Beyond the Surface: Scott Paradis on Systems Under Strain and Personal Power

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is Scott Parity, a retired Army colonel, a former congressional fellow, and author of eleven books, who brings a powerful systems-level conversation to the chaos that we see in our world today. While many conversations focus on surface-level politics, God digs deeper into the underlying forces. And he knows that the chaos that we're seeing isn't just random, but a system under strain. And more importantly, he helps us learn what to do about it as individuals. This is a conversation about clarity, responsibility, and reclaiming agency in uncertain times. And once again, thank you for your service, Scott, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Well, thank you very much, and thanks you thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Sure. I grew up in southern New Hampshire when I was um young. My father had served in the Air Force, and when I was young, I had thought about serving and I had considered maybe applying to the military academies. But as I went through high school, I applied to colleges, and that dream kind of fell to the side. And I had been accepted to the University of New Hampshire. And a few months before that, I'm still in high school, I get this phone call from a Army recruiter. And I had expected when I told him I was going to college that he would hang up. But instead, he said, Have I got a deal for you? And that deal was joining the simultaneous membership program where you enlist in the Army Reserve, which is one weekend and then a couple of weeks in the summer, one weekend a month, a couple of weekends in the summer. And uh for me, go to basic training right out of high school and then enroll when I enrolled in college, enrolled in reserve officer training corps. So that's what I did. I went off, I started that great Army adventure in the Army Reserve for the first few years. I went through college, got my commission, and then stayed in the reserve because my intention was to light the world on fire with entrepreneurial ideas. My wife, we got married a year or so after college. She was teaching school, she was the steady income. When we were having our first child, we wanted my wife, Lisa, to be able to stay home. So that meant I needed to get on the straight and narrow. So I applied to go on active duty with the Army. And so the next 25 years, I was on active duty with the Army, had a grand adventure all over the world, doing all kinds of different things, and was exposed from the ground level to the highest levels of our government to see how things are actually done. So it's been quite an adventure uh over these last 30 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Well, you talk about looking beyond politics to what's happening underneath it all. Talk about what people miss when they only focus on so-called surface-level events.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

It's one of the things for me, and I characterize this as now I I'll use these terms, but I mean I don't know that's an accurate description, but I was a Boy Scout. So my my vision always that was that we were moving in a positive direction, both personally, professionally, and as a nation. So the United States was presenting the we were the arsenal of democracy. We were always bringing opportunity to nations around the world. And as I saw, as I was involved both in the Army, the Army's focus is how do we apply power to achieve political ends? As I moved through the years with the Army and I saw what we were doing, I thought, we're not heading in that positive possibility direction. We're being challenged by circumstances. And so I started to peel back the onion and see what was going on. Fundamentally, I read a book 20 years ago, it was written in the late 90s called The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe. And they had a thesis that we are in a cycle of, it's a social cycle of coming together, awakening, finding our own individual paths, and then essentially getting into a crisis circumstance. And that cycle repeats every 80 years or so. And so I started to look into that and I saw it seemed to be accurate as to what was happening in our country, especially after first 2001, then 2008, and then as we went on through the following years. So I stepped back and I said, okay, is this just another bump in the road or is something bigger going on? And where I've the conclusion that I've come to is something bigger is going on.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Well, another thing I'd like to highlight about your amazing career is that you were a congressional fellow. So to tell listeners what that involved and what you did.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Yes. So when I arrived to my first assignment at the Pentagon, I was really in an analysts kind of position, and we saw they offered the military services the opportunity to apply for congressional fellowships. So I applied for the fellowship and was selected, and then ended up being a fellow for a senator working on Capitol Hill. For me, it was eye-opening in that I got to move across the river from the Pentagon and look back at both how the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense approached Capitol Hill and how things got done. So it was an application of both seeing this idea of power, but how it's applied through politics. For me, it was eye-opening in how things get done or don't get done. And that contributed to my education and really my perspective on the big picture of what's going on now.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Well, from your experience in the military as well as government, what when did you start seeing the first systemic cracks forming?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

I think for for us it was really I've traced it back to sort of a diversion that started in about 1980 with the direction that we were going with our politics, but it has accelerated since then. But when we got involved in Iraq and I deployed to Iraq, the idea was that we were going to be bringing freedom and potential and opportunity to that part of the world. But there was always this undercurrent of is that our real motivation? So for me, I was, I'll do what I need to do to make sure we continue to move this progress of American democracy and the ideals that our nation was founded on. So I volunteered and I went to Iraq and I served there. But I kept seeing that maybe these motivations at the highest level were not in concert with the motivations of the people. And that's where I started to see this disconnect. And as we continued on through the aught years of the 2000s and then into the teens of the 2000s and now into the 2020s, we have just succumbed more and more to a competitive paradigm which disenfranchises the many for the benefit of the few.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

So talk about what systems you see breaking down right now.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Yes. I see I see five things that are happening, all converging. So if we use the metaphor of a storm, we have five different storms all converging at the same time. First is the is using the storm analogy, is the environmental upheaval. So as we're speaking today, we're seeing storms all about the south, southeast of the United States, tornadoes and so forth. But we're seeing things drought. We have 40% of the world's what had been agricultural land is now either degraded, arid, or unusable. We have megastorms that are happening around the world, earthquakes, the volcanoes. I don't know if you've been paying attention to what's going on out in the Pacific in the Philippines, but a volcano has just blown a week ago, and we're seeing earthquakes recurring on a more frequent basis. So those, that environmental upheaval is the Earth's way of signaling that things are not going well. So that's one storm. Then we have the second storm, economic stratification. We have human society, for some reason, we prefer hierarchy. And what ends up in hierarchy is we have a few at the top, many at the bottom. So might makes right and the many serve the few. And we see that we continue to rebuild the Tower of Babel over and over and over again, with the few at the top getting all the wealth and power and the masses at the bottom until finally that tower crumbles. That's the second storm. The third storm is our political polarization. And this is the age-old tactic of divide and conquer, where those in power find issues that they can get the masses emotional about and pit them against each other. And that way nobody really sees what's going on. So political polarization is the third storm. The fourth storm is really an amplifier of our social division, and that is technology. So we have now established social media as a lifeblood of our communications infrastructure. And now folks are more addicted to the phones than about anything else. So we have this technology that amplifies the good and the bad. And unfortunately, fear is a powerful driver, and more people respond to fear than they respond to opportunity. So this accelerating technology, now compounded by artificial intelligence, which again could be a savior of humanity, but it could be our downfall as well. It is the fourth storm of my five storms. The fifth storm is that you and I, just by the nature of our being in this reality, we face adversity. We face challenges, personal challenges. We are going to lose, we're going to lose our loved ones. We're going to have uncertainty in our lives. All of those personal storms. So we have those five storms: environmental upheaval, economic stratification, political polarization, technological acceleration, and personal adversity converging at this specific time. But it is for a purpose. And that is because this turmoil, this convergence of storms is really an opportunity to make an evolutionary leap. For 12,000 years, we have been playing the same competitive paradigm. We've been playing the same competitive game, building our hierarchies, collapsing the hierarchies, finding some opportunities to connect, collaborate, and create, and then prosper a little bit. Prosperity always leads in that greed and that envy, and that ends up building more hierarchies. We've been doing this for 12,000 years. The storms that are converging now are saying we have an opportunity. We have an opportunity to take a new direction, to step out of this paradigm of competition and conflict, death and destruction, pain and suffering, if we so choose. So the reason leadership hasn't arisen to tell us that this is the direction is that ultimately this is a personal decision. We each must come and make a personal choice about which way we want to go. I'm not saying right or wrong, but there are consequences to our decision. If we decide, we can choose. I want the old way. I want the time-tested, challenging way of competition and conflict, death and destruction, pain and suffering. I've been, we've been in that paradigm for 12,000 years. But that's a viable choice. People can make that choice. The alternative is to step out of that old way of doing things, step into a higher resonance, which the earth is calling us to do, and start a new path. Leadership has been failing in that people are not recognizing the big picture of what's happening. I do hear individual voices calling forth in like platforms like yours that let this message get through. And that is where we individually have to find the opportunities so that we can make that decision and we can realize what's really going on and potentially change course.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Well, I know you've studied human behavior extensively. So talk about the patterns that you are seeing right now that concern you the most.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yes. So there are three things that I would highlight as challenges for us. First of all, our human nature often pushes us to this vision of us as separate, autonomous, sovereign beings. While that's not remotely true, we hold on to that. Our egos, our awareness and ourselves cling to that that we are separate, we are autonomous, and we're sovereign. We are not. Just in from a physical perspective, you cut off our air, you cut off our water and our food, and we're not going to be around for very long. We are an integrated part of this environment. So we are not sovereign and separate. We are all connected, and everything we do affects others, and everything others do affects us. So our choices we make, our orientation, our awareness, our sense of the big picture, it all contributes. We all make waves in this grand ocean, and we all have to find our way together. So that's the first challenge is this idea of we're separate. We're not separate. We're not, if you if you believe you're separate, then you believe the other person is competing with you. And then it becomes back to that competition and conflict. The second thing is we are social beings. So again, within our human nature, we have this need to connect, this need to belong. And in doing that, we find, unfortunately, when we are challenged, we find our own tribe. And these tribes then put up walls. They cause conformity within the tribe, and then you feel secure and safe within your tribe, but everybody outside your tribe is an enemy. And that is what continues to fuel this political polarization. It's this tendency toward tribalism. And I would say the third major tendency or trait or aspect of human nature that is our potential downfall is this need to control. And this is back to how do I, what's my perspective of what's going on in the world? If I could only control circumstances, if I could only control events, if I could only control the future, if I can only control other people, then I can make things right. That is a profound mistake. We're all on this adventure of life. Life is changing for our benefit. Life is not happening to us, it's happening through us, for us. So those three components of human nature, this drive towards separation, where I want to be autonomous and sovereign, this idea of I will find solace or safety in a tribe, or if I can just gain control of everything out there, then everything will be well. Those are all misnomers that guide us in the wrong direction. The fundamental thing driving us to use those strategies is fear. We are afraid of letting ourselves go and revealing who and what we truly are.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Well, many people feel overwhelmed or powerless. I'll talk about what agency looks like in a time in times like these.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yes. You know, I think so. I'll give you an I like I like to do things in threes, and I'll give you three things that are important as we consider our own position. First of all, is the environment. So what are the physical, what's the physical environment I'm in, and who are the people that I have associated with or am surrounded by? Because they are all going to influence and impact how we respond. So there's the physical environment. Then we have within that physical environment, we have human nature, which are those three things that I talked about, potentially steering us in the wrong direction. And then that third element for us, we have the systems that we collectively build. So the agency for us first is to be aware. And that is aware about your own nature. You have to come to a decision about what is the nature of this reality. Is this a dangerous competitive world, or is this a world of opportunity, potential, possibility, and adventure? You've got to decide that. You've got to decide what's your place in this world. Is it I've got to compete to stay to survive, or is it I'm going to flower, I'm going to expand, I'm going to grow and learn and become. So you've got to come to terms to who you, what this world is and your, what's your place in it, what's your purpose. To do that, once you do that, once you, I call it radical responsibility. Once you assume radical responsibility, and this is, you have to make the this decision. If you think everything out there is what causes everything in your life to happen, then you can never assume responsibility. Once you assume radical responsibility for your own life, now that doesn't mean you have control of all those circumstances, but it means you control how you respond and the direction you take. Once you assume responsibility for yourself, radical responsibility, you take back your power. Often we seed our power. We give our power away. I'm going to have somebody else make those decisions for me. I'm going to give someone else control of this, and then I'm going to rely on them, whether it be family members, whether it be at the workplace, whether it be community members, whether it be politicians, I'm going to give my power away and just wait for everything to change. That's not how this works. This is a personal adventure. Once you assume responsibility for your own life, you then reclaim your agency. Not easy. This is not easy. This is not a panacea. This is not a simple solution. Doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but it's going to be, I'm going to reclaim my power, my agency to chart a new path forward.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Talk about how the relationship between money, power, and meaning has shifted in recent years.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Yes. One of the things I talk a lot about money, because money has such a paramount position in our lives. Now, this is we have made it, we have empowered money to take that pinnacle position. Most people do not understand what money is. Money is not a physical thing, it is a social construct, it's an idea, it's a collective agreement based on trust that we use to exchange value. In this competitive paradigm, the old way was a taking game. The taking game was the biggest, the strongest, the fastest would dominate weaker opponents, if you will, or other people and take whatever they wanted. That taking game has been going on for 12,000 years. At certain times, we would come to a point where the taking game would at least subside to a degree where people would realize if we connect, collaborate, and create, we can prosper. And then people would prosper. And then, sure, again and again, we continue to our hierarchy build and we get in this taking game. That taking game has been going on for 12,000 years. We have empowered money to facilitate what I call a making game. The making game is where I create value, you create value, we bring it to the marketplace, we exchange that value, we increase the pie, we all benefit. This is the making game. This is what we call the real economy, Main Street. We have, however, now money is what facilitates that exchange of value. But once money is so widely accepted, we empower money, and people soon realize that instead of bringing value to the marketplace and exchanging that value, if I just get my hands on money by whatever means it takes, good, bad, or indifferent, as long as I get my hands on money, I can get whatever I want. Then the game shifts from a making game, which is bringing value to the table and increasing that value, to a taking game. Most people do not understand what game they're playing. Most people are legitimately, genuinely, honestly playing a making game. They are trying to create value. And bring that value to the marketplace. What they don't understand is a taking game is overlaying their making game. And as hard as they work and as hard as they try, there's always this game of extraction, taking some of the value that they are bringing to the marketplace and extracting it. Once they have this awareness of what games, what the those two games that are being played, then they can be aware of how they are being abused, who are they associating with that might be taking advantage of them and shift their focus more toward the making game than the taking game. That is that puts us on this treadmill of always losing. We're always losing the game because we don't understand the rules of the game. So the first step, in again, going back to our agency point is awareness. You got to understand the game that you're playing and that wealth, money, power are not the end objective. It is the fullness of life. It is an opportunity for you to become what you are meant to be.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Well, for someone who senses that something bigger is happening but can't quite articulate it, how would you help them connect the dots?

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Part of it is I'll go back to that word awareness, and it's look around. Look around at what's going on. Do you see those five storms? Those five storms are converging. Now, if I'm wrong, then this is potentially a bump in the road, and maybe leaders will come out of the woodwork and we will change direction and all will be well. But if I'm correct, these five storms are going to in fact get worse. The challenge becomes now, do I believe that I have some agency in these storms about choosing my own course? This is some soul, this will require some soul searching, some introspection. If you are willing to do that, then you look at these storms, you figure out what it is you want to experience, where you want to go. The old paradigm, that doesn't mean you can't learn anything in the old paradigm. Millions of people are going to select the old paradigm. They are in the competitive conflict, death and destruction, pain and suffering. Hey, I'm going to learn through that paradigm. That's fine, that's their choice. But if you want to make a different choice, if you want different consequences, then first of all, it's this awareness of what's going on. And then how am I best going to respond? And I would say take responsibility for your own life. Look for opportunities that are in the direction of a higher resonance, a higher exchange, interchange, relationships with other people. Start to associate with yourself, yourself, with people who are going in the direction you want to go. And that will help you continue to move in a positive direction.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Talk to the listeners about your books. Tell us what we can expect when we read them and where we can get them.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

I have uh I've written 11 books. And I'll tell you about the two that I'm working on right now that I'm most excited about. And that is what has brought us together. The one is what's really going on, apocalypse or evolution. Now, that I have not actually hit the publish, we're not at the published stage yet, but it will be coming out in the next month or so. But the idea really is a summary of everything we've been talking about. The other one that will then follow probably later this year, I'm calling the money game. And that is where we I highlight these two games that we're playing, the making game and the taking game, and how we, as uh citizens, people, can come to terms with money and wealth and power and actually put a system in place that benefits us all, as opposed to a system right now that might makes right, the few benefit, the many do not. So those are the two that are in the works. So of the other 11, nine of them are nonfiction, which are all essentially under the personal and professional development umbrella. So I have a health and fitness, I have money, I have politics. These are books that are to help you have insights about you and your opportunities to grow. I have Success 101. I have Warriors, Diplomats, Heroes, which is about my army journey, but the lessons that the Army, the United States Army, uh have ingrained in me. The I do have, and this is the one that I like to recommend for folks, if you want to just test, I have two fiction. And the one that is a short read, a quick read, I call Sheep Herders Wolves. Sheep Herders Wolves is a fable about how we got to where we are. And that is this paradigm of might makes right, which always results in the many serving the few. So it's a quick read, just a simple fable, a story about looking into what is it that has brought us to where we are today. Those are all available on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, wherever your books are sold.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Well, besides the two books that you're working on, tell us about any other upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Yes. One of the easiest things, if if this subject of what's really going on, apocalypse or revolution strikes a strikes a tone with you, I do have a course on udemy.com that same name, what's really going on, but I also have a YouTube channel, which if you were to look at what's really going on apocalypse of revolution, and it's Scott F. Parody on YouTube, you would find essentially that same course without the workbooks and all of that, but essentially on YouTube that you can explore that subject from my perspective in more detail. So that's available to you. I also have other programs on listenable, and um, some of my books are on audible as well. So you have those kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

So actually, contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

SPEAKER_00 28:09

The easiest place, and I've used I'm using the platform of LinkedIn. So hopefully your listeners will have, if they're not on LinkedIn, that's the easiest way to get in touch with me. Scott, S-C-O-T-T, F as in Francis, Perody, P-A-R-A-D-I-S, Paradise without the E. So if you find me on LinkedIn, by all means, send me a connection. And if I can help you in some way, I absolutely will.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

One of the things, so this idea of radical responsibility is complemented by this idea of radical compassion. By that I mean we are all in this together. None of us has all the answers. We're going to navigate these storms together. If you feel like you haven't found the right group of people yet, then go establish new relationships. That means sometimes we have to get out of our comfort zone. We have to face our fears. I'll give you one final thought with this. Fear, I'll just put that umbrella of fear is that one thing that holds us back. It's that one thing that keeps us from being everything we truly can be. And fear is really an opportunity. Fear is a signal to us to examine what, in fact, are we hiding or repressing or resisting. So when you feel fear, it's not that you have to combat fear, it's that you have to recognize the fear, realize that I have this sense of fear in me, and then ask yourself why. The why is what that fear is pointing you to. And if you can come to terms with that and realize who and what you are, you are a divine being having this life experience for your greater good. Life is happening through you, for you, then you can come to a tone, a whole new orientation about where you go next.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

If you got unemy, check out that course, check out the YouTube channel, check out his books, and for those of you who got LinkedIn following on LinkedIn and keep up with everything that he's up to, pick up those two new books when they come out and follow rate review, share this episode to as many people as possible. Also, to keep up with all things living a dream, please visit www.curveball337.com and share the website and the show to everybody that you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Scott, once again, thank you for your service. Thank you for all that you do, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Well, thank you. I really do appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.