Many years ago, a courageous and devoted American broadcast a message to his listeners that served as a harbinger for where the nation was headed societally and culturally. In his broadcast he revealed what he would do if he were “the devil,” to destroy our culture and undermine our collective societal standards and social mores. That man was Paul Harvey Aurandt, affectionately known to the nation simply as Paul Harvey, and his message not only has proven to be prophetic, but serves as a warning to Americans today of where our society continues to trend. Paul Harvey was a broadcaster who rendered daily news on the radio from the 1950s through the 1990s, and inspired generations of Americans with true stories of goodness and heroism with his daily, “The Rest of the Story.” He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005 for his contributions to the nation. At his peak, his broadcasts reached as many as 24 million listeners and readers, as 1,600 radio stations and 300 newspapers carried his program and columns across the nation.
One broadcast, which he titled, “If I Were the Devil,” ran originally in 1964, but he updated it several times over the years, and the version detailed below aired in 1996. In Paul Harvey’s own words, here is what he said he would do, if he “were the devil.”
Everything Harvey saw as nascent trends back in the 60’s has come to fruition. And realizing that many readers may not believe in the devil, per se, doesn’t change the fact that these portents have achieved fruition. Whether the causality is the adversary, other nefarious evil or injurious sources, or merely the result of wanton and hedonistic human nature, the culmination of these destructive trends in society has ripened dramatically in recent years.
Some benighted souls may interpret the dissolution of our most fundamental institutions, the defloration of our cultural mores, the rejection and denunciation of God, and the abandonment of standards of decency as “progress.” But to any with even a modicum of conscience, ethical grounding, or even objectivity in assessing our social viability from a historical perspective, we’ve not evolved as a society; we’ve devolved. Not unlike previous great cultures before us.
As intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has summarized, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized . … As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral – the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called – is now seen as pathological.”
Alas, where do we go from here? Do we continue to plunge to new depths of degeneracy as a society, or do we rise as a phoenix, reversing our downward spiral to nihilism? The answer lies in each of us, individually and collectively, and whether we, by honest introspection and appraisal, acknowledge our own failures and shortcomings, and determine to do better.
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