The fastest way to turn truth into violence is to ask for candor from exhausted people.
In The Dionysus Program, this is the substrate test. Before you run a hard postmortem or ask for radical honesty, ask a simpler question: is the group merely afraid, or depleted? The test is not only moral. It is metabolic.
You can see it in the standard move: a brutal sprint ends, and leadership schedules the “honest conversation.” Same facts, wrong substrate. The strongest voice takes over. Nuance disappears. Someone becomes the problem. As the book puts it, exhaustion is a mimetic accelerant.
So the prerequisite is plain: sleep, food, daylight, silence, ordinary kindness, temporary demand reduction. Not perks. Preconditions. If you skip that step, truth will not get metabolized. It will get weaponized.
That matters now because more leaders are asking people to absorb disruptive change at a pace their nervous systems cannot safely hold. If the substrate is shot, do not raise the heat. Lower it first.