Critical Path
To a Competent Right Wing.
Another long read that won’t fit in the email. Apologies, but hopefully you’ll open it at the site. Leave a comment too!
If you’ve played strategy games you’ve no doubt interacted with the ‘ol tech tree. A simple diagram representing your side’s technological advancements from whatever year the game starts to whatever year the game ends. The concept is ancient in digital history, possibly having first appeared in Sid Meir’s Civilization, but likely existing in some form or another previously. For instance, I have no doubt that the Americans had something of a hypothetical tech tree planned out to get them from atomic theory to atomic bomb - hold onto that thought.
In its most stupid implementation, tech trees serve as nothing more than artificial lags of a linear progression of deterministic history. Every player discovers the same things, and it’s just a matter of how many resources you put into it. In more entertaining games the tech tree becomes branched, or even entangled, to provide for opportunities to “chose your own adventure”. Why invent a library if you plan on focusing on military, for instance? The ability to simply discard parts of a game for another time is a curious design approach, as it means there will be players who go years without interfacing with parts of the game which were no doubt tirelessly designed as much as all the rest. But the benefit is you feel more “You”.
Over the years, tech trees have become other things as well, such as skill trees and cultural trees. In many games they can get incredibly autistic in detail. You know full well that the vast majority of people will never take the time to investigate. They will simply find a preferred set of arrangements and ignore the rest. At this level of complexity, it isn’t because players aren’t interested, it’s because they are real people who do not have the time to go through all the meticulously planned outcomes. For many games this ends up resulting in complex skill trees that have sum total stats all within +-1 or so. In such instances, the skill tree is a red herring. No matter what path you take, you will never be over or under powers - you will never have to think about tactics to compensate. Rather, you’re being fooled with a thousand linear trees made to look like a branch.
For games such as Hearts of Iron, the branching actually does have an impact in terms of how you run your ship of state and how well your military performs. You actually do need to compensate or strategize between different outcomes. It’s what makes the game so fun. One time you may wish to play as Cuba and go down the tech tree that leads to a capitalist state as opposed to Castro’s social experiment. Or you can go down the tech tree that leads to Stalin falling from power and the Tsar returning. These are far more entertaining models of tech tree, as opposed to the linear lag approach.
Real Life
In many professions today something like these tech trees exist as well, called the Critical Path.
More commonly seen as CPM, or Critical Path Method, it is a rather novel system for managing complex projects that have known local time slots, but may feature unknown lags due to the complexities involved. This takes the form of visualizing each task as interdependent nodes, with known time marked out and unknown time given reasonable ranges to resolve itself. In this way, it serves also as a means of tracking delays, and determining which delays are a threat, and which ones are an inconvenience.
Today, CPM is used in my own discipline of Architecture to plan out the complexity in project work rotations. For instance, I may know that the contractor will take five days to build a foundation for my design, but I can never know for sure if the site surveyor will find something that delays the contractor. Thus, my CPM can show a five day node for the contractor, on a two week slider that is dependent on what the surveyor finds. The contractor thus knows he must be available for two weeks, but will only work on the project for five days in that zone. This frees him to schedule other work that can fit in that two week slider, and allows him the freedom to mix and match what is in that time slot while I wait for the surveyor. If the surveyor calls me on the fourth day and says everything looks great, I can call the contractor to get started. The contractor in turn can prioritize his schedule to do the main task of the foundation, and maintain planned secondary tasks he arranged many months prior. If I get a call from the Surveyor that the site has a contaminant and it’s going to take a few days to remove, I can tell the contractor to go do his secondary tasks for other projects and bring him back when the site is cleared, with minimum delays.
proofhub.com image
Do you recall when I mentioned how the Americans likely had something of a hypothetical tech tree for going from theory to bomb? CPM was developed specifically for the Manhattan Project originally, although there are some examples of a more primitive use prior. It was also, in turn, used to plan out the Apollo missions as well. CPM allows the co-habitation of theory with fact, to set reasonable goals and staggered accomplishments. All the theorists, engineers, mechanical specialists, military staff, contractors, etc etc, can tackle a complex project such that individual distractions and delays don’t get in the way. Today, professionals like myself use the CPM to tie together all the designers, builders, consultants, engineers, and various trades like painters and plumbers. Modern efficiency in construction and design wouldn’t be possible without a CPM.
It’s therefore worthy of note that the incapability of doing such great things as the Moon Landing or the Manhattan Project suggests parts of the United States is no longer capable of such planning, or has lost the knowledge as to how it is done - albeit, military and civilian contractors of the United States are still capable it would appear. Politically speaking, we also know the NGOs the United States employ use CPMs as well, especially in color revolutions. They will identify several weak points in a regime, the necessary steps to destabilize those weak spots, and then task cells with that job. Only when all cells have completed their task will the critical path move forward. Incidentally, developing a series of well-tested and repeatedly-verifiable criteria to engineer an act of violence has another use: Engineering mass shooters. Tracy Cassidy, head of MITRE’s Insider Threat Capability group, has documented these technical details for the US military in preventing threats to the US, though you will forgive me for speculating these can be used in engineering threats for others as well. Her team’s visualization of this research is quite a world to dive into:
While the CPM was developed initially to track the knowns and unknowns in developing a nuclear bomb, it was quickly applied to psychology in tracking out deterministic end points in engineering an outcome. The United States continues to use this to engineer color revolutions and violence, as well as track and discover foreign and domestic attempts to do the same to her.
But, as the decline of the west spreads, it’s likely this will become cluttered with regime propaganda and break down from the cold hard science of the mid-century. As a result, being able to maintain a CPM plan can put you at a significant advantage over those that cannot. For these reasons, I believe dissidents need a CPM. They need some kind of staged series of knowns and unknowns to build towards political change, such that they can maintain pace whilst suffering from their multitudinal fragmentations. Mind you, I am not limiting this to the Dissident Right. Those depressed Communists and Libertarians ought to do this too. I am a radical only in desiring something - literally anything - other than what we currently have. What that means in the end is less important to me than actually taking a step anywhere at all.
How to make a Critical Path
Of course, chances are that if you don’t know what a CPM is or how to make one, you’re waiting for me to explain it. I would encourage you to go read it on your own time more, as I’m not an expert. But in brief, let’s look at this example diagram.
Tim Tyler's diagrams are useful
Let’s say you have the goal of eating some eggs. Each blue island in this diagram represents work that must be done. Yellow elements are areas where work cannot be done by you, but rather someone or something else. Consequently, they are also zones of time you can do something else. Each green bulb represents transitions from tasks, with the arrows marking out what you are moving on to do.
While this type of graph may be called a “Critical Path” diagram, in reality the critical path itself only constitutes a part of it. A critical path is the longest path. AKA, it’s where you will have to orient all other tasks and waiting gaps around. In most contracts, changing the timeline of the critical path is grounds for termination as it is the primary timeline most financial institutions use to schedule their financing of a project. If you violate the critical path, it is almost always cheaper - and safer - to fire you and replace you with someone who can maintain the critical path. As such, critical paths should also be given the most amount of generious waiting gaps with which to orient all other tasks around. Most financial instituions not only want you to add in extra days to be safe, they encourage it. Often, the critical path will also clarify the bare minimum work required to get to completion, with all other tasks considered replaceable. Thus, for the simple task of eating a meal in this diagram, making the eggs is the critical path. It has been given the most amount of time, and defines the min-max timeline of the overall project. Additionally, you can see how Eggs alone could constitute a meal, bread and tea not so much.
From this task, once the eggs are cooking you can move onto other tasks like slicing bread. Likewise, once the bread is toasting you can move onto preparing boiling water. As a result, the critical path has two branching tasks that have been organized around it. In essence, if you collapsed all the blue islands down onto the time arrow, there would be no overlaps. Indeed, were there multiple people on a project such as this, a Critical Path diagram for each of them ought to show the blue islands can collapse onto the timeline without any gaps. Thus, every member is never caught without something to do. There, also, is a third advantage of CPMs in that they begin to teach you when you need additional labor, and the advantages an additional person could provide.
For instance, maybe you want to fry your eggs while you make tea and toast? A CPM can identify a large gap you need to fill. Perhaps with two people, someone could fry the eggs while you do the other tasks sooner? You can draw it as such:
Be sure to check out Tim Tyler's thorough explanations
What I described was for a fairly simple task for a meal. Larger projects with many hundreds of members can start to become very complex with novel representations and timelines, but the idea remains the same: collapse the islands and everyone should have a task to do without any blank spots. When it gets into the realm of theoretical physics, you have to have a steady pattern of advancements to predict the time range that includes unknowns such as “Figure out how not to die of rads”. As you can imagine, for such high-theory CPMs the violation of the critical path is fairly expected, but risk management can often make up for unknowns. After all, if you fail to invent some anti-gravitational gizmo, you can always just use a rocket. In this way, CPMs allow room for innovation, but don’t get bogged down on impractical wonder-tech that promises much but can’t deliver. You simply shift tasks rather than cancel the entire project. That said, failure to follow a CPM in its early stages is fairly good grounds to cancel a project long before you go bankrupt from it, as well.
A Critical Path for Dissidents.
With all this in mind, let’s try to map out the Critical Path that Dissidents have to commit to in order to achieve meaningful success. I’m right leaning so I will start with the dissidents there, but there’s stuff here worthy of others too. Feel free to plot out your own and send it to me.
Let’s imagine the Dissident Right. They represent a broad spectrum ranging from Pagans wanting to go back to throwing grandpa into the bog, to legacy Ron Paul fans. I don’t care about all that. I will be writing this for my own goals. I’m Christian, I hate the Boomer Truth Regime, I reject the post-war consensus, and I want less federal nonsense. I can go further and say I want something of a cross between Venice and The Holy Roman Empire in terms of government organization, but that’s for later. For simplicity’s sake, let me set the goal of devolution. Maxmimum devolution. So much so that the federal government is nothing more than a board of advisors for the states. Most politics in the United States operate on something like a 20 year cycle, so let’s plot that time range initialy.
From my perspective, there are a number of obstacles in the way of doing anything at all:
The Kooksphere: Charlatans like Alex Jones, Rudy Giuliani, “Alien Man”, etc are social parasites. Even if they do get some things right on a long enough time span, so do psychics. Say enough random junk and you’ll eventually get something right. As far as I’m concerned, the energy and attention of the Kooksphere distracts from any meaningful work in reality. It has to collapse.
Social Media: I’m guilty of this myself, but time spent staring at memes is time wasted from building up means. Social Media is bread and circuses and will eventually have to be abandoned in favor of real-life. Though for now, it’s useful for finding folks.
Boomer Truth: The last remnants of the post-war consensus have to be thoroughly removed from any right leaning efforts. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc, all have traditional operations of family and state that were never built upon universal suffrage or equality. They were hierarchies of self-interested collectives which featured rites and rituals to earn participation in a state, and teach a shared responsibilities to peers, underlings, and lords. This worked for a over a thousand years then suddenly - seemingly overnight - such things were considered evil and we all had to become open democracies and egalitarianists. Until these fictions are rejected, social capital will be wasted defending the devils of democracy who have been lied into secular sainthood.
Worldly Christianity: This is very simple. In order to have the church promote stable societies, churches that promote unstable ones will have to be folded. Although this would seem to be happening on its own without any effort.
These are a few primary tasks to resolve, though they each have different scales of impact. For instance, while collapsing the kooks is a work, as is the minimization of social media, things like the end of Boomer Truth and Worldly Christianity appear to be things to wait on rather than do. Most Boomers are in their 70s and thus, their hitting the average death age in a few years. So, Here’s an initial Island map.
There are some additional actions needed in terms of building as well, such as:
Organized Community Work.
Independent Data Management
Independent Financial Institution
Judicial Activism
Independent Education
Independent Media
Many of these are currently - or in the process of - formalizing. Most have known time ranges too. For instance, judicial activism takes decades to do, as we saw with the Pro-Life movement. Such things will take a dedicated team that won’t be able to work on anything else. But something like an education institute will take 4-5 years to cycle through a student’s degree span. Data management usually operates on 5-7 year cycles of tech, and media can be said to exist within electoral cycles of 2-3 years. Incidentally, we can also start imagining different task groups for these goals. So we can imagine a more complex graph:
Three main task groups can work towards the devolved goal over a twenty year project, with some carefully staged interactions. For instance, the team set to take down the Kooksphere can found a media institute that replaces them. Then begin entering into finance as you see many tech companies doing now. The legal task group can provide pathways for financial gain attacking the enemy in the lawfield as well. And the third group, the working man’s, can tackle real world issues like student-teacher boards, helping the poor and in-debt, and offering support out of the SSRI and Meth killing fields. This group would be those willing to sacrifice social media presence for real-world work. You could imagine they are repatriated incels who will have to be bullied out of their degeneracy. From that, they could start an education institute, especially with the children of those abandoned poor families. They would have the social trust capital to do so, and from that they could help those students manage their own data and set up their own little media presences for Group 1. If several institutes developed their own internal forums - just like the old Arpanet - this would create an independent internet between education institutions. At that point, some could split to focus on organizing the parents into right wing unions, and others can develop data centers to protect them.
As you can tell, the Critical Path is identified in this scheme as the legal team. Only when a band of law brothers becomes willing to do the hard work needed will the other two be possible, and that fighting and protecting of “our” people can create precedent law within the system to build upon for other activities.
Of course, all this is fictions in my mind, and my humble attempt here certainly isn’t technical, but I do hope you explore Critical Paths further. Send your own designs to me in replies or on twitter @krinjewolker
Apparently, your CPM allows you to write these brilliant articles as well.
Your plans sound a bit idealistic, but i like them.