On moral drift, organisational capture, and whether the same remedy applies at every scale.
A friend in the United States, a lifelong Republican who finds the current iteration of his party unrecognisable, asked me a question that’s on the minds of many. He wasn’t asking about politics. He was asking about people. Specifically, the people he had known for years, family members and old friends, who had, in his words, gone somewhere he couldn’t follow. “How do we reach those people?”, he asked. “Is there anything left to reach?”.
My answer may have surprised him, I think, because I didn’t answer from the perspective of politics or morality. I told him: “Treat it the way you’d treat someone in the grip of an addiction. Don’t attack the substance; you’ll lose. Don’t ridicule the user; you’ll harden them. Make clear what you’re willing to offer and what you’re not willing to absorb. Stay present without being complicit. And accept, for now, that the person you’re trying to reach may not be accessible until something shifts in them that no argument from the outside can force”.
After a second of thought, he said: “You know what, that might exactly be it”.
What I said carries an implication that I mulled over in the days after our conversation. If the same approach that works for addiction applies to ideological capture, the analogy isn’t just useful as a rhetorical device. It might be structurally true. And if it’s structurally true at the level of a person, the question that follows is this: does a closely related mechanism operate when the entity doing the drifting isn’t an individual, but an organisation? A company? An institution? A state?
That’s the question this piece tries to answer. Not as a provocation, but as a genuine diagnostic inquiry. Because if the answer is yes, even partially, it may change how we think about intervention at every scale.
Mechanics of Dependency
Addiction, in its clinical description, is not primarily about the substance. It is about what the substance does to the self: it reorganises identity around the dependency. It reframes the world into two categories: what feeds the need, and what threatens it. Over time, the ‘pre-addiction self’ becomes not just inaccessible, but actively dangerous to the dependent self, because acknowledging it would require confronting the distance travelled between then and now.
This is why intervention is so difficult, and why the instinct to argue, ridicule, or shame often fails. You are not reasoning with a person who has simply adopted a wrong belief. You are reasoning with a person whose identity has restructured itself around that belief. To dislodge the belief is to threaten the self. The resistance you encounter isn’t stubbornness; it’s survival.
Three mechanisms make this restructuring self-reinforcing.
The first is the erosion of the social buffer.
Before the dependency takes hold, there are people around the individual who provide friction: friends who push back, family members who notice the change, colleagues who raise an eyebrow. This friction is uncomfortable, but it’s also protective. It slows the drift. As the dependency deepens, those people are gradually shed, or the relationship with them is subtly renegotiated so that the friction disappears. What remains is a social environment that confirms rather than challenges.
The second is a form of the prohibition paradox.
The instinct of those who love someone in decline is often to confront, to forbid, to ultimatum. And occasionally this works. But more often, the act of prohibition triggers something more dangerous: identification with the excluded. The person doesn’t hear “we’re worried about you“. They hear “we think you don’t have the right to be who you are“. And in that moment, the dependency stops being a habit and becomes an identity. Now it has defenders. Now leaving it means not just changing behaviour but surrendering selfhood.
The third is what we might call the activation of the latent.
This is perhaps the most unsettling mechanism, because it suggests the dependency didn’t create something new. It revealed something that was already there. The question of whether a person’s moral drift reflects a character that was always present but suppressed, or whether it represents a genuine transformation caused by external forces, may be unanswerable in individual cases. But structurally, it matters less than it seems. Whether the vulnerability was latent or constructed, once activated, it follows the same logic.
Now keep those three mechanisms in mind, because they will reappear. Not as metaphor, but as operational description, at a different scale.
The Captured Self
There is a type of person you will recognise, even if you have never put a name to it.
Genuinely collaborative at the start. Curious, open, interested in building something. The kind of person who listens in meetings, who credits others, who seems to understand that what they’re constructing depends on the people around them. You trust this person. You invest in this person. You build alongside this person. And for a while, it works.
Then something shifts.
It rarely happens suddenly. It happens in the way the tide moves: you don’t notice it until you’re standing somewhere different from where you started. A new circle of acquaintances appears, people your partner describes as smart, successful, connected. The language changes slightly. Decisions that were once made together begin to be made elsewhere, and reported back rather than discussed. The shared language of the original project starts to feel like a costume being slowly exchanged for a different one.
What follows is a familiar sequence for anyone who has been in this situation. Money begins to move in directions that serve the individual rather than the enterprise. Status becomes a preoccupation, measured in the wrong currencies: the right address to live at, the right car to drive, the right room to be seen in. The people who built the foundation, who enabled the early growth, who held the thing together when it was fragile, begin to feel like reminders of something inconvenient. They are managed at a distance, then marginalised, then gone.
And here is where the addiction analogy stops being a metaphor and starts being a mechanism.
The social buffer erodes first. The colleagues and partners who would have said “this isn’t you” are precisely the ones who get shed. What replaces them are people who confirm the new identity, who reflect back the image of the successful, autonomous operator who no longer needs the constraints of collaboration. The echo chamber isn’t just emotional comfort. It’s structural protection for the dependency.
The prohibition paradox follows. When someone does push back, when a remaining partner or board member or trusted colleague names what they’re seeing, the response is not reflection. It is defence. The criticism is reframed as jealousy, as failure to understand the new vision, as an attempt to hold back someone who has simply outgrown the original arrangement. The confrontation doesn’t slow the drift. It accelerates it, because now the identity has an enemy, and enemies are a confirmation of the position.
And the latent question reasserts itself. Was this always there, waiting for the right activating conditions? Did success simply reveal what ambition and insecurity had kept hidden? Or did the new circle, the new money, the new status, construct something that wasn’t there before? The answer matters less than it seems. Once the reorganisation is complete, the original person is not gone, but they are no longer in charge. What you are dealing with is the captured self: a recognisable face on an unfamiliar entity.
The organisation around this person undergoes its own parallel transformation. The culture that once reflected the founder’s genuine curiosity begins to reflect the founder’s new centre of gravity instead. Loyalty is redefined as agreement. Dissent becomes disloyalty. The company develops the characteristic of the addict: a polished exterior maintained at increasing cost, while behind it, the coherence that made it functional is quietly dismantling itself. The high, in this case, is not a substance. It is the quarterly number, the market position, the image of strength that must be projected regardless of what the internal reality looks like.
This is not a description of inherently bad people. It is a description of a mechanism that operates on people and organisations with equal indifference to their original intentions.
Which is precisely why it scales further.
Institutional Drift
Institutions do not drift the way individuals do. There is no single moment of temptation, no identifiable circle of bad influences, no offshore account that marks the turning point. The drift is distributed, slower, and for that reason far more difficult to name while it is happening.
But the mechanism seems the same.
Consider the Toeslagenaffaire*. What the Dutch childcare benefits scandal revealed, when it was finally fully exposed, was not a conspiracy of malicious actors. It revealed a system that had reorganised itself around the protection of its own logic. The Tax Authority didn’t set out to destroy families. It set out to reduce fraud. That was the original ‘dependency’: the institutional need to demonstrate control, to produce numbers that showed the system was working, to satisfy political masters who had defined success in terms of recovery rates. The ‘substance’, in this case, was institutional self-justification.
The social buffer eroded in exactly the familiar sequence. Internal signals that something was wrong, individual civil servants who noticed the disproportionality, legal challenges that should have triggered review; all were absorbed and neutralised by a system that had learned to protect its own conclusions. The people who raised concerns were not silenced dramatically. They were simply not heard in any way that mattered. The institution had selected, over time, for the kind of internal culture that confirmed rather than challenged.
The prohibition paradox appeared in the form of legal process. Families who fought back, who went to court, who demanded review, found that the act of resistance was itself used to confirm the original suspicion. You are challenging us, therefore you must have something to hide. The defence of the institutional position hardened with each challenge rather than softening. Identity had formed around the dependency, and the dependency now had defendants at every level of the hierarchy.
Dieselgate* follows the same architecture. Volkswagen did not decide one morning to deceive regulators. The decision, if it can even be called that, emerged from a culture that had reorganised itself around an impossible target: emissions standards that the engineering reality could not meet, combined with a market position and a brand promise that could not be surrendered. The defeat device was not a crime committed by individuals. It was a structural solution to an institutional dependency on a particular self-image. We are the engineers. We solve problems. We do not fail.
The latent question here is sharp. Was the cultural vulnerability always present in these organisations, a German engineering perfectionism that could not admit limitation, a Dutch bureaucratic culture that prioritised process over outcome? Or did the external pressure, the political targets, the competitive environment, construct the conditions that made the drift inevitable? Again, the answer matters less than the structural observation: once the reorganisation was complete, the institution behaved exactly as the captured individual behaves. It protected the dependency over the people it was supposed to serve.
The banking crisis of 2008 is the largest case, and in some ways the clearest. The financial system did not collapse because a few bad actors decided to gamble with other people’s money (though some certainly did). It collapsed because an entire institutional ecology had reorganised itself around a dependency on the continuation of a particular kind of growth. The high was not a substance or even a number. It was the systemic assumption that the model was self-correcting, that risk was being distributed rather than accumulated, that the complexity of the instruments was a feature rather than a concealment. The social buffer, in this case, was the entire apparatus of regulation, rating agencies, internal risk functions, all of which had been gradually incorporated into the dependency rather than standing outside it.
When the correction came, the institutional response followed the addiction script closely. Denial first. Then defence. Then, only under the pressure of complete systemic failure, a partial acknowledgment that was structured, wherever possible, to protect the identity of the institution over the interests of those it had harmed.
What connects these three cases, and connects them to the captured individual and the drifting business partner, is not moral equivalence. The Toeslagenaffaire destroyed families. Dieselgate poisoned air and eroded trust. 2008 wiped out the savings and livelihoods of millions. The scale of harm is not comparable to one person’s moral drift or one company’s cultural capture.
What is comparable is the mechanism. The latent vulnerability. The activating condition. The erosion of the social buffer. The prohibition paradox. The identity reorganised around the dependency. And the consistent pattern in which the institution, like the individual, becomes most dangerous not when it is openly corrupt, but when it is sincerely convinced that what it is protecting is legitimate.
That last point is where the diagnostic value of the analogy becomes most acute. And it is also where the intervention question becomes unavoidable.
The Intervention Question
If the mechanism is the same across all three scales, the question that follows is genuinely interesting: does the remedy logic transfer?
The honest answer is: partially. And the part that doesn’t transfer is as instructive as the part that does.
In addiction treatment, the field has moved, over decades of evidence, away from two positions that feel intuitively correct but often backfire. The first is prohibition: remove access to the substance, criminalise the behaviour, make the cost of the dependency high enough that the rational actor chooses differently. The second is confrontation: force the moment of reckoning, stage the intervention, demand acknowledgment of the harm as the precondition for help.
Both approaches share the same structural error. They treat the dependency as a behaviour to be corrected rather than an identity to be negotiated. And because the dependency has reorganised the self around itself, the attempt to remove it by force can trigger the prohibition paradox: the identity hardens, the social buffer of the recovery network is rejected, and the person emerges from the confrontation more defensive than before.
What the evidence supports instead is a combination of harm reduction and relational continuity. You do not pretend the dependency isn’t there. You do not absorb the harm it causes without limit. But you remain present, you make clear what you are willing to offer, and you resist the urge to make your continued presence conditional on a transformation the person is not yet capable of. You are not enabling the dependency. You are keeping the door open for the self that preceded it.
This is essentially what I told my American friend. And at the personal scale, it holds.
At the organisational scale, it seems to hold only partially. The equivalent of harm reduction in a captured company is the preservation of structures that can outlast the capture: governance mechanisms, dissenting voices kept inside rather than expelled, documentation of decisions that creates accountability even when accountability is not currently welcome. The equivalent of relational continuity is the colleague or board member or investor who does not leave in protest, not because they approve, but because their presence is the last remaining social buffer. These are not glamorous interventions; they are the unglamorous work of keeping a door open that the captured self is trying to close.
But the organisational scale introduces something the personal scale often doesn’t have: collective action dynamics. In a personal relationship, you are one person deciding how much to absorb and how long to stay. In an organisation, that decision is distributed across shareholders, employees, customers, regulators, each with different thresholds, different interests, and different capacities to sustain the cost of proximity to the dependency. The intervention logic fractures along those lines. The employee who stays and maintains the social buffer may be absorbing harm that the shareholder who exits does not. The regulator who chooses harm reduction over prohibition may be protecting the institution at the expense of the people it is supposed to serve.
This is where the supplier question becomes unavoidable. In addiction treatment, there is a long-running debate about whether intervention should target the user or the supply chain. Criminalising the user hardens the identity and triggers the prohibition paradox. But leaving the supply chain intact means the activating conditions remain in place regardless of what happens to the individual. The same logic applies at the organisational level. You can work with the captured leader, maintain the social buffer, keep the door open. But if the circle that activated the capture, the “smart businessmen“, the political pressure, the structural incentive, remains intact and accessible, the intervention is working against a current it cannot overcome alone.
At the institutional scale, the partial transfer becomes a near-complete one, but the logic inverts in one important way. At the personal and organisational scale, the intervention priority is the preservation of relationship, keeping the door open, maintaining the buffer. At the institutional scale, the priority shifts. The institution is not a self whose dignity must be protected through the intervention. It is a structure whose function must be restored for the people it serves. This means the intervention logic that fails at the personal scale, direct confrontation, enforced accountability, the removal of the conditions that enabled the dependency, becomes not just acceptable but necessary.
The Toeslagenaffaire was not resolved by keeping the door open and maintaining relational continuity with the Tax Authority. It was resolved, partially, belatedly, inadequately, through external force: parliamentary investigation, legal challenge, political pressure sustained over years. Dieselgate required regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions. The financial crisis of 2008 required the kind of systemic intervention that the ideology of the preceding decades had declared impossible.
What this suggests is not that the addiction analogy breaks down at the institutional scale. It suggests that the analogy is scale-sensitive in a specific way. The further you move from the individual toward the institution, the more the intervention logic shifts from relational to structural, from keeping the door open to forcing the door closed on the conditions that enabled the drift in the first place.
And here is where the analogy earns its keep most precisely. Because the consistent failure across all three scales is the same: we intervene too late, at the wrong point in the sequence, targeting the visible symptom rather than the mechanism that produced it. We argue with the belief rather than addressing the void that the belief fills. We sanction the behaviour rather than dismantling the supply chain that makes the behaviour available. We demand accountability after the collapse rather than maintaining the social buffer that might have slowed the drift before the tipping point was reached.
The question is not whether we can reach those people, those organisations, those institutions. The question is at what point in the sequence we are willing to act, and whether we are honest about which intervention logic actually applies at the scale we are working at.
There is no universal answer, but there is a universal error: believing that the approach that feels most satisfying, the confrontation, the prohibition, the public accountability, is the same as the approach most likely to work.
Because, it seems, it rarely is.
The Door That Stays Open
There is no clean ending to this kind of inquiry. That is, in itself, part of my argument.
We are drawn to the intervention that resolves. The confrontation that produces the moment of clarity. The regulation that stops the rot. The parliamentary inquiry that restores accountability and returns the institution to its original purpose. These things happen, occasionally, and when they do they feel like vindication of the belief that the mechanism can be reversed.
But the more honest observation is this: the reorganised self, at every scale, rarely fully reverses. The individual who drifted into ideological dependency may, under the right conditions, find their way back to something recognisable. The path may be long, the conditions surely specific, and the outcome never guaranteed by the quality of the intervention alone. The captured company may survive its founder’s reorganisation, rebuild its culture, recover its original coherence. But the scar tissue remains. The institutional drift that produced the Toeslagenaffaire, Dieselgate, the 2008 collapse, has been partially addressed. The structural vulnerabilities that enabled those drifts are still present, in those organisations and in others, waiting for the next activating condition.
This may sound like pessimism, but I think it’s the realistic acknowledgement of the kind of effort that can actually change things.
Because what the addiction analogy offers, beyond the diagnostic clarity, is a specific kind of hope. Not the cinematic kind of hope, where the recovered self steps back into the light as a kind of hero after a full recovery of hardship. Rather, the deeper and perhaps more difficult kind of hope: the understanding that the work of maintaining the social buffer, of keeping the door open, of staying present without absorbing the harm, is not wasted even when it produces no visible result. The door that stays open is not nothing. It is the precondition for any recovery that eventually happens. You cannot predict when the tipping point back will come. You can only ensure that when it does, there is somewhere to return to.
This reframes the question my American friend was really asking. He wasn’t asking whether those people could be argued back; he had already learned that they couldn’t. He was asking whether the relationship, the shared history, the original connection, was worth preserving through a period in which it could not be fully inhabited. And whether the cost of keeping the door open was justified by the possibility, not the certainty, of eventual return.
My answer then, and now, is: “Yes”. With limits, that is. The limits matter as much as the openness. You do not keep the door open by absorbing unlimited harm. You keep it open by being honest about what you will and will not accept, and by making clear that the distinction is not a judgment on the person but a condition for your own continued presence. This is not a soft position. It is, in fact, harder than either confrontation or abandonment, because it requires sustained engagement with ambiguity and no guarantee of return.
At the organisational scale, the same principle applies with the same limits. The colleague who stays and maintains the buffer is not endorsing the capture. They are preserving the conditions for recovery. But they must also be honest, with themselves and with others, about the point at which staying becomes complicity rather than continuity. That line is not fixed. It moves with the depth of the drift and the nature of the harm being caused. There is no formula; there is only the ongoing exercise of judgment, informed by as clear an understanding of the mechanism as possible.
At the institutional scale, the door that stays open looks different. It looks like the civil servant who documents the decision they disagreed with rather than simply executing it. The regulator who maintains the capacity for intervention even during periods when intervention is politically unwelcome. The journalist who keeps the institutional failure in the record even when the news cycle has moved on. The citizen who sustains the demand for accountability past the point where it is comfortable or fashionable to do so. None of these are heroic acts in the cinematic sense. All of them are the structural equivalent of keeping the door open: preserving the preconditions for recovery that the institution, in its captured state, is actively working to close off.
The reorganised self, at every scale, is not unreachable. But it cannot be reached by the same approach at every scale, and it cannot be reached on the timeline we would prefer. What we can control is the quality of the conditions we maintain while we wait for the mechanism to shift. The social buffer we preserve. The intervention logic we choose, honestly, based on scale rather than on what feels most satisfying. The door we keep open, not out of naivety about what is on the other side of it, but out of a clear-eyed understanding that closing it forecloses the only outcome worth working toward.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reorganised-self-roland-biemans-kwyxe/
*Toeslagenaffaire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal
*Dieselgate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
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