Beyond “the high”: restoring self-governance at the point of decision
How identifying the “synthetic governance object” restores choice and prevents the inversion of our survival instinct
Most people who struggle with destructive urges already know the cost. They are not ignorant, and they are not stupid. Yet in certain moments, that knowledge disappears—and something else takes over. I argue that this “something else” is not vague or mysterious, but structurally identifiable: a synthetic governance object. In the case of addiction, it often appears as “the high”—a simplified, decontextualised construct that stands in for a much longer and more costly causal chain.
My work has traditionally focused on governance in the large—laws, courts, and systems of authority. Here I apply the same lens to the individual. I suggest that addiction and compulsion are not just matters of chemistry or psychology, but of failed self-governance. Specifically, a collapse in attribution allows this synthetic object to assume authority and drive action, short-circuiting choice and inverting the very instincts meant to preserve us.
This is not a confessional, but it is grounded in lived experience: witnessing the casualties of the gay “chemsex” scene; a close friend in alcohol rehabilitation; an eating disorder within my own family. You will likely have your own equivalents—gambling, prescription drugs, tobacco, or other loops that quietly take hold and are hard to break. The forms differ, but the pattern is recognisable: opportunities for self-destructive cycles are everywhere.
There is no shortage of research or professional expertise on these topics. I do not seek to compete with that literature. However, I believe the model set out here offers something structurally different—a novel account of how control is lost at the point of decision. My purpose in writing is practical: if this framing helps even a small number of people see the mechanism more clearly, and act differently as a result, it will have been worthwhile.
Many approaches to addiction begin at an unhelpful point. They focus on the moment of failure—why the person made the wrong choice—or on the consequences that follow. Others concentrate on techniques to break the loop once it is already in motion. All of these have value. But they share an assumption: that the critical event is the action itself.
I suggest that this is too late.
By the time the choice is consciously experienced, something more fundamental has already occurred: the decision is already structured. What matters is not the action, but the authority under which it is taken.
The problem is not desire, but what we allow desire to decide.
In the decisive moment, we are not reasoning from first principles. We are appealing—often implicitly—to something that has already been granted the right to decide:
In healthy self-governance, that authority is grounded in a full and attributable understanding of consequences over time.
Under conditions of attribution collapse, however, that authority shifts. A simplified construct—what I call a synthetic governance object—steps in and is treated as if it were sufficient to justify action.
In addiction, this object most often appears as the idea—and anticipation—of “the high”. The first sip, the first toke, the first spin of the wheel—and with it comes an immediate sense of calm. The first effect is not the high itself, but the resolution of the decision. The tension of whether to act collapses, and this relief is experienced as confirmation that the correct choice has been made.
The full rewards of intoxication, euphoria, or winning have not yet materialised, yet something has already changed. A false and temporary peace takes hold.
As such, this “high” is not simply a remembered pleasure. It is an active construct. It presents itself as immediate, self-justifying, and sufficient: this will feel good; this is what matters; this is enough. Crucially, it does not present the full chain of what it entails—its duration, its aftermath, its cumulative effects.
Those are not denied; they are simply absent.
In this way, the imagined “high” functions as an authority-object. It is treated, in the moment, as if it were a complete account of the action, when in fact it is only a fragment.
This can be understood as a form of shortcut. And shortcuts, in themselves, are not the problem. All decision-making relies on compression. We cannot carry the full causal chain of every action at all times; we must act on reduced representations of reality.
The problem arises when the shortcut ceases to be a faithful compression and becomes a substitution. Instead of standing in for the full chain, it displaces it. What should be a summary becomes a cover. The “high” does not merely simplify the decision—it removes the parts that would contradict it.
In that sense, it is not just a shortcut, but a form of cheating: an incomplete representation presented as if it were complete.
Synthetic governance objects do not arise by accident. They serve a function.
In institutional settings, synthetic governance objects emerge when systems must continue to operate despite broken or incomplete attribution:
a court proceeds on the basis of a procedural fiction;
a regulator acts under a broad mandate where the underlying facts cannot be fully established in time;
a police force invokes operational necessity when the full chain of accountability cannot be resolved in the moment.
In each case, something stands in for what is missing, allowing action to continue.
These constructs are not inherently illegitimate. They are necessary. To reject them outright would be to reject the possibility of acting under constraint. Rather than “truth with receipts”, we allow for what is true enough under the circumstances. The issue is not their use, but their misclassification.
Without them, systems would stall under the weight of their own demands for evidential completeness. The alternative is paralysis—and, ultimately, collapse.
The same dynamic appears at the level of the individual.
Under conditions of stress, deprivation, or overload, we cannot always afford to hold the full causal chain of our actions in view. Yet life must continue. Decisions must still be made. In these moments, the mind generates simplified constructs—synthetic governance objects—that stand in for what is too complex, too distant, or too costly to process in full.
In the context of addiction, this object is often experienced as something that promises life: relief, connection, intensity, aliveness, even sanctuary. It appears not as a threat, but as a solution. In that moment, it is not irrational to move toward it. On the contrary, it represents what the system currently understands as the best available path to continuity.
The problem is not that this object is sought, but that it is misclassified—it is not true enough under the circumstances. And the more overloaded we are, the less capacity we have to distinguish between a legitimate short-cut that compresses reality, and cheating our own future wellbeing.
What presents as sustaining does not, in fact, deliver it. The anticipated improvement in baseline—relief, restoration, stability—fails to materialise. Instead, the system returns depleted, more vulnerable, and more dependent on the same construct it trusted.
This is the inversion.
The very mechanism designed to preserve continuity is redirected toward what undermines it. What appears, in the moment, as a move toward life becomes, in aggregate, a move away from it.
Worse still, each re-engagement does not simply repeat the cycle; it strengthens it. The salience of the synthetic object is refreshed, lowering the threshold at which it can reclaim authority in future decisions.
This reframing has an important consequence. It explains why moralising approaches to addiction so often fail.
Telling an addict simply to stop contradicts their lived experience. From within the loop, participation has been associated with continued functioning—relief, regulation, the ability to carry on. If it had not, the behaviour would not have been repeated. In that sense, it presents itself as part of what has kept the system going.
Nor is the problem a lack of awareness. Most addicts already understand the downsides: the apparent “reset to zero” after each loop, the deeper reality of progressive baseline degradation over time, and the accumulating cost. If that knowledge were sufficient, addiction would not exist.
The issue is not information, but where authority is assigned.
From within the system, this is not failure but optimisation. The individual is selecting what appears—given the available model—to be the best available move. They are acting in pursuit of what appears—under conditions of attribution collapse—to be the most viable path forward.
The loop repeats because the authority to act has already been attached to the synthetic governance object.
To object at the level of behaviour alone is therefore to misunderstand the mechanism. The task is not simply to suppress the impulse, but to understand the structure that grants it authority—and thereby turns it into action.
If the problem is one of authority, not action, then the solution is not abstinence in the first instance, but re-anchoring self-governance. We are dealing with a paradox: the way out is not to condemn the behaviour, but to insist on its complete accounting. The act is not denied; it is evaluated in full—its immediate rewards alongside its downstream effects.
In doing so, it reveals its own emptiness. What appeared as gain is exposed as a trade that depletes the very state it promises to restore. The act fails not under prohibition, but under full attribution.
Most addiction frameworks implicitly operate on what might be called an income model. The focus is on the immediate return: the relief, the pleasure, the escape. Even when the downsides are acknowledged, the decision is still framed in terms of whether the short-term gain is “worth it”. From within that frame, relapse is almost inevitable, because the income is real.
The shift required is not to deny that income, but to account for it properly.
What is missing in the moment of decision is not knowledge of harm or immediate loss, but visibility of the capital account. The relevant question is not “how will this feel?”, or even “how much did this cost?”, but “what state will this leave me in?” Not the intensity of the experience, but its effect on baseline: energy, stability, resources, clarity, and future vulnerability to relapse.
Under this framing, the same act is evaluated differently. The “high” is not rejected as unreal or even unworthy; it is recognised as a short-term inflow that carries a corresponding and often greater drawdown in capital. What presents as income is, in fact, a drawdown of capital misclassified as gain.
This does not eliminate desire. It changes its governance. The act is no longer authorised by the synthetic object alone, but evaluated within a broader system that includes its downstream effects.
It is important to be clear: “accounting for the costs” is not a novel idea. Most people struggling with addiction are already well aware of the consequences. They can describe, often in detail, the damage done—the resets, the loss of control, the erosion of baseline. Yet this knowledge does not reliably alter behaviour.
The reason is that the accounting is taking place at the wrong level of ledger. The numbers are known; they are simply not being counted where the decision is made.
It is typically framed retrospectively, or as a general warning: this is bad for me; this has negative consequences. But in the moment of decision, the operative ledger remains short-term and income-focused. The synthetic governance object presents a local account—immediate gain—while the costs sit elsewhere, abstracted, deferred, or disconnected from the act.
What is required is not more information, but a re-alignment of accounting with authority at the point of decision. The capital account—baseline, stability, future state—must be brought into the same frame as the decision itself. Only then does the act cease to appear as a net gain. The desire remains; it simply no longer governs. At that point, nothing has been suppressed—but the authority to act has changed hands.
To summarise — we observe the following:
The moment of conscious choice is not the origin of the decision, but its endpoint. By the time we experience deliberation, the frame within which we are deciding has already been set.
What is sought is not only the anticipated high, but the immediate relief that comes from resolving the tension of whether to act — supplied by the synthetic governance object. The sense of “this is the right move” arrives before the reward itself.
The object of desire is not false, but incomplete. It presents a fragment—immediate reward—as if it were a sufficient account of the action.
The issue is not a lack of knowledge. Those caught in these loops are typically well aware of the consequences. The failure lies elsewhere.
That failure is one of authority. Action follows what is treated, in the moment, as sufficient to decide.
What is being accounted for is real, but it is being accounted for on the wrong ledger. The decision is governed by immediate return, while effects on baseline—energy, stability, future vulnerability—are excluded.
The costs are therefore not unknown, but displaced. They exist, but not in the frame that governs the decision.
The behaviour is not irrational. It reflects a system attempting to maintain continuity under conditions where full attribution is not available.
Attempts at suppression fail because they do not address the underlying structure of authority. They operate downstream of the mechanism that produces the action.
When the act is brought under full attribution—when it is accounted for in terms of its complete effects—it loses its authority. It does not need to be prohibited; it no longer presents as a coherent choice.
These are not independent observations, but aspects of a single failure: the misassignment of authority under conditions of attribution collapse.
The distinction between old and new thinking can be stated simply.
Old thinking treats addiction as a problem of behaviour:
resist the urge,
avoid the trigger,
manage the consequences.
It assumes that behaviour is irrational—that we are acting against our own survival—and that the problem can therefore be corrected with better information or stronger discipline.
The model outlined here locates the problem elsewhere:
It is not, in the first instance, about behaviour, but about authority;
not about ignorance, but about attribution;
not about the excessive strength of the reward, but the ledger on which it is accounted.
Change the behaviour, and the problem returns.
Change the authority, and the behaviour follows.
That is the point at which self-governance is restored.
Nothing external needs to change—only what is allowed to decide.
It’s hard to value the future above the present unless one can see eternity in the moment.
Holy guacamole Martin!