A friend in the United States watched people he had known for years go somewhere he couldn't follow. We spoke about a growing ideological gap. Family members, old friends; the shared history was still there, but the distance kept growing. He asked me: "How do we reach those people? Is there anything left to reach?" My instinctive answer surprised him. I told him to treat it the way you'd treat someone in the grip of an addiction. Don't attack the substance. Don't ridicule the user. Stay present without being complicit. Keep the door open, even when no one is walking through it. After a second of thought, he said: “You know what, that might exactly be it”. But then I thought about it a little longer. Because if the same approach that works for addiction applies to ideological capture, the analogy isn't just a rhetorical device. It might be structurally true. And if it's structurally true at the level of a person, does the same mechanism operate when the entity drifting isn't an individual, but a company? An institution? A state? That's the question I try to answer in this article.