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Lester Cox
I shared this with Jim yesterday and he was kind enough to call and thank me for doing this. I asked AI to do a summation of Paul Harvey's somewhat famous radio broadcast in the 60's, about the time most of us would graduate from high school. Since that script is copyrighted and could not be printed without permission, AI simply summarized to a modern retelling of his broadcast. I thought I would share it here with all of you.
If I Were the Devil
A Modern Retelling of Paul Harvey’s Famous Message
If I were the Devil, I wouldn’t try to destroy a great nation all at once.
That would be too obvious.
I would do it slowly—quietly—one small change at a time. I would make each change seem reasonable by itself, so that most people wouldn’t recognize what was happening until the transformation was nearly complete.
I would begin by convincing people that there really wasn’t such a thing as absolute right and wrong. I would suggest that morality was simply a matter of personal opinion. What was considered wrong yesterday could become acceptable tomorrow, and anyone who objected could be dismissed as old-fashioned, intolerant, or unwilling to change with the times.
I wouldn’t try to eliminate God from society overnight. Instead, I would gradually make faith seem unnecessary.
I would convince people that they were too sophisticated to believe the things their parents and grandparents believed. I would make prayer seem outdated and religious conviction something that should remain hidden and private.
I wouldn’t close the churches.
I wouldn’t need to.
I would simply make people too busy to attend them.
I would fill their weekends with entertainment, sports, shopping, travel, television, and endless distractions. Eventually, millions of people would discover they could go weeks or months without thinking seriously about God at all.
Then I would turn my attention to the family.
I would tell husbands and wives that marriage was primarily about personal happiness rather than commitment. If happiness disappeared, I would encourage them to believe the marriage should disappear with it.
I would convince people that promises were temporary.
I would make divorce easier, commitment harder, and sacrifice seem foolish.
I would persuade parents that disciplining their children might damage their self-esteem. I would slowly transfer authority away from parents and convince children that almost any restriction placed upon them was unfair.
I would make fathers appear unnecessary and motherhood less important.
I would convince society that virtually every traditional role within the family was somehow oppressive or outdated.
And while families became weaker, I would make government, institutions, entertainment, and popular culture increasingly influential in teaching children what to believe.
Then I would go after the schools.
Not by eliminating education—but by changing what education meant.
I would make academic achievement less important than social promotion. I would gradually lower standards while continuing to assure everyone that students were becoming better educated.
I would teach children enormous amounts of information but very little wisdom.
I would teach them how to make a living but spend less time teaching them how to live.
I would tell them about their rights constantly while speaking less often about their responsibilities.
I would encourage them to question every authority except the authorities telling them what they should question.
I would make history something to be ashamed of rather than something from which to learn.
I would magnify every national failure and minimize every national achievement until young people began believing there was little about their country worth respecting or defending.
Next, I would take control of entertainment—not by force, but by temptation.
I would discover that people would willingly invite almost anything into their homes if I called it entertainment.
Language that once embarrassed people would gradually become commonplace.
Sexual behavior once considered private would become public entertainment.
Violence would become recreation.
Shock would replace creativity.
And each generation would become comfortable watching things that would have horrified the generation before it.
I would make pornography easily available, eventually putting it within reach of nearly every adult and child.
I would convince people that this represented freedom.
I would make modesty seem foolish and restraint seem unhealthy.
I would teach that virtually every appetite deserved to be satisfied.
Then I would turn to drugs and alcohol.
I would tell young people that experimenting was simply part of growing up.
I would glorify intoxication in music, movies, television, advertising, and popular culture.
I would make addiction enormously profitable while pretending to be surprised by its consequences.
I would encourage people to escape their problems rather than confront them.
Whenever life became painful, I would offer another substance, another distraction, another excuse.
Then I would attack personal responsibility.
Whatever went wrong in a person’s life, I would convince him that someone else was responsible.
His parents.
His employer.
His neighbors.
The government.
Society.
The wealthy.
The poor.
Another race.
Another religion.
Another political party.
Anyone except himself.
I would make victimhood more attractive than responsibility.
I would teach people that success should be viewed suspiciously and failure should always be explained by circumstances beyond their control.
I would encourage envy.
If someone had more, I would teach others to resent him instead of learning from him.
If someone became wealthy through years of work, risk, and sacrifice, I would convince others that the wealth itself was evidence of wrongdoing.
Then I would turn people against one another.
That would be one of my most effective strategies.
I would divide them by race, religion, income, education, geography, gender, age, and especially politics.
I would convince each group that another group was responsible for its problems.
I would make disagreement feel like hatred.
I would make compromise look like weakness.
I would make people stop talking to one another and start shouting at one another.
I would make neighbors suspicious of neighbors.
Friends would end friendships over politics.
Families would stop speaking because someone voted differently.
And all the while, I would whisper to each side:
You are the good people. They are the enemy.
Then I would undermine respect for law.
I would make criminals into celebrities and police officers into villains whenever possible.
I would teach people to demand perfect behavior from those enforcing the law while making excuses for those deliberately breaking it.
I would weaken respect for courts, government, churches, schools, businesses, journalism, and nearly every institution society depended upon.
Not because every institution deserved unquestioned trust—they certainly would not—but because a society in which nobody trusts anything is much easier to divide and control.
Then I would attack truth itself.
I would make it increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from opinion.
I would flood people with information until they became exhausted trying to determine what was real.
I would make rumors travel faster than corrections.
I would teach people to believe information because they wanted it to be true.
I would create a world in which people could find evidence online supporting virtually anything they already believed.
Eventually, two neighbors could look at exactly the same event and sincerely believe two completely different versions of reality.
That would be one of my greatest victories.
I wouldn’t need people to believe my lies.
I would simply need them to stop believing that objective truth existed.
Then I would keep everyone distracted.
I would give them hundreds of television channels.
Phones that never left their hands.
Messages every few minutes.
Breaking news every hour.
Social media every waking moment.
Endless entertainment.
Endless outrage.
Endless advertisements.
Endless arguments.
I would make silence uncomfortable.
I would make reflection rare.
I would make people so busy consuming information that they seldom stopped long enough to think deeply about any of it.
And I would make them believe that being informed was the same thing as being wise.
Finally, I would convince people that none of these changes mattered very much.
That would be essential.
Every time someone sounded an alarm, I would call him extreme.
Every time someone mentioned declining standards, I would call him nostalgic.
Every time someone defended an old value, I would tell him the world had changed.
And whenever another boundary disappeared, I would simply move on to the next one.
I would never announce what I was doing.
I would never say:
“Today we begin destroying the family.”
Or:
“Today we abandon personal responsibility.”
Or:
“Today truth no longer matters.”
No.
I would accomplish everything gradually.
One compromise.
One excuse.
One surrendered principle.
One generation at a time.
And eventually people might look around and wonder:
How did we get here?
The answer would be simple.
They arrived there one small step at a time.
And if I were the Devil…
I wouldn’t change the strategy.
I would simply keep doing what was already working.
This is an original retelling inspired by the themes of Paul Harvey’s famous “If I Were the Devil” commentary. It is not a verbatim transcript of the broadcast.
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