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Four years ago, I was singled out and lost my career as a tenure computer science professor as a result of my religious beliefs. In addition to the loss of my university career, I also lost a multi-million dollar tech startup that I had founded and built up for years as my two dozen employees abandoned me in the face of pressure from media, friends, and family. In spite of broken promises from existing investors and potential customers, I was able to rebuild my company from scratch and keep it going until a year ago last month. Since then, I've dedicated more than full-time effort on ministry through this channel and the books that I write, all of which I give away for free. And I'm grateful for the financial support of those who donate at upwardthought.org. You make this possible and I couldn't do it without you. Now, anyone that finds utility in the things that I produce, I would humbly request that you consider a one-time or recurring donation because it's only through those donations that I can keep doing this and they are appreciated and needed. Now, I think given the current situation, it's pretty easy to forget that before the last presidential election, the situation as far as wokeism and cancellations was very different than it is today. Things are very different, but they're also extremely fragile. And there's no reason to believe that there won't be a return to what was before or something far worse. Now, because of all that, I thought that it might be appropriate on this anniversary to share some of the lessons that I learned through getting cancelled and losing so much of what I had worked so hard for. My hope is that whatever the future holds for you or me and everyone else, that there's some nugget here that helps you prepare, that helps you be a stronger person and hopefully avoid some of the things that can be avoided. But regardless, to have strength to face what can't be avoided. Normal life exists within tight bounds of what we're used to. And that leads us to incorrectly believe that reality is defined solely by what exists within those bounds. Now, as esoteric as that might seem, it's as if people somehow know this because they consistently do whatever it takes to stay away from the edges. Now, this instinct is so strong that it may in fact be the root cause of what makes cancellation possible. And as I elaborate about that, I hope that makes sense. You see, the problem is that while you can almost always do the right thing without ever hitting the bounds of what people tolerate, you can't always do the right thing for very long without smacking right into what offends a lot of people. You probably haven't realized how fragile your relationships are or just how often you have to compromise who you really are and what you actually believe to fit into what others are willing to tolerate. Every single time you compromise your values, you degrade yourself in ways that have long reaching effects. Very often you'll face a choice. Do you keep what is good about you or do you sacrifice it for what is bad about someone else in order to avoid offending them? If and when you step outside the bounds of what society tolerates, the dam breaks and much of what you thought was good about people in general or in particular is swept away, leaving them exposed as being much worse than you ever believed possible. A lot of people are much more evil than you think. Not just imperfect, not just flawed, but straight up evil. There are more of them than you think, and they are far worse than you think. Do not underestimate the evil that bad people can do. You can easily but incorrectly believe that truly bad people are limited in the evil that they do by everyone else. But it turns out that normal people are surprisingly willing to not just allow evil people to do what they do, but in many cases to actively support them as they do so. Normal people will do nothing to help you. Normal people will do great harm to avoid harm to themselves. Normal people are selfish, ungrateful, and cowardly. Most people are not good, no matter how good they pretend to be. We walk around with this romantic idea that there are heroes all around us. We like to think that normal people around us are heroes in disguise, waiting for the right emergency to spring into action. Why? Because we'd like to think of ourselves as the same. We tend to think of ourselves much more highly than we should. The truth is, not only are heroes excruciatingly rare, even plain old decent people are very hard to find. If you ever find yourself in a situation like I was, you shouldn't be surprised at how willing completely uninvolved people are to take a strong stand against you. People who don't know you at all and have absolutely no grounds to be upset with you whatsoever. If you find yourself in that kind of situation, don't be surprised by how few friends you actually have and how unwilling all of these people who know you well and to whom you've done nothing but good are to come to your aid in any way or even to acknowledge your existence. Those for whom you have sacrificed greatly will betray you for shockingly low prices. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to be some kind of terrible person in order for this to happen to you or that you have to actually do anything wrong to be attacked. You don't. They'll lie. And when they do, you can't count on legal protection. It's all been subverted in shocking, horrific ways. So, I told you that these were lessons learned and and you're thinking to yourself, "Well, okay. So, what can I do about this? I've thought about this for four years. Like so many other big problems, the very bad news is there really aren't many solutions to this. Now, the good news is is there is a solution and it works great, but it costs an awful lot and it smacks right up against the limitations of what most people are willing to do to help one another, to bear each other's burdens, to do unto others as you would have them do to you. Now, there there are some things in general that everyone can do, and no matter whether someone tries to cancel you or not, you'll be a million times better off. What are those? Well, for example, you could find a job where you're less likely to be asked to compromise your values. But what you'll find is increasingly those jobs are harder and harder to find. Not only that, but you can get surprised at any job. Out of nowhere, you can be asked to compromise your values and it can be a you need to do this or you need to leave kind of situation. But the other pitfall with this is that increasingly the kinds of jobs that you have to do to earn a decent wage in our collapsing economy and out of control inflation are all the more likely to pigeon hole you into some situation where you're pressured to do or say something that you don't believe or to not do or not say something that you do believe. And you can also fortify your life in general. If you're married, you can strengthen your marriage. You can increase the security that your spouse and your children feel. You can fortify yourself financially. You can put away money for a rainy day. You can pay down debt. You can get more reliable vehicles or vehicles with lower miles per gallon. You can move to a less expensive place. All of these things can pay enormous dividends when what you least expect to happen slaps you right in the face. But even then, and even being willing to make sacrifices that most people aren't because they just don't see this as the kind of credible threat that it is, the number of people that can actually effectively self-insure against cancellation, it's very, very small. So, what is the surefire defense against this? The surefire defense is building networks of actual good people who will back you when the world turns against you. Now, these people are few and far between. They're not easy to find, but their value is greater than their weight in gold. Even Jesus struggled to find people like this, he he picked 12 of the best people he could find as his apostles. And when he was being interrogated by Pilate, he said in John 18:36, when Pilate asked him if he was a king, he said, "If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews." And where were his servants at the time? They had fled from him instead of helping even his closest friends, they abandon him. And unfortunately, this is quite a common occurrence. And the deeper the water that you get caught in, the more likely it is to happen to you. So, it's never too early to start to try to find friends who are this trustworthy and this reliable and this good. But you know, you can't control how other people are, but you can control how you are. The very best thing that you can do to prepare for something like this happening to you is to be the kind of person you would want to find and have as a friend if it did. So I encourage you to think about these things and to realize that our current situation is a very brief respit from what will come back with a vengeance. The best thing you can do to fight cancellation is to do unto others as you would have them do to you. Support those who have been unrighteously attacked. Try to make restitution for the wrongs that have been done to them. Lift the burdens of others. This is the ultimate unbreakable insurance policy. Now, some people have done this recently. There was a guy, Daniel Penny, who he was a good Samaritan on the subway. He choked out some crazy person that was going to do harm to a bunch of people. He got arrested. He went to jail. And random strangers came together and gave him a payday so that even if he never could get a job again, he'd never have to worry about money. That's the kind of thing we ought to be doing. And if you're a Christian, you ought to be at the front of line of the line on those sorts of campaigns. Unfortunately, that's that's not typically the case. God is observing what we do with the resources that we have. And when it happens to you, you better pray that you made the right choice before it happened to you. That you made the right choice when it happened to someone else. I hope you think about this. It's a very grave situation.