coaches with being well compensated meant that they'd be able to be more regulated, have more self esteem, produce better work, provide for their families, and reduce more suffering than I could ever do on my own.

I was helping reverse the traumas that kept people stuck in their own mental loops. I was helping reverse the damage of societal programming that kept people caged in limiting stories and beliefs. I was helping people turn the poison of their own pain into antidotes that would feed the world. This felt like worthy purpose enough.

When I was challenged by the group to push father and make up a God-sized dream, I had to really stop and think. What I wrote down felt absurd, terrifying, and like I could never accomplish it (which is the point... for a God-sized dream, you need God on your side to not be crushed by it entirely).

Vulnerably, here's my God-sized vision for my work over the next 10-20 years:

• ​QX Coaches is a $3,000,000/year business (profit), run by a team of passionate, purpose-driven coaches, and we've helped 150,000 coaches create 6-figure incomes sharing their work with the world.
• I have written 5 books on the subjects of the evolution and integration of the human body/psyche/soul, Jesus, and masculine development, leaving maps of meaning for my grandchildren's grandchildren to navigate the wilderness of life.
• 90% of my personal income is donated and invested back into regenerative agriculture and infrastructure that supports art and culture. I own more farmland in North America than Bill Gates (lol) or anyone else, and am providing affordable organic, regeneratively produced food for 100,000,000 people.
• I've helped 1,000,000 people grow their own food, replacing their lawns with self-sufficient food systems based on permaculture principles.
• I am a loving father of 4, leading my wife and family as a devoted, Christ-serving man.

I was flooded with the elation of feeling like I had stumbled on a vision of Eden. Despite the insurmountable grandeur of the vision, I was inspired by the spirit of the group, as Matthew 19:26 echoed in my mind — “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Leaving that retreat with the deepest sense of motivation and hope for a better world made the pendulum swing of polarity hit me like a wrecking ball (cue the Miley Cyrus) when I opened my phone to confront the extent of evil and suffering we're collectively contending with only a few days later.

The swing from vision to violence left me gutted. One day I was sketching blueprints to steward the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; the next I was staring into the furnace of hell on my phone screen. It would have been easy to surrender to cynicism, to mutter Ecclesiastes under my breath—“all is vanity”—and let darkness dictate the story. But when I stood at that edge, I remembered: despair is also a form of worship. It bends the knee to evil, agreeing that its dominion is final.

History doesn’t let us off the hook that easily. Leviathan has been confronted before. He has been charged at with muskets, with manifestos, with Molotov cocktails—and he always devoured those who came at him on his own terms. But there are other tales in the archive. Tales where people did not bow to despair, nor burn themselves out in rage, but quietly lit another kind of fire. They built communities the tyrant couldn’t extinguish, and lives the empire couldn’t counterfeit.

These stories remind me that evil isn’t always defeated by being toppled. Sometimes it is outlived. Sometimes it is hollowed out from within, until its roar is just an echo in an empty hall. That’s the story I want to tell you now.

Replacement Over Removal

History tried revolution first. Guns, marches, manifestos—the usual theatrics of the oppressed trying to dethrone the tyrant. But authoritarian regimes have a way of metabolizing direct resistance; blood in the streets is their favorite diet. Russia 1905. Hungary 1956. Prague 1968. Tiananmen Square. Each time, the boot came down harder. The lesson became painfully clear: if you try to strike Leviathan on his own turf, he only grows stronger, and his fangs sharper.

Then, there was a rock band. In 1976, the Czech group The Plastic People of the Universe—heirs of Zappa and the Velvet Underground—were arrested for playing the wrong kind of music. No Molotov cocktails, no manifestos—just guitars, distortion, and a little too much freedom of speech expressed in their lyrics.

The Communist Party thought it was a minor arrest. But that arrest cracked open a whole new underground dialogue and network of imagination. Intellectuals, artists, priests, and students began to see: the real rebellion wasn't going to be overthrowing the system head-on. It was building something invisible the system couldn’t touch.

That spark gave rise to what Václav Havel later called “parallel societies.” Instead of storming the palace, they quietly built an alternative kingdom—book clubs, underground universities, home concerts, samizdat (hand-copying banned books) publishing networks. Apartments became classrooms. Kitchens became concert halls. A samizdat book copied on a typewriter was more subversive than any speech shouted in the square. The state could jail a band, but it couldn’t silence an imagination once it was seeded into enough souls.

The regime didn’t collapse all at once—it rotted. Parallel societies were termites in the beams of totalitarian architecture. The party still had its tanks and microphones, but the hearts of the people had quietly defected. Every secret seminar, every bootleg jazz record, every kitchen lit by forbidden poetry was a withdrawal of loyalty. Power doesn’t die when it is opposed—it dies when it is ignored.

By the late ’80s, the state’s grip was all spectacle: parades of soldiers, speeches no one believed, slogans painted on gray walls. The people were still showing up to work, but their souls had already migrated elsewhere. Václav Havel described it perfectly in The Power of the Powerless: when the grocer no longer believes in the sign he is forced to hang in his window—“Workers of the World Unite!”—the whole charade begins to unravel.

When the Velvet Revolution swept Prague in 1989, it wasn’t a bloody insurrection. Hundreds of thousands filled Wenceslas Square with keys jingling in their hands—the sound of a people unlocking their own shackles. The regime tried no last desperate crackdown because it had already lost the only thing that matters: the consent of the governed. Its monopoly on truth had been eviscerated by a society that had been living a freer reality all along.

And the outcome? Something far better than revenge. When the dust settled, Czechoslovakia didn’t descend into chaos or civil war. The parallel structures of trust, education, and art gave the nation scaffolding to build on. A playwright, Havel, became president. The absurd irony was almost biblical: “He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Luke 1:52).

The lesson is sharp and luminous: love, truth, and imagination are slow acids. They corrode tyranny not by frontal assault but by hollowing it out until one day, the giant topples because it is made of papier-mâché. Evil cannot sustain itself in a people who have already begun to taste a better kingdom. That is how the tyrannical vice grip of evil dissolves—not by sword, but by spirit.

Why did it work? Because evil regimes need monopolies. They thrive on being the only story in town, the only structure you can lean on. But when people start creating parallel infrastructures—art, education, mutual aid—the regime is no longer the sole source of meaning. These communities weren’t trying to destroy the existing order; they were outgrowing it. In biblical language, they were living as “aliens and strangers” (1 Peter 2:11), cultivating vineyards in Babylon without bowing to Babylon’s idols.

Parallel societies work. Scripture is blunt about this: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). The parallel societies weren’t fueled by hatred of the regime, but by love of truth, beauty, and human dignity. They were, in their own way, living sermons on the mount. Instead of cursing the darkness, they lit thousands of small lamps. And by the time the Berlin Wall cracked, those lamps had become a sunrise.

This is the paradox of Christ’s kingdom too. Rome expected zealots and swords; instead, it was undone by house churches, letters passed in secret, bread broken around wooden tables. The gospel spread not through overthrow but through parallel societies of love—“another city,” unseen yet unstoppable (Hebrews 11:10, 13:14).

Authoritarianism always tries to own the horizon. But a horizon seeded with music, scripture, art, education, and community is one the tyrant cannot rule. Love builds an infrastructure that can’t be handcuffed. And that is how the world is changed—not by attacking Leviathan, but by making Leviathan irrelevant.

A Call to Arms

We may not live under the shadow of an iron-fisted dictatorship, but don’t mistake that for freedom. The myths and paradigms of our age are every bit as tyrannical as a party line broadcast from loudspeakers in the square. We are politically and morally divided, pitted against one another like gladiators for the entertainment of algorithms. Our minds are decimated by distraction, our desires sold back to us through capitalized convenience, our nervous systems hacked by technologies engineered to hijack our attention.

We live in a culture that rewards self-exaltation and materialism, while our souls starve for reverence and communion. Ideologies claw at our psyches, desperate to stitch together some counterfeit sense of common purpose in the void left by a culture that has forgotten love. There is an enemy. I call him Moloch—the ancient god of devouring, the zero sum game, the logic of endless competition, the cold hunger that thrives on division and despair. He is alive and well, and his altar is everywhere you look.

And so the call is clear: we must build our own parallel societies. Not in theory, but in practice. That is why I have such a profound belief in the community building power of Skool: coaches transforming into community leaders, gathering their own ekklesias of healing and shared purpose.

My friend and mentor Erick Godsey has already begun planting those seeds with his Dharma Artist Collective. Just as Eastern Europeans once gathered in living rooms to pass around banned books, hold underground lectures, and turn kitchens into concert halls, Erick created a digital counterpart. His community has become an underground university for the modern soul—an online dojo where hundreds of artists are reclaiming their fragmented attention, resisting the empire of distraction, and transforming their craft into a vocation.

It is the same rebellion: replacing the system’s suffocating myths with structures of meaning, beauty, and shared purpose.

And we can all do the same. We can seed communities that are the parallel societies that become the ecosystem of Eden.

It’s why what we're building with QX Coaching is more than a "coaching business model". It’s a community of builders who are not just solving the problem of business, but leading a quiet revolution—one client, one conversation, one community at a time. We are sketching the scaffolding of a world we actually want our children to inherit.

If we do not rise and build, Moloch will. His temples are already humming in our phones, his priests already catechizing our children with ads and algorithms. Parallel societies are not a luxury project for the spiritually inclined—they are the ark, and the flood has already begun. The question is not whether evil will collapse—it always does—but whether we will have the scaffolding ready when it falls. This is the hour to defect from the empire of distraction and lay the first stones of the kingdom. Anything less is worship at the wrong altar.

Music I'm Listening to:

​🎧 Headboppin' Dirty Electronic Jams for "Focusing" with a Stankface​

Scripture gripping me:

• 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 — “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul responds: “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
• Philippians 4:13 — “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
• John 15:5 — “Apart from me you can do nothing.”
• Psalm 127:1 — “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.”

I love you.

-Anthony

PS - Did you know you can reply to these emails, and I'll get them? I'd love to know if something in this letter woke something up in you. Don't be shy.