02 | You're Spiritually Sick, Not Mentally Ill.

Paul Harvey’s 1965 radio broadcast 'If I Were the Devil' eerily foreshadowed America’s cultural and spiritual collapse. The fallout of the ’60s still haunts us today.

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Second in a series on spiritual victory over Mental Illness.

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Hello again,

I’m back with a new essay, one not directly linked per se (contextually, not thematically) to the personal testimony and overview of the spiritual life that kicked the series off.

It seems a fitting place to switch gears and introduce the Satanic blitzkrieg that descended upon America (and the West) in the 1960s and ’70s. Why bother? Because it happened, and we’re still living under that cloud.

There is mystery in Salvation — maps, signs, and meanings — and the better we understand the landscape of Exile, the better prepared we’ll be to navigate it.

Godspeed,
Mark

Feast of our Lady of Fatima, 2025

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WHEN NATIONALLY SYNDICATED radio host Paul Harvey released, ‘If I Were the Devil’ in 1965, I imagine his 20-MILLION DAILY LISTENERS stopped dead in their tracks, whatever they were doing, if only to really listen to what they were hearing.

No one had ever done or said anything quite like it before. Paul pulled no punches in revealing the Devil’s hoof in the small of our backs. It was shocking for its time, and right on the money. Some called it prescient; others, a warning.

Both were right.

Today, Mr. Harvey’s famous bit is found (above and) everywhere online, and aside from benefitting from some cultural updating, is just as relevant now as it was then. To listen in is to step back in time and inside the lull before the storm — of a heavily concentrated spiritual attack against America’s soul in the late 1960s and ’70s.

One that would ultimately cost more lives than US soldiers killed in Vietnam and alter the course of history.¹

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FOR THOSE OF YOU not familiar with this time period (and no, Forrest Gump doesn’t count), let me sketch it out for you: For roughly 20 years after the end of WWII in 1945, most Americans enjoyed unprecedented prosperity — what historians call the Golden Age. Everybody had jobs. Living was easier and affordable. And the sky was the limit (by the end of the decade, NASA would put a man on the moon — or not).

But for all of the post-war polish, like The Truman Show, something wasn’t right.

Many returning GIs weren’t able to simply pick up where they left off (the wounds of war don’t heal on command, as Vietnam would shortly prove in spades). After half-a-century of struggle and conflict (the Depression, two World Wars and the Korean War), new anxieties flared around what to do with all this freedom; and other questions arose: Why did Eisenhower warn us about the Military-Industrial Complex? What are the Beatniks up to? And — Hey, is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

And then came the shocking assassination of JFK in Dealey Plaza in 1963. By 1968, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy would all fall to conspirators’ bullets.

By then, the American dream of the 1950s had turned to rust.

Within a couple of years of Harvey’s broadcast, collective progress and urban sprawl would collide with the air-conditioned nightmare of reckless social abandon and mounting cynicism — exploding overnight in a red-tide embolism of magnetic pole-inverting upheaval that flipped the world on its head with the arrival of …

… Women’s Lib, the Pill, ‘free love,’ the rise of third wave communism, and the occult. Widespread drug use and abuse. The nation’s youth demanding to be seen and heard. Populist manifestos and campus uprisings. The civil rights movement, mass protests and police beatdowns. The Watts fires, and the previously listed assassinations. The rejection of compliance, and embrace of God-replacement liberalism (‘If it feels good, do it!’). And the greatest disillusionment of all — the war in Vietnam.

While the bombs bursting in air of generalized lunacy wouldn’t break the Internet (only because it didn’t exist yet), the fallout — a frenzy of anarchy and mad zeal for out-of-body experience² fused with limitless carnal indulgence — shook the US to its core, setting in motion something far more insidious than flower power, burnt bras, and the shadow of insurrection.

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I DIDN’T COME to Christ as a leather-bound, pipe-smoking intellectual. I came exactly as I was (vomiting on a street corner at 5 am with no one to hold my hair). If there is one advantage of hitting triple rock bottom it’s this: you’re fried. You’re brain. You’re body. Your ego. Your ability to distend disbelief. None of the props and lies work anymore. You’re pinned down by enemy fire, often in secret, and what remains of your soul’s once beautiful nature is filled with weeping and dread.

All roads are closed except for the one left open.

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IT IS JESUS — the One sent³ — who entered time to free us from Original Sin (and its spreading tendrils). By the 1960s, Catholicism and the Christian churches would face their toughest test yet, as rank and file Americans worn lean by toil and sacrifice, grew enamored with the temptation of post-War liberties, and less fond of toeing the line.

It was ancient Israel’s recurring problem all over again — good times erasing the boundaries that keep us safe in hard times. The Beats (Beatniks),⁴ Jazz culture,⁵ and outlaw Motorcycle Clubs⁶ of the period⁷ openly scoffed at the rise of soulless consumerism and the gospel of success. It probably didn’t help that these change agents/agitators were constantly in the news — stoking unrest, thumbing their noses at the established order, and making rebellion sexy for those with an existential itch to scratch.

By the mid to late ’60s, what began as fringe defiance by misfits and outliers had gone mainstream.

‘There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail ... That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip: He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait.’ — Hunter S. Thompson

YOU HAD TO BE THERE, as the old saying goes, to grasp how awful and traumatizing the late 60s were (though just a kid at the time, I’ll never forget the frequently disturbing media reports from those dark years).

The thudding impact of all that celestial ground-n-pound came crashing in from all directions, splitting the national psyche, ultimately pitting the Greatest Generation against the likes of Timothy Leary⁸ and a host of gurus, manias and mantras that would cleave those forged by a half-century of hardship, from a new breed of Boomers panting for escape and adventure beyond the shire.

Looking back, it continues to stun as the most catastrophic, wilful, sudden collapse of morals and tradition — and sanity, by extension — on record reflecting a society hellbent on recreating itself through runaway concupiscence,⁹ with too little fear of the Lord in the tank to withstand the resulting demonic downpour.

It should also be said — since so many of the Oprah Winfreys of our time nursed their beliefs on that New Age guernsey — that in stark contrast to ‘live your best life now,’ few who embraced the godless witchery of the ’60s (‘Love the one you’re with’¹⁰) ever emerged from their denim cocoons as butterflies. What came for them wasn’t transformation but desolation, as those devoured by their own rebellion and disorder — despite their transcendental claims — fell beneath the wheels of God’s rolling judgement.

With virtue derided, punished, and pillaged, once innocent souls were set ablaze — not in any Godly sense, but how African Warlords do it.

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APART FROM PAUL Harvey catching the Devil in the act, so to speak, why did so few others see it coming? And when that low-flying, drug-fueled Jefferson Airplane finally slammed into Mt. Zion atomizing everyone aboard, where were the experts to sift the crash site and tell us what happened and why?, so that similar combustions might be avoided in the future?¹¹

Here’s what I do know: As the social order cracked and people everywhere buckled under the barrage of that swarming evil, Big Pharma stepped in like a benevolent tyrant — not to help those spiraling in spiritual and psychological collapse, but to exploit their suffering through the rapid deployment of chemical containment.¹²

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IN ESSENCE, MOST summaries of the time will say that no one, single event alone caused the tumultuous 1960s. They will tell you that the JFK assassination symbolizes the turning point when America lost its innocence, accelerating the counter-culture’s rise. They will point to how the cumulative impact of Beatnik ideals, outlaw rebellion, institutional distrust, Vietnam-era disillusionment, and drug experimentation led directly to the unprecedented cultural upheaval and tragic excess of that decade.

They would be only partially right:

What unfolded in the ’60s and early ’70s was more than a mangle of force and effect. Somehow, in the golden haze of postwar optimism, a fracture formed in the nation’s spiritual armor — just wide enough for the Enemy’s blade to slip through. The Devil marveled as Americans fell for his ruse, trading discipline for comfort and truth for entertainment. And when the hour came — with the nation transfixed by the glow of their television sets, and a new generation of overmatched fools lining up to take the bait — Satan drove the blade deeper … and broke it off.

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GEORGE WILL, A pundit I’ve long admired for his cutting intellect, once said something so profound about ‘the Sixties’ that I made a mental note to remember it, only to lose it somewhere on the road more traveled.

What I do recall is that he dropped the axe on the wildness and debauchery of that era in such a way as to boil all nostalgia off its bones.

It went something like this:

The ’60s are heralded for free love, civil rights, and experimentation. But beneath that mythology lay the rupture of America’s soul. The Woodstock generation lost its mind to sex, drugs, and rock and roll — many dying young, or falling into addiction, homelessness, or the arms of false prophets and cults. The times also produced countless aborted children, and others born to single mothers with wounds of their own. Out of that chaos came the fruit of apostasy: the unholy march of a new normal that still defines us today — a nation of shattered people and broken families.

Six decades before my re-imagined re-telling of what George Will may have said about all of that, Paul Harvey saw and shared the writing on the wall.

The rest isn’t history in the conventional sense, beloved, but a legacy of still smoldering fires that continue to affect the world, poisoning the air we breathe.

JMDA

.30.

More Americans likely died from drug-related causes during the 1960s and 1970s than were killed in the Vietnam War.

• Vietnam War deaths: ~58,000

• Drugs + drug induced psychosis-related deaths (1960–1980): Easily 80,000+, possibly over 100,000

1. And that's excluding the millions more who survived the 60s but were left broken, addicted, institutionalized, homeless, or spiritually shipwrecked.

Drug Culture and Soul-Destruction

2. Initially, drugs promised liberation, spiritual enlightenment, and social unity. But what started as hopeful experimentation spiraled rapidly into despair and destruction.

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John 6:29 (RSV-CE):

"Jesus answered them, 'This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.'"

John 3:17 (RSV-CE)

"For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."

The Beatniks: Reaction Against Conformity

4. The ‘Beats’ were deeply disillusioned by the conformity, consumerism, and militarism prevalent in postwar America, rejecting traditional values and seeking deeper spiritual meaning through exploration of Buddhism, existential philosophy, and Eastern mysticism.

A sonic rebellion against structure, predictability, and control.

5. Jazz culture and the jazz clubs of the '40s and '50s became underground sanctuaries for dissidents, bohemians, and the racially integrated few who dared to dream outside the lines. Jazz taught a generation how to riff, how to feel, how to reject the script.

Motorcycle Clubs: Outlaws on Wheels (Late 1940s–1950s)

6. Outlaw motorcycle gangs embodied the darker, more violent edge of social rebellion. Their presence signaled a broader youth dissatisfaction — a hunger for freedom from traditional constraints and the seductive pull of living dangerously. Not surprisingly, these MCs would go on to play a significant role in the illicit drug trade throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and beyond.

The Altamont Speedway Free Festival (1969)—where the Hells Angels violently policed the Rolling Stones’ concert (and killed Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African American) symbolically marked the dark end of the idealistic 60s, highlighting the paradox and eventual tragedy of that era’s idealism.

A cultural revolution needs drivers:

7. A cultural revolution doesn’t happen on its own — it needs drivers. In the postwar years, Jazz clubs, Beats literature, and outlaw motorcycle gangs formed an unholy trinity, each chipping away at the old order in their own way. Their offspring? The Hippie movement — a Rosemary’s Baby of counterculture, birthed in rebellion, baptized in drugs, and raised to reject everything that came before.

‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!’ - Timothy Leary

8. Timothy Leary (1920–1996) was a former Harvard psychologist turned counterculture icon glamorized LSD as a shortcut to spiritual awakening and societal evolution, encouraging widespread use with no concern for moral, psychological, or social consequences. His influence helped normalize psychedelics among youth, with many suffering from psychosis, long-term trauma, and suicide as a result. In short, Leary was no prophet of light, but a pied piper of deception and doom — leading a generation into a pharmaceutically induced pseudo-spirituality that promised transcendence but delivered injury and death.

This isn’t to short-change the deeply rooted desire for justice

9. at the time — but we can’t ignore how the 60s protest movement bundled personal freedom with rebellion, increasingly expressed by entitlement and antichrist tendencies.

Stephen Stills, ‘Love the One You’re With’

10. If you're down and confused
And you don't remember who you're talkin' to
Concentration slip away
Because your baby is so far away

Well, there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with

— Steven Stills, 1970

The 60s are alive in 2025

11. Today, it’s hyper-narcissism, app-supported hook-ups, Ayahuasca rituals, and a buffet of micro-dose hallucinogenics in place of the old pills and powders.

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Pharma Milestones from this era:

• Thorazine (1950s): Introduced as a tranquilizer, became the first antipsychotic — used heavily in mental hospitals.

• Lithium (approved in 1970): Used for bipolar disorder, began mainstreaming the idea of "chemical imbalance."

• Valium (1960s-70s): Marketed to housewives to manage anxiety and existential despair — known as “Mother’s Little Helper.”

• Prozac (late '80s, but built on the groundwork laid earlier): Cemented the SSRI revolution.