What is emerging · Opinion · Malta, June 2026

The immune system that attacks healthy cells

Why organisations and political systems reflexively expel rebels — not out of malice, but out of self-preservation. And why that is precisely what will bring them down.

By Jacobus van Merksteijn · Malta, June 2026

An endogenous immune cell attacks a healthy cell carrying a new idea — an autoimmune reaction as a metaphor for how organisations expel their own innovation

A healthy body has an immune system that recognises intruders and neutralises them. A sick body has an immune system that attacks its own cells. That is called autoimmune disease. The body believes it is defending itself, but consumes itself from within. The disease feels like health — until it is too late.

Our organisations and political systems have become autoimmune. They attack their own healthy cells in the conviction that they are defending themselves. And, as with every autoimmune disease: not out of malice. Out of reflex.

The question is not whether people are bad

When someone points out that the European institutions, Dutch polder politics, the large corporations, the universities and the press collectively expel the most necessary ideas of our time, the first response is usually: that cannot be right, because all those people cannot be bad at the same time. And that is correct. They are not bad. Most are honest, hard-working, well-intentioned and intelligent. Personally they are in order.

The problem does not lie with the people. It lies in the system they together form. And more specifically: in the mechanism by which that system maintains itself. Because every living system — whether a body, an organisation, a state or a continent — needs an immune system to survive. Without a defensive mechanism, every parasite, every infection, every malicious influence would take over. The immune system is not evil. It is essential.

But that is precisely what makes autoimmune disease so treacherous. An immune system working normally saves lives. An immune system that derails turns on its own carrier — without realising it is choosing the wrong targets. It recognises healthy tissue as a threat, attacks it, and breaks it down. Multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type-1 diabetes — all variants of the same story: the defence turns inward.

The immune system of a system

Every organisation has an immune system. It consists of procedures, hierarchies, peer reviews, permit systems, press culture, training standards, "best practices", consultation rounds and — above all — unwritten rules about what "normal" proposals are and what are not. This immune system is essential: it keeps charlatans outside the door, protects against bad actors, and ensures that ad-hoc impulses do not undermine all accumulated knowledge.

But when the immune system no longer distinguishes between "threatening to the cells" and "threatening to the framework within which the cells work", it starts attacking healthy cells. Innovative proposals — which by definition fall outside the framework — are not tested on their content, but expelled on their form. The system feels healthy while doing so. It becomes ever sicker.

The biomass-to-ethanol case

Since 2024 I have been working on the development of a specific industrial technology: biomass-to-ethanol conversion via accelerated fermentation of equatorial fast-growing biomass, followed by distillation to fuel quality and re-injection into the fossil value chain. The short name is BiCRS — Biomass-to-Carbon Removal and Storage. It is not an exotic technology. Brazil has been building a large sector on exactly this principle since the 1970s. Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are experimenting with it. The economic figures are calculable, the logistics are known, the science is solid.

BiCRS solves several European problems at once: it delivers liquid fuel without our having to reinvent our cars, our fleet or our aircraft fleet; it binds net CO₂ from the atmosphere (the growing biomass absorbs, the ethanol combustion emits what has just been bound — carbon cycle, not carbon addition); it makes Europe less dependent on both Russian gas and Saudi oil; it leaves the existing refining, distribution and end-use infrastructure intact. And it works on a timescale of years, not decades.

You would think that such a technology would be received in Brussels with open arms. The opposite is true. BiCRS falls outside the ETS+CBAM paradigm on which the entire European climate bureaucracy is built. It does not fit the Green Deal categories. It is not "electrification", not "hydrogen", not "energy saving". It reckons with a different unit of measurement: not "grams of CO₂ emitted", but "grams of CO₂ in and out of the cycle". That single arithmetic difference makes it indigestible for the European climate immune system.

What happens when you propose BiCRS in Brussels

The first reaction is not "interesting, let's look at the figures". The first reaction is framework processing: which committee is supposed to judge this? Which Directorate-General? Which MEP working group? Which subsidy programme applies? When none of those frameworks fit — and with BiCRS none of those frameworks fit, because it was conceived to work outside the existing paradigm — the label "out of scope" appears automatically.

The second reaction is word choice. Burning biomass = "air pollution". Equatorial plantations = "deforestation risk". Cycle CO₂ = "accounting trick". Every positive property is handed a negative framing by the existing discourse. The technology need not be refuted; the discourse does the work.

The third reaction is institutional aloofness. No one is explicitly "against BiCRS". But every person the proposal passes has a good reason not to take it further themselves: "that's not my portfolio", "other colleagues handle that", "we've already chosen this path", "come back in two years". No one demolishes the proposal. Everyone passes it on until it dissolves into air.

None of this is malice. No official sits with arms folded thinking "how do I keep Europe behind Brazil?". Every official simply follows their procedure, stays within their framework, uses the language they are used to, and passes the file to the next person. It is precisely that which makes the immune system so effective: it works without anyone steering it. It is a property of the system, not of its participants.

The autoimmune reaction as rule, not exception

BiCRS is not a unique case. It fits into a long series of comparable autoimmune reactions the European system has shown in recent decades:

New-generation nuclear energy: SMRs, thorium reactors, molten-salt reactors. Each a European invention, each wiped away by an immune reaction that equates "nuclear energy" with "Chernobyl" and filters out every nuance in between. Other countries — France excepted — are now simply building them.
Genetic agricultural technology (CRISPR): a European Nobel Prize (Charpentier, 2020). A European legal barrier that in practice forbids its use. Our farmers may not use what our scientists have invented.
Open-source software and cloud: European developers wrote Linux, MySQL, MariaDB, Nextcloud. European institutions run on American cloud. Proposals for a European sovereign cloud have died for twenty years in immune reactions: "American vendors are more reliable", "open source is not enterprise-ready", "we have no budget for it".
Voluntary-mandate democracy movements: such as VMP. Political forms not bound to constituencies, which can therefore take difficult decisions. The immune system replies: "that is not democratic" — without asking whether the current system still leads to decisions.
BiCRS / ethanol from equatorial biomass: as described above. Rejected on framework, not on facts.

The pattern repeats itself. A healthy European idea presents itself. It does not fit the existing framework. The immune system reacts with procedural exclusion, framing and institutional aloofness. The idea leaves Europe — for Brazil, for China, for the United States, for Singapore. There it is picked up, scaled up, commercialised. Ten years later we import it back, pay a multiple for it, and confirm — loudly — that we "knew it all along".

The demise feels like health

For the autoimmune patient, the treacherous thing is that they feel healthy — until suddenly an organ fails. The same applies to the autoimmune organisation: it feels powerful, considered, "cycle-time sensitive", "consensus-oriented". All its internal metrics confirm that it is functioning well: meetings are held, reports written, evaluations carried out. But its productive tissue — the innovative cells the system itself produces — is being continuously broken down.

When the first organs fail — the German car industry, the Dutch nitrogen-stricken farmer, the entire West European chemicals sector relocating to the US — it is initially blamed on external factors: "China plays unfair", "the war in Ukraine", "inflation", "post-COVID stresses". The diagnosis of autoimmune disease is rarely made. Because that would mean the patient is themselves the cause, and that is psychologically unbearable.

How do you recognise an autoimmune reaction?

A few marks of recognition, for those wondering whether their organisation or their political space suffers from autoimmunity:

Proposals are handled on form rather than content. "This does not fit our procedure" is a framework reaction. "This is incorrect, here are three counter-arguments" is a substantive reaction. Count how often each occurs.
Outsiders are not refuted, but ignored. When a rebel idea is not investigated, not cited, not discussed — when a wall of silence is built around it — the immune system is working at full strength.
The system's language has no words for its own blind spot. When a proposal does not fit the existing categories, and people cannot even articulate what they do not understand — only repeat "this is not clear" — you are witnessing an autoimmune reaction.
Criticism from within is tolerated, criticism from outside is not. A professor mildly critical of the Green Deal pace is quoted. An entrepreneur fundamentally critical of the Green Deal paradigm is not invited.
The diagnosis "our system no longer works" is never made. There are always "implementation problems", "communication challenges", "delivery issues" — never a fundamental defect in the system itself.

Those who recognise themselves in one of these features — as victim, as bystander, as participant — have just observed an autoimmune reaction. No more. No less.

Why this image helps

The image of autoimmune disease is not an insult. It is not an attempt to smear anyone. It is a diagnosis. And diagnoses are useful for two reasons:

First reason: it shifts the discussion away from moral blame and towards structural cause. It is not a fight against "the bad official" or "the lying politician" or "the greedy chief executive". It is a recognition that a natural defence mechanism has gone too far. That makes it discussable without accusations, and therefore solvable without a fight.

Second reason: it points to possible treatments. Autoimmune diseases are hard to cure — but they are not untreatable. There are three main routes in medicine:

Suppression (immunosuppressants): switch off the immune system entirely. In an organisation: abolish all procedures, scrap all peer reviews. Works in the short term, but leaves the system defenceless — every charlatan can then enter.
Deception (immune-modulating therapy): teach the immune system not to attack certain cells. In an organisation: package the healthy idea in the words, structures and frameworks the immune system recognises as "its own". For example: present BiCRS not as "biomass-to-ethanol" but as "carbon capture with reduction of European energy import dependency within the existing CBAM mechanism".
Rerouting (building parallel tissue): do not let the healthy idea land within the sick system, but outside it. Build a new circuit, supported by another immune system that does tolerate the idea. Your own newspaper, your own foundation, your own party, your own company.

None of the three is comfortable. Suppression is dangerous; deception is morally ambiguous; rerouting is exhausting and lonely. But those who accept the diagnosis see that these are the real options — not the pseudo-option of "advancing better arguments". Because better arguments are not received by an autoimmune system; they are attacked.

Where from here?

The Open Visor itself grew out of this realisation. The truth that advancing better arguments within the system no longer works, that is what drove us to start publishing outside the system. Not out of contrariness. Out of pragmatism. Anyone with experience of BiCRS conversations in Brussels, of Consequences-Map conversations in The Hague, of VMP conversations with the established parties, learns after a few years that the immune system is not broken through with better PowerPoints. It is bypassed — or it simply carries on.

But this is a temporary solution. Your own newspaper convinces your own readers; it does not convince the immune system. In the long run that is not enough. The question that concerns all of us is: how do we make Europe immunologically competent again — capable of recognising and absorbing its own healthy ideas — before it is too late?

The question to you, reader

This piece does not end with an answer. It ends with an invitation to think along. Three questions lie on the table:

Do you recognise the autoimmune reaction in your own work or governance experience? For those inside an organisation where healthy ideas are reflexively expelled — municipality, ministry, university, hospital, company, association — do you recognise the mechanism? What are the specific procedures, words and habits your own immune system deploys?
Which of the three treatment routes — suppression, deception, rerouting — works in your context? Or are you on the trail of a fourth route we have not named here? In which situations is which route legitimate, which morally transgressive, which pragmatically most feasible?
What is the role of the press, of education and of democratic institutions? Together they form the meta-immune system that decides which ideas may appear at all. How do we make them competent again to distinguish healthy cells from pathogenic ones? Is that a question of education, of structure, of financing, of culture — or something else again?

Responses and contributions via The Open Visor are read and — when they add value — incorporated in a follow-up. This is not a monologue. It is an attempt to discover together how we can help our immune system once again to distinguish between friend and foe.

Because one thing is certain: a body that keeps attacking itself will, despite all the good intentions of its cells, still go under. Not through malice. Through reflex.

And for a continent that calls itself Europe, that is not an acceptable ending.