The Dionysus Program
Knowledge now melts faster than organizations can re-bind it into identity, norms, and operating systems—without depleting trust.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Pull Quotes
The Dionysus Program
Under that pressure, the primary obstacle to progress is no longer technical—it’s cultural.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
The method is a loop you can actually run: critique → dissolution → reconstitution → renewal.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Call the speed at which a person, team, organization, or city digests error into new structure its epimetabolic rate.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Dionysus governs Ritual Time—containers in which critique is welcomed, meanings are allowed to melt, and new commitments are forged in public.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Apollo governs what I’ll call Run Time—prediction, execution, scored forecasts, safety margins.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
The Readiness Rule: Never build a ritual container (Li) larger than the shared humanity (Ren) you have available to fill it.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
The program you are reading requires Ren to run.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Distributed work removes the serendipity of proximity and the rootedness of shared community.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
In the world the one-man job is creating, play is infrastructure.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
In principle, any artifact, policy, or assumption can be nominated as an anti-scapegoat and put on trial.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
We ritualize non-defensiveness: the builder speaks last; the critic holds the floor; the process owns the pain.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Skin-in-the-Game Rule: Every rite must be owned by the person or group with the most downside in its scope.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
The Dionysus Program needs Cincinnatus because its rites create exactly the kind of liminal authority that tends to harden into priesthood.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
When a rite is experienced as a Social Fact, you do not attend it; you submit to it.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
If the ritual feels like a chore, you will get compliance; if it feels like a gift, you will get truth.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Beauty is not decoration; it is fuel for epimetabolic rate.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
The non-violent alternative is to raise epimetabolic rate—heat the culture without burning it, and turn loss into structure on a deadline.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
Renewal is not a restart; it is continuity through digestion.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
If a ritual, metric, or role does not increase your epimetabolic rate, it is overhead and should be deprecated.
— Sean Devine
The Dionysus Program
If your Ren is weak, I will not be contained by your Li.
— Not Dionysus
The Dionysus Program
A ritual is a riverbank; if you make the water too hot, it may boil over the bank and drown the village.
— Not Confucius
The Dionysus Program
If the ritual container cracks, you do not get renewal.
— Not Apollo
The Dionysus Program
You are right that we advance by killing our theories so that we do not have to kill each other.
— Not Karl Popper
The Dionysus Program
You call that tax "Ritual Time." I called it error-correcting code.
— Not Claude Shannon
The Dionysus Program
Ritual Time is for jumping to the next one.
— Not Andy Grove
The Dionysus Program
Sometimes, the only way to raise the epimetabolic rate is to induce a fever so high that it nearly kills the patient.
— Not Carly Fiorina
The Dionysus Program
You argue that we must invite the heat inside the walls to avoid being burned by the fire outside.
— Not Alfred Sloan
The Dionysus Program
A static society is one that employs rituals to prevent knowledge from growing, to keep the future exactly like the past.
— Not David Deutsch
The Dionysus Program
You are trying to design a heat shield for organizations.
— Not Abe Silverstein
